The Pirate Queen: How Filmmaker Maja Bodenstein Rediscovered Her Chinese Roots with an Emmy-Nominated Video Game About Ching Shih

Ching Shih was notoriously hard to impress. History’s most powerful and swag-laden pirate, born in Canton, the scourge of Chinese, British and Portuguese fleets, commanding some 1,800 ships and 80,000 crew, she was also a ruthless disciplinarian and enforcer of women’s rights who executed rule-breakers of all kinds.

But she would undoubtedly approve of Maja Bodenstein. The film and television writer has transported Ching back to the South China Sea of ​​the Qing Dynasty – reincarnating her as the unmistakable Lucy Liu, not on the big screen, but in video games The Pirate Queennominated for an Emmy Award in 2024.

All the more remarkable because it was Bodenstein’s first attempt to write for this genre.

“I was invited to join the game project very early on,” she says during a Zoom call from her home in London. “The designers were looking for a writer with a Chinese or East Asian background who could really shape the story.”

At this point, Eloise Singer, founder of Singer Studios, came into the picture as the second component of what would become the female triumvirate taking charge of the game.

“Eloise is the director of the game and comes from a film-making background,” Bodenstein says. “We started off by making a demo, just one level of the game. That went to the (London-based) Raindance Film Festival and won the Discovery Award for Best Debut at Raindance Immersive 2021.

“With that, we got funding from Meta to make a full game version, we came up with more levels, and we wanted to make a really exciting story about Ching.” And that launch saw the writer navigating home waters. “Having Ching operating in the South China Sea was a huge draw for me, because I knew that story,” reveals Bodenstein, whose father is German and mother is from Beijing.

“I was born near Cologne, Germany, but moved to Beijing when I was one year old, and then to Hong Kong in the early 90s; so my entire childhood was spent in China and Hong Kong,” she says. “I did the school trip to Cheung Po Tsai Cave on Cheung Chau!”

Bodenstein may not have discovered any of the island’s legendary pirate treasures, but with her script for The Pirate Queen She would strike gold: it was sent to Liu’s agent to gauge interest and came back with a request to cast the Hollywood star as the narrator for the title role, which the game’s player takes on.

“It all takes place on a fictional night in 1807, when she comes to power, just after the death of her husband (pirate Zheng Yi),” Bodenstein says. “We really wanted to get a sense of all the historical players.”

The player rows across open water, climbs rigging and discovers treasure chests, but for Bodenstein other details were more important.

“We went to a lot of trouble to find the right objects that would give a sense of the history but also tie into the story,” she says. “I wanted a lotus shoe in there because people know what they are but don’t really understand the size. Ching didn’t have bound feet, but this was a time when a lot of women did. It’s the horror of what that was like in real life and the fact that this happened — it really brings it home.”

Available now on the Meta Quest platform and on the Steam store for PC VR – “you need the headset to play it,” says Bodenstein – The Pirate Queen is also the subject of plans for a film, podcast series and graphic novel. All of which could rectify its recent, subdued arrival. A game “is just in the store. It’s in the app store, so you don’t have a premiere,” she adds. “It was really weird and anticlimactic. (But) it was great to bring that piece of history to life.”

It won’t be long before Bodenstein gets her first taste of the red carpet, though. She left Hong Kong for Britain in the mid-2000s, earning degrees in film studies and performing arts from Oxford Brookes University, and feature film screenwriting from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her film The Mannequinwhich she describes as “a Gothic, psychological thriller with horror elements” and which was written by a Bodenstein “inspired by the work of (novelist) Eileen Chang,” is now under option and is seeking a director.

“My other horror film, Painted skinis in development with (director) Steve McQueen’s company, Lammas Park,” she says. And then there’s her “Chinese Indiana Jones-type thing, which is as inspired by Stephen Chow’s work as anything,” which is “a big action-adventure movie called Detective Zeke and the Jade Tablets of Destiny”. And even if it doesn’t make it to the screen, Bodenstein still has plans for it. “I’m thinking about exploring it as a game or graphic novel,” she says.

“There are a lot of Asian characters in all my stories – all my interests are really intertwined with things that feel very Chinese to me,” she says.

Ching Shih may have brought her back, but perhaps Bodenstein never really left.