April 16, 2024April 10, 2024 by Sharlene

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

Once, when I lived in the seaside town of Brighton, England, a fox strolled past me on the street. It was at night, and I was with friends along the walkway that overlooks the beach. The fox trotted nonchalantly past us and the rest of the people out haunting the streets that night. It disappeared from my view shortly after, and while our encounter was fleeting, it has never left my memories.

Foxes have long been seen as tricksters in various cultures. In Chinese culture, which is what I’m most familiar with, 狐狸精 or hulijing (fox spirit) are shapeshifters, depicted sometimes as both good and evil, not quite god or demon. This is similar to the kitsune and gumiho myths in Japanese and Korean cultures too.

But back to The Fox Wife. Yangsze Choo, who is from Malaysia, has written other Asian mythology-related books, The Ghost Bride and The Night Tiger. Both books I would highly recommend! So I went into this full of expectations, and I was not disappointed.

The Fox Wife is a beautifully subtle, atmospheric book. It is essentially a tale of revenge, for Snow, a fox who has shapeshifter into a woman, is hunting down the man who killed her child. It is also the tale of Bao, a detective of sorts. He has this strange ability to tell when others are lying. And he’s investigating the death of a young woman who was found outside a restaurant in the cold. The restaurant owner wants Bao to find out her name, so that proper prayers can be said and that she can be put to rest.

“This case, with its overtones of foxes and lost girls, fills Bao with strange urgency. He has the uneasy sensation that he’s walking into a shadowy realm. No longer a child, he’s an old man now, setting out into an unknown forest of lies an half-truths.”

Snow, as the title gives a big hint to, is a wife. She has a husband and that husband is later revealed in the book. And I can’t help but think back to this point that Snow makes early on in the first chapter:

“…though most tales focus on the beautiful female foxes who live by devouring qi, or life force, little is said about the males. Women who run around wilfully doing whatever they please are bound to be censured. A handsome, cunning man is a different matter.”

So while we expect a tale of cunning and misdeeds from Snow, in reality, it is not that easy, not as a young woman in Asia in the early 1900s. For instance, traveling alone as a young girl attracts unwanted attention, and she manages to get on a train by following a pimp. Later, she finds work as a servant in a rich household that owns a traditional medicine shop.

While Snow’s is the main story, Bao’s is told in alternating chapters, and it feels like a cat and mouse game as he traces her steps and catches up to her. Bao’s story is an intriguing one, and we are told much of it through his childhood memories, his own encounters with foxes as a child, and his mysterious abilities – and what is happening to his shadow? When I first saw his name, Bao, I immediately thought of the legendary character Bao Gong (Justice Bao), who apparently was a real-life man from China (born in the year 999), but who many know from wuxia stories, Chinese mythology, or maybe it was the 1990s TV series. Bao Gong is known for his fairness and bringing bad guys to justice.

Despite the whole murder-mystery element of the story, this is a book without that kind of urgency that some readers might expect. It takes its time to build up the encircling stories of Snow and Bao, but I thoroughly enjoyed the way Choo edges the gaps between them closer and closer. Their stories were artfully woven together in a satisfying and beautiful tale.

March 11, 2019 by Sharlene

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo is an enchanting read

2019, Books, Diversiverse, Global Women of Colour, Reading, Reading Asia, review
malaysia, review, Yangsze Choo
6 Comments

Dark, magical, and bewitching, The Night Tiger transports the reader to colonial Malaya where weretigers supposedly roam, strange deaths are happening in a sleepy town in Ipoh. A young boy is searching for a missing finger and is mysteriously connected to a woman trying to make some money as a dance hall girl.

Choo permeates her story with all the sounds, smells and tastes of Malaysia. She brings in so many Malaysian foods that I am often left hungry after reading a few chapters (Malaysian and Singaporean foods are quite similar).

She deftly weaves in a variety of folklore and superstitions like the pontianak and weretigers. It’s a great mix of supernatural and historical. And overall, a beautifully written, magical tale blended with some mysteries that left this reader guessing until the end.

August 20, 2014August 20, 2014 by Sharlene

TLC Book Tours: Ghost bride by Yangsze Choo

2014, Books, Reading, Reading Asia, review, Southeast Asia, TLC
books, malaysia, reading, Southeast Asia, Yangsze Choo
7 Comments

In the seventh month of the lunar calendar, usually around August, Chinese Singaporeans (and Chinese in other parts of the world) observe what we call the Hungry Ghost Festival.

It is believed that the gates of Hell open and the ghosts are allowed to wander the earth. To appease these hungry ghosts, offerings are made to them – food, joss sticks, candles, paper money and other items made out of paper like houses and cars. In Singapore, big dinners are held, and guests bid at auctions for auspicious items (one man even paid S$258,888 (about US$207,000) for a gaudy urn that cost S$100!). And entertainment is provided for both human and ghostly guests, traditionally in the form of wayang (Chinese street opera) but these days, getai (literally ‘song stage’) is the popular mode of entertainment, where Mandarin and dialect songs are sung by colorfully dressed singers. But one thing remains the same, the first row of seats remain empty, for the spectral guests.

(Photo via Singapore Tourism Board)

When I was a kid in Singapore, not far from our house, a wayang/getai stage and dinner tables would be set up in a small parking lot of a row of shophouses. And we would hear the loud music late at night from our house, and smell the offerings being burnt. One had to watch where we were walking, to make sure we didn’t tread on ashes or offerings as it would bring bad luck. My parents weren’t the superstitious/religious sort but my grandparents were, and they had altars and joss sticks at their house. I remember helping to fold joss paper money and burn them, although I cannot remember if this was for Hungry Ghost month or for funeral rites. Perhaps both. (In Singapore columbariums, large troughs are provided for the burning of joss paper).

And it is during Hungry Ghost month that the more superstitious avoid doing certain things like swimming, going out late at night, getting married (see more here).

But nothing has been said about reading books that talk of this ghostly world, like Yangsze Choo’s amazing Ghost Bride.

The story is set in late 19th-century Malacca, a sleepy seaside town in southwest Malaysia. Li Lan is about to receive an unusual proposal, to be the bride of a young man recently deceased, the only son of the wealthy and powerful Lim family. It is a very rare practice, and is meant to appease a restless spirit. Of course there is far more to this as we later learn as we delve into the spirit world with Li Lan.

Li Lan’s own family was once wealthy but now its fortunes are in decline, and her opium addict father’s debts are owed to the head of the Lim family. She soon finds her dreams haunted by Lim Tian Ching, the deceased she is meant to marry. She enters a ghostly world in her dreams, where everything is “intensely and unappetizing lay pigmented”, where food is displayed like funeral offerings. But her thoughts are with his cousin, the scholarly and gentle Tian Bai, now the heir to the Lim fortune.

As a Chinese Singaporean, I was drawn to Choo’s story and her skilful rendering of 19th century Malaya. Many of our superstitions and beliefs are similar to those of the Chinese Malaysians, and they continue today, such as the Courts of Hell, the various levels and chambers in which souls are taken to atone for their sins. A visit to Haw Par Villa when I was a kid, brought those chambers – torture methods and all – terrifyingly to life through statues and dioramas. It is not for the faint of heart. Or children really! (More photos of this bizarre theme park built by the Aw Brothers in 1937 – warning, although these are just statues, some images are very violent. And bloody. Some are just plain weird.)

Apart from the spooky afterlife, Choo’s novel just meant a lot to me. There aren’t many books that are situated in Southeast Asia, despite its 11 very diverse and interesting nations, including the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia. (Here’s my list of books set in Southeast Asia/written by Southeast Asians). Malaysia, which neighbours Singapore, has more than a few similarities, and so to read of foods, traditions, customs, slang that I could relate to, that just made me feel so very warm inside. And a little homesick.

“They had all my favourite kinds of kuih – the soft steamed nyonya cakes made of glutinous rice flour stuffed with palm sugar or shredded coconut. There were delicate rolled biscuits called love letters and pineapple tarts pressed out of rich pastry. Bowls of toasted watermelon seeds were passed around, along with fanned slices of mango and papaya.”

For instance, Li Lan’s Amah, a very traditional, superstitious woman who has looked after for Li Lan since she was a baby. I was tickled by her solutions of boiled soups and tonics, of her fondness for consulting mediums and so on, which are not out of place even in today’s modern Singapore. My mother-in-law, for instance, still boils up ginseng tonics to boost energy, and when I was pregnant would make sure I drank chicken essence every day (thankfully that was the only thing, as there were plenty of other soups and tonics one ‘ought’ to consume during pregnancy, and even more after, during the ‘confinement period’ of the first three months).

(via)

“Malacca was a port, one of the oldest trading settlements in the East. In the past few hundred years, it had passed through Portuguese, Dutch_ and finally British rule. A long, low cluster of red-tiled houses, it straggled along the bay, flanked by grooves of coconut trees and backed inland by the dense jungle that covered Malaya like s rolling green ocean. The town of Malacca was very still, dreaming under the tropical sun of its past glories, when it was the pearl of port cities along the Straits. With the advent of steamships, however, it has fallen into graceful decline.”

I adored Choo’s depictions of Malacca, a sleepy coastal town I’ve been to just once in my life during a school trip when I was 12, despite the fact that it’s only about 2.5 hours from Singapore. I remember the red-bricked Stadthuys, built in 1650 as the office of the Dutch governor, visiting a Peranakan museum and eating Peranakan food. Of course it was a lot more about having fun with our classmates as it was our last year of primary school and we would likely end up in different secondary schools.

“Malaya was full of ghosts and superstitions of the many races that people it. There were stories of spirits, such as the tiny leaf-sized pelesit that was kept by a sorcerer in a bottle and fed on blood through a hole in the foot. Or the pontianak, which were the ghosts o women who died in childbirth. These were particularly gruesome as they flew through the night, trailing placentas behind their disembodied heads.”

Longing and wistful, haunting and melancholy, Ghost Bride has a little something for everyone – a romance, a mystery, a coming-of-age story. An apt read for the Hungry Ghost Festival but also for every other month in which the spirits do not roam the earth.

Yangsze Choo is a fourth-generation Malaysian of Chinese descent. She lives in California with her husband and their two children, and loves to eat and read (often at the same time).
Connect with her on her website or on Facebook.