by Zen Cho
Well, I didn't say that last sentence. The first was quite enough. I am sufficiently Confucian not to want to alienate even the intolerable aunt. After all she is the only aunt I have here.
It did sting, though. I know — at least, my mind knows — that she thinks Rose and Clarissa are beautiful because they look English, and anything that is English is good to Aunt Iris. My heart is rather less sensible, and vulnerable to jabs about eyes. When I got home I crept down to the landlady's drawing room and stared at myself in her full-length mirror to remind myself of how pretty I am.
You can't ever tell people you think you are pretty. Even if you are pretty you have to flutter and be modest. Fortunately here nobody thinks I am pretty, so my thinking I am pretty is almost an act of defiance; it makes me feel quite noble. I have that slim bending willowy figure that looks so good in a robe, and smooth shining black hair like a lacquered helmet, and a narrow face with a pointy chin and black slashes of eyebrows.
It took me a long time to realise I was pretty, because Ma and Pa never thought so. Even the fair skin they didn't like — I'm not the right kind of fair. The Shanghainese girls on cigarette cards are like downy white peaches. I am like a dead person. This was disturbing on a child. Now I am an adult, I am like an interesting modern painting, but my parents are keen on moon-faces and perms.
They are the nicest parents, though. They always told me I was clever.
But the eyes are small, there's no getting away from that. Poor phoenix eyes! Here you might as well be sparrows.
What a disgusting entry! I must improve my character. The reason why I started this diary was to become a better writer, to develop a purer voice, and to practise cursive handwriting. And here I am raving about looking like a willow when I don't in the least, not being anywhere near as leafy — and all in handwriting that would be enough to make the sisters at my old school cry. (Or more likely, move those tough old biddies to make me cry.)
Enough! I must work on my review. I am reading a terrible sententious book called The Wedding of Herbert Mimnaugh. Firstly, what sort of a name is Herbert and why would a parent with any trace of natural affection wish to afflict their child with such a name? Herbert's parents do not feature prominently in the book when this choice alone makes it obvious that they are the most interesting people in it.
Secondly and cetera, it is awful — hollow intellectual grandstanding that always stays five steps away from any true feeling even while it professes to plumb the depths of human experience. And no sense of humour. I cannot forgive a book that has no sense of humour.
I shall write a review tearing it apart and ask Ravi to look at it. He might give me enough for it that I could buy myself a new dress.
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Author's Commentary
The First Witch of Damansara — Author's Notes
I wrote this story when a friend sent me a call for submissions to an anthology of urban fantasy stories about fashion (thanks, Micole!). I think mine is more suburban fantasy than urban fantasy, if only because I am interested in what happens in the home, but the editor of the anthology bought it anyway.
I am not sure if it is realistic for Nai Nai to be so down on white in a wedding dress. It is true that traditionally white is the colour for mourning, but that taboo seems to have been wiped out by the ubiquity of the Western white wedding dress. The way I've explained it to myself is that Nai Nai is trolling Vivian throughout, which is consistent with her characterization.
Vivian's real name is Wei Lin. Like several of my other characters, she has adopted a Western name as a means of hiding herself.
"Nai Nai is always bad in the movies" is something my mother once said. I steal all my best lines.
Go to next story: First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia
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First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia — Author's Notes
This story was inspired by a brief stint with a NGO in Malaysia, where I helped organize moderated discussions of the type described in the story. The actual discussions were even funnier in real life than I have probably managed to convey. The part where everyone sinks into a happy rose-tinted dream of how great the country was before it all went to shit, and the curious way in which Malaysia's golden age corresponds with the speaker's childhood, are lifted directly from life.
First National Forum got rejected once for being preachy. It isn't meant to be! The parts where the Datin lectures everybody on tolerance and racial harmony are supposed to be funny, because that is precisely the kind of thing people say. Of course the real irony is that as a member of the ruling elite and (ex-)politician Datin Zainab has benefited from the perpetuation of the rigid ethnic and religious divisions reified by colonialism, but that is probably too subtle a point for anyone who isn't familiar with Malaysian history and politics to pick up on.
Esther is one of my few non-Chinese protagonists. I should improve on this lor.
Go to next story: The House of Aunts
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The House of Aunts — Author's Notes
Of all my stories The House of Aunts is the one that people have responded to most strongly. There is fanfic. The audio magazine PodCastle departed from its usual guidelines on story length and did an audio version (read by my super talented friend Nina Shaharuddin). The Stanford Asian American Theater Project put on a stage adaptation. I've received enthusiastic feedback from all sorts of people, from Southeast Asian Chinese women who remember being girls with a surfeit of aunts (who are the sort of people you would expect to like it), to male Mat Salleh lawyers working in Hong Kong.
I've been touched and a little surprised by the reception of the story, and I guess that is for the same reason that it has elicited a strong reaction — it is very personal. It is the closest I have got so far in my work to honouring where I've come from. Which is funny, because the people on whom the characters are based would not be happy about being transformed into pontianak, which is why I haven't told any of them about it.
People ask whether the aunts are based on my aunts. No individual aunt in the story is based on any of my actual aunts, but all of the aunts are based on an aggregation of my aunts as a whole.
I am grateful to Ann Leckie for buying the story for GigaNotoSaurus, and for telling me to submit it to PodCastle.
Go to next story: One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland
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One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland — Author's Notes
Having grown up on a diet of Enid Blyton and Chalet School books, I have a lasting fondness for boarding school stories. They are such a neat solution for the problem of adults getting in the way of adventures (frequently solved in young adult fiction by killing off the protagonist's parents). And I like stories about enclosed communities that operate by strict rules, which are neither obvious nor familiar to the reader at the outset, and require some figuring out. I am also fond of Star Trek slice-of-life fanfic about what happens on starships between away missions, Patrick O'Brian's Age of Sail novels with their careful attention to the minutiae of shipboard life, and Jane Austen's squabbling gentry.
"Kids stumble on mysterious magic in the English countryside and there is trouble" is another established genre of British children's literature that this story draws on. The magic is standard for its setting, but the kids are a little different.
Go to next story: 起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion — The Lion Bows)
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起狮，行礼(Rising Lion — The Lion Bows) and七星鼓(Seven Star Drum) — Author's Notes
The titles of both of these stories are taken from lion dance "moves" or sequences, which you can see if you feed the Chinese characters into YouTube. I realized after it was published that Rising Lion — The Lion Bows is kind of a fiddly title to remember if you don't spe
ak Chinese (it is neater in Chinese), but by then it was too late to re-name the story.
I had a hard time at university for various reasons, and joining the lion dance troupe in second year was one of the things that helped turn it round. You could be useful from the beginning, even if you didn't know very much — after all, anyone with half a sense of rhythm can clash a pair of cymbals together — and it combined learning new skills with being part of something out of the everyday. I'd seen lion dance before but hadn't thought of it as something people who weren't acrobats could do.
The other thing that went into 起狮，行礼 was non-white people in old European paintings. There are lots of such paintings, and many stories about people of colour who ended up in the UK through slavery or war or some other cataclysm, long before the Windrush. They built communities, but doubtless many of them still felt lonely. Because the story came out of a feeling of loneliness, it is about finding friendship.
七星鼓 is backstory that I cut from 起狮，行礼, but I like Boris, so I cleaned it up and posted it online. Someone asked me why Boris is drinking and has abandoned lion dance in the story: was that meant to show he was depressed?
My interpretation is that Boris is drinking because he works in the City and it kind of comes with the territory, and he abandoned lion dance not only because he was beginning to wonder if it was right for the lion to devour ghosts, but because lion dance had given him what he needed from it, and now he could move on to the rest of his life. You're welcome to adopt the other interpretation if it makes sense to you, though.
Go to next story: The Mystery of the Suet Swain
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The Mystery of the Suet Swain — Author's Notes
I originally wrote this story to submit to a crime/mystery anthology, which is why it has an investigative element. Sham is meant to be the Sherlock Holmes character — the kind of character girls never get to be: smart, snarky, bad at people. (This is the BBC Sherlock version. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes is frequently seen being nice to victims of crimes, police officers, and even Watson.)
But what mostly drove the story was the idea of failure, the failure of a community. Harassment is only allowed to continue because people don't recognize it, or if they recognize it they play it down, or if they don't play it down they don't do anything to stop it. When a creep gets away with predatory behavior, it's often because we let them, because they're mostly nice and mean well and hang out with all our friends, and we don't want to be the first person to say the awkward thing, like, "Stop harassing women, it's not charming and it's not funny."
When I was writing this story I was thinking of a time I failed to do the right thing in a similar situation (though without the orang minyak lah). Sham does what I wish I'd done. The story is an apology, but it's also a reminder to myself.
It's a funny contrast with Prudence and the Dragon, which takes place in an alternate world where dragons exist and being a creeper with no respect for boundaries can get you a girlfriend. I feel OK about Prudence and the Dragon because it's a wish fulfilment fantasy from Prudence's point of view — for me, it's not really about what Zheng Yi wants. But The Mystery of the Suet Swain is the more realistic story.
Go to next story: Prudence and the Dragon
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Prudence and the Dragon and The Perseverance of Angela's Past Life — Author's Notes
I wrote Prudence and the Dragon for an anthology seeking love stories between humans and magical creatures — werewolves and vampires and the like. (If you are reading these author's comments straight through, you may have noticed that several of the stories I wrote for anthologies were not actually sold to those anthologies. The writer's life!) Anyway, dragons are my favourite kind of magical creature, so that is what I chose.
I like Prudence because she is very ordinary, but also very clear about who she is. I like people who aren't cool but don't care, both in real life and in fiction. Angela is cooler but she isn't as comfortable in herself, as I found out when I wrote The Perseverance of Angela's Past Life.
Most of my friends were medical students in clinical school at the time I wrote these stories, which is why Prudence and Angela are both medical students in clinical school. If you draw from life you can save on research.
Go to next story: The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote
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The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote — Author's Notes
I wrote the first draft of this story when I was 19. It only got published quite a while later. At the time I cited as inspiration: Legolas & Gimli, "When are you going back?", Russell Lee's Singapore Ghost Stories, that one excellent seafood restaurant in Selayang. Which means:
The forest spirit is Legolas and the earth spirit is Gimli. (Kind of. The earth spirit is female. I don't know if that's obvious to readers.) I've always loved the story of Legolas and Gimli, which is a story of racists who learn better and make friends.
Malaysians use "back" in a different sense from other English speakers. It's one of the more subtle distinctions between Manglish and "standard" English, and one I enjoy.
Like everyone else I used to read Russell Lee's Singapore Ghost Stories under my desk at school. They're trashy purported non-fiction of the "here is a totally true story of this one time my cousin-in-law saw a pontianak" type. They have a lot of stories about local hantu, which is a large part of their appeal — as everyone knows Asian ghosts are about a million times scarier than Western ghosts.
I don't remember what the seafood restaurant has to do with anything at all, though the food was good.
Go to next story: Liyana
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Liyana — Author's Notes
My grandmother has a garden that is the most efficient use of a small space I have ever seen. It sustains pineapples, papayas, jackfruits, mangoes, vegetables, herbs, and numerous chickens. Every time we visit we return with a boot full of produce.
The idea for this story grew out of an afternoon of staring at the pineapples in her garden. Pineapples are very interesting to look at when they are small. The ones in my grandmother's garden were purple. They only turn golden when they mature and ripen. I started with an image of parting the leaves and revealing a sleeping child, and went on from there. Maybe the story got all tangled up with ideas of women's sacrifices because it started in my grandmother's garden.
Go to next story: The Four Generations of Chang E
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The Four Generations of Chang E — Author's Notes
As an Immortal who lives on the Moon, Chang E is an obvious candidate to feature in science fiction. She's also the most overseas of all overseas Chinese — a natural stand-in for the sprawling Chinese diaspora.
I was obviously thinking about immigration when I wrote the story, but I don't mean for it to be taken as the one true narrative of diaspora. It's not even really reflective of my own experiences of immigration. There is a certain progression from the first to the fourth generations, but while that is convenient for the purposes of a story, it's not like I really think there is a linear progression with something as complicated as immigration and its impact on cultures, communities and identities.
As a person poised between worlds you are always keenly conscious of the various other people you could have been, the other lives you could have lived. The story posits a set of lives Chang E could have had, but there are so many others.
Go to next story: The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat
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The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat — Author's Notes
A truncated form of this story appeared in Esquire Malaysia, for which even the original title was too long. (The Esquire version was re-titled Jebat Dies.) This is, of course, a Five Things story, and a more traditional title would be Five Times Hang Jebat Died.
The source material is the legend of Hang Tuah, which every Malaysian knows
. Hang Tuah, Melaka's most esteemed warrior, is wrongly accused by his enemies of conspiring against the Sultan, so the Sultan orders his execution. The Prime Minister, being wiser than the Sultan, doesn't execute Tuah, but hides him away. But Tuah's BFF Hang Jebat doesn't know that, and in revenge he rebels against the Sultan and takes over the palace. The Prime Minister then produces Tuah and the Sultan asks Tuah to kill Jebat. Tuah obeys.
I wrote this to submit to Esquire Malaysia because it's hard to follow unless you know the canon. But my dad read it three times and still didn't get it, so I don't know if this story works for anyone!
Go to next story: The Fish Bowl
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The Fish Bowl — Author's Notes
My Maths Teras tuition teacher had a koi pond in her living room. Looking back on it, I wonder whether she actually had it purely for its ornamental value. My mother made the immediate practical-minded assumption that she was rearing the koi to sell on.
