by Zen Cho
I had a hard time in Form 4, though not nearly as hard a time as Su Yin. My violin teacher dumped me because I wasn't practising. I remember being mildly surprised by this because I hadn't practised for the past five years and it hadn't seemed to bother her before. If you're a bright kid who's been trained to do exams you can skate through school for quite a while, but at a certain point things start to require actual work, and a system that's focused on exams and ticking boxes and jumping through hoops doesn't prepare you all that well for that humbling.
Su Yin is very sheltered, of course. But you can be sheltered and still suffer a lot. I guess that's what this story is about.
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Balik Kampung — Author's Notes
For a while I was batting around the idea of writing a cosy mystery about a hantu that balik kampung for a festival, and ends up investigating the mystery of their own death. A detective novel with a twist!
("Balik kampung" means "returning to the village", and it's what you do when there's a big holiday on, like Hari Raya or Chinese New Year or Deepavali. I feel like the notion of balik kampung is embedded in the urban Malaysian psyche, the way the road trip is something that means a lot to Americans; it's all tangled up with traffic jams and family and our persistent nostalgia for an imagined simpler past.)
When Jonathan Oliver invited me to submit a story to his anthology of weird road trip stories, I thought of my hantu detective idea. It turned out a lot more melancholy than I'd imagined it, and not especially cosy. Maybe I will write the cosy mystery version of the story one day.
I looked at maps of Peninsular Malaysia a lot while writing this story, as well as local food blogs. I have never had Kampar curry chicken bread, but it looks pretty good.
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Publication credits
Here
"The First Witch of Damansara" first published in Bloody Fabulous, ed. Ekaterina Sedia, Prime Books, October 2012.
"First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia" first published in Fantastique Unfettered, September 2011.
"The House of Aunts" first published in GigaNotoSaurus, December 2011.
There
"起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion — The Lion Bows)", first published in Strange Horizons, March 2011.
"Prudence and the Dragon" first published in the Crossed Genres Quarterly, February 2011.
Elsewhere
"The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote" first published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, May 2012.
"The Four Generations of Chang E" first published in Mascara Literary Review, October 2011.
Going Back
A shorter version of "The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat" appeared under the title "Jebat Dies" in Esquire Malaysia, April 2013.
"The Fish Bowl" first published in The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic, ed. Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber, Alchemy Press, November 2013.
"Balik Kampung" first published in End of the Road, ed. Jonathan Oliver, Solaris Books, October 2013.
