Fiction Reviews
Spirits Abroad
(2021/2024) Zen Cho, Tor, £9.99, pbk, 340pp, ISBN 978-1-035-01566-5
This comes from the author of Black Water Sister and is the paperback edition of the extended version of a collection first published by Fixi Novo in 2014, now with nine additional stories, including 2019 Hugo Award winner “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again”. That is definitely one of the highlights of the book and nicely represents Cho’s style of cosy East Asian mythology inspired fantasy. Taken from Korean legend, the central character is Bayam, an imugi, or proto-dragon, who is determined to ascend into dragon-hood but is repeatedly frustrated. Until, that is, it meets a certain human who transitions from being its nemesis – albeit unknowing – into someone special.
A very different and much more sophisticated kind of dragon shows up in ‘Prudence and the Dragon’, one that infuses London with its magic, so that buses turn into giant jungle cats and pigeons acquire human bodies, wearing suits from Austin Reed. Another love story, this is also about the intertwining of different cultures and the companion piece that immediately follows, ‘The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life’, uses Prudence’s friend Angela to pursue the theme of how best to navigate the resultant emotional turmoil.
These heart-warming tales are placed at the end of the second of the three sections that the collection is divided into, labelled ‘Here’, ‘There’ and ‘Everywhere’. A similar kind of love story from the first is ‘The House of Aunts’, which features a Malaysian ‘pontianak’, or vampire, named Ah Lee, who died while a teenager but continues going to school. There, where she eats fried human kidneys disguised as pork for lunch, she meets a boy who clearly likes her in that awkward way that teenagers do. Unfortunately, Ah Lee lives in the titular house of aunts, who are not so keen on her forming human attachments. In this story, it’s all about gaining some measure of independence whilst still retaining the love and support of one’s family, as makeshift as it might be. If that all sounds a little too cloying, Cho leavens the mix with contrastive, but generous, helpings of both gross body-horror and gentle humour.
However, perhaps my two favourite pieces are ‘Monkey King, Faerie Queen’ and ‘The Terra-cotta Bride’, from the ‘Elsewhere’ section. In the former Cho takes Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West and throws him, with all his strutting self-belief, not into India as in the original tale, but into the Faerie Court in England. Where, of course, he is less than impressed by the ‘barbarians’ he encounters but nevertheless helps a woman save her baby from the fae and has a good amount of fun along the way. (‘The Western Adventures of the Monkey King’ is surely crying out to be streamed as a TV series!) ‘The Terra-cotta Bride’, on the other hand, is both darker and more poignant. The protagonist, Siew Tsin, is killed while still a young woman and finds herself in the Chinese afterlife, where she is sold into marriage to the richest man in the tenth, and most desirable, of the ‘courts’ of Hell. There peace and stability are maintained through the corruption of the local demons but this harmonious if dull existence is threatened when Siew Tsin’s husband purchases a curious terra-cotta golem (to mix cultures in the spirit of the book). The implication is that if someone could lock their consciousness into such an immortal shell, they could escape the Wheel of Life and avoid the otherwise inevitable reincarnation. This revelation, coupled with another of more emotional resonance, shatters Siew Tsin’s state of quietude and the ending, although not unexpected, is both beautiful and touching.
Nevertheless, as much as I enjoyed Cho’s writing, I feel that there is a balance to be achieved between conveying the ‘otherness’ of another culture and ensuring comprehensibility (at least for a Western reader) and occasionally here that balance tilts too far in one direction. So, for example, in ‘The Earth Spirit’s Favourite Anecdote’, we have: ‘Maybe you will think I too pengecut but I hate toyol. I cannot tahan the way they act like real babies. They make me feel damn geli.’ (p. 267) Having to Google terms like these is definitely not conducive to maintaining the flow of the narrative! Still, having said that, Cho adeptly navigates an impressive variety of cross-cultural entanglements to successfully create a series of tales that are both illuminating and entertaining.
Steven French
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