Malaysian author Choo Yangsze on the complex symbolism of fox spirits

SINGAPORE – Malaysian author Choo Yangsze does not know how many stories of fox spirits she read before writing her new novel, The Fox Wife.

After all, Chinese literature is teeming with the creatures, from Pu Songling’s 18th-century Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio to first-person accounts of spirit encounters in the 1950s.

“It wasn’t that hard to find a lot of material on it and, from there, to extrapolate and build a world of foxes,” Choo says over Zoom. “What’s always intrigued me is what’s on the other side. Why would foxes bother with people? Opening the door to the other has always appealed.”

The historical fantasy writer, based in California with her husband and two children, has built a career on writing about Asian ghouls and monsters.

Her 2013 debut, The Ghost Bride, sees a young woman in 1890s Melaka haunted by her ghostly suitor.

Her follow-up The Night Tiger (2019) then drew on the myths of shape-shifting were-tigers in South-east Asia, recreating a British Malaya full of magic and romance.

Published in January, The Fox Wife is told partly from the perspective of a female fox spirit, Snow.

It takes readers across north-eastern China in the dying throes of the Qing empire, as Snow attempts to track down the human killer of her cub, meeting old loves and masking her identity along the way.

Choo has chosen to set her novel in this period of social disruption as it lent itself to a surge in reported supernatural activity.

The early 1900s were replete with conflicts between the Han people and the ruling Manchus. Borders between China and Japan were also more porous.

The fox myth – along with Chinese students in search of modern education – travelled to Japan, and Snow and two male foxes also cause a stir there midway through the book.

“The whole idea of ‘are you human?’ speaks to a very ancient kind of reaction to a stranger,” Choo says. “You try to judge if a person is trustworthy. It is a means of trying to put all the strangeness into a box so that you can react.”

But like folk religions across the world, stories of fox spirits are both a site for the reaffirmation of social norms and a means through which women especially could challenge them.

One of the first things Choo notes in The Fox Wife is the formulaic nature of many fox stories: A male scholar, busy studying for his examinations, is interrupted in the twilight by a beautiful woman and lured to her den. “Pu Songling was a failed scholar,” Choo notes cheekily.

In general, the moral lessons are transparent: Female foxes tended to be subjugated by marriage before giving birth to sons who do exceptionally well in imperial exams, while male foxes who try to seduce married women meet ghastly deaths.

“But I also see it as a means for women, mostly young women, to gain a voice in society because people are much more likely to listen to you if a god was talking through you,” Choo says.

There are several instances in the book where claims to a higher power are spurious.

A human detective named Bao is the other main character and has the power to suss these impostors out, a truth-telling ability that he has carried like a burden since an unfortunate childhood illness.

Asked if she is able to distil the traits of a fox, Choo adds an interesting paradox: “Foxes are always trying to find their way around things, and are predatory when they can. They are tricky because they are powerless. Really powerful creatures don’t trick people. They just go ahead and say, ‘This is my will.’”

An initial draft of The Fox Wife was double in length, Choo confesses, and contained footnotes throughout the narrative that mimicked the marginalia women who could not attend literary salons in the past would scribble onto books and pass around.

Her publisher has edited these down to just a few asterisks that gesture towards Choo’s original concept – a third-time thwarting for Choo, who says with shyness that she has also had to “control myself” in her footnoting in her previous two books.

She wonders if the discomfort is caused partly by cultural difference, though she also laments that hopes of such an intertexual book being published are becoming increasingly slim as it would be unwieldy to read on e-readers.

“In Western academia, it’s full of dry and scholarly footnotes, but the way the Chinese used to do it, it will be people’s opinions, so that’s inherently more interesting.”

She has already settled on yet another fantastical idea for her next novel: ginseng changelings.

A slow writer – and one who prefers to extemporise without an outline, much like the fox spirits of old – she has begun preparing for it.

“When I went to South Korea last summer to do some research, I saw how the plant grows and the fact that it literally looks like a person. It’s very creepy,” she says. “My mum would not approve.”