SPIRITS ABROAD is such a wonderful short story collection that, after finishing the ebook, I ordered a physical copy because it would have been a greater shame to deprive myself and my bookshelf of this great collection. I have also recommended SPIRITS ABROAD to anyone in earshot as readily as I give my name when introducing myself.

Grouped into 3 sections (4 if you’re reading the ebook, with extra stories!), the stories are grouped by their setting, and unifying all of them is the whimsical way Cho brings to life the spirits of Malaysian folklore. The interactions between humans, spirits, and magic is, for lack of a better word, delightful, reminiscent of Miyazaki, which can aptly be applied to Cho’s voice as a writer within SPIRITS ABROAD and her other works.

What sets Cho apart from other writers is how well she writes dialogue—not just how clever it is, but how well she writes the small sounds and asides people make when speaking. Like turning lead to gold, the dialogue transforms “said” from descriptor to gestures and expressions, and make the characters come alive with misleadingly simple sentences. The ever-present aunties and mothers especially are shining examples of this three-dimensional dialogue, even those outside the brilliant “House of Aunts.”

Fans of Cho’s novel, SORCERER TO THE CROWN (which, if you haven’t read, needs to be next on your list) will be delighted to see a return to that world in “Prudence and the Dragon.” Without giving away too much, there is a wonderful scene that takes place in a grocery store which I have read aloud for friends and co-workers, usually unprovoked. Also cat buses. The ebook offers the added bonus “The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life,” an equally fantastic short story that expands upon Prudence’s best friend. I will long for it when I open my physical copy.

In short, SPIRITS ABROAD is a brilliant collection, and the ebook is inexpensive enough that you don’t have a good excuse.

This book is a collection of short stories by Zen Cho. Some of my favorite stories are:

The Fish Bowl: This story resonates with me because I, like many first-born daughters of Asian households, based my entire self-worth on academic success and won't hesitate to sell my soul to an evil spirit to get a good grade.

The House of Aunts: I know Stephenie Meyer is crying in her room because she wished the Twilight series to be this good

Prudence and The Dragon: I would like to have a handsome dragon boyfriend too

If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again: I would like to have a hard-working dragon girlfriend also

The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote: All Toyol enthusiasts will love this story

Does anyone remember the Amazing Race? This book is kind of like that, assuming you're not Malaysian. You're dropped in the middle of the culture and then have to figure your way around based on textual clues. I thought this was pretty cool. I'm sure there were plenty of things I missed, but that was no obstacle to enjoyment.

It succeeds the way it does because the folklore isn't just the backdrop, but a living fabric that shapes and informs relationships between characters. And relationships, mainly those between women, are at the core of every story here.

Some things I learned while reading it:
-Manglish has great rhythm, but apparently Zen Cho is one of the few authors who uses it
-toyol is a type of spirit summoned from a dead fetus; it can be trained to steal things and commit petty mischief, but presumably it may learn other tricks ("The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote" has some tips on the latter)
-some paranormal investigators in Singapore have scads of info on pontianak (this pertains to the excellent "House of Aunts")
-the orang minyak is basically Fedora Guy's ascended form (and "The Mystery of the Suet Swain" is by turns whimsical and chilling in laying this out. It has a thematic companion in "Prudence and the Dragon" but with less grease and realism, and more dragon.)
-it takes serious writing skill to be hilarious yet unsentimental, whimsical and realistic, dark yet optimistic (ok, I knew this already, but Zen Cho's writing is such a fantastic example of striking that balance that I feel I learned it all over again)

A seriously good collection. Read it.

*cradling this book against my chest like its the most precious thing on earth while i sob uncontrollably*

Excellent audio book.

2020 Jun 07:

Plot: Short story collection ft. Malaysia, Malaysians and the Malaysian diaspora. Mostly fantasy with a sprinkling of sci-fi and a large helping of what I assume is Malaysian- accented English.

1. So ideally for a short story collection I would note down my impressions of each individual story. I don't think I'm going to do that in this case because (a) it's hard, and the effort is not justified if the stories don't invoke widely varying feelings in me and (b) I love all of this very much so it's just going to be me typing down the title of the story and then gushing.

2. There are commonalities between these stories; a longing for culture that's both present and slipping away (boy do I get that), commentary (often tongue in cheek, but no less serious for that) of social justice and a continuing theme of the humanity of the other- only our main characters are all poc women so the other is usually monsters and you know what? I dig that.

3. The themes of the stories are often melancholy (a dead woman comes back to the land of the living to see her husband one last time, a sci-fi immigrant experience featuring a lot of discrimination, a story which basically amounts to non-human sacrifice of a loved one, a girl struggling to cope with the draconic examination system) but that doesn't stop Zen Cho from peppering everything with humor and affection. And this is one of those books which I'm starting to think encapsulates the Asian (I didn't even know it was an Asian thing till I read books written by Asian authors ft. Asian families I thought it was just a my family thing) family dynamics, which is a complicated mixture of love and sacrifice entwined with criticisms and control and expectations. Just- //flails.

4. I love this book very much okay. I think everyone should read it. It's exposure to cultures that you may not be familiar with and the stories are just so goddamned good.

5. A collection of random quotes. I had to delete more than half of them because I figured I was going overboard.

The aunts had a horror of talking about death. In life this had been an understandable superstition, but it seemed peculiar to dislike the mention of death when you were dead.

--

She'd only met Murni that morning, when she introduced herself as the press officer of a Muslim feminist group.
"The Muslims don't like us and the feminists also don't like us," she'd told Esther.

--

She had never thanked an aunt for anything before. It was understood that they would do things for her, that that was the way the world worked. She did not need to thank them any more than trees thanked the sun for shining or the earth thanked the clouds for rain.

-

Mr. Yu was not pleased. "Lion dance is supposed to get rid of evil spirits. Why should I hire you if you're not going to bring good luck?"
"He's nine or ten only," said Simon. "He can't be an evil spirit at that age, right? Naughty at the very most."

-

Prudence was only listening to about 40% of what Zheng Yi was saying, which was good because Zheng Yi only meant 40% of anything he said.

-

What Chang E didn't like was the rabbits claiming to be intelligent. It's one thing to cradle babies to your breast and sing them songs, stroking your silken paw across their foreheads. It's another to want the vote, demand entrance to schools, move in to the best part of town and start building warrens.

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2017 Oct 10

*6 stars*

Since I finished The Terracotta Bride with a yearning for more, and since I have already read Sorcerer to the Crown, I went and found this book.

What I liked best was about how I was reading about a culture that is both very alien and very familiar. I grin whenever I spot Tamil names and words, and the broken English the characters use (which I presume is combination of English words and their own languages' grammatical structure) is something I very much identify with.

It's new and wonderful, this feeling reading stories set in a culture that is not familiar because of media exposure (I look at you, the West), but familiar because there are so many patterns to it that I identify with my own life. That made the reading experience far less chaotic to me than it might have been for someone from a different place, possibly.

The stories themselves are /exactly/ the kind of narratives I'm partial to. I love outsider perspectives and ruminations on how nice and how nasty and how smothering people can be to each other. And I love reading about monsters who live among the people. SO yeah- it was sort of tailor-made for my tastes. I adored House of Aunts, The First Witch of Damansara, The Fish Bowl and The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote and Rising Lion-The Lion Bows in particular, but I also have a soft sport for all the other stories. I mean, there is a reason this got six stars.

Will. Except for the Hang Jebat story, which I honestly did not understand, so I can't really say anything about it.