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| photo: James Cham | |
Yangsze Choo is a fourth-generation Malaysian of Chinese descent. Her first novel, The Ghost Bride, was set in colonial Malaya. Her second novel, The Night Tiger (Flatiron Books, February 2019), returns to Malaya decades later with the story of a young houseboy, a dance-hall girl and a weretiger. Choo lives in California with her husband and children.
You wrote The Night Tiger over the course of four years. What was that process like and how did you stay committed to the story?
At different points in time, the novel changed its shape. While working on it, I never quite knew what this book was about. Is it the boy Ren? Is it about Ji Lin, the dance hall girl? When I first started writing, Ji Lin wasn't even in there at all. I'd written a few chapters like that, and my agent asked why there weren't any women in the book.
There were a number of ways I got into the story. One of them is my love for old houses. Malaysia has a lot of abandoned colonial houses left by the British, and they speak to a completely different lifestyle. So one way to think about this novel is something like a Downton Abbey of the tropics, in which it's all colonial. The British had these large houses with large local staffs and, because of the language barrier, sometimes the people in the house didn't know what the staff were saying, or what they knew about them. That was always very interesting to me.
Did you visit those old houses when researching this book?
I tried to visit as many as I could. When you're inside an old house, you realize its character. You think: How many people came down these stairs? Why is the third stair worn away? Did people stop here to listen? Many of the buildings have now fallen into disrepair, and there's something very melancholy about these old houses that are just falling to pieces. Sometimes you can see them by the side of the road, and other times you can ask people permission to visit the house.
What other research did you do? There is so much detail about 1930s Malaya in the story.
When I was a child, there was nothing to read. So I was forced to read Somerset Maugham. He wrote a ton of stories set in the 1930s in colonial Malaya, all from the point of view of the British. Things of intrigue happen within the "upstairs" society: who gets invited to the party and who doesn't, who's having affairs with local mistresses. Things like that. I've had those stories in the back of my mind for a long time.
When I was researching my first novel, The Ghost Bride, I found a book called Malay Magic. It details a lot of charms, and short poetry about magic, and really caught my attention. When I was researching an earlier book about an elephant detective, I kept finding stuff about tigers, and that stayed with me.
And when I started this book, I actually spent some time driving around Malaysia. My parents still live there, so we went around to all these towns, many of which I'd been to as a kid.
There are any number of superstitions, myths and beliefs represented in the novel.
Malaysia is very much a melting pot. There are Malays, a large Chinese presence and also Hindus from Southern India. There were Arab traders, Jewish traders, Portuguese and Dutch settlers. The interesting thing is that everybody has superstitions, and in such a multi-cultural society, everybody adopts everybody else's.
For example, when I was growing up, I was told not to hang around banana trees at night because there are female ghosts that come out of them. That's an Indian superstition. And the Malays only plant frangipani in graveyards. But everybody else there, whether Chinese, Indian, whatever, also avoids it outside of graveyards. A lot of the tiger myths are Malay, but they may have some Chinese roots as well, because there are many Chinese stories of weretigers.
Can you talk a bit more about the myth of the weretiger?
The tiger is the largest land predator in Asia--the Indian subcontinent all the way up to China. It's very revered; in Malaysia, there is a custom of asking a tiger for permission before entering a jungle. The weretiger, too, is revered, in a very different way than the European werewolf is. The European werewolf is seen as a pest--a scourge, a vermin, if you will. It is a man who changes into a wolf when the moon is full and runs into the forest killing livestock and people. The Asian weretiger is almost a direct inversion of that. This is an animal that wears a human skin, and comes out from the jungle to eat you in your house. It's very creepy and somewhat disturbing. But because the tiger is such a venerated creature, the weretiger takes on almost god-like abilities. There's still a fear there, but there's also a great deal of respect.
The idea that the weretiger is not really a human at all, but an animal who's walking amongst us was interesting to me because it inverts our idea of what a shape shifter is. And it crosses a lot of those forbidden territories. You're not supposed to go around killing people--that's rather taboo.
Would you consider the novel a ghost story?
While writing this book, I asked myself, "Is this a ghost story? A murder mystery?" I don't really know. But I've always been interested in what I call mirror worlds--there's a world that is seen, and a world that is not. In the old houses, there's an upstairs and a downstairs. And perhaps in the end, reality is what you end up believing in. Two people can see the same event and will recall it significantly differently.
The interesting thing about people is that we're always searching for patterns. And maybe that's something that we're built to do. When there is no pattern, it feels very unsatisfying. We're always looking for something, and it may or may not be true, but your mind finds patterns in what we see. --Kerry McHugh