In “The Mystery of the Suet Swain”, a group of Malaysian students at Cambridge are intrigued by a mysterious character on Facebook who seems to know all of them, and who turns out to be an orang minyak, one of an impressively rich variety of Malaysian supernatural figures that Cho introduces us to. That cultural contrast between British and Malaysian (or sometimes Chinese) approaches to the spirit world is perhaps the most fascinating recurring theme in the collection. Instead they wrote articles about them.” The main part of the story concerns the dragon’s infatuation with the rather incurious Prudence, even though in his human form he sometimes seems like a parody of toxic masculinity. Prudence, having grown up in Malaysia, is less taken aback than most Brits, because “In Britain people were far too sophisticated to pray to their spirits. We do meet another dragon, in the hilarious “Prudence and the Dragon”, in which London is transformed by magic – pigeons growing human bodies and entering the workforce (“they had a firm grasp of commercial realities, and never went on Facebook”), buses turning into cats, and most of all a giant dragon curling itself around the famed Gherkin building. Among the additions is the Hugo-winning “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again”, a moving and delightful saga of an age-old aspiring dragon (called an imugi) and its sadly mortal human friend, but that’s not the only example of the versatility of Cho’s talent on display here.
It seems fair to say that not a lot of international readers got hold of that book, but even for those who did, the new edition from Small Beer Press is far more substantial, containing 19 stories to that original edition’s seven. Spirits Abroad, Zen Cho ( Small Beer 978-6-9, $17.00, 352pp, tp), August 2021.īefore Zen Cho earned well-deserved popularity for her revisionist Regency-era fantasies Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, she received the 2015 Crawford Award for her collection Spirits Abroad, from the Malaysian publisher Fixi Novo.
0 kommentar(er)
