Written by Zen Cho, and nicely narrated in my audiobook version by Catherine Ho, this novel came out just this year. I'm a fan of this Malaysian author's work (see here for my appreciation of Spirits Abroad and other pieces), and Black Water Sister more than lived up to my expectations.

The central protagonist is Jess Teoh, who moved from Malaysia to the United States with her family as a child, grew up there, and graduated from Harvard. But her father gets sick, and loses his job, so they decide to return to Malaysia -- specifically, to Penang.


Our first visit to Penang, 2000

It's a tough period for Jess. She's a bit of a fish out of water back in Malaysia; she and her parents are living with relatives, a situation that inevitably brings its own pressures; she's missing her girlfriend (whom her parents don't know about) -- and, as though that were not enough to deal with, she's being haunted by Ah Ma, her dead grandmother...

Ah Ma used to be the medium for a god known as the Black Water Sister, and she finds herself unable to move on peacefully to the spirit realm, because she has a major bone to pick with a local bigwig. It's a double-ended bone, in that she's campaigning not only on her own behalf (he's the unacknowledged father of her son), but also (indeed, mostly) on her god's behalf (the Big Cheese is encroaching, for development purposes, on the land where the god's shrine is located).

And Jess is the one that Ah Ma nominates to fix all this...









I loved the way Zen Cho effortlessly blends the supernatural and the realistic, the laugh-out-loud funny and the eternally tragic. I loved that the novel takes the world of spirits seriously (a sine qua non of living in Malaysia), while also engaging with material-world problems like land acquisition, workplace safety, and the corruption/violence vortex that so often swirls around the whole business of "real estate development". Not to mention the challenges of coming out to your parents in a largely conservative society such as Malaysia... 

As Olivia Ho puts it, the novel is a "galvanising ride through a Malaysia both modern and mystical, a milieu of hipster cafes and heritage temples, where the trees are full of spirits that ask pleasantly: 'Eh, how are you? Died already, is it?'"


George Town, 2018



The dialogue is great, as is always the case with Zen Cho. She has a wonderful ear for "Manglish" (Malaysian English). And the character of Ah Ma -- feisty, acerbic, and ultra-persistent -- is a particularly fantastic exponent of it. 

Certainly, if I were out of Malaysia, this is the sort of book that would in a flash transport me right back. It's saturated with the spirit of place, the details perfectly evoked. One example from many: the Datuk Gong (that quintessentially Malaysian, wonderfully syncretic local deity who plays a benevolent and protective role, and who helps Jess in her struggles with the Black Water Sister) is Malaysian-specific about the offering that should be brought to him in acknowledgment: nasi dalca (from an outlet that has a particularly good rep, of course) and air Bandung.... 





Black Water Sister also presents quite a powerful feminist treatise, albeit conveyed very entertainingly. Male gods, Jess points out, get to be deified through a kind of patriarchal promotion system. Female gods, on the other hand, often reach their status because their awful fates have left black, vengeful spirits that have to be propitiated. Zen Cho doesn't beat around the bush in conveying that our mothers and grandmothers often led really shitty lives... And whether or not you believe in ghosts and gods, the kind of trauma that carries on resonating down the generations is surely familiar to all of us.

As the author observes in an interview, the boundaries separating Jess, Ah Ma, and the Black Water Sister often blur. However, "Jess is also really different from Ah Ma and the Black Water Sister, of course. The most important difference is that Jess was born in the modern era to parents who don't value her any less because she's a daughter and who think she should be educated and safe and happy. Powerless as she may seem, this gives her resources neither Ah Ma nor the Black Water Sister have."

That being the case, I guess the only thing that, to me, didn't totally feel right about the book was the ultimate resolution of the Black Water Sister's tragedy... It felt just a tiny bit too easy after all those terrible cycles of violence and hatred and vengeance, stretching out over the best part of a century.

But then, Jess certainly paid a steep price for the role she played in facilitating deliverance, and at the end of the day, I'm not an expert on the Malaysian supernatural...

All up, a beautiful book. Brava!