Continuing the theme of Malaysian women writers, this post is about my increasing admiration for Zen Cho. Born and raised in Malaysia, she now lives in England, and is a full-time lawyer and part-time "fantasy author".

She first sailed into my consciousness by means of a collection of 10 stories (Zen Cho | Spirits Abroad | 2014 | Kuala Lumpur: Buku Fixi). The genres represented range from horror to science fiction, and as Subashini Navaratnam puts it, the narratives successfully combine and interrogate "speculative fiction" and Malaysiana.

I'm not a fan of ghost or horror stories generally (going to see Pee Nak earlier this week was a kind of aberration, brought on by our recent sojourn in Thailand). But Malaysia (indeed the whole of Southeast Asia) is home to a vast array of ghosts. They are part of the narrative terrain, for whatever reason.



Cho's "The House of Aunts" is about Ah Lee, a teenage pontianak (this is the ghost of a woman who has died in childbirth, and now nourishes herself on men's innards). Not that Ah Lee uses that term. She prefers the inaccurate but safe term "vampire":

"'Vampire' was like Dracula, like goofy old black and white films, like pale ang moh boys who swooned over long-haired girls. Vampire was funny, or sexy, depending on which movie you watched. The right word was not funny. It was not sexy. Most of all, it was not safe."



Ah Lee lives with other dead members of her family, goes to school, and falls in love with a classmate. Cho weaves from this scenario a story that is creepy, funny, and moving.

It begins like this:

"The house stood back from the road in an orchard. In the orchard, monitor lizards the length of a mans arm stalked the branches of rambutan trees like tigers on the hunt. Behind the house was an abandoned rubber tree plantation, so proliferant with monkeys and leeches and spirits that it might as well have been a forest.

"Inside the house lived the dead."

But a dead family is still your family -- "only family will be there for you at the end of the day" -- and the aunts' vigorous, if sometimes misguided, efforts to look after Ah Lee are pure gold.



It's only at the end that the sad story of the pregnancy that killed Ah Lee emerges: the parents who can't cope with her "disgrace"; her increasing isolation and invisibility; the birth that goes bloodily wrong; and then -- liberation. "When she woke up she was a new person. She was dead, but she wasnt alone. There was nothing to be scared of in this new life. With six aunts behind you, you can be anything."

Cho has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and I've lived in Malaysia long enough to be able to hear in my head conversations like this one:

Girl, what's the matter? said Ji Ee.
What's happening? said Ah Chor.
Hao ah, said Ah Ma. Crying!
Crying? said Ah Chor. Ah Lee is crying?
You're crying, is it? said Sa Ee Poh.
The diagnosis bounced from aunt to aunt, each aunt repeating it to another for certainty.
So old already still crying! said Ah Chor.
Nobody has died. Your stomach is not empty. What is there to cry about? said Sa Ee Poh.
Ah girl, don't cry lah, ah girl, said Ji Ee.
Teacher scolded you, is it? said Ah Ma. Or is it because Ji Ee and Aunty Girl were late when they picked you up from school?
Ah, that's it, late! said Ah Chor sternly. Always late! What's the use of all this line-dancing? Now you are late to pick Ah Lee up and you have made her cry.
She is so big already. I thought she can look after herself for an hour, said Aunty Girl, but she spoke with contrition, conscious that she was in the wrong.
Ah girl, don't cry, said Ji Ee. Ji Ee wont be late anymore. We don't need to go dancing. Ah, so old already, we wont miss it!



But as Abigail Nussbaum remarks, there's a wealth of commentary on Malaysian history, politics, and social change tucked away in Cho's easy-to-read stories. "The First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia" (on ethnicity and marginalization) and "The Four Generations of Chang E" (on migration) are particularly noteworthy in this respect. Again, she has an admirable ability to throw everyday discourse into sharp relief by providing a fantasy-inspired context.

Another of my favourites is "Rising Lion, The Lion Bows", about a ghost-busting lion-dance troupe. (This story was inspired by Cho's own experience with lion dancing at Cambridge University.)

When a new member of the group is told about its clandestine exorcism activities, she "demanded no proof", having "already known that there was something magical about lion dance".

The following description rings 100% true to me:

"As the lion danced an enchantment began to fall on the room. It was as though the dance had made the years turn over on themselves all at once, so that the dust of centuries began to settle on the furniture in a matter of minutes. Outlines grew hazy and the room grew dark, matching the blue-black evening sky outside. Only the cabinet glowed golden, the figures on its doors standing out in sharp relief, so vivid that they seemed about to move. And the lion --

"The lion blazed through the room. Jia Qi knew its legs were Simon's and Tiong Han's legs, working in unison. She knew the tossing head and blinking eyes were operated by human hands. And yet she did not know it. The lion had changed; it was not human anymore. The spirit that slumbered in the lion head had awakened. It was a single, strange, live creature, and the beat of the drum was the beat of its heart."



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Having enjoyed Spirits Abroad, I investigated Cho's website a bit further.

There you can find a number of stories that incisively and amusingly use the vehicles of fantasy or historical fiction to examine timeless human emotions and predicaments. She is unfailingly entertaining.

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Cho's writing credo is here.

Standouts for me:

"Every voice is needed. Only you can write your stories...

"Take the work seriously, but not yourself."

On getting published, she has this to say:

"[It] is not that important. It is nice to be published and have readers and all that sort of thing. But if you can turn your writing into a nourishing, sustaining practice if you can find joy in it divorced from the need for external validation then you will have a source of meaning and reward that no one can take from you and that is dependent on no one but yourself."

This sounds a bit like James Hollis's reflections on the "second half of life":

"The relinquishment of ego ambition, as fueled and defined by first-half-of-life complexes, will in the end be experienced as a newfound and hitherto unknown abundance. One will be freed from having to do whatever supposedly reinforced ones shaky identity, and then will be granted the liberty to do things because they are inherently worth doing... The revisioned life feels better in the end, for such a person experiences his or her life as rich with meaning, and opening to a larger and larger mystery.

"Ultimately, our vocation is to become ourselves, in the thousand, thousand variants we are."