Reviewed by Alyson Baker
Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman ‘falls’ from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver.
All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese Pākehā writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit húli jīng as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is an audacious blend of biography, mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history..
“You will give these women voice and nourish them with hope … You will give them flesh and make them real” – Lee Murray, a “New Zealand-born Chinese Pākehā”, tells nine tales of women of the Chinese diaspora, women who were either the victims of and/or perpetrators of unconscionable crimes in Aotearoa. How did these atrocities occur (and they did occur), and how did stifled women get the spirit to act?
Murray frames her stories as tales of the morally ambivalent húli jīng, a nine-tailed fox. But a húli jīng out of her milieu. Not travelling from China to Korea, where she would have switched into a gumiho, or to Japan where she would have morphed into a kitsune. The narrating Fox finds herself awaking in Aotearoa, a land where no embodied fox has ever set paw – “turning your hazel fox-eyes instead to the bright wax-eye that is flit-flit-flitting from flax to fern, to the sturdy black wētā trudging up the trunk of a nearby ponga tree … you curl your claws in the softening detritus.”
Out of her environment, the Fox, like the girls and women in the tales, is unable to enjoy the beauty of her new world – she is from a different culture, speaks a different language, she “becomes a lonely spectator of life”. She cannot run free, she is confined to the lives of the nine women. This is because she longs to travel to heaven, and “she cannot know her true place without first experiencing the agony of living. It is the eternal contract”. There is only one way: “Nine tails. Nine tales. Nine mortal lives.” And what tragic lives they are.
“Whose skull will you wear?” The tales are of women from different times and at all stages of life, from baby, to girl, to young woman, to adult, to elderly. All the women are confined and lacking agency. As well as their spirits being the húli jīng, Murray also terms the women penjing, which became bunjae in Korea, and usually known as the Japanese bonsai – wild things dwarfed and shaped by humans.
The women are all seen as of value only for their capability to procreate or carry out menial tasks. Education, aspiration, potential, all having no place in their lives, or if they do, they are quashed as the women mature. And this cycle of extinguished hope flows through the generations. The Fox is always there as a silent witness, apart from when she bushes her tail “beneath stiff cotton”, or gnashes her “tiny sharp teeth in distaste”, when “for an instant, you become your true self. You lift your head, and flick your ears”.
FOX SPIRIT ON A DISTANT CLOUD talks of the burden of a culture when it can’t be embraced, when it traps you rather than empowers you. In this “New Gold Mountain” you are only seen as: “An almond-eyed difficulty.” Any flicker of personal life is taken, as are any children you bear: “It is the way things are, the way things are destined to be.” You have no property, and if you do manage financial independence, you are always aware of shadows in the dark: “They exist everywhere. Not a woman, since women understand the rules, and any woman who has a problem with you would approach you in the daylight … Only men skulk in the shadows.”
The tales are all sad and bleak, they wear down the women and drive the Fox to explosive rage: “All these years your fox-bones squeezed into places they didn’t belong.” These are not tales of women who are ciphers for all Chinese women. One is, like Murray, “one-part willow and one-part manuka”. They are tales of those who became snippets in Papers Past, or whose stories appeared in the national media. They are tales of women whose spirit has waned: “The gods were right all along. You are a no-good woman and a waste of rice.”
The book is beautifully constructed, prefaced by poetry, and contrasting the tales are the smatterings of short couplets they include: “tuatara / steps on a rock”, “frost on the grass / late for work”, “lifting a rock / the slaters scatter.” The Fox, after: “All these years imprisoned in a domed skull cage. Surrounded by ghosts”, comes to a revelation that her difficult journey to heaven, her life in this far off lonely alien land, has been all about bearing witness – just like Murray’s novel.
I found FOX SPIRIT ON A DISTANT CLOUD wonderfully conceived and executed.
Alyson Baker is a crime-loving former librarian in Nelson. This review first appeared on her blog, which you can check out here.
No comments:
Post a Comment