#YISHREADS January 2025

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

Chinese New Year approaches! So, this month’s column is devoted to speculative fiction from and about the Chinese diaspora, ranging from Singapore to Malaysia, the Philippines, Canada, and to the People’s Republic itself.

Long-time readers may remember that I devoted August 2022’s column to an almost identical topic.[1] In the two and a half years since, Chinese SFF has exploded on multiple platforms, including TV (see the Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem), computer games (see Black Myth: Wukong) and, of course, books (there’ve actually been complaints about there being too many Chinese-inspired fantasy novels promoted by services like Illumicrate and Fairyloot).[2]

This lineup, however, reveals the breadth of the genre. Here we have forays into literary fiction, science fiction, horror and romance; middle-grade and highly sexually explicit content; varying degrees of identification with Chinese heritage vs. the national culture of the authors’ citizenship. Plus, it’s a happy coincidence that three of the novels here feature queer protagonists!

And yes, I know this also happens to be the Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian and Hmong New Years, cos we’re all using the same lunisolar calendar. Maybe next year I’ll be able to offer a less Sinocentric lineup. Can anyone recommend any works of Mongolian SFF?

Sister Snake, by Amanda Lee Koe
Ethos Books, 2024

A perfect novel to welcome the Year of the Snake! And AAAUUGGGGHHH, how can I convey how epic, how magical, how fiercely gorgeous and deeply necessary an addition to Singaporean literature this is?

You’d think I’d have expected it to be this good—the author’s previous works, Ministry of Moral Panic and Delayed Rays of a Star, were awesome too, no? But the first was a collection of finely wrought short stories about Singapore, and the second was a composite novel about historical figures of 20th century Europe, China and the USA, i.e. neither one was a novel about Singapore, a field that’s terribly prone to cliché. Nor was it remarkable that she’d chosen the folktale of Lady White Snake as her inspiration. Loads of Singaporean storytellers have done the same, from my own play Snake (1999) to the ETCetera’s Madam What’s Next (2000) to Wild Rice’s musical Mama White Snake (2017) to Sher Lee’s novel Legend of the White Snake (also 2024). Plus, the speculative turn of ageless immortals in 21st century cities isn’t terribly new these days, is it?

But while Sister Snake’s in dialogue with Chinese myth—particularly Tsui Hark’s interpretation in his film Green Snake (1993), which really developed this idea of its title character as having more agency than the glorified White Snake—I’d argue that it’s also legible through the lens of Crazy Rich Asians. Like John Chu’s film, this story begins in the familiar cosmopolis of New York City (I’m not counting the London prologue, don’t @ me); where Emerald (aka Xiaoqing, aka Green Snake) is working as a sugar baby; likewise, we switch to the world of elite Singapore through the eyes of Bai Suzhen (aka White Snake), all designer brands and aesthetician clinics. The bulk of the tale then involves Emerald’s trip to Singapore, experiencing its delights and overturning its norms through her little rebellions.

However, Amanda comes not to praise Singapore, but to bury it. Su’s devotion to Singapore comes with the price of conformity: she’s a perfect wife to a PAP Minister of Education who embodies the patriarchalism and control freak spirit of our nation. (The Ashlee saga plays out in the background: a trans student who refuses to wear a boy’s uniform, constantly misgendered by men in white.)[3] Emerald’s favourite place here isn’t Marina Bay Sands, but the grungy soon-to-be-demolished Golden Mile Complex, where she flirts with the Malay lesbian bodyguard Tik (this is not an all-Chinese story, phew). And gradually it becomes evident that our paradise city is toxic, and something must change… but I’ve said too much. Can’t afford spoilers.

What I will say, however, is that we’ve got this mastery of emotional tension here—the betrayals are heartbreaking and nerve-wracking—combined with the raw fury of someone who clearly wants to unleash terror on oppressors; who knows and loves Singapore but also knows that there is so much more than this city. (Multiple flashbacks to medieval Hangzhou, Victorian London, the Harlem Renaissance, as you’d expect from the lives of immortals.) And there’s great love for Singapore too, as evidenced by the fact that what you see in the photo is a Singapore-only edition, with rights accorded to Ethos Books —though this is also being sold by Harper Collins as a glossy international hardback, the author also wants it to be understood in the context of local literature, telling readers that Singaporean books can be as splendid, as devastating as this.

One last note—a friend confided in me that this is actually their least favourite of Amanda’s books. My guess is that this is because she’s leaning hard into genre fiction, which isn’t going to be to everyone’s liking. As she said at her star-studded book launch,[4] she’s determined to have every one of her books be completely different from its predecessors. Awesome goal for a mid-career writer: to never stop changing, to never stop growing.

Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho
Small Beer Press, 2021

Malaysian publisher Buku Fixi printed a version of this in 2014, which I read and loved. This international edition, however, is a whole other beast: almost twice as long, with nineteen short stories compared to the original's ten.

As it turns out, it’s worth it to read the whole thing all over again, cover to cover. The tales are in dialogue with each other (or with her greater oeuvre: “Prudence and the Dragon” takes place in the same magical world she created in Sorcerer to the Crown), and they're fascinatingly revealing of the extent to which Cho is intent on exploring her emigrant Malaysian Chinese identity, never erasing it in favour of the generic Chinese diaspora. Even in tales set in the UK, like the boarding school in "One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland", the characters are almost all Malaysians; Sun Wukong speaks Manglish in "Monkey King, Faerie Queen" and the parables of "The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote" and "The Four Generations of Chang-E" speak directly to the narratives of acculturation and women's intermarriage with indigenous men.  

(Yeah, "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again" is an exception with its focus on Koreans and Korean legends of the imugi. But it won a Hugo Award, so she could hardly leave it out.)

I’ve written about Cho’s consistency in representing  racial diversity before. You can see it here, in the adorable Malay guy who’s the love interest in the feminist pontianak tale "The House of Aunts", the Indian lesbian protagonist of the orang minyak story "The Mystery of Suet Swain", the Black ghost in the fantastical "起狮，行礼" (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows)", and of course a wide range of ethnicities in the orang bunian-inspired "The First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia".

On the whole, however, you don’t see her being tokenistic. Most of her stories have all-Chinese casts, or even ambiguous races—a girl born out of the Earth in "Liyana" is given a Malay name, despite the family being Chinese-coded. Mixed feelings about this—it doesn't feel like she's avoiding the complexity of racial diversity so she has space for fantastical worldbuilding; it feels authentic to the way race actually works in Malaysia, with minority-majorities and mixings we don’t get so much in Singapore. 

Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor, by Xiran Jay Zhao
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2022

Yeah, yeah: I know I should be covering Zhao’s newest novel, Heavenly Tyrant, but I’ve only just got round to finishing their middle-grade debut: the tale of a 12-year-old boy whose VR headset gets possessed by the spirit of China’s first Emperor, Qin Shihuang.

Cool premise, yeah? But to be honest, I wasn't sold on the opening chapters. Middle-grade fiction doesn't always agree with me (I'm definitely not the target audience), and there was so much explaining: why Chinese-American kids are scared to eat their homecooked food with their friends, Zach's cultural background (he's Hui, a refugee after his dad was executed by the PRC government), and of course a million details about Chinese history, legend and current affairs.

But as the story rolled on, I got hooked—mostly cos the battles with vengeful spirits come fast and furious, with him and the spirits of Tang Taizong and Wu Zetian on a race to save China in fourteen days before a ghostly portal opens at the Seventh Month. What genuinely impressed me, however, was that Zhao's giving kid readers a way deeper than expected window into Chinese lore: we don't just see battles with relatively familiar icons like Li Bai and the Eight Immortals and the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, but also obscurer figures like Jing Ke (the assassin who almost merked Qin Shihuang), Di Renjie (Detective Dee of the movies). There's even a sequence where the spirit of Qu Yuan starts pelting them with explosive rice dumplings!

Furthermore, the magical logic of the story is that these spirits are shaped and sustained by folk belief—not just temple worship but depictions in TV serials and computer games, with emphasis on the fact that they're inseparable from Chineseness cos the language makes constant reference to their histories (spells are literally cast through quotation), which means that Zach, as a deracinated kid, has to learn all this in order to wield his powers effectively (info pops up handily on the VR headset).

Yet he's also a source of insider knowledge, not just a recipient—especially his bitter reflections on being a Hui emigrant who's suddenly told that he's a bearer of Chinese majoritarian heritage. Some resonance, I think, among us in the Southern Chinese diaspora, borrowing glory from imperial Chinese history in the north.

Oh, and he's gay. Explicitly so, with a history of awkward crushes on possibly toxic boys around him. He's a 12-year-old gay Muslim shaoshu minzu middle-grade protagonist! Where else do you get this kind of representation?

Won't give away spoilers, but I’ll say that I’m impressed by how the story wraps up so suddenly, but effectively at the end, with a great hook for the sequel... and also character arcs that really drive home the moral ambiguity of power in Chinese history, where tyrants and paragons are often the same people. Definitely recommended for the average young reader in Singapore, cos it manages to balance an appreciation for the richness of Chinese heritage while also saying a big fat NO to ethnofascist Chinese pride.

Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology, ed. Charles A. Tan
Lethe Press, 2012

I've been curious about this work for a while. Printed only in the Philippines, it features fourteen tales by Isabel Yap, Rin Chupeco, Paolo Chikiamco and others, highlighting the specific perspectives of Chinoys—a group which the editor actually claims are underrepresented in the SFF scene, at least compared to mainstream Philippine literature.

I'm currently revising an essay on SFF by the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and the work really drives home how different the situation is for the community in the Philippines compared to Singapore and Malaysia. There's actually rather little invocation of Chinese myth and legend—the goddess Xi Wangmu's in Margaret Kawsek's "The Tiger Lady", a classical novel about Buddhist hell in Douglas Candano's "The Way of Those Who Stayed Behind". (Sure, Kristine Ong Muslim's got a story called "The Chinese Zodiac", but that serves only for a structure, not iconographic exotica.)

Instead, what we get is a lot of examinations of family dynamics and racial elitism/otherness. Chupeco's "Ho-We", about a matchmaking dinner for a monsterfucker girl, hilariously does this by featuring a dad so racist he'd prefer a rotting zombie for a son-in-law than a non-Chinese vampire or an Arab demigod; Yap's "Pure" delves into horror with a potion that lightens a girl's skin so she'll be a more acceptable girlfriend for a Chinese fuckboy... which of course eventually renders her flesh transparent, exposing her tortured organs. Plus tales which recall early immigrant days: Yvette Tan's "Fold Up Boy", with a ghost of a 17th century victim of anti-Chinese pogroms; Chikiamco's "The Captain's Nephew", about a Chinese Kaputinero enlisting a tikbalang to help in the Philippine Revolution.

Plus, there's plenty of stories which aren't really about Chineseness at all—Christine V Lao's "Dimsum" (which I included when I edited HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology) is really just a weird fiction tale involving a random restaurant worker; Andrew Drilon's "Two Women Worth Watching" operates on a system of ghosts as influencer followers that doesn't seem bonded to any specific culture. Chineseness really does seem to be an identity that can be worn lightly in the Philippines.

Not all the tales are winners (honestly, I'd say it's a little front-loaded), but it's well worth reading, especially considering how few Philippine publications you can get as ebooks. One slight regret: these are all fantasy/horror tales. Don't Chinoys do sci-fi?

The Husky and His White Cat Shizun Vol. 1, by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou
Seven Seas Entertainment, 2022

From the wild world of Chinese web novels, this here's a work that combines danmei (boys love), wuxia (martial arts fiction) and xianxia (mythological fantasy), with a crazy premise—what if a tyrannical, blood-soaked emperor, vanquished by rebels at the age of 32, found himself suddenly reborn into his fifteen-year-old body with the chance to live his life all over again? Also, what if everyone was gay and gorgeous AF, while also deeply repressed?

Thus, Mo Ran (courtesy name Mo Weiyu) finds himself back at the magical martial arts cultivation academy of Sisheng Peak, rooming with his never-consummated crush Shi Mei, suffering under the tutelage of his stern but coldly handsome teacher Chu Wanning... whom he appears to have sexually enslaved and ritually executed in the past version of his life! And we witness his adventures, from robbing his sex worker boytoy Rong Jiu to lifting a curse from Butterfly Town (including a scene in which a goddess performs a mass ghost wedding, then makes corpses rise and have vigorous sex, all while Mo and Chu are squished together in a coffin) and delving into the submarine wonderland of Jincheng Lake (where they both get impaled on sacred willow thorns and Mo experiences an apparition of a fox fairy taking on Chu's form whereupon he can slake his lust). Bonus scenes of bumping into each other naked in baths and there being only one bed.

It's fascinating to read all this, not just cos it's simultaneously horny and morally complicated, but because it's at odds with the queer puritanism that's rising in Anglophone circles, where age gaps and problematic power relations are anathema. I.e. the author and publisher are operating in a system that does not care what the West thinks—hence the relative lack of shame about homosexuality per se (it's hidden for reasons of propriety rather than institutional homophobia), the constant use of specifically Chinese terms (there's a glossary to explain terms like shizun, face, cut-sleeve, xiao-, da-, qianbei, zongshi... yet it also comes with lots of ideograms so semi-Sinophones like myself can feel closer to the text).

Sadly, this isn't the kind of book you can pick up and get closure from: it's eight volumes long (wuxia really is a continuation of the traditional Chinese novel genre) and this particular volume ends on a frustrating cliffhanger. But I hear a live action version's in development! Both happy and confused that there are now highly visible tropes of gay Chineseness for youngsters to refer to!

(Also of note: the author's gender is a mystery. The book uses they/them but some online resources use she/her. No further info in the back matter, just some fake news that they actually inhabit this mythic world and publish exposés of top martial artists!)

Endnotes

[1] Ng Yi-Sheng. “#YISHREADS August 2022.” Suspect. 26 August 2022. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2022/8/26/yishreads-august-2022

[2] See Xiran Jay Zhao. “I just think it’s absurd…” Tiktok. 12 December 2024.
 https://www.tiktok.com/@xiranjayzhao/video/7449494059690888453?lang=en

[3] For more information, see “Transgender schoolgirl Ashlee saga.” The Singapore LGBT Encyclopedia Wiki. https://the-singapore-lgbt-encyclopaedia.fandom.com/wiki/Transgender_schoolgirl_Ashlee_saga

[4] For a summary of the launch, see Ng Yi-Sheng. “Sunday afternoon book launch at Alma House…” Facebook. 14 January 2025.
https://www.facebook.com/ng.yisheng.9/posts/pfbid02uMD5W6CvrBkoLsAYXHV9e8oew1J1juEFqZnQ5j2j425Vb7hZ5cPVJqDNRC9FJwREl

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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