The Fox Wife: A Novel by Yangsze Choo
The fox. Such an intriguing creature. Some consider the fox an elusive but harmless denizen of the wild, trotting silently along greenways and through forests. Others insist that the fox is a devious animal, attacking small fowl and trailing in its wake anguish and destruction. Still others prefer to relate the idea of a ‘fox’ to a human being, usually a beautiful but aloof woman (sometimes man), more cunning than kind. The fox, then, has excited all kinds of reactions. Perhaps most notoriously, the British established (until 2004) fox hunting as the ‘sport’ of aristocrats; gradually, however, what had been devised originally as a means to assist farmers in ridding their lands of vexing vermin, became for later generations only an appalling ritual of human dominion, displaying the triumph of brute force over creaturely vulnerability. No other localized animal has endured such an encoded offensive.
Yet, despite such a complicated portrayal, the fox has also populated indigenous and popular spiritual folklore across the globe for centuries. In myths and sacred narratives, the fox represents bravado and defiance, observation and intelligence, and trickery, but rarely pure evil. East Asian religious cultures have especially associated the fox with spiritual forces and magical powers, and have depicted foxes as shrewd and astute, sometimes quick-tempered, but also protective and courageous. The author Yangsze Choo (“The Night Tiger,” “The Ghost Bride”) has brought those Chinese myths about foxes into focus with her new novel “The Fox Wife,” a lyrical and enchanting novel of magical realism about a range of themes: individual and collective identity; the enchantment of reality; the bond linking humans and animals, and the spiritual dimension of life. The novel is so elegantly written that it encourages close reading in order to savor the exquisite prose, the delicately layered imagery, and the rich symbolism.
As in her other novels, Choo sets the story in pre-Communist China: most of story of “The Fox Wife” takes place in northern China—Manchuria (and, briefly, southern Japan) in the early 1900s, a time in China fraught with political change (the sluggish demise of the Qing dynasty, the last imperial house to rule China) and social transformation (the rise of frenzied warlords and the country’s subsequent brain drain of young intellectuals to Japan), all of which threw China into a crisis of identity—political, social, cultural, and spiritual. The existential turbulence of that era threads its way through the novel.
Two primary characters drive the narrative: the first is a young woman named Snow who (as she volunteers at the very beginning of the novel) is bent on revenge, traveling far from home to locate and then kill the person who was responsible for the death of her infant daughter. The other major character is an aging private investigator named Bao who is asked to investigate the troubling case of an unknown woman who had been found frozen to death in a back alley of a small town Mukden, south of Snow’s region. Yet it was not just the frozen condition of the body that compelled attention; rather, it was the broad smile on the face of the dead woman that also urged further consideration. Initially, the two narrative threads seem disparate and unrelated to each other; however, in keeping with the dynamism of magical realism, nothing in the novel is quite as it might seem. As the reader also quickly discovers, Snow—who is also the narrative voice for her portion of the novel—is a fox…or, at least, a fox spirit, a huxian, and Bao, while not a huxian, has always been attuned to the presence of foxes and can recognize the presence of a huxian even amid a crowd of people.
In an appendix to the novel, Choo explains that a fascination with foxes and the occurrences of many fox cults existed in China, especially in northern China, since the earliest dynasties, as well as in Japan and Korea. People worshiped foxes as eminent shape-shifters, able to take on human form at will, and live their lives as human beings: such individuals came to be known as huxian and hulijing, synonyms for “fox spirits.” Chinese legends describe fox spirits as enthralling creatures, unaccountably handsome (male) or inexplicably beautiful (female), who were able easily to beguile (non-fox) human beings to do their bidding. Huxian are able to compel acts and thoughts in humans over which the humans have little power, and just being in the presence of a fox spirit can overwhelm the will of an unsuspecting human. Snow is just such a fox spirit and throughout the novel she shares with the reader her bemused perceptions of human beings, including how effortless is her dizzying effect over some individuals who allow her entry into places and situations usually denied to a woman but providing her with opportunities to continue her search for her child’s killer. Snow also shares her curiosity about those few select humans who are either resistant to the fox spirits or are able to manage—even admire—their wily vulpine energy. Investigator Bao is very much in the latter category.
Bao has always been sensitive to the presence of huxian wherever he has traveled, and since childhood he has been intrigued by their legendary abilities and antics. When he was very young, Bao spent most of his time with his elderly nanny, who introduced him to the fox cult and shared with him often her wealth of fox lore. They built a small but identifiable shrine to the fox god in their backyard and the image of that shrine remained with Bao all his life because it was after an ordinary visit one day to the fox shrine that Bao developed a special ‘power’, the ability to detect lies from truth simply by hearing a person’s voice. He also soon developed an uncanny sensitivity to fox spirits. When Bao is brought on to investigate the death of the anonymous woman, the person who first discovered the body and contacted him, a local restaurateur named Gu, insisted to Bao that the smile on her face proved to him that a fox had somehow been involved. That meant, insisted Gu, that Bao must discover the name of the woman in order to provide her with a proper burial, as the fox god demands. Bao, though nearing the end of his career, is immediately captivated by that request which he implicitly understands and with which he concurs.
The novel is structured so that the stories of Snow and Bao alternate with each chapter, in parallel narrations, as if each were in pursuit of the other, but finally they converge at the story’s end. Such a structure makes the novel broad and plentiful in its scope. While initially the novel appears to be simply a familiar revenge tale of a distraught mother trailing a callous culprit that has been blended with a similarly familiar mystery of a detective investigating a shadowy death, those scenarios in the prolific imagination of author Yangsze Choo only to lead to other and more complex themes and topics: societal tension about in early 20th century China when some women still had to endure having their feet bound and other (mostly younger) women were resisting such oppressive practices; the unruly collision between the material and the spiritual worlds in daily encounters and in lives lived in different communities, and the ceaseless quest for authenticity. The novel is also a gentle meditation on love, on the boundless capacity of love to make meaning and to forge identity: the unceasing love of a parent for a child; the lingering allure of first love; the magnetic love for a soulmate; the mesmeric love of the human for the divine, and the irresistible love of truth. With graceful excursions of entrancing prose, Choo inspires the reader to contemplate such themes.
Like a fox spirit herself, Choo leads the reader into the realm of the huxian, into realms of the indefinite and the mystical: as a Chinese sage is quoted in the story, Humans and things are different species, and foxes lie between humans and things: darkness and light take different paths, and foxes lie in between darkness and light. (20) The fox symbolizes ambiguity and liminality, inhabiting the ‘in-between’ space of existence, and, with the narrative direction of Snow, Choo emboldens the reader to discard the customary ways of seeing and assuming that reality exists only in binary structures. In particular, the delightful appreciation of Bao for the fox spirits within the world, his ready recognition of the manifold breadth and depths of the human condition, allow the reader sufficient space to reflect on the mysteries of the human condition and remain comfortable with a meditation that offers few answers but so many enticing questions.
June-Ann Greeley, Ph.D., is Professor of Languages, Literature and Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University. She is trained in classical languages and literature and Medieval Studies, specifically late antique and medieval theology and literature, religious and intellectual history, and classical/medieval (Latin) poetry. Dr. Greeley translates and interprets late antique, Celtic and medieval Latin theological and literary works and explores late antique and medieval spirituality, including the literature of medieval women, medieval mystics (Christian and Sufism); sacred art and architecture; medieval and modern Celtic authors; the emergence of Islam in medieval Europe; Dante Studies, and global medievalisms.
