Spirits Abroad

by Zen Cho

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Short Stories
Pages: 352
Rating:

Synopsis:

"If you live near the jungle, you will realize that what is real and what is not real is not always clear. In the forest there is not a big gap between the two."

A Datin recalls her romance with an orang bunian. A teenage pontianak struggles to balance homework, bossy aunties, first love, and eating people. An earth spirit gets entangled in protracted negotiations with an annoying landlord, and Chang E spins off into outer space, the ultimate metaphor for the Chinese diaspora.

Straddling the worlds of the mundane and the magical, Spirits Abroad collects science fiction and fantasy stories with a distinctively Malaysian sensibility.

Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad is a fun collection, with a lot of Malaysian background to the stories. She doesn’t waste time on explaining the Malay words she uses, but it’s usually perfectly clear from context, or easy to look up.

I don’t quite know why it didn’t work for me: there was nothing I could pinpoint as disliking in any of the stories, but something about the collection as a whole kind of dragged for me. I know I’ve liked some of the short stories in isolation, too, because I know I’d read a couple of them before — so I’m under the impression it just wasn’t the right time for me with this book.

All the same, I’m glad I finished it. I vaguely remembered ‘The Terracotta Bride’, but it surprised me all over again, and I really liked the imugi trying to become a dragon, as well. Maybe it wasn’t the right moment for me, but there was still a lot to enjoy, reading it piecemeal the way I did.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)