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.
What connects these women, and the short, pointed tales in FOX SPIRIT IN A DISTANT LAND is that all these women are part of the Chinese diaspora in New Zealand, and all the stories are inspired by real events. Murray has chosen to explore these stories of violent crimes, by and towards a number of woman using a combination of styles: biography, mythology, horror and poetry, using, as a connecting thread, the mythological Chinese nine-tailed fox.
Harrowing, and yet beautiful, this is the story of foul play at it's most confrontational, death by others and own hands, the brevity of this collection is part of its strength, and in a weird way, it's saving grace. There is so much in this that's confronting that the language, the style, and the almost shorthand in which the stories are told make them even more compelling and audacious.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
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.
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