On Spirits Abroad

What a charming, beautiful collection. My copy is the enlarged 2021 re-release; the collection first appeared in 2015, but several stories here weren’t in that version, so your mileage may vary by which one you pick up. I’m not sure whether Cho belongs under “magical realism” or “fantasy,” but whichever it is, the work is fascinating. Nearly all of the stories come from a specifically Chinese-Malay perspective, where Taoism, Islam, Buddhism, and indigenous Southeast Asian traditions converge into a stunning kaleidoscope of the fantastical, and about a third of them deal in some way with migration from Malaysia to the United Kingdom, which adds another dimension to an already multidimensional set.

My favorite is “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,” which follows an imugi named Byam who longs to become a dragon. Each attempt, a thousand years apart, is foiled — ostensibly by humans, though really by the way it goes about it — and after the third try it unexpectedly assimilates into human society and learns what it means to live in the present. Other stories turn on complicated family dynamics: the first follows a young woman whose grandmother is a witch and whose sister is following in the grandmother’s footsteps; another follows a vampire family, a young woman who died in childbirth and is cared for by her undead aunties. The stories are unapologetically female, and many deal with living as a lesbian in a conservative society, while others take up ethnicity, immigration, and the experience of being “other” — whether that othering is interior or imposed from outside depends on the story. The most fascinating part, and the hardest for me, was the final third, set entirely in magical worlds; one highlight follows Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Journey to the West, which I found more digestible than some of the others. A lot of the stories were difficult for me, with layers of cultural content I don’t share, but that never detracted; spend enough time in Cho’s worlds and you can come to live and breathe them, though some working knowledge of Malaysian and Chinese story makes for an easier path in. Spirits Abroad offers marvelous, fantastical stories that reach into the depths of human experience — literature at its best, and of special interest to anyone curious about non-Western spiritual traditions.