Book review: Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud by Lee Murray

 

Beauty and pain are entwined in this gorgeous book by Lee Murray, winner of the 2023 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize. This is a book that weaves together myth and history, the real and the unreal, poetry and prose. It describes the tragic stories of nine Chinese diaspora women in New Zealand from the early 1900s to the present day. Connecting these nine stories is the figure of the fox spirit—a liminal creature of Chinese mythology. In some tellings, a fox spirit can take on human form through wearing a human skull that perfectly fits its head. A fox spirit can also cultivate to immortality through arduous trials. In Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, the story-framing device is that of a nine-tailed fox spirit who must find nine skulls to wear, nine human lives to live, before she can reach celestial heaven.

 

The nine lives the fox spirit lives through in this book are harrowing. Here are brides brought reluctantly from China to New Zealand, Aotearoa--“the land of the long cloud”—by husbands they barely know or don’t know at all. Here are women who come willingly in pursuit of their own ambitions. There’s the daughter of Chinese immigrants, dutifully working in her parents’ fruit shop. There’s the young woman fleeing despair and horror in China, saved and brought to New Zealand by kindly missionaries, who finds, ultimately, only more horror in her new land. There’s the modern-day owner of a massage parlor, who considers herself a strong, independent businesswoman. Murder, suicide, and acts of horrific violence mark the end of many of these stories. But there are also quieter tales of despair. Murray’s gift is such that she can make the mundane, ordinary tragedy of a life—a girl whose dreams of music never come to fruition, who never escape her parents’ fruit shop and dutifully dons her work apron each day as her dreams slowly die--as compelling, poignant, and in its own way harrowing as her more extreme, shocking tales. Loneliness and longing infuse most of these stories. Here are tales of early immigrant women crushed by loneliness in their new world, longing for the families and homes they left behind, facing prejudice and alienation, unable to connect to anyone in their new country. Unable to truly make a new home.

 

The subject matter is heavy, but Murray evokes beauty with her light, leaping prose. In the opening pages, the fox spirit finds herself in a strange space:

 

You have arrived, yet even without opening your eyes, you know you have not ascended to the celestial palace, where mountains are sculpted from dragonfly wings and the sky smudged with plum petals. Even before you become real, before your bones have crystallised and the flesh has fused across your back, you know this.

 

When a woman’s dreams die, it’s described like this:

 

The sonatas are gone, replaced with FM and there are no such things as shillings. It’s no matter because your ancient heart no longer brims with silver. No silver, just relentless, endless grey. Even in sleep, you do not flutter.  

 

In this book’s moving afterword, Murray writes of the inspiration behind this book, and describes some of the real-life stories behind it. There are spare hints of stories in the archives—a report of a Chinese woman falling from the second floor of a tobacco shop in the 1930s, a report of a “half-caste” Chinese women who slit her newborn daughter’s throat. Murray has clothed the spare bones of these archival reports with the flesh of her empathic imagination. The result is spellbinding. This is compelling stuff, a compulsively readable book—I finished it all almost in one sitting—and a beautiful, moving piece of art. Delicacy and brutality coexist in this book. It’s a book that asks us to bear witness to these human stories of the past, even as the fox spirit of the title pays witness by donning, for a little while, the lives belonging to the human skulls she wears.