So you have the world of the dead, and the world of the living, and the world of servants and masters.Īnd I feel that we are often in several planes of existence at the same time. This novel, I think, as I mentioned, in my mind seems like mirror worlds. On balancing the supernatural and the real in the novel There were lots of rumors - what did they do on this side, or maybe they did nothing? And I thought: This is such a weird world, and also so glamorous, to think of all these girls in their, you know, flapper bobs and, you know, cheongsam or. They were so - you know, in some ways they were cloistered. And he'd mentioned how mysterious it was - like, nobody knew anything about them. you can only dance with them for a ticket. And in an aside, he describes visiting a Chinese dancehall in which he says: There's all these young girls, and they dance really well - they're professional dancers - and in between dances they're all kept in a pen, and. He wrote this one in 1936 or so, and it's a description of his travels. I first read about these Chinese dancehalls in an old book when I was a kid, and this was, I think, called Return to Malaya by Bruce Lockhart. actually quite a socially unacceptable occupation.

And my mum said, 'Couldn't you write about something more uplifting?''īook Reviews Pack Your Bags And Your Books For 6 Literary Journeys With Nancy Pearl 'You know, my mum asked me - my first book was about the marriage of the dead, and this one is about missing fingers and possible weretigers. 'Yes, it's such a cheerful story isn't it?' she says in an interview. It all happens in Yangsze Choo's new novel, The Night Tiger. Ji Lin is searching for a man who lost a finger. Ji Lin is a dancehall girl and dressmaker's assistant in 1930s Malaya who has a sudden gift pressed into her hand during a dance: a severed finger in a glass tube. MacFarland, who takes a last breath to ask the boy to find the finger amputated from the doctor years before, and to return it to him in his grave within 49 days before his soul disappears. Ren is an 11-year-old houseboy at the deathbed of his master, Dr. It's not just the finger of fate that brings Ren and Ji Lin together. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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