A few years ago, I wrote a comedic short story, “Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long and Happy Life,”1 about a 900-year-old fox spirit hawking self-help seminars of dubious value. At the time, it seemed logical and funny that these trickster and seductress figures from East Asian folklore would buy into beauty influencer hustle culture. After I wrote this story, I kept coming back to its narrator. I started asking myself: why did I find the fox spirit in my story so compelling and tragic? Was it because the fox spirit repeatedly loses loved ones to mortality, constantly migrates as nations rise and fall, or survives through the centuries while presenting as a queer person? Was it some combination of all of the above?
I wanted answers, so I did what writers do: I started writing—a much bigger project about a different, much more menacing fox spirit haunting three sisters. In between drafts, I’ve been reading a number of depictions of fox spirits, many of which are by writers from the Asian diaspora. As a product of the Chinese diaspora, I’ve found it inspiring to see how others like me have approached age-old folklore. I want to highlight two examples that have helped me find my way in my own work.
Stories by diaspora authors about fox spirits, particularly queer fox spirits, weren’t widely published until recently, so I assumed most had been written within the past fifteen years. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that diaspora writers have been writing about queer fox spirits for longer. One early example is Larissa Lai’s novel When Fox is a Thousand, first published thirty years ago, in 1995. It went out of print but was reissued in 2004, thanks to critical acclaim and recognition of its importance as a piece of queer Asian diasporic literature.2
It is told from the point of view of three narrators: a fox spirit who is almost one thousand years old, a Tang Dynasty poetess named Yu Hsuan-Chi (based on a historical figure; more commonly romanized as “Yu Xuanji”), and a young Chinese Canadian woman in Vancouver named Artemis Wong. The Fox remains obsessed with the poetess, whom she fell in love with nine hundred years ago, and most of her sections are about the past, retelling memories and stories she has collected during her long life. When she spots similarities between Artemis and the poetess, the Fox decides to intervene in Artemis’s life. Meanwhile, Artemis is a college student who has been struggling with her sexuality since meeting a woman she is inexplicably drawn to. Artemis’s struggle to accept herself contrasts with the Fox’s matter-of-fact attitude toward her own love. The Fox possessed Yu Hsuan-Chi’s body upon the poetess’s premature death, and while most fox spirits can possess a body for only a few hours, she has done so for centuries. Other foxes find her odd and disapprove of her humanlike behavior, but she explains, “It is other foxes who are strange, not me.”
An interesting feature of the novel is that the Fox’s and Artemis’s paths don’t intersect until over two-thirds of the way through. However, even though the Fox doesn’t directly interfere with Artemis’s life earlier, her memories of past lovers and her tales of fox trickery cast shadows that haunt Artemis’s story. For example, the Fox and the poetess’s story is interleaved with Artemis meeting the woman who causes her to doubt her sexuality. This reminds modern readers that many queer stories have been lost or left to implication because they were not written down, and so we are forced to search for the ghosts of queer presence in history and literature.
Amelia Possanza writes in her book Lesbian Love Story about how difficult it was to do research on lesbian history.3 She compiles seven love stories of lesbians from the twentieth century, and she dramatizes scenes for each couple based on the limited historical information available. She also connects the ups and downs of each couple to her own experiences with friends and lovers. For me, there’s an added barrier to doing research because I’m unable to read classical Chinese. I can’t study primary sources from ancient China for my own work, but the Fox’s stories have helped me imagine possibilities for queer women and spirits falling in love and having their hearts broken throughout history. These fictional characters don’t even have to be likeable to have stories worth telling—both the Fox and Artemis are complex, often unlikeable characters making difficult choices.
Another book with fox spirits and complicated women that has inspired me is Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails,4 a collection of linked short stories featuring Chinese diaspora characters from the early 1900s to the present. These characters include a young woman who is a Chinese–English interpreter working at Angel Island, a fox spirit who has taken over the body of a dead girl in modern-day New York, and a woman whose only desire is to shrink in size.
In the story “Turtle Head Epidemic,” a disease called Koro is spreading across Singapore in the 1960s. Koro, Malay for “turtle head,” is causing men’s genitals to retract inside their bodies before their sudden deaths. The narrator is Meng Li, a teenage boy who has been warned by his mother to be careful around women because they could be fox spirits spreading Koro. He has a classmate named Suzanne Hu, a transfer student who rumors say grew up in the West and who everyone blames for the epidemic. A few months later, Suzanne vanishes, the epidemic ends, and everyone seems to forget about her, as if by magic. Around twenty years later, Meng and his family travel to his parents’ hometown in Hainan, China. They come across a parade that turns out to be a wedding, and when the bride takes off the cloth over her head, Meng recognizes Suzanne, who has not aged at all.
The townspeople Meng asks know nothing about Suzanne’s past or who she is, except that she is marrying a rich man from Shanghai. Meng, too, is an outsider to this town, his family not having returned since they left Hainan for Singapore in the 1940s. His family is bound to Singapore now, but Suzanne is not bound by passports and national borders. She gets to reinvent herself as a mysterious bride in China, while Meng has to return to Singapore and content himself with running a turtle soup restaurant and raising his children. As a fox spirit, Suzanne is allowed to go back and forth from the motherland to wherever—and whenever—in the world she pleases.
My family also moved frequently as I was growing up—I didn’t go to a school for more than two consecutive years until high school. Though I got used to having to make new friends every time, I’m drawn to the way Suzanne can comfortably pop up in different places. The fluidity Suzanne exhibits shows up in the other stories from Ninetails, with fox spirits appearing as regular humans, vengeful spirits, and occasional tricksters. Most of the fox spirit stories I heard from my mother took place in a generic historical Chinese setting during an unspecified time period that I found unrelatable as a child. The way Sally Wen Mao weaves traditional folktales into her stories reminds me of those stories from childhood but with settings and people I recognize: the aunties and uncles I knew in the community who talked about how hard it was to survive in America as an immigrant, their children trying to find some meaning by going back to their parents’ hometowns, only to find they understood nothing at all. This is the world the fox spirits in Ninetails thrive in, the metaphorical cracks between here and there, past and present, human and fox.
What Larissa Lai’s and Sally Wen Mao’s fox spirits have taught me is that they’re complicated and versatile. They’ve made me critically examine how to depict queer history, write about diaspora, and center complex women in speculative fiction. My novel’s social media–savvy fox spirit, who is chronically bored and looking to be amused by human folly, has begun to embody what I’ve learned. As my human protagonist tries to become influential and famous, the fox spirit is threatening to haunt her journey—and mine.
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- Tina S. Zhu, “Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long and Happy Life,” Lightspeed, October 2023, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/four-self-care-secrets-for-a-long-and-happy-life/. ↩︎
- Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). ↩︎
- Amelia Possanza, Lesbian Love Story (Catapult, 2023). ↩︎
- Sally Wen Mao, Ninetails (Penguin, 2024). ↩︎
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