In this guest author seminar we will be joined by Yangsze Choo the debut author of The Ghost Bride published in 2013. Yangsze Choo is a fourth generation Malaysian of Chinese decent The Ghost Bride is set in Colonial Malaya in the elaborate Chinese world of the afterlife. The book is about a peculiar historic custom called a spirit marriage, in which a living person is betrothed and wedded to the spirit of a departed person inhabiting the afterlife. In fact, much of the middle portion of the novel takes place in the world of the afterlife as the spirit of the living protagonist, a young woman named Li Long, separates from her physical earthly body. And pursues answers to a puzzling series of questions in the populated, but utterly strange world of spirits. One of the novel's central themes, in fact, is the boundary between life and death, the living and the dead and the capacity of empathy and curiosity to cross that boundary in myriad ways. Now we should keep in mind, for the purposes of this course the ghost write is a bona fide work of historical fiction though, it's been described as historical fantasy. A sub genre that pushes the boundaries of the historical novel in ways that are fascinating to think about in relation of the genre's traditional emphasis on realism and plausibility. Indeed one of the questions that my students at the University of Virginia take up with the author, is what we might call the pliability of historical fiction. The sorts of accommodations the genre has to make when it contends with historical issues of religious belief, miracles, afterlives and so on. So, I hope you enjoy this seminar on The Ghost Bride with Yangsze Choo. And we're delighted today to welcome Young Zhe Chu into our global classroom thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. [COUGH] Hello everyone and thank you, Bruce. [COUGH] I must confess that when my mother found out that I was writing a book about dead people, and ghost marriages. she said very plaintively, why can't you write about something nice? And I could only tell her, that I thought it was an interesting story, and then I went away rather guiltily, and kept on writing. Now, as much as I still listen to my mum, I'm very glad that I didn't listen to, I didn't heed her words, because if I had, it would be the second time that my book, The Ghost Bride, did not get written. In fact, when I was still a university student struggling over what to do about my senior thesis, I'd wanted to write about the historical role of female ghosts in Asian culture. Thanks to a childhood spent, reading far too many strange Chinese tales. I'd always wondered why it was that one Asian ghosts were so much more terrifying than Western ones and secondly, why the most frightening ghosts were all female. Clearly it must have been some sort of subconscious recognition that women were traditionally dis-empowered in Asian society and this was reflected in their frustrations, even beyond the grave. So unfortunately, I never did write that thesis because I chickened out, thinking that nobody would ever employ me if they saw it on my resume. But instead, I ended up writing a terrible dissertation on the economics of Chinese industrial townships, which was so mind numbingly boring that even I could hardly read it without feeling this urge to rush out of the library and stuff myself with pizza. So, needless to say, I didn't find any extra inspiration although I did gain a rather lot of weight. [LAUGH] So, however I kept the society for women and girls rattling around in my head, and they showed up in a number of short stories that I wrote. usually to I is sort of like writing a novel about an elephant who was a detective, and there were many reasons why this, although marginally better than Chinese industrial townships was also not a good subject. But, while I was researching it in the archives of our location relation newspaper, I came across sentence, which alluded to the decline of spirit marriages amongst the Chinese. And so my first reaction to this was, you know what is this, and then I realized that what they were alluding to was the marriage of the dead. And this matter-of-fact reference was so intriguing that I ended up putting aside my elephant detective novel to write this book instead. So this idea of a ghost marriage is actually a real although rare occurrence, so I'd like to tell you a little bit about the historic roots behind ghost marriages the Chinese supernatural and how it all relates to my book, and then I'll conclude by reading a short passage and you know we can take questions after that if you like. So what is a ghost marriage anyway? The folk tradition of marriages to ghosts or between the dead usually occurred in order to placate spirits or to repair family relations, there are a number of illusions to it in Chinese literature. But the roots of it probably lie in ancestor to worship, so usually a ghost marriage is a union between two dead people, and there are various reasons for it, for example two sweet hearts who had died might be married after death so they could be together in the after world. Or a ghost marriage might also be done post humanly in order to raise the rank of a concubine who had produced a son to make her officially a wife. Or to allay a haunting? So let's say for example your uncle died and he came to you in a dream and said that he wanted to get married. So by the way, this situation actually happened to a Singaporean friend of mine. after I had written this book and I was chatting with him, he said oh, he said his grandmother had actually had exactly that experience, she'd had such a dream, and she was even told the name of the family and what street they lived on. So she got up the next day, she went to look for them, and she found them. And they said that they too had such a dream in which their deceased daughter had come to them and said, you know I've met this guy in the after world I want to get married and what they ended up doing was. they arranged a wedding ceremony and they formally married to them, to each other and my friend tells me to this day that this, that family is still considered family. So they get invited to all the major you know celebrations, weddings, banquets etcetera so it is a very real tie in that sense. But far more rarely, the living were married to the dead. And sometimes a poor girl was taken into a household to be a widow in order to perform the ancestral rites for a man who had died without descendants or, you know, without a wife. And this is a case for Li Lan the main character in my book. In writing this book, I decided to set it in 1890s colonial Malaya for a few reasons. One because I come from Malaysia, and it felt like a place I could write about with some authenticity. my uncle actually used to live in the city of Malacca, and when I was a child we would visit him quite frequently. I've always felt that Malacca itself is a fascinating city. It has a, a very long and varied history of being a trading port occupied by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. And the Chinese actually have settled in Malacca since the Ming Dynasty which is the late 1300s it's been a long time. Secondly, I also thought the 1890's were an interesting time period in Malaya, itself particularly for the overseas Chinese. Who were culturally, still very much tied to the collapsing Ching Dynasty in China yet, heavily influenced by the British, under whose jurisdiction they lived. so there was a great confluence of ideas at that time with straight, you know, the young, straights-born Chinese being sent abroad to study, some to Oxford of Cambridge and others to the East, to Hong Kong, Canton, and even Japan, and you see that reflected in the book as well. [COUGH] In an interesting juxtaposition the late 1800s also saw the flowering of the classic Victorian ghost story. Building off a tradition of Gothic tales so, I actually have a theory about the differences between Asian ghost stories and Western ones. The traditional European ghost story is very similar to a detective novel, so you need to find out who died, you know, what happened to them. An the tale is resolved, when the ghost is laid or the criminal, is brought to justice. In its classic forms such as the stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu or M.R. James It has strong elements of scientific inquiry, and is as compelling as a whodunit. It is in fact a whodunit except the victim's already dead so in contrast many Chinese ghost stories are about managing relationships with family. Even after they are deceased, so the dead have needs like any other relatives. You have to provide them with pocket money, with houses make sure you're even arranging marriages and settling disputes for them. So, there's a lot less emphasis on the straightforward solution and more ambiguity. And everything is seen through the lens of family, and its effect on several generations. So, if a European ghost story, I think, tends to trace belying of a single thread or an individual life then a Chinese ghost story is like a web of relationships in which some threads are concluded and other are simply left hanging. So, for example the scholar who is tricked into marrying a ghost, has to not only contend with things like whether or not he became ill or died as a result of this experience, which was one option. but also whether or not she actually had children with him. Whether he did well in his examinations, and who provided for his elderly parents and, you know, even what happened to his descendants. There's actually a long Chinese literary tradition of tales which are set in this blurred borderline between spirits, and humans where beautiful women turn out to be foxes. And the afterlife is run like a monstrous parody of imperial Chinese bureaucracy. These stories, which were known as [FOREIGN], or wonder tales, were often written in the style of literary biographies and one of the most famous collections is [FOREIGN]. So when I was a child, I really enjoyed reading these stories, and I was always intensely curious about what actually happened. and how would you feel for example if the pretty girl you picked up had no feet or a palace you visited was a beehive. So in this sense it is a kind of fantastic world like that of Neil Gaiman or [INAUDIBLE]. it's a rich and curious Chinese mythology that I'd love to introduce for you this too. And at the same time, my book is also concerned with how these supernatural beliefs are part of the everyday life of the characters. The Chinese concept of the afterlife with its elements of Buddhism, and Daoism mixed in with folk religion is taken quite seriously and still practiced today. So, for example, the idea that the burning of paper effigies makes them tangible in the afterlife. and that the and that the afterlife still requires things like you know, money, cars, and modern-day offerings like paper iPhones, paper Gameboys paper Louis Vuitton suitcases. You can see all of this for sale if you go and around the time of the hungry ghosts, they'll have a lot of paper goods up for sale.
