Firewife

October 2, 2006
Making her fiction debut while working on her Ph.D. in East Asian lit at Yale, Choong, a Malay-American, riffs on myths of fire and water as manifested in eight contemporary women's lives. An Indian woman Lakshmi (or "fire"), marries a man for passionate love and ends up having a forced abortion (because she is carrying a girl) and being burned alive (after refusing her brother-in-law sex ). In an awkward framing device, her soul finds Nin, a 31-year-old Malay-Chinese-American photographer who, as a memorial to her little sister, Mien (who drowned at a tapioca factory at five), undertakes a six-month globe-spanning journey to complete the FireWife project, a "personal photo essay" documenting the lives of such women as young prostitutes like Ut (innocence) and Table (stability), and the anorectic data-entry worker Maria (mother). There are eight women in all, each presented in incantatory first person, alternating with chapters from Nin. Nin's mission connects her to what seems distressingly like an eternal feminine conflict between desire, exploitation and self-debasement, one that recalls Nin's own struggle with survivor's guilt after Mien's death. The connection is tenuous, and the journey can be hallucinatory and downright mystifying, but it's also often forthright and sexy.