Lake Like a Mirror

Starred review from December 16, 2019
Malaysian writer Fong’s excellent debut collection features women pushed to the margins of society. In “The Wall,” a highway construction project transforms a neighborhood. After a little girl who lived in a nearby apartment building is run over and killed, a barrier is built between the highway and the back of the apartment building. The life of a woman called “next-door aunty” is disrupted by the presence of the wall, which blocks sunlight and her back door. In Fong’s sly fantastical tale, the aunty’s body gradually adjusts, becoming thin enough that she can slip through the foot of space between door and wall. In “Aminah,” a young woman with that name born to a Muslim father applies to the Syariah Court to leave Islam. The application is denied, and she is ordered to stay at a rehabilitation center. In her despair and frustration, she wanders the grounds at night in her sleep, naked, spurring crises of faith among the teachers and wardens. In “Wind Through the Pineapple Leaves, Through the Frangipani,” another Aminah lends further insight to resisting a Muslim rehabilitation center (“Reading from the Quran mends mouths, but they sin by mispronouncing syllables. They sin by secretly skipping pages”), and Aminah begins imagining a froglike angelic apparition. Fong’s vivid imagination and keen eye for women’s pain, gracefully translated, are hallmarks of a deeply talented writer.

Starred review from January 15, 2020
Dreamlike stories about Malaysian women in mysterious circumstances. The stories in this collection--Ho's first book to be translated into English--follow a dreamy logic. In "Lake Like a Mirror," a teacher's students remind her of a "herd of elk in long grass, nestled meekly against one another." Later, when a deer leaps out in front of her car, she swerves off the road. In "Aminah," several women have been detained by Muslim authorities who believe they've strayed from their faith. One of the women sleepwalks at night, naked and unchecked--none of the guards want to apprehend her in that state. Ho's stories, which center almost exclusively on women, have an eerie quality, an otherworldly elegance, many of them with uncanny images: Cats yowl at the edges of that rehab center, and some of the women perform shadowy exorcisms late at night. But as misty-edged as these stories can be, Ho also makes pointed critiques about politics and culture in her native Malaysia. The teacher in "Lake Like a Mirror" fears for her job when one of her students comes out, in a video he posts online, after reciting a sexually explicit e.e. cummings poem she'd taught in class. In "Radio Drama," a cluster of women gossip at the hairdresser's. Someone, they hear, has committed suicide, and they speculate about her reasons. Her husband probably took a mistress, they think. "But a mistress was only natural, once a man made a bit of money!" They conclude: "For a wife to kill herself over it, well, that was just silly." Throughout this fine collection, Ho's touch is only lightly apparent. She has created a world in these stories that is entirely, and uniquely, her own. Straddling the surreal and the pointedly political, Ho reveals herself to be a writer of immense talent and range.

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February 15, 2020
To her, life was always someone else's story. In her second collection of stories, Fong (Maze Carpet, 2019) depicts women who are trapped by repressive patriarchal, religious, and governmental powers delineating their lives outside of their control. In The Wall, a brick barrier is built to separate a row of houses from the adjacent highway. It puts the houses' tenants in perpetual gloom and leads one aunty to become incredibly thin as she quietly creates her own world in her kitchen. In Aminah, people in a rehabilitation center are forced to adhere to strict Muslim law. Among those resistant to following Islam is the story's title character, a woman who sleepwalks naked and embodies the unspoken desires of every human being. And in the title story, a Chinese Malaysian teacher has learned to quietly live a censored lifestyle according to what the committee at the university dictates as politically correct for the sake of her job. Fong's critical and surreal prose will engage readers interested in soft magical realism and compelling imagery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)