By Audrey Fong
Content notes: suicide, sexual assault
Silicone sex dolls, shape-shifting women, a teen ghost—with flashy characters like these, poet Sally Wen Mao kicks off her fiction debut with a bang, immediately drawing readers into the fantastic worlds of her short story collection, Ninetails. Consisting of nine stories, the collection weaves the mythical nine-tailed fox figure from East Asian mythology—the jiǔwěihú (九尾狐) in China, the kitsune (きつね) in Japan, or the gumiho (구미호) in Korea—into every story, reimagining its place across the world and across time.
In these stories, foxes watch over immigrants on Angel Island in early twentieth-century San Francisco; a húxiān (狐仙) seduces men in order to transcend to heaven; and flies pour out of a girl’s eyes each time she cries. However, in several stories, the fox feels unnecessary to the story’s arc, such as when a fox briefly appears in “Love Doll” to allow a sex doll to have control over her movements as she defends a woman she cares about, or how in “The Fig Queen,” the fox does little other than appear in a woman’s garden after her abortion, providing her with a moment of awe. Upon finishing the collection, I remain unconvinced that the fox is necessary for every story other than as a tool to connect the nine stories in some form. However, the collection doesn’t need the fox for cohesion because there is a theme that connects the stories much more clearly and one that better propels the stories forward: feminine rage.
In “Turtle Head Epidemic,” an epidemic named Koro sweeps through Singapore’s Tiong Bahru district, causing men to experience a “genital-retracting illness.” The illness represents an affront to one’s masculinity and the high school-age boys in the story all fear it, believing that one female student named Suzanne is “the source of the Koro.” The boys simultaneously are drawn to Suzanne while also bullying her, claiming that only the boys she bewitches catch Kora: “She’s a slut. She came up to him while feigning an apology and then took him home, and the next thing you know, he’s in the hospital, crying over his penis. I swear to god, she strikes the moment you let your guard down.” When the narrator, Meng, confronts Suzanne about this, she says, “I haven’t been doing anything” and “I have nothing to do with their mental problems.” By Suzanne suggesting this affront to their masculinity is a mental problem, Mao touches on incel ideology without outright naming it. Like incels, the boys in the story hate the woman they are attracted to; their bruised egos cause them to react violently towards Suzanne. Through this story, Mao makes her anger clear; she does not have time for incels.
Mao’s commentary on incels is the most obvious in “A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality,” more blatantly sampling from their ideology when she writes that “certain men believe they are systematically oppressed because women won’t have sex with them,” calling to mind the manifesto of the UCSB mass shooter who’s become a sort of hero to the incel community. However, the focus of the story is not incels. Rather it focuses on a huxian, a female nine-tailed fox, embarking on a revenge narrative similar to the 2020 film, Promising Young Woman. In both stories, a woman seeks revenge against the man who sexually assaulted another woman and recorded the assault to distribute publicly, resulting in the woman committing suicide due to shame.
Feminine rage guides the huxian’s path of revenge. She writes to herself, “You will meet men who have committed crimes for which they were never punished. You will meet men who have never learned accountability, and in fact become indignant at the very thought.” Her rage, Mao argues, comes from the injustices and violences women face by men, who will never be held accountable or who refuse to accept it even after being found guilty (i.e. Brock Turner). Echoing the way Promising Young Woman cast actors known for playing nice guys (like Adam Brody of Seth Cohen fame) to demonstrate how even seemingly-nice men can be capable of harm, Mao shows how a man can be both gentlemanly and dangerous: “With her, you were what you consider gentlemanly, but with the girls on this app, you don’t need etiquette or artifice.” This sentence points to how often this performance of niceness or manners is just that, a performance meant to convince someone to have sex with them—something Mao demonstrates again in the collection with “Lotus Stench.” The repercussions of such a mindset is what propels the huxian into action, and feminine rage comes into full fruition as the huxian sucks the life from each perpetrator, allowing herself to ascend to heaven.
Looking at the collection as a whole, I was confused by the logic of separating “The Haunting of Angel Island” into five sections, sandwiched between the other stories. The tales disrupted my reading of “The Haunting,” giving me time to forget the names of characters so that the next time I returned to “The Haunting,” I would have to flip back to previous sections to remember certain characters. I would have preferred to have “The Haunting” left as one chunk, even if it meant this story was significantly longer than the rest in the collection.
While I remain unsure of how necessary the fox figure is in each story and was confused by the breaking up of “The Haunting of Angel Island,” I still left Ninetails convinced of Mao’s formidable storytelling capabilities. Each story is immensely readable—the pacing is snappy, the details are fun, and the worlds are easy to jump into. Additionally, Mao includes key pieces of Chinese American history in some of the stories, making it a fun option for teaching high school and undergrad students about this history.
RSVP for our Saturday, October 26 Ninetails book club here.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.