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#zen cho
smokefalls · 2 months
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Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew. At a certain point, this stops being sad—but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?
Zen Cho, "The Four Generations of Chang E" from Spirits Abroad
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ireadiguess · 1 year
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i wanted to recommend some books with *very* cozy vibes for this fall because i love reading cozy books when it gets cold
the ones i read and recommend:
Sangu Mandanna- The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches (all things witchy and a fun take on magic, a witch trying to find a place where she belongs and is accepted, found family, bulding community)
Courtney Milan- The Duke Who Didn't (adult romance, small town, kind of a grumpy/sunshine romance where the 'sunshine' is the male character!, great food descriptions)
Zen Cho- Sorcerer To The Crown (set in a alternative historical England with magic, magical creatures, one of the side characters is a fun/strong older witch trying to fight everyone, a female witch fighting against patriarchal expectations)
T. Kingfisher- Paladin's Grace (a fantasy romance with an intriguing mystery, the female mc owns a perfume shop, again magical creatures, romantic scenes are so great because the mc's are just trying to figure out how to be comfortable with eachother)
Adriana Herrera- Mangos and Mistletoe (sapphic novella set during a Christmas baking contest, the mc's have to work together to win the contest while trying to not to fall in love)
books i haven't read yet but want to and sound very cozy:
Cynthia Zhang- After The Dragons
James Nicol- The Apprentice Witch
Austin Chant- Caroline's Heart
Julie Abe- Eva Evergreen, Semi- Magical Witch
Travis Baldree- Legends & Lattes
Becky Chambers- A Psalm for the Wild- Built
Also i love to hear more recommendations if somebody would like to share :)
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papenathys · 1 year
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Hey, do you have any recommendations for books exploring the experiences of first and second-generation immigrants?? I've already read Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak so something along those lines or maybe entirely different would be great!
Try these:
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: Powerful and harrowing, this novel is about Afghan identity, lived history, fiercely devotional childhood friendships and how the past will never cease haunting you. PLEASE check the trigger warnings, if you want dm me.
And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini: A collection of interconnected narratives about people from different backgrounds and at different points in history, trying to make peace with their pasts. A large number of the characters are immigrants. Beautiful, lyrical writing.
On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: Penned in the form of letters written to the narrator's mother, it's a complex study of the Vietnamese immigrant experience, war trauma, fractured family and queer desire.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri: A poignant picture of Syria before and after the war, and one couple's resilience as they travel the refugee trail to Europe after their home town is bombed.
One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: (I will never shut up about Divakaruni she is SO good) Nine people stranded inside a building after a massive earthquake spend the time by talking about significant moments of their life to each other. Set in an American city, this gem of a story has many narratives of immigrant experience embedded in it.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi: Now relevant more than ever, this graphic novel style memoir deals with Satrapi's childhood in Iran, her radical Marxist upbringing, her complicated relationship with religion, the advent of the Islamic Revolution in her country and her eventual decision to go abroad. It is at times very funny, but also, at others, mostly devastating.
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo: A recipient of several awards (and for good reason) this coming of age novel deals with a young Zimbabwean girl, her early childhood in her home country in the wake of military police violence under Prime Minister Mugabe, and then her journey to Detroit in search of a better life. Captures the African immigrant experience in rich detail.
If you are looking for some lighter reads, here are the follows:
Black Water Sister by Zen Cho: In this chaotic and funny novel, Jess, a closeted lesbian, reluctantly follows her parents back to live in Malaysia- a country she had last seen as a toddler. Now, in the suffocating heat and braving the constant presence of her nosy relatives, Jess must deal with dreadfully dull jobs and balance a long distance relationship...... oh yeah, and her feral grandma's ghost is haunting her, determined to settle a score against an old enemy.
Amerika by Franz Kafka: Kafka's first and funniest novel deals with young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl must instead contend with crooks, thugs, long lost uncles, drunk friends and lascivious ladies. A very short and very funny read.
Running in The Family by Michael Ondaantje: When a dream leaves him shaken, the author decides to return to his home country in Sri Lanka after decades to reconnect with family, muse upon the turbulent history of the land and remember his late father. This novel is SO beautifully written, it will make you laugh full belly laughs but also move you to tears. Has some photographs and poems included in the book.
Hope you find something to your liking here. If you want to give me a tip, my kofi is papenathys.
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a-ramblinrose · 11 months
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JOMP Book Photo Challenge || April 29 || Freebie:    The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho
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The House of Aunts by Zen Cho
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Well, it's been a while since I updated, and not for nothing. The fasting month has arrived and much of my weekend energy is preoccupied elsewhere. Also, there are several longfics that are currently WIP, full completion uncertain.
So imagine my feelings as they got slammed against the wall by this: The House of Aunts by the Malaysian-born Zen Cho. An original vampire fiction that is set in Malaysia, uses traditional Malaysian monsters die Dracula, and deals with issues that hit close to home for anyone living in this part of the world, such as overbearing parental figures, unspoken religious and ethnic boundaries, and familial shame.
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Since the story is Malaysian at heart, I decided to use Malaysian pictures and themes.
The book cover is actually made from drawing paper, printed with the image of a rubber plantation to evoke the story's setting. The front side has a glued-on image of a frangipani flower - the flower of the undead in Malaysian stories — surrounded by Baba Nyonya tilework — the Baba being Chinese Malaysians who settled and intermarried with locals.
The printed endapapers threw me off. I wanted to have a tilework or frangipani motif, but none of the free internet sources came up with anything distinctive. I did eventually find a peculiar color gradient that reminds me of twilight, considered the time when Malaysian monsters strike the most.
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The Malaysian motifs continue at the title page, where I used Baba Nyonya tilework and Malay woodcraft motifs to frame the title. Same thing too with the copyright page — believe it or not, I actually intended that part to be minimalist! But one curious placement of images led to another and soon, I was looking up different websites to find the right Malaysian decorative features to bedight the logos!
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The story is divided into three parts, and I also wanted the headers to be minimalist. Something of that won out here more, as I decided to use plumerias to highlight the 'undead' parts of the story and the greyscale tilework/woodwork to highlight the human connections of the main character, whether they were broken or not.
This bind took me less than a week and it was actually refreshing to get my hands busy again. Full rights to the story goes to Zen Cho, who really deserves all the awards for writing a monster tale that hits at so many themes, it's quintessentially Malaysian!
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wizardsvslesbians · 9 months
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A very good crop this time around:
“The Terracotta Bride” by Zen Cho
“Lay My Stomach On Your Scales,” by Wen-yi Lee
 “Margo Lai’s Guide to Dueling Unprepared,” by Alison Tam 
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vote YES if you have finished the entire book.
vote NO if you have not finished the entire book.
(faq · submit a book)
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shortstorytournament · 9 months
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Short Story Tournament!
THE WHITE OLD MAID by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1935) (link) - tw: death
"Away!" cried the lofty one. "Thou hadst him living! The dead is mine!"
LIYANA by Zen Cho (2021) (link) - tw: death
"It had been so long I almost didn’t recognize you when I saw you. I came so close to plucking you out from the sheltering leaves— but God must have been watching me. I touched you, and the tips of my fingers felt the vibration of your beating heart."
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agardenandlibrary · 1 year
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Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
This is contemporary fiction, which is kind of weird for me. I’m so used to reading secondary world fiction that books using modern parlance throw me for a loop. This was just a problem because I’m not used to it! Which is a flaw of me the reader, not this book.
So much of this book is about the immigrant experience. Our main character Jess is caught between worlds. She sticks out wherever she goes, not quite Malaysian and not quite American. I really liked how she found connection with other immigrants in small moments of solidarity. 
Jess is struggling with the move from America back to Malaysia with her parents, hiding her personal life, being her mother’s emotional support – and then the ghost of Jess’s grandmother starts to haunt her, demanding that Jess help her save a temple from destruction. She begins to explore the spiritual culture of Malaysia, to visit temples and meet mediums: people who gods can speak through. And there are many gods, big and small, everywhere.
Even as she learns about the spirit world, Jess also learns about her own family history, things her mother never told her, secrets kept for decades. Jess finds herself in unexpected danger, not just from a world of shady gangs and business deals, but also from the spirit world, where her grandmother’s god, a vengeful spirit known as the Black Water Sister, tries to take over Jess’s body in order to enact her revenge on the world. 
I really enjoyed this book! It was dark but not constantly; there were moments I laughed out loud. It’s contemporary, which I’m not used to, but it fully committed to “spirits and gods are real and people communicate with them regularly” which I love to see. 
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meikuree · 6 months
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the lightness of a foreign sky by meikuree
Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: F/F, Gen Relationship: Jessamyn Teoh Min/Sharanya, Jessamyn Teoh Min & Her Parents Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary: After her business in Penang with the Black Water Sister was settled, Jess set off for the skyscrapers and new vistas of Singapore.
wrote this for bethefirst, a challenge to create the first fanwork for a fandom. this wound up as a chance to write some setting porn. thank you to @bothzangetsus and @pretty-rage-machine for the kind beta!
black water sister is, paraphrasing wikipedia, a diaspora fantasy novel about a malaysian chinese lesbian who gets tied up in supernatural hijinks involving her grandmother.
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smokefalls · 2 months
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“It’s already suffering enough to be a woman,” Ah Lee recited. “Don’t need people to eat you some more.”
Zen Cho, "The House of Aunts" from Spirits Abroad
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quote-tournament · 9 months
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I'm adding
Sacrifice creates obligations. Remember that, Liyana. You have rights.
-Zen Cho, "Liyana"
To the honourable mentions
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evenaturtleduck · 1 year
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Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
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a-ramblinrose · 1 year
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7 books 7 days day 5
Rules: every day, I will post the cover of a book that I love and nominate someone new to start the challenge
Tagged by @booksandrandomfandoms
Tagging @therefugeofbooks
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wafflehousecult · 1 year
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Review: The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
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(We’ve now come to the end of an unofficial trilogy, consisting of three books with supernatural themes featuring female protagonists by Malaysia-origin authors. More on that later.)
Girl Falls For Guy, Girl Finds Out She’s Promised To A Ghost Instead
Spooky story set in colonial Malaya and centred on a Chinese ghost wedding? There was no way this book wouldn’t find itself on my radar. Since I know someone who’s been to actual ghost weddings, I was very much intrigued. What were these weddings were like in the not so distant past? What sort of restitutions were there if your Dad bartered your soul away to a rich dead man?
A Leaf On The Wind
The Ghost Bride is Li Lan’s story. The only daughter of a once well-to-do man, she lives in a crumbling house with her shut-in father and a skeleton crew of servants. 
Barely into adulthood, she dearly loves Ah Mah, the elderly, fiercely loyal and highly superstitious domestic servant who raised her. Her father is usually in an opium-induced haze, still torn after all these years by his disfigurement via smallpox and the death of his beloved wife, a woman Li Lan only has the faintest memories of.
Li Lan’s only obsession in life is Tian Bai, a youngish man she saw one time at a house party in the opulent Lim mansion and… little else. 
Well, until she meets someone else. 
Even then, obsession may be too strong a word. 
Li Lan’s yearning for these men reflect less of an obsessive, all-encompassing and all-consuming desire and more of a vague hope that she might escape her humdrum life and her family’s decaying fortunes. 
Like a leaf on the wind, soaring by no virtue of its own, Li Lan is painfully directionless until things take a real turn near the tail end of the book. 
[ Spoilers below for The Ghost Bride and The Wicked And The Willing ]
“We call them puppet men here.”
Yangsze Choo does a great job of describing those eerie paper servants you see at Taoist funerals and the uncanny feeling that even ghosts get around their doubles in the spirit world. This shoddy facsimile of real, three-dimensional people feels instinctively off and that’s kind of how I feel about the characters in The Ghost Bride. 
Their primary purpose seem to be fulfilling plot points instead of living their own (un)lives and desires. 
Take Li Lan's yearning, for example. Why does Li Lan think Tian Bai is so special? The author is unable to tell me us why, beyond comparing him with Lim Tian Ching, Li Lan’s would-be spirit husband, who apparently looks like Porky Pig. 
By the end of the book, Li Lan hints that her feelings for Tian Bai may have been more girlish infatuation than anything truly substantial, as if she herself doesn’t know for sure. As for Tian Bai himself, it’s impossible to say because we only get glimpses into his psyche. 
Hell, we don’t even know if he has any inkling of the murder of Lim Tian Ching. As for Er Lang, that’s an even tougher bet because he’s not strictly human. (And no, I’m not convinced that Li Lan is that special either. More on that later.)
Li Lan, Gean Choo and Jessamyn
The Ghost Bride, The Wicked And The Willing and Black Water Sister. Leading these stories are three young women in varying stages of peril. 
Now let’s take a look at what they want.
Li Lan’s most fervent wish seem to be getting married into a good (rich) family because she’s halfway convinced that she loves Tian Bai, a man she knows very little about. About 3/4 into the book, this suddenly becomes a lot less urgent than regaining ownership of her own body; a crisis put-upon her late in the story by a character so tedious and boring it’s no wonder she’s a ghost. 
Black Water Sister’s Jessamyn wants nothing more than to reclaim her headspace from her nosy dead grandmother. To do so, she needs to solve the mystery of why her ghost refuses to rest. This leads her to some uncomfortably loud conversations with grandma in her own head, some of which are hilarious. It also results in the uncovering of family secrets, her learning some things about herself, culminating in her making some important decisions.
Sure, Li Lan learnt some family secrets during her time as a kitchen assistant in the underworld. She even got to meet her mother. But there were no earth shattering revelations. Nothing that makes you feel wistful about how her husband, Li Lan's father, still struggles to live without her. Honestly, I'm not even sure if Li Lan learnt anything substantial about herself.
As for The Wicked And The Willing’s Gean Choo, what she wants is to start making something of herself and be rid of her family’s debt. To do so, she moves out of a crowded boarding house into the Edevane House, ignoring rumours of it being haunted in favour of a handsome salary. She becomes a live-in servant to the pointedly nocturnal and mysterious Mrs. Edevane. 
She quickly becomes Mrs Edvane’s object of desire.
Despite Mrs Edevane's unnaturally long lifespan, I can understand why she would gravitate toward Gean Choo, even if she’s had many human playthings before her. 
Because unlike Li Lan, Gean Choo has an actual personality and some serious spunk. Though she recognises the power Mrs Edevane has over her, this does not stop her from resolutely seeking out experiences she desires and feeling the rich inner turmoil that comes with being feeling more important that she's ever felt before. She even got Mrs Edevane to say please.
On the other hand, we have to put up with Li Lan going cross-eyed at the mere thought of one of her suitors. I see no reason why Er Lang, a celestial being who has lived for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, would see anything special in Li Lan. I don't know what Tian Bai sees in her either.
Despite having all the right ingredients to be so much more, The Ghost Bride is definitely the least of the three books I’ve read. The fact that THIS is the one that’s been made into a Netflix series instead of the other two feels like a slap in the face. That it's the only one among them that features hetero romance feels like no coincidence.
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