FOREWORD
Alma Katsu
There may not be a more natural pairing in all of literature than “Asian woman” and “horror”.
That may sound a tad melodramatic to some. Every ethnicity and gender has its own grievances after all, its members forced to grapple with the expectations levied on them. I might feel that Asian women have it toughest because I am one of them and grew up shouldering this particular burden.
What does it mean to be an Asian woman? The whole world thinks it already knows what we are about. We are usually reduced to one of two stereotypes. Sometimes we’re seen as Geishas, the beautiful, desirable woman who is trained to bend herself to the will of another (usually a man). She exists only to give pleasure. Other times, we’re the Dragon Lady, manipulative and dangerous (but, here too, sometimes with a tinge of the erotic). In either guise, we’re not seen as individuals but as a doll, an empty vessel. Not a real person at all. Depersonalization makes it easier to forget that we are each individuals with very specific likes, dislikes, dreams, and wishes. Depersonalization makes it easier for the exploiter to go about their business.
Above all, Asian women are supposed to be submissive. Obedient, invisible, without wants of her own and so content to devote herself to making others happy. This is the expectation that I found hardest. Not that I, for a minute, thought I was supposed to be that person. But I found the mere expectation soul-crushing. That anyone could expect another person to negate themselves, that this was the natural order of things. That anyone would negate themselves voluntarily.
These are very destructive stereotypes. And, like all stereotypes, difficult to overcome. That is what we are trying to do with this anthology, we horror writers, using the only weapon we have. We are using the power of story to push back on these stereotypes. To show the damage they cause. To show that we’re made of flesh and blood.
Given this negation of us as people, no wonder Asian women carry so much anger. You’ll see fury and rage in each and every one of these stories; some even have the words in the title. It’s because we’re not allowed to be as we were born to be. We’re told our whole lives that we must be somebody else, someone we don’t recognize. Or maybe that’s not true: we’re often asked to be our mothers, women who sacrificed themselves for their children. As grateful as we are to them, we don’t want the same for ourselves. We want better. Does that make us ungrateful? A bad daughter?
I’m half Japanese. My Japanese mother married my father and came to America not long after World War II. I watched her bend, and nearly be crushed, under the weight of the expectations of her youth. She tried to make her daughters believe these expectations applied to us, too. She was only semi-successful here; we were modern American girls, after all. Still, to this day, I have to stop myself from waiting on my husband hand and foot, as we waited on my father and brother, even though my brother was the youngest and worked no harder than I had on any given day. (He had his own burdens to deal with, don’t get me wrong.)
Perhaps no cultural norm weighs more heavily on Asian daughters than our obligation to our parents, particularly in old age. It’s this inescapable expectation that often makes the last years of a parent’s life something to be dreaded. Knowing that you are expected to sacrifice your life in order to care for aging parents is enough to curdle anyone’s love into resentment, and the bulk of this invariably falls to daughters. We are expected to attend to the physical needs: lifting, carrying, feeding, bathing. We change their diapers and wipe up their diarrhea, the insult stinging twice as bad for knowing we were always the less-favored child, being female.
You’ll see that the notion of family runs through most of the stories in this collection. As in many cultures, families are very important in Asian life. They are, however, a double-edged sword: they are where we go for safe harbor from a rough and dangerous world, but they’re also the place where we’re smothered by expectations.
A few of the stories are futuristic, like “The Genetic Alchemist’s Daughter” by Elaine Cuyegkeng, which is about opening the Pandora’s box of editing one’s genes. This story has an added twist, seemingly tailor-made for parents with sky-high expectations of their children (maybe the defining characteristic of Asian parents): what if you could change your children in situ? Snip out the traits you didn’t like and replace them with the preferred ones? Does it seem too good to be true? Of course it is, but there’s always a price to be paid for getting what we want.
Angela Yuriko Smith gives us two sci-fi stories. “Skin Dowdy” is a sly look at the commoditization of beauty and the pressure Asian women (though, let’s be honest, this applies to most women) feel to be beautiful, no matter the cost. In a future world where there are infinite cosmetic enhancements, it pays to know why you want to change yourself in the first place. “Vanilla Rice”, her second story, offers the ability for parents to alter their child’s physical attributes, to get rid of the characteristics that mark us as part of a group. The mother (who grew up embarrassed by her ethnicity) decides to give her baby this “gift”, but as it turns out, you can’t always predict what someone else will want. And in “Fury” by Christine Sng, we are taken to a near-future world that is succumbing to a disease set on wiping out the world’s population, to see a daughter trained to be a fighter and a leader ultimately saved by her father’s sacrifice.
Several of the stories call back to ethnic folklore and legend, from the common to the esoteric, bringing us back to our roots and reminding us we can never truly escape what is in the blood. “Kapre: A Love Story” by Rin Chupeco shows an indigenous monster rising above his monstrous nature to protect a woman after he falls in love with her as an infant. “Rites of Passage” by Gabriela Lee examines different aspects of womanhood through the story of the tiyanak, a vampiric baby. “The Ninth Tale” by Rena Mason uses the legend of the nine-tailed fox to show the many faces of womanhood—including the calculating side. The nine-tailed fox is a popular figure in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean folklore, a creature who (generally speaking; various cultures portray the creature differently) ascends the ladder of spirituality by consuming humans’ vitality. Woe to the human who tries to out-trick a long-lived trickster entity. And Indonesian history and folklore is visited in Nadia Bulkin’s “Truth is Order and Order is Truth”, a retelling of the story of Princess Dhani, who leads her people in an uprising to reclaim her family’s throne.
The fury we feel when we have sacrificed our lives to meet the expectations of others is a common thread through several stories. “Little Worm” by Geneve Flynn is about a woman who bitterly accepts the responsibility of caring for her rapidly deteriorating mother only to find out the terrible bargain her mother made, long ago, in order to bear the self-sacrifice demanded of her. “Frangipani Wishes” by Lee Murray and “The Mark” by Grace Chan both show what tragedy can happen when one is overwhelmed by guilt—or resentment.
Food looms large in the most Asians’ lives, particularly as a gatekeeping mechanism. Our food—seen by outsiders as either exotic or downright disgusting—is a substitute for our ethnic group. Does the outsider accept or reject us? In one of my favorite stories in the collection, “Phoenix Claws”, a woman decides to keep a suitor who fails her family’s litmus test of acceptance—trying chicken feet, considered a delicacy—she learns there’s a price to pay.