Transnational Hauntings, Hungry Ghosts: Malaysian Chinese Domestic Gothic Fiction

Anita Harris Satkunananthan

doi:10.22452/sare.vol57no1.5

Abstract

Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride, which was a finalist for the 2014 Mythopoeic Awards, has recently enjoyed renewed success owing to the Netflix serial based on its premise. The novel takes place in a liminal world populated by Chinese ghosts, Gods and demons. Cassandra Khaw’s short story “Some Breakable Things”, on the other hand, provides a painful and intimate look at loss and bereavement while utilising the Hungry Ghost as a metaphor. A postcolonial feminist reading of Derrida’s theory of hauntology will be applied to my construction and coining of a Malaysian Chinese Domestic Gothic to interrogate and contextualize the hybrid and transnational nature of these texts, which are a palimpsest of Western Gothic traditions and diasporic Chinese funerary customs. The texts’ re-creation and re-visioning of these traditional beliefs and customs display the interstitial dilemma of transnational travellers and diasporic individuals who have to constantly negotiate between consent, autonomy and inherited nostalgia. This article will interrogate these narrative palimpsests to unearth how these tales could provide an answer to the problematics of consent inherent in Derridean hauntology.

Highlights

In this article I connect specific Malaysian Chinese customs, beliefs and folklore related to the rites of death and the afterlife, with the physical and spiritual embodiments of a Malaysian Chinese home and its customs as depicted in Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride (2013) and Cassandra Khaw’s “Some Breakable Things” (2016), using Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology
My use of the term “Malaysian Chinese Domestic Gothic” requires an exploration of what may be categorized as the Domestic Gothic, and how it is distinct within a Malaysian Chinese perspective
The sense of unity is one that, as with most communities, is not devoid of crosshairs of conflict and transgressions of omissions and commissions, but it is doubly fraught for the transnational and diasporic woman caught between worlds. This liminal state is by its very ontology transgressive, and this is why narratives that enfold both the states of the living and dead are both suggestive and important to consider within the postcolonial feminist hauntological framework that I have constructed for this essay, connected to the proliferation of Hungry Ghosts in The Ghost Bride and in the persistent return of the ghost of the protagonist’s father in “Some Breakable Things”

Summary

Introduction

Introduction In this article I connect specific Malaysian Chinese customs, beliefs and folklore related to the rites of death and the afterlife, with the physical and spiritual embodiments of a Malaysian Chinese home and its customs as depicted in Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride (2013) and Cassandra Khaw’s “Some Breakable Things” (2016), using Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology. In considering the Malaysian Chinese Domestic Gothic, it is important to connect these diasporic associations with cultural traditions.

Results

Conclusion