Yangsze Choo’s Letter to Librarians

Yangsze Choo’s forthcoming novel, THE FOX WIFE, brilliantly explores the dazzling intersection of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts. Full of unforgettable characters, this is a stunning novel about old loves, second chances, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.

We’re thrilled to share with you a letter from Yangsze herself about her years-long love affair with libraries and how they have shaped her as a reader and as an author!

THE FOX WIFE is available for download on Edelweiss know more. LibraryReads votes are due by January 1st.

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Dear Librarians,

When my husband and I were newly married soon after college, we looked for an apartment to rent. The one thing we quickly agreed on was that it would ideally be near a library, or failing that, a bookstore. We didn’t have much money, so our date nights were spent going to different public libraries in the greater Boston area. It was free, and fun to explore Medford, Somerville, Brookline, and Newton. Once we even drove out to Amherst to check out the public library there. I worked in downtown Boston and sometimes on my way back from a client meeting, I would stop in at the Boston Public Library on a rainy cold day in lieu of a coffee break.

Librarian recommendations were extremely important to me. To this day, I look at the carefully arranged highlighted books that someone has thoughtfully picked out to appeal to readers. I almost always found something new that I wanted to read, though I was mindful not to borrow the entire display. Libraries, to me, have been places to find tales within other tales. There’s nothing better than opening a new book to discover fresh worlds within.

The idea for my third novel, THE FOX WIFE, came from a story within a story. Or if you will, a very long tradition of tales about foxes. By this, I don’t mean the usual animals (although I loved George Saunders’ Fox 8), but the shape-shifting foxes of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature. Charming tricksters who sometimes kill you, they will steal your heart as well as any gold ingots you happen to have lying around.

These stories, as familiar to Asian culture as vampires are to the West, often unfold in the following manner: Late one evening, a beautiful woman comes knocking on the door of a scholar who is studying for the Imperial Exams. He lets her in and they have a passionate affair. Then he discovers that she’s not actually human…

This always led to all sorts of questions on my end, including what these creatures were up to, and why did they always come and interrupt people’s exams? I wondered about the secret lives of foxes, these mysterious supporting characters who came at dusk to meddle in our lives. It is the flip side of the story, the unspoken possibility that knocks on the other side of the door, that intrigues me.

The word for fox in Chinese is a homophone for another name which in ancient times was used to denote foreigners or barbarians, and there are intriguing parallels between them. Foxes were traditionally described as being people who aren’t real people—beasts masquerading as humans. In addition, the tales of foxes are very male-centered. The scholar, who represents civil society, “tames” the fox woman by taking her as a concubine or marrying her. She bears him sons, who go on to do well in the Imperial Exams. This raises all sorts of other questions about what conquest actually means.

And so, I decided to write a book about what foxes do in their own, complicated personal lives.

THE FOX WIFE begins when a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is blamed on rumors of foxes, who are said to entice people away. A detective named Bao, with the uncanny ability to hear lies, sets out to discover the truth. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach. Until, perhaps, now.

Having grown up on a diet of PD James and Agatha Christie, I must confess that I love detective stories, and who better to sniff out a murderer than a fox, who is insatiably curious and not bound by human regulations?

When I started writing this novel, the voice of the fox, who is one of the narrators, simply took over and had lots of opinions on everything from appraising antique wine cups to burning down other people’s houses. She also tries very hard to be good, which raises the question of what is “good” to a non-human creature? At its heart, THE FOX WIFE is a tale about revenge, redemption, and love. I hope you enjoy it!

Yangsze Choo

THE FOX WIFE by Yangsze Choo; 9781250266019; 2/13/24