Searching for a Home That Doesn't Exist in "Ninetails"

David Vogel

May 31

The concept of literary debuts is a particular obsession of the publishing industry. I understand the appeal: Novelty attracts attention, and attention garners sales. It's one of the most surefire sources of publicity in a time when the amount of content produced rapidly outpaces consumer interest. It also creates the opportunity for authors to debut in multiple disciplines or genres, allowing audiences to be reintroduced to a talented author in a new context, as is the case with the revelatory short story collection Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao. Ninetails is the author's fiction debut, although she's previously published 3 acclaimed collections of poetry: Mad Honey Symposium, Oculus, and The Kingdom of Surfaces. It's a frequently surprising collection of short stories that shows just how much Mao's time as a poet has sharpened her skill as a writer, and signals the entry of a bold new voice in fiction.

In Ninetails, Sally Wen Mao uses the mythological figure of the fox spirit from Asian folklore, "legendary for their cunning wit and maddening beauty," to create fiction that feels simultaneously fresh and timeless. The stories all involve fox spirits in some capacity, but the circumstances and settings of the nine tales vary widely, from the Hong Kong penthouse of a collector of sentient sex dolls to the New York apartment a fox spirit and ghost share as they try to get over a shared ex-boyfriend. All Mao's characters also share a few common characteristics: They're all trying to find new homes, whether spiritual or physical, while knowing the place they came from no longer exists. They're also largely defined by the gaze of others, and at the mercy of the shifting opinions of unqualified authority figures.

The standalone stories are interspersed with an interconnected narrative about Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island, near San Francisco, in 1910, as they wait to be approved or denied entry to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely restricted Chinese immigration to the US, but when the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed municipal records, it created the opportunity for "paper families" to be invented. In a workaround of severe immigration restrictions, current Chinese residents of the US falsified records of fictional family members who existed solely on paper and sold these slots to strangers looking to live in America, allowing prospective immigrants to "shed the life they'd always known and become a fictional invention." The center of the Angel Island stories is Tye, a Chinese-American woman born in the US, working as a translator during immigration interviews to validate claims of paper relatives.

Tye serves as a recurring representative for "otherness" in Ninetails. The white Americans she works with view her as Chinese, with preconceived notions about her ethnicity, while the detained migrants are distrustful of her because she's never been to China and she works for the officials trying to send them home. She also has her own conflicted feelings about life in America and her job working with the US government, feeling "disgusted with herself, as if she were betraying her own." But despite the thorny nature of her professional occupation, it's hard to fault Tye. She's a woman trying to survive while asserting what minimal agency she has and working within a system that's designed to treat her as disposable. She gets minimal respect from her coworkers, and is greeted with emotions ranging from casual disdain to outright vitriol from the detainees denied entry to California, even though she's not the one deciding their fates: "The woman looked at her with such a specific spite, Tye knew it was reserved only for her. Because betrayal was a worse offense than misunderstanding, even hate."

As she did in her poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces, Mao uses her fiction to examine the fetishization and objectification of Asian women. Are they afforded autonomy, or do they get treated as expendable scapegoats whose only function is ornamental? In the first story of Ninetails, "Love Doll," a collector of sex dolls fetishizes what he views as the perfect woman, until both his assistant and the dolls start expressing that their desires may differ from his, after which he makes no attempt to treat them as anything other than expendable objects. In "Beasts of The Chase," historical details about the sport of fox hunting are interwoven with the experiences of a woman who transforms into a fox, only to find herself being hunted for sport, where she finds out that "one of the most chilling things about composure and civility … was the murderousness hidden beneath manners. One can be dignified while tearing something into obliteration." And perhaps most damningly, in the Angel Island stories, the immigration officers repeatedly accuse the Chinese women of being sex workers, to which one detainee responds, "To be fair, they think every woman is a whore.… What they don't know is that whores can also be great poets."

Ninetails consistently amazed me with the linguistic beauty, depth of emotion, and psychological acuity contained in each story. Sally Wen Mao's writing is visceral, and her years as a poet have paid off by making her prose consistently vivid and filled with sensory details that kept me reading passages over and over to make sure I didn't miss any layers of meaning. Each of these tales seems designed as an exercise for the reader to expand their imagination and perception of the world around them, but none of them are simplistic or didactic. This is writing to savor. Ninetails is clever, insightful, and so delicately crafted each story feels like a world in miniature. If this is her fiction debut, I can't wait to see what Sally Wen Mao does next.