Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong

We notice Bi at the same time, in front of the prayer mat. When we lift our forehead from the floor, we see a trail of damp, muddy footprints leading to Bi's long, webbed feet. Bi is a gift from above. Heaven's answer to our prayers. Bi is all sinew and bone, dry and shriveled, scales almost too big for her body, like a frog just returned from the desert. Why does Bi look so strange? With our back to the light, we watch Bi fade away, like watching a shadow fall across a mirror. Who made Bi like this, amphibious, dual, neither of earth nor water? This is the question, hidden like frogspawn in the sand of the hourglass. We did, is the answer. Aminah and I. And the understanding undoes us, what to do, what to do. Go back to yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that--time is like a steamroller, crushing everything flat as a card and vanishing it into endless blackness. Aminah and I prefer to pretend that Bi fell from the sky. Fell like rain from on high. Imagine how far Bi must have come.

In "The Wall," the first story in Malaysian writer Ho Sok Fong's collection Lake Like a Mirror, a wall is built to protect a row of houses from a nearby road, leaving a backyard space that is just inches wide. A woman, whose daughter's car crash death preceded the wall, builds a garden in the long, skinny space, and even becomes skinny herself. Her cat disappears in the space, and then she herself, into the marginal place between the house and the highway, between the home and the world. The cat is discovered--a moldering corpse beneath the leaf litter and trash that such places collect--but the woman is never seen again.

Such uncanny moments are the highlights of this collection. Some are more subtle than others, subtle enough to disorient you, and make you wonder whether you have missed something: In "Summer Tornado," a woman follows a man and his children around an amusement park. Is she a stranger, being slowly absorbed into their domestic life? Or has she been the children's mother, suffering a strange alienation and detachment all along? She is, maybe, like the woman in "The Wall" who disappears into that neither-here-nor-there space. Another, more overt image is Bi, the imaginary froglike guardian who watches over Aminah and her friends in the oppressive girls' school where she is brought up to be a good Muslim. Bi, a frog, an amphibian, a creature of the land and water, home in both but in neither, may be a perfect guardian for a girl who feels neither here nor there, neither fully inside the mesh of power the school represents nor fully free from it.

Ho's stories often deal with the oppression of the Malaysian state. In another story, Aminah ("The name 'Aminah' is very common in Malay society," she writes, "as with Sarah or Mary, there can be many Aminahs") finds herself in a reeducation camp for those who wish to legally renounce their Islamic faith. The title story deals with a university professor who finds herself in the crosshairs of the Islamic censors, only to breathe a sigh of relief when another colleague finds herself fired instead. In this story, such rigid reactions encourage a kind of soft oppression in which people stifle themselves ("You should be more sensitive than they are," an administrator remarks), but Ho makes it clear that these systems are as insidious as the violence and rigidity that keep a character like Aminah imprisoned.

Some of Ho's stories are too cryptic: I felt like I was missing something in "Radio Drama" and "The Chest," some secondary layer that lurked in too much obscurity behind plainspoken prose. The collection may not get any better than that first story, "The Wall," though I did like the last story as well, "March in a Small Town," in which a young girl working at a seedy motel becomes obsessed with a man who checks in every night, seemingly without remembering he'd ever been there before. 

With the addition of Malaysia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 93!