"The Night Tiger", "The Bear and the Nightingale"

[fiefoe]

The most interesting part of Yangsze Choo's fantasy/mystery novel was all the superstitions Malaysians pick and choose to follow. I was gratified to have figured out half of the mystery at least. The love story, told in the first person was YA grade.

• The Kinta Valley in which we lived held the richest tin deposits in the world, and there were dozens of mines, both large and small, nearby. Tin-ore dealers made a good living, and he could have sent to China for a wife,
• “What a coincidence! That makes two of the five Confucian Virtues. You’d better have three more children so you can complete the set.” ... Ren, for humanity, and Yi, for righteousness. Ren always thought it was odd that she’d stopped at two of the Five Virtues. What about the others: Li, which was ritual, Zhi, for knowledge, and Xin, for integrity?
• Perhaps it’s the eyes of this new doctor, which pin the words in his mouth so they won’t spill out. Ren looks at the floor, then forces his gaze up. Dr. MacFarlane taught him that foreigners like to be looked in the eye.
• No pictures on the walls, not even the indifferent watercolors so beloved by English mems.
• A keramat animal is a sacred beast, a creature with the ability to come and go like a phantom, trampling sugarcane or raiding livestock with impunity. It’s always distinguished by some peculiarity, such as a missing tusk or a rare albino color. But the most common indicator is a withered or maimed foot.
• “It’s the character for mo—you know, tapir.” I’d seen pictures of a tapir. It had a nose like a stunted elephant’s trunk, and black and white markings as if the front of the animal had been dipped in ink, while the back part had been heavily floured, like a rice dumpling... “No, the dream-eater is a ghost animal. If you have nightmares, you can call it three times to eat the bad dreams. But you have to be careful. If you call it too often it will also gobble up your hopes and ambitions.”
• Still, hearing his name filled me with an inky, twilight gloom. My mother’s debts, Ming’s marriage, and my lack of a future were cold weights on a string of bad luck. And that wasn’t even counting the mummified bottled finger tucked at the very bottom of my traveling basket.
• live chicks and quail, green lotus seed pods that resembled shower sprinklers.
• Ash and scraps of partly burned colored paper blew around the compound—the remains of paper funeral goods burned for the deceased. I wondered whether they had burned plenty of dancing girls and garlicky chicken rice for the salesman in the Afterlife,
• Chan Yew Cheung had been twenty-eight years old, to which had been added, as was customary, three more years to increase his life span. One year from the earth, one from heaven, and one from man.
• It was a white rooster with yellow eyes, the pupils angry dots. At Chinese funerals, a white rooster was released into the graveyard at the end of the ceremony. Of course, this lady might just be taking it home for dinner, but the sight of the white bird on Shin’s recently vacated seat filled me with dismay.
• Malaya, with its mix of Malays, Chinese, and Indians, is full of spirits: a looking-glass world governed by unsettling rules. The European werewolf is a man who, when the moon is full, turns his skin inside out and becomes a beast. He then leaves the village and goes into the forest to kill. But for the natives here, the weretiger is not a man, but a beast who, when he chooses, puts on a human skin and comes from the jungle into the village to prey on humans.
• There’s a rumor that when we colonials came to this part of the world, the natives considered us beast-men as well, though nobody has said that to my face.
• After all, half of a broken pair is one: the unlucky number of loneliness. Dr. MacFarlane once explained radio signals to him, saying they needed both a transmitter and a receiver to work. Ren immediately understood what he meant. He and Yi always knew where the other was, so much so that the matron at the orphanage would send one boy on an errand and keep the other with her. At any delay, she’d ask the remaining twin how far away his brother was.
• Ren discovers he can read William now in a way he never could before. William’s interest is like a taut string. It snaps around, but mostly it’s drawn to women.
• There was something in his eye, a sort of greedy loneliness that I recognized from all those long afternoons dancing with strangers.
• Ren suddenly recalls Dr. MacFarlane’s vomiting fit and the retching, gagging sounds that came from behind the closed door. “The other sign of a weretiger,” Dr. MacFarlane continues, “is a deformed paw... Transfixed, Ren watches from the open door as Dr. MacFarlane lifts his head, slavering, his eyes like a wild animal. Thrusting his left hand into his mouth, the one with the missing finger, he pulls out a long, coiling black strand of woman’s hair.
• The scent of the operating room often clings to him with its sharp top note of disinfectant and murky undertones of bone dust and blood.
• William had resorted to Krukenberg’s procedure, popular since the Great War. He seldom performs it, preferring to save every inch of wrist that he can, but in cases like this it’s the best he can offer. By dividing the two bones of the forearm, the stump can be used like chopsticks. It’s an ugly solution that amplifies the mutilation. There will be no discreet hook, no wooden hand to deceive at first glance; only two raw-looking prongs like lobster claws instead of forearms. But they work far better than prostheses. The man will be able to grip items with full sensation, open doors, even handle implements.
• Those things which we ought not to have done—the words perch on him like soft heavy birds.
• Sometimes—unexpectedly—what he wishes for comes true. Doors open, obstacles are removed. Like Rawlings’s suspicions of foul play, brushed aside by an impatient magistrate. Or the fortuitous timing of that salesman’s obituary in the newspaper. Call it coincidence or just plain luck, it’s happened a little too often in his life.
• yet, there’d been an odd flutter in the pit of my stomach when he’d leaned in. As though a thousand moths were gathering around a candle that had silently and mysteriously been set aflame.
• He’s Hindu and Ah Long is nominally Buddhist; between the two of them lies a tradition of little offerings and sacrifices, but Ah Long scowls. “What are we going to offer—a chicken? I only have three and they’re needed tomorrow. Besides, we don’t want it to come back.”
• It was best to look cheerful, I decided. Not as though I’d stayed up half the night catching up on ten years’ worth of jealousy in one fell swoop.
• Then he hears it, a rumbling snarl. It’s pitched so low that the air trembles; he can feel the reverberations in his bones. Every muscle in his body freezes, the hairs on his head stand on end. At this moment, Ren is no longer a boy or even human. He’s nothing but a hairless monkey caught on the ground.
• The five of us should have made a kind of harmony. After all, weren’t the Confucian Virtues supposed to describe the perfect man? A man who abandoned virtue lost his humanity and became no better than a beast. Dazed, I wondered whether that was happening to all of us. “It’s all a problem with the order—the way things are being bent and rearranged. The further each of us strays, the more everything warps,” said Yi miserably. “And the fifth one is the worst.”
• Chinese people have an aversion to suddenly waking people from sleep, in case the soul separates from the body.
• Chinese sometimes exhumed a grave. Bone-picking, it was called, when remains were disinterred seven years after death to be sent back to an ancestral village. If you had no family and died in a foreign land, you’d become a hungry ghost, wandering and starving forever. To prevent that, the bones were carefully washed with wine and laid out on a yellow cloth, before being packed in a jar. If even the smallest bone was missing, a substitute must be made.
• Incomplete sets and broken promises. Dark thoughts, like an eel twisting in my head.
• I studied him surreptitiously, struck once again by his disarming manner. I suspected the reason he could be so casual was because he didn’t really see me as a person, just another interchangeable local girl.
• Yi had said we’d all gone a little wrong, perhaps in the way we’d failed to live up to our Virtues. My own choices—working at a dance hall, getting mixed up with a dead man’s finger, and telling lie after lie—could hardly be called wise, despite my supposed cleverness at school. I imagined the five of us making a pattern. A set that fit together naturally like the fingers on a hand. The further we strayed, the more the balance in our worlds distorted. Less human, more monstrous. Like the claw of a beast.
• I’d heard that the hard stone from a tiger’s eye and the bezoars formed in the bellies of goats and monitor lizards fetched outrageous sums on the black market.
• a plate of char kway teow, fried rice noodles garnished with bean sprouts, eggs, and cockles.
• hole, it was clearly something trying to get in, not out! But from time to time, people put stakes in his grave to make sure he doesn’t come out. I’m not worried myself; I’m Church of England,” she said proudly.
• In the uproar over the discovery of Pei Ling’s horrific fall, I remembered how Koh Beng had been the only person who kept eating. So busy pretending to be normal that he forgot to look surprised. I felt sick.
• “My Chinese name has the same character—Li for Li di ya—as yours. It’s one of the Confucian Virtues,” she says.
• “The truth is, there was a murder at the Batu Gajah hospital on Monday. Another orderly was killed by the same man who tried to shove Ji Lin off the roof. The police asked us not to talk about it, but there’s a scandal brewing. Why do you think the hospital is paying me for not working? In return, they’ve asked us both to leave the area.”... I glanced at Shin. He was an inspired liar, mixing half-truths and facts.
• Hui rolled her eyes. “Rich young men are wasted on you.” But she smiled at last.

--------------------------------------------
Katherine Arden writes well about cold weather. Also a serviceable fantasy that doesn't leave me wanting to read more.

• “Whasser name?” mumbled Alyosha. He was old enough to test the authenticity of fairy tales by seeking precise details from the tellers.
• A perpetual smoke trickled from its chimneys, and at the first hard freeze, Pyotr fitted its window-frames with slabs of ice, to block the cold but let in the light.
• Ivan Kalita was a hard prince, eaten with ambition, cold and clever and grasping. He would not have survived otherwise: Moscow killed her princes quickly.
• The years slipped by like leaves. On a day much like the one that brought her into the world, on the steely cusp of winter, “Why don’t you ever catch her?” said Alyosha, with some resentment, as Olga towed him back to the house. “She’s only six.” <> “Because I am not Kaschei the Deathless,” said Olga with some asperity. “And I have no horse to outrun the wind.”
• Beneath the tree, it had been indeterminate dusk, but now it was night, woolly night on the cusp of snow, the air all dour with it.
• She was rubbed with horrible mustard-seed, and beaten with quick, whisking birch-branches, to liven her blood.
• “And I will leave you awhile, to walk free in the sun. However”—the quiet voice dropped lower and the laughter drained out of it like water from a smashed cup—
• let his thoughts race along the winding track through the winter-dark forest, to the snows of Lesnaya Zemlya and the simplicities of hunting and mending, away from this city of smiling enemies and barbed favors.
• But in the house of Pyotr Vladimirovich, they all feasted as best they could with Lent upon them and winter grown old and bony. They made decent shrift of it, with fish and porridge.
• Three seasons in the north will kill this upstart, or at least fade that oh-so-dangerous loveliness. Better than killing him now, lest the people take his flesh for relics and make him a martyr.
• The sprite was sitting on a thick limb with catlike nonchalance, steadily combing her long tresses. Her comb was the rusalka’s greatest treasure, for if her hair dried, she would die; but the comb could conjure water anywhere.
• The water-spirit was old as the lake itself, and sometimes she looked wonderingly on Vasya, the brash child of a newer world. ... Child though she was, she blazed with the strength of her own mortality and was a match for any rusalka.
• “Not meat,” the creature had said with a shudder, hair scudding like wavelets over her skin. “Fear—and desire—not that you know anything of either. It flavors the water and nourishes me. Dying, they know me for who I am. Otherwise I’d be no more than lake and tree and waterweed.”
• Alder for yellow. But that is not enough for the face of a saint. You will paint us icons, Batyushka?” “I have the red earth, the powdered stones, the black metal. I even have the lapis-dust to make the Virgin’s veil. But I have no green or yellow or violet,”
• “I have never seen Tsargrad, or angels, or heard the voice of God. But I think you should be careful, Batyushka, that God does not speak in the voice of your own wishing. We have never needed saving before.”
• His voice was like thunder, yet he placed each syllable like Dunya setting stitches. Under his touch, the words came alive. ... As he chanted, Konstantin pulled the crowd to him until they echoed his words in a daze of fascinated terror. He drove them on and on with the supple lash of his voice until their answering voices broke
• The others gazed at the priest with terror and a hungry admiration. Anna Ivanovna glowed with a kind of hesitant joy. Their fervor seemed to lift Konstantin and carry him, like a galloping horse.
• “I would do it again,” snapped Vasya at last, exasperated beyond caution. “Did not God make all creatures? Why should we alone be allowed to raise our voices in praise? Crickets worship with songs as much as we.”
• “Already it has begun. If he goes on as he has, all the guardians of the deep forest will disappear; the storm will come and the land will go undefended. Have you not seen it? Fear is first, then fire, then famine. He made your people afraid. And then the fires burned, and now the sun scorches.
• The light should have been for him—for God—for him as God’s messenger. She was as Anna Ivanovna named her: hard-hearted, undutiful, unmaidenly. She conversed with demons and dared to boast that she’d saved his life. But his fingers itched for wood and wax and brushes, to capture the love and loneliness, the pride and half-blossomed womanhood written in the lines of the girl’s body. She saved your life, Konstantin Nikonovich.
• But Alyosha understood his darkening eyes very well. Vasya looked you full in the face: she was more like a warrior unblooded than a house-bred girl,
• “Why did you give me your cross?” asked Vasya abruptly. “After we met at the lake?” His jaw set, but he did not at once reply. In truth, he hardly knew. Because she had moved him. Because he hoped the symbol could reach her when he could not. Because he had wanted to touch her hand and look her in the face, disquiet her, perhaps see her fidget and simper like other girls. Help him forget his wicked fascination. Because he could never look at his cross again without seeing her hand around it.
• Pyotr, staring in astonishment at his wife, found her almost beautiful in her steady purpose.
• “And now God will have his reckoning,” he hissed. His voice flowed like black water with a rime of ice.
• Vasya went to the horses every morning at first light during those clipped, metallic days, only a little after her father. They had a kinship in this, to fear so passionately for the animals.
• “No,” he said. “Some things I can heal. But I cannot heal gently.”
• Vasya smiled. “Nightingale. A little name for a great horse. How did you get it?” I was foaled at twilight, he said gravely. Or perhaps I was hatched; I cannot remember. It was long ago. Sometimes I run, and sometimes I remember to fly. And thus am I named.
• “Can you tell me how you do it?” She came up beside him and peered eagerly at the brush in his hand. “You are too attached to things as they are,” said Morozko, combing the mare’s withers. He glanced down idly. “You must allow things to be what best suits your purpose. And then they will.”
• “Nothing changes, Vasya. Things are, or they are not. Magic is forgetting that something ever was other than as you willed it.”
• A low fire burned in his sunken eyes. “I gave everything for you, Vasilisa Petrovna.” “Not everything,” said Vasya. “Since clearly your pride is intact, as well as your illusions. Where is my stepmother, Batyushka?”
• The one-eyed man sat beside her where she lay on the earth and smiled. “Oh, my beauty,” he said. “Scream again. It is beautiful. Your soul ripens as you scream.”