The Night Tiger

The Night Tiger, by Yangsze Choo, blends the legends of jungle weretigers, restless spirits and prophetic dreams with everyday challenges in 1930s Malaysia.

The beginning starts slowly, for the same reasons that shifting narrators is usually slow. As soon as I caught on to who’s who and what’s happening in one storyline, we switched to another.  I usually don’t much like shifting narrators, for exactly that reason, but after a few shifts, I really enjoyed seeing the same story unfold from different angles. It helped that there was a mystical connection between characters and storylines, so I kept seeing the same themes and events.

The characters start to cross and interact, and the shifting narration also helped show wildly different experiences of Malaysian life. Ren, an orphan boy, works as a servant to Dr. William Acton, an English doctor with layers of secrets in the expat enclave. Teenage Ji Lin is better off than Ren, but she’s still been pulled out of school and sent to work in a suitable occupation for girls, as a dressmaker’s apprentice, while the boy of her family, her “twin” stepbrother Shin, can attend medical school. Race, class and gender separate these characters, creating such a wide variety of experiences, but something supernatural is pulling them together.

Warning, though, there are some revolting moments in this book. The plot hinges on reuniting a severed finger with a corpse, and the story includes multiple severed fingers, preserved organs in general, gruesome tiger attacks, murder, and medical descriptions. It’s not gory or gratuitous, but if Crazy Rich Asians is the Singapore/Malaysia novel to make you hungry, The Night Tiger is the Singapore/Malaysia novel to kill your appetite.

A man loses a finger and a man-eating tiger, missing just that toe, prowls the village… is it a coincidence or a supernatural predator?  William’s girlfriends don’t seem to have a long life expectancy… is he terribly unlucky, or is something more sinister happening? This compelling novel kept me questioning what was supernatural, and what was just an unlucky (or way too lucky) coincidence. Outside of the central question of weretigers, each character has other things they’d like to keep quiet, too.

Spoiler alert from here on, so if you haven’t read it, stop here and go pick up The Night Tiger!

One plot point relies on knowing the Chinese versions of English names, and I immediately guessed the answer, because that’s how I would transliterate Lydia. When William’s Chinese name came up, it turned out to be 威力安，not 威廉 as I expected, so I thought that Lydia was just another coincidence or a misdirection.  So it was a double twist when the whole thing was revealed.  Such a great series of twists.

Lydia’s backstory threw me off the trail, because I just assumed she had a broken engagement back home and now she’s husband-hunting out in the Colonies where English men greatly outnumbered the women. As one did.

Overall, I was on board with the step-sibling romance. I understand why Ji’s mom was upset, but they’re not really related by blood, so ok. There was one really yucky moment when Shin tells Ji that he’s going to sleep with her because another suitor won’t want her if she’s not a virgin anymore.  This is a perfectly reasonable attitude for 1930s Malaysia, but eeew, gross. The whole idea of women as pure virgins vs secondhand goods is gross, and banging a girl to defeat another guy is gross, and just, yuck. Shin, I expected better from you. 

I also liked how, at the end of the novel, you could still insist that everything was just a coincidence, or you could be completely caught up in the supernatural connections between Shin and Ji, between Ren and Yi, and between William and Lydia, and the danger of restless weretigers.