Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in
a scullery; ten years later another woman ‘falls’ from the second
floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother
in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver.
All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa
for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence.
Chinese Pākehā writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed
fox spirit húli jīng as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these
women and others like them and tell their stories.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is an audacious blend of biography,
mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to
illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history.