Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing author, Meihan Boey. She is the author of The Formidable Miss Cassidy, which is the first novel in the Miss Cassidy trilogy. The first novel is about how a Scottish governess helps her employer's family who is haunted by a malevolent spirit. She has recently released, The Enigmatic Madam Ingram, which is the second novel in the trilogy. In this interview, we discussed not only her latest novel, but also Singaporean mythology. Thank you, Mrs. Boey!
What inspired you to write The Formidable Miss Cassidy? Did you know it would be a trilogy before you started writing or did it form while you were writing it?
Yes, I did know I wanted to create a trilogy - I just didn’t know at the start whether or not I would be able to get there!
The Formidable Miss Cassidy started life as a COVID project, sent as a short story to a little Canadian indie press. Because I didn’t think a typical Canadian audience was going to be able to relate easily to a fully Singaporean character, I decided to go with my favourite, no-explanations-needed trope character - the Victorian governess!
She became Scottish partly because that’s where my husband is from, but mostly because I had the idea of pitting supernatural beings of East and West against each other. The only real equivalent of a Southeast Asian hantu (malevolent spirit) are the fay, especially the unseelie. That was how Miss Cassidy was born!
She then arrives in 1890s Singapore as an outsider, experiencing all the magnificent weirdness of our part of the world during one of the most fraught periods in our history, exactly as I imagined any newly-arrived stranger would - including the reader.
From a short story, on the advice of a kind Canadian editor, I expanded it into a novel. An equally kind editor in Singapore suggested I should submit the completed manuscript. This book became The Formidable Miss Cassidy, and co-won the 2021 Epigram Fiction Prize in Singapore.
The first book was not very long, because I wanted to keep it simple to start with. By then I had already indulged in creating origin stories and developing many more characters, on the idea that if the book did well, I wanted to feature more and more of our monstrous, magnificent, terrifying hantu. I wanted Miss Cassidy to have a worthy nemesis, I wanted Mr Kay to have his own adventures, and I wanted to feature as much of Singapore’s (I think!) very cool and mixed-up cultural and spiritual beliefs as I could.
In short - Out of all that came the story of The Enigmatic Madam Ingram, and the Mystical Mister Kay!
Untidy, would be the diplomatic way of putting it! By the 1890s, Singapore had been absorbing a huge wave of migrants (largely from South China and South India) for generations - and this is on top of the migrants who were already there, who had arrived centuries earlier and integrated with the local Malay communities. The East India Company and the British had established a colonial structure that worked patchily, at best. Not only were there many different races, within each ‘race’ of people there were multiple subdivisions of dialect, religion, culture and class.
Not everyone got along all the time, to put it mildly. But most ordinary folk certainly tried. Languages all blended into a kind of patois, with a mostly Malay base (often called pasar Melayu, or marketplace Malay). Temples of multiple denominations were built back to back with one another. Polytheistic religions freely mingled gods and deities, and anyone was welcome to pray to any of them (and still are to this day). Singapore’s incredibly diverse and unique street food (now listed by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity) developed from all this intermingling.
It was a mad and messy place, but that version of Singapore forms the foundation of the shiny city it is today, for all its faults, and in all its glory.
Many Western readers are unfamiliar with Singaporean mythology. Could you explain more in detail about the Singaporean supernatural creatures that are in your novel?
The hantu are not just Malaysian, they actually exist across all Southeast Asia including Philippines (which has some real nasty critters!), Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, etc. The word ‘hantu’ is Malay, which is spoken (with regional variations) in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. So I grew up calling them hantu. A very large percentage of hantu are female and related to vengeance, childbirth, and wrongful death.
The most famous is the Pontianak. (There is a whole town named after her in Malaysia.) She’s a vampiric creature who traditionally hunts women, but in the 60s, horror movies reinvented her as a vengeful soul hunting men who have wronged her, and eventually just men in general who are stupid enough to approach a beautiful woman under a banana tree at midnight. She is associated with the scent of frangipani flowers - as the scent fades, she is getting closer, and her voice also fades as she approaches you. She transforms into a monstrous creature of teeth and claws once she has captured her victim, and normally disembowels him and consumes various parts.
To me, the most terrifying hantu is the penanggalan. Also a woman, and sometimes a bomoh (a form of shaman or witch). Her body can split in two, sometimes through the torso, sometimes at the neck. The upper part then flies through the night, entrails dangling like poisonous tentacles, in search of prey. Legend has it that you’ve got to get all your washing in before nightfall, because if she passes by and drips gore on your laundry, your household is … basically screwed.
The bomoh is a spiritual healer, shaman, and folk magic practitioner. They’re tied deeply with the spirits of land, sea and jungle, and traditionally they aren’t ‘evil’ at all - but lots of movies and TV shows love the idea of the evil bomoh, casting curses, raising dark spirits, etc. Related to the bomoh is the toyol, the spirit (and body) of a dead baby, who is raised with black magic and serves its master as long as it’s regularly fed. Toyols are kept in glass jars and are immortal, so once you’ve raised one, it remains in your family and must be maintained by all your descendants.
Why did you interweave Singaporean myths with other worldly mythology?
Firstly, because I think our hantu are the most mind-numbingly terrifying supernatural beasties in the world, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t get a bigger audience to give nightmares to!
Secondly, in the books, the hantu who leave Singapore and try to seize power in the West are also attempting a kind of reverse-colonisation. Two of them attempt this, in different ways - Bungadarah in The Enigmatic Madam Ingram, and… someone else… in Book 3, The Mystical Mister Kay. They can’t seize back trade routes, and can’t free nations and peoples. But they can infest peoples’ souls, and colonise minds, bodies and spirits, one by one. (They have time to do it slowly - they’re immortal!)
For those who are interested in Singaporean folklore, what books do you recommend?
Online (or in a library) you can find the primary written source of our traditional stories in The Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu). It was first translated to English in 1821 by John Leyden. You can probably find more casual reader-friendly versions by Asiapac Books in Singapore, which publishes comic book versions of local tales.
I love Malay Magic, published by Walter William Skeat in 1900, which is an incredibly detailed study of how bomohs, pawangs and other traditional spiritual leaders practised medicine and ritual. It’s a unique work, since bomohs generally don’t share their secrets! And female bomohs are barely represented, since the researchers were all men and wouldn’t have much access to them. But it’s quite amazing nonetheless.
Singapore is very multicultural, though, so we also share stories from Chinese mythology and Hindu sagas. One great modern retelling is Sister Snake, by Amanda Lee-Koe, a version of the Chinese tale of "Lady White Snake".
Our most well-known piece of mythology, the founding of Singapore by the Prince Sang Nila Utama, was recently reinvented into a wild and wondrous novel by Singaporean writer Ng Yi-Sheng, titled simply Utama. Yi-Sheng is also the author of a children’s series of books that retells Singapore’s lore in a simple, all-ages friendly format; the first is called Crazy Colonisers.
In the sequel, The Enigmatic Madam Ingram, why did you decide to tell the story from multiple perspectives?
I think the decision was made for me, really! I started out in third person, but Letty Ingram would not separate herself from my own consciousness and eventually I gave in, and she remained a first person narrator.
Because she is the one around whom the mystery revolves, from her point of view, everything is a terrible puzzle she’s desperate to seek answers to - her own past, her monstrous magical Mama’s origins, the dancing wayang kulit ghost trying so hard to communicate with her, and the tremendous curse she carries.
Because Letty herself knows and remembers so little, the perspectives of those who know more than she herself does necessarily had to fracture into different viewpoints. Each character holds a different piece of her puzzle, and each had their own notion of what ‘really’ happened.
I always felt there had to be a different perspective from Miss Cassidy’s. In particular, I felt it was essential to reverse the point of view. In Book 1, Miss Cassidy is a Western woman entering a (to her) confusing Southeast Asian world; in Book 2, I wanted the viewpoint of a Southeast Asian woman entering (equally confusing!) Western society.
There are actually two Madam Ingrams, mother and daughter, one fully Malay, and one half-Malay, half-British. They would view and experience the world differently from a fully Western woman, and I felt that perspective was important, regardless of their moral and spiritual alignments.
What were the challenges of writing The Miss Cassidy trilogy?
The biggest challenge is getting all the timelines properly aligned! While this isn’t strictly full historical fiction, I still didn’t want anything too wildly anachronistic happening.
Other than that, my only real challenge is to stop myself writing when the story’s done - otherwise I will go on and on and on!
What can readers take away from the Miss Cassidy trilogy?
I’d like to think a ripping good story with a bit of horror, a bit of fantasy, a few different ways of seeing the world - and a different way, as well, of experiencing what love is.
Hopefully, for those who didn’t start off familiar with Singapore and Southeast Asia, you might start to find this part of the world a little bit interesting as well!
Are you a fan of historical fiction and paranormal romances? What are your favorite books?
I absolutely am. My favourite book of all time is Jane Eyre, which is not paranormal romance technically, but might as well be! I am a big Anne Rice and Stephen King fan. I am also a huge anime and manga geek. I love Junji Ito’s horrifying tales, and I’m currently both reading and watching Jujutsu Kaisen.
I do sometimes find it funny that ‘historical fiction’ and ‘paranormal romance’ are separate genres in the Western publishing world - I think almost throughout Asia, they are one and same so frequently, nobody considers them two different types of stories. Since the 80s I’ve been watching martial arts swordsmen from the Qing dynasty (or Japanese schoolgirl shamans) dying in the arms of magical fox, snake and raven spirits.
Now that the Miss Cassidy trilogy is complete, what project are you working on next?
I have a new novel within the same universe coming out next year with Bindery Books! The working title is The Matchmaker of Club Street. If you liked the Kay & Cassidy books, I hope you’ll like this one too!
About Meihan Boey:
Meihan Boey is the author of the Miss Cassidy trilogy. She also published a science fiction novella, The Messiah Virus. Her work has appeared in Fish Eats Lion Redux, Fright 1, the inaugural issue of Sploosh and the sixth volume of Best New Singaporean Short Stories. She loves manga, comic books, and video games. She lives in Singapore. For more information, please visit her website.
If you are interested in purchasing The Enigmatic Madam Ingram, you can purchase it through HarperCollins's website!
Also, check out my reviews of Meihan Boey's novels:
Great, insightful interview! The hanfu sound terrifying!
ReplyDelete