Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m reviewing The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. This author, however, is best known for her second novel The Night Tiger (read my review here).Nonetheless, The Ghost Bride is also quite popular, and it has been picked up by Netflix for adaptation into a TV drama series. The show is available for streaming on Netflix’s website now. Visit the author’s website here. This review has spoilers.
This book is definitely going to make it to my most surprising reads of 2021 list, for I liked it a lot more than I had expected. Set in Malaysia at the turn of the 19th century, The Ghost Bride is about Li Lan, the young daughter of an upper class merchant family living in the port city of Malaca. However, her family is bankrupt and where once she would have been out socializing with other “good” and wealthy Chinese families in the area, Li Lan has no prospects and lives a secluded life with her father—an opium addict and an absent father at best—and her Amah in her family’s decaying household; a sheltered existence that Li Lan is probably never going to get out of unless she marries well, and her prospects are dim. Until her father tells her that the wealthy and powerful Lim family are interested in her as a bride for their son. The only caveat is that her husband-to-be is dead, and she’d marry his spirit. Ghost marriages are a remnant of the ancient customs Chinese living in colonial Malaysia, now dominated by the British, still linger on, and though now rare, they are traditionally used to placate restless spirits. She’d marry into widowhood, her father says, but she’ll be a widow set for life. To his credit, Li Lan’s father doesn’t force her into accepting the proposal, but he also knows that it is probably the only proposal Li Lan is likely to get, so he suggests she accept the Lim family’s invitation that Li Lan gets of visiting them in their home. So Li Lan does.
And it is there that two things happen: Li Lan meets Tian Bai, the new heir of the Lim family and is immediately attracted to him, and Madam Lim, once Li Lan is about to leave, quite innocently asks Li Lan if she could have one of the ribbons in her hair, to match its color to a new baju she is planning to have made, she says. Unbeknownst to Li Lan, however, Madam Lim does not want the item for a new piece of clothing but as an offering to her dead son, who needs it in order for him to be able to visit Li Lan in her dreams. And that is what he does, once his mother burns the offering. So, from the very beginning of the book we are shown Chinese customs and beliefs concerning marriage and the dead, respectively, and I really liked that. Also, I found it interesting that the dead can visit the living in their dreams if they possess something of the living that connects them to this world, and that the living can see beings of the underworld, like demons and other creatures, in their dreams. Dreams are the gateway into the underworld, and those that dream are in an intermediate state between living and dead. This is not the only culture where this is so. After all, Thanatos (God of Death) and Morpheus (God of Sleep) are brothers in Greek Mythology.
And this is why Li Lan’s dreams are so important; she spends most of the book asleep. However, her dreams are shockingly vivid and realistic. And it is in her dreams where we meet Tian Chiang. He is terrifying. Li Lan is scared by his vehemence, dark nature, and aggression. He is nothing like Tian Bai, and so she refuses to marry him.
Despite my terror, I felt a slow burning in my stomach. Why should I be married to this autocratic buffoon, alive or dead? “I don’t think so.” “What?” I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I don’t want to marry you!” Lim Tian Ching’s eyes narrowed into slits. Despite my bold words, my heart quailed. “You don’t have a choice in this matter. I’ll ruin your father.” “Then I’ll become a nun.” “You don’t know the extent of my influence! I’ll haunt you; I’ll haunt your father; I’ll haunt that meddling amah of yours.” He was raging now. “The border officials are on my side, and they said I have a right to you!” “Well, you are dead! Dead, dead, dead!” I shrieked.
But her refusal angers him even further, and he haunts her until she is a shadow of her old self; he torments and tortures her until she becomes a living ghost. So, in wanting to escape her fate, Li Lan travels to the underworld to change her destiny taking us on a journey into the Chinese afterlife; an afterlife where the dead are not above connivery, treachery, and deceit to get what they want. And this was very different (in a good way) than the portrayal of the Greek underworld (read my review for Alcestis by Katharine Beutner here) or the Mayan underworld (read my review for Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia here), two other novels concerning the dead and the worlds they live in other than the Christian view of hell (portrayed in Dante’s The Divine Comedy; read my review here) that I have read recently. And the Chinese underworld itself is what really shines in this book, more so than Li Lan herself. And I can confidently say that it is the Chinese underworld that is the main character of this book.
There are a lot of things that Li Lan has to go through in the underworld to achieve her goal, all of which are important to solve a lot of mysteries going on in the world of the living as well. One of which is the mystery of Tian Bai, and for the longest time I thought that he and Er Long were one and the same. The question of who Li Lan will end up with is always lingering in the background. But no, Tian Bai turned out to be not that interesting (poor guy) and I was happy that Li Lan didn’t settle for him in the end. But I do want to point out here that in most books that I have read like this one, the main couple doesn’t stay together. One of them always stays in the underworld while the other goes back to the world of the living. So I was happy when she chose the most unconventional option, the one that she ultimately wanted.
I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating.
