Hauntingly beautiful and demonstrating the power of memory, The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo makes it easy to suspend disbelief about creatures who transition between fox and human form in Manchuria, 1908. The author doles out just enough detail in this magical tale, foxes are charming, clever and ageless, for readers to understand the differences with humans while preserving a sense of mystery. Foxes are sly in getting what they want. The more impulsive ones are ruthless, impatient predators while others are more self-disciplined, resisting their nature and striving to live a full millennium.
Foxes take control with flattery, companionship and feigned subservience. Some foxes are reckless and others like Snow, the protagonist, are cooperative and wary in society: “Nobody likes to feel a fool, and the downside of playing with people’s feelings is the whiplash fury of betrayal.”
Only a few humans, often near death, recognize they are under the watchful eyes of foxes: "Dark as a bottomless pool, like a lake under moonlight. Bao is falling, sinking. Images flicker past: Ears lifted and a sharp muzzle across endless waves of grass. A lonely shape trotting down a mountain. Blink and he’s back, staring into the eyes of this stranger. Unreadable eyes, grave yet inhuman. They pierce Bao to the depths of his soul, or perhaps that’s the knife wound in his side.”
Interactions between foxes and humans require a delicate balance. Fox emotions are intense. Snow, the protagonist and fox wife, seeks revenge for the death of her cub, wrested by its den by a hunter on assignment for a photographer. “Grief continually amazed me with its ability to resurface at inconvenient moments. Whether I was sleeping in the grass or walking beside railway tracks by myself, the wind blowing and the lonely sun shining down, it always found me.” To track the photographer, Snow takes a job as companion for an elderly woman whose family owns a popular medicine shop. An investigator also tracks the photographer after the death of a courtesan in an alley, a beautiful woman last seen with a foxlike man.
The two searches collide, and during their travels, the two women each encounter a past love. Snow meets her estranged husband whom she partially blames for the cub’s death: “it was a lot easier to consider Kuro dead to me than to deal with the pain that his presence reminded me of. I should have known better. What you bury eventually comes to light in some form or other.” Her employer Tagtaa, in her sixties, encounters the young boy whom she was once served as a companion when both were children. Bao’s choices often displeased his parents, a pattern that continued into his adulthood as he pursues a career as investigator rather than scholar.
Bao’s parents had forbidden marriage with Tagtaa, a child of a Mongolian concubine, but he still felt attraction. “She’s aged but hasn’t changed. Over the years he’s observed this phenomenon in his old friends – though their bodies have weathered, stretched, or shrunk, the same soul peeks out from within.” Notably, both Bao and Tagtaa admire foxes after memorable encounters with the creatures in their youth. Bao's experience left him with the ability to discern truth from lies, aiding his investigative work. And another fox, possibly Kuro, rescued Tagtaa as a child.
Tagtaa longs to meet a fox again though Kuro, the fox husband, urges caution. Tagtaa confides her belief that foxes are gods or spirts, but he cautions that not all foxes mean well. “It depends on what you want to believe. What’s important is the ability to tell truth from lies,” Kuro explains. “Or perhaps truth from what’s merely hope.” Snow, his wife, overhears the conversation: “Hope, of course, is the most painful thing in the universe. Clinging to a thin strand is the most agonizing way to live.”
Humans feel angry panic after being tricked by a fox. “That’s what leads to all those tales of disillusionment and discovering yourself naked, covered with fleas and eating rotting meat in an abandoned grave," Snow notes. "Of course that exact scenario seldom happens, but it’s a good metaphor for how people feel when they discover they’ve been duped. That’s why a careful fox refrains from unduly influencing others.”
Parental expectations, lost loves, class inequality interfere with the present day for each character. Intelligent and self-disciplined foxes and humans who admire them are keenly aware of the period’s class and gender inequality, thus connecting with readers by offering relevant and modern insights. The novel is a cautionary fable for divided societies where the corrupt show disdain for those who work hard, the spendthrifts who scoff at the savers, the impulsive mock the patient, and the ignorant willfully resent the success and guidance from those with expertise.
