My grandparents lived in Kuala Selangor, a sleepy seaside town in Malaysia where the sun burns ceaselessly and time seems to slow in.
When I was a small child, there used to be some part of me that dreaded heading back there for overnight visits—the city-slicker part that was used to modern conveniences wouldn’t quite know how to handle the lack of air conditioning or ceiling fans necessary to combat Malaysia’s intense heat and humidity. Nor would that inner city-slicker enjoy the way mosquitoes would swarm me and inflict bites all over my limbs throughout the day, the windows being left wide open since we could rely only on the natural breeze for air circulation. And you can imagine how much chagrin that wee little city-slicker had while using my grandparents’ bathroom, which were simple squat toilet affairs and where showers had to be taken the old-school mandi baldi way—dipping a pail into a well and pouring the collected water over myself, involuntarily flinching when what felt like ice-cold liquid made contact with my bare naked flesh.
But my other childhood memories of Kuala Selangor made up for those minor hassles, hushing the city-slicker with quaint small-town pleasures: chowing down some of the freshest seafood you’d ever find (my personal favourite being the salted egg yolk mantis shrimp—so good); visiting the famous hill nearby my maternal grandmother’s house where an old fort once stood, watching the silvered leaf monkeys run around the old cannons (if I was lucky, I’d spot an adorable mother cradling an even more adorable redheaded newborn to her chest as she scrambled around the hill); and taking a rickety wooden boat out to the mangroves as the sun set to watch the fireflies come out, their little yellow lights limning the thick river-drenched roots with otherworldly charm.
I didn’t know it at the time—what kid is prescient enough to?—but these were just some of the memories that would make up the bedrock of my brain, the lens through which I viewed the world even as life took me away to other cities, countries, continents over the decades.
When I started building the world for The Serpent Called Mercy in my youth—because every bored kid living in the era of dial-up internet needed a paracosm to escape into—I had no particular desire to create a setting inspired by my Malaysian-Chinese heritage. I wasn’t avoiding it, to be clear. It honestly just didn’t occur to me that was even an option—growing up, it seemed a requirement for any fantasy book published by the Western traditional publishing industry to be set in fictional worlds where the fantastic would have their attributes informed by various European cultures. Fantastical creatures like hobbits would lead lives that reflected an idealised version of the rustic British life, and fantastical lands like Narnia would be populated by Greek mythological creatures. If Asian cultures ever appeared in these books, they tended to appear in the form of the exoticised, the fetishised, or the demonised.
I didn’t have the language for all this when I was younger, of course. Concepts like colonialism or internalised racism were felt but not vocalised by people like me in those days. I didn’t interrogate these feelings deeply as a child—I just read and wrote what I felt I had to read and write. And these Western influences wouldn’t be that far removed from me either, despite being miles away from Europe—Malaysia, with its plethora of multicultural influences, also bears the impact of once being a British colony, our modern culture still frequently showcasing intersections between the English and the Asian.
But there remained a distance between what I felt I had to write, and what my natural instincts wanted to write. The books I read featured characters eating meals of bread, cheese, and stew—and so I thought my characters would have to do the same. Amorphous blobs of baked dough and slabs of vaguely described cheese would pass into my characters’ gullets—and I’d feel something was wrong, while never quite being capable of putting my finger on what.
Eventually, I realised what the issue was: I was trying to pull upon knowledge and experience that simply did not resonate with my soul. What meaning did all those platters of bread, bread, and more bread have to someone whose diet mainly consisted of rice?
So with some level of dubiousness, I started squeezing ingredients from my corner of the world into my drafts: kaya, starfruits, curry leaves, rice cakes, mangos, etc.—and just like that, a little bit of joy and a sense of fun grew as I kept building my world, infusing the fantastic with fragments of authenticity—fragments of home.
As I wrote and edited and revised The Serpent Called Mercy over the years, more bits of Malaysia, more bits of my Chinese heritage, more bits of all the Asian countries I’ve lived in started painting my world with their colours, fleshing out the lore and my characters. Four is symbolically associated with death in Chinese culture due to similar pronunciations—and so four, too, became the number of death in my world, the real-life wordplay origins being swapped instead for an in-world explanation that it was on the fourth day of creation that the first death of a mortal occurred. A deep sense of spirituality and high levels of religiosity pervade Malaysia to this day—and so too do idiosyncratic religious beliefs influence my characters’ actions and behaviours, in their shrine-going habits, and in the decisions they make throughout the novel.
But perhaps my favourite bit of home finding its way into the fantastic is how my world lights up their darkest nights: citizens of the city of Setgad carry around lanterns filled with hives of lightning-bees, chubby little insects which luminescent bodies keep the city bright. And it goes without saying that these lightning-bees are the fantastic cousins to the fireflies of Kuala Selangor, whose warm yellow glow still light up my brain with the joy of nostalgic childhood memories, of visiting my grandparents and eating snacks with them while sitting cross-legged on the floor, of my stoic grandfather plucking fruits off a tree in his garden for my family to bring home—of my father taking me out to that river by the mangroves on a quiet night and watching insects become the only source of light for the next few minutes of my life.
The Serpent Called Mercy features the absurd and slightly unhinged corners of my brain—but it also features home in the nooks and crannies.
As should all good things.
The Serpent Called Mercy is out now. Order your copy here.
