Yellow savior: "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains" by Jane Pek

So far in Best American Short Stories 2020, we've had two stories that were fictionalizations of real historical figures ("The Apartment" and "Liberte"), one story alluding heavily to a myth ("It's Not You"), and one story with a character modeled very closely on a real-life figure ("Something Street"). Now, we come to yet another story that uses an existing model to help form its own framework. 

I doubt most readers will be unaware that there is a Chinese myth involving a nine-tailed fox even before reading "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains" by Jane Pek. In this era of globalized everything, Westerners tend to have at least some ideas of important stories from other countries, but this myth in particular has been successful in sharing its cultural DNA. It's appropriate, I guess, that the nine-tailed fox myth has found success in the global marketplace of stories, because even during the time when cross-cultural exchange tended to be more regional, this myth had a lot of success getting passed around. Japan has versions of it, as does Korea and Vietnam. Western audiences have probably heard of it through one of these versions. The Japanese anime Naruto features a child in whom resides the spirit of the nine-tailed fox. If you Google "Nine-tailed fox" right now, you're liable to get a lot of results that refer to a Korean drama about a reincarnation of this figure, a drama that just concluded its run. 

The story belongs to a long line of "set the record straight" narratives, in which a minor character from one story becomes the narrator of her own story, often providing a counter-narrative to the one from the original. I'm not going to get deep into the founding myths, partly because there are so many versions, and also because Pek gives us the version she'd like us to work with for the purposes of reading "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains." The nine-tailed fox was created by the mother goddess Nüwa in order to seduce and destroy the emperor of the Shang Dynasty. Nüwa created partners in crime for the nine-tailed fox, one a pheasant spirit and the other the embodiment of the musical instrument the the pipa. So the nine-tailed fox is an example of a femme fatale. She's gone down in history as a woman out to do men dirt, someone who uses cunning and sex appeal as weapons. 

One example of a pipa. 

In Pek's non-canonical version, the nine-tailed fox becomes friends with the pipa spirit and refuses to take the tea of forgetfulness after she accomplishes her mission, lest she forget her friend. This prevents her from reincarnating, meaning she's lived about two thousand years. As a near-immortal, she experiences time as "walking in circles, always in one direction, through a vast landscape." Once in a while, though, she comes to a spot in her journeys where her uneventful walking meets something unexpected, meaning she has to "pick out (her) path the way mortals do." 

That's where we are in this story. The fox has mostly been dormant for a long time, so disgusted by the Chinese history of the past hundred or so years, she's chosen to mostly remain hidden. (She has to live with a man in order to maintain her life, and this process sucks the life force out of the men she lives with at an advanced rate. She's rather like a succubus in Western tradition. But we don't know anything about any of the men she's lived with for thousands of years.) She's currently inhabiting a body mortals look upon as a beautiful but otherwise very mortal and ordinary Chinese woman. When rapidly modernizing China finally arrives at the base of her mountain to start yet another major construction project, she decides it's time to leave China. The fox, in her form as a Chinese woman, has come to the U.S. as a mail-order bride. 

Two ways of looking at mail-order brides

When I was in the Marine Corps, I knew a lot of servicemen who married women from other countries and brought them back to the U.S. In the sarcastic, cynical parlance of the military, this was sometimes referred to as "bringing her to the land of the bright, shiny PX." In other words, there was an assumption that the woman had seen the promises of American life through her contact with the military (a PX being the department store on a military base) and chose to be with the American man out of the hope it might bring her a better life. 

That's one way of looking at mail-order brides--that they're essentially mercenaries, using sex to get something, not unlike the fox's reputation in literature. But that's just one way of looking at it. Another perspective, the one that's probably more common now, is to think the man is the one using his power to profit in an unfair way from the relationship. He is using his status as a citizen of a wealthy country--a status he did not earn--in order to coerce an attractive young woman to marry him and gratify him sexually by offering things she is desperate for. 

Both of these ways of looking at it have an assumption in common, which is that the American man ordering the foreign bride is somehow offering her something she needs, that he is, in effect, saving her. In one version, he saves her because he's a schmuck who doesn't realize she's going to leave him as soon as she has her green card. In the other version, he's a lowlife who's saving her from assumed poverty or insecurity, but only for his own ends.  In both versions, though, he is saving her. Both ways of looking at it stem in part from our Western "white savior" mentality of saving the heathens, the same mentality that led us to send missionaries all over the globe, the same missionaries who for the first hundred years or so of America's relationship to east Asia were so influential on our policy there.

In a sense, then, the way her husband's friends are commenting on her when she goes to a house party to be introduced to them after the marriage are all stand-ins for the way America has thought about "starving kids in China" for ages. They either sexualize her exotic beauty or comment that she will be gone as soon as she gets her green card or criticize him for being a creep and pathetic for having taken advantage of her.  

Don't need no stinking missionary

It so happens that the fox has met a missionary before. She corrupted him, apparently, rather than him saving her. (Possibly, he was one of the men she's drawn life from.) She learned English from him, but that's about all he gave her (well, that and maybe some of his life force). She looks upon corrupting him as a form of having saved him: "I liberated him from all that nonsense about original sin." 

The fox doesn't need saved. She's strong. She laughs at the notion that she married her husband for the "prize of living in (his) leaking cruise liner of a country." She actually chose him quite by accident. To the extent there was any missionary impulse, it was hers, not his. When he contacted her, she "could smell the spoor of his loneliness, and...thought, This one. This one I can help." 

The fox identifies with a figure in a painting. The painting is Edward Hooper's "New York Movie," which focuses on a female usher at a theater leaning on a wall just outside the theater, where the audience is watching a movie. Here's an image of the painting:

The fox thinks the woman in the painting is not interested in the movie, because she's seen it a hundred times, but she is instead looking at the "glowing darkness where the audience sits." As someone who's lived a few thousand years, she really has "seen the movie" a few times. She's interested now, perhaps, in guiding others to the show, those who will only have one brief chance to see it. 

She does, in fact, help her husband. She helps him to realize he's in love with his best friend, who is, for the moment, in a relationship with someone else. She also helps others along the way. She helps businessmen to learn Chinese so they can capitalize on the wealth there is to find in China. (Now missionaries teach Chinese instead of English to those who want to get ahead.) She also helps those who want to learn Chinese for various personal reasons, such as to understand their parents or connect with a loved one. Perhaps appropriate for a symbol of Chinese culture that has conquered the world in terms of ubiquity, the fox is represents the inverted nature of China's relationship to the world from how it was a hundred years ago. 

Not that the fox is willingly any patriotic symbol of Chinese ascendancy. She is fully aware of the country's troubled past and conflicted present. To her, perhaps, China's current ascendancy is just another movie she's seen before. In a world (dramatic movie preview voice?) where she is forced to continue wandering in a circle, the fox is trying to do what the pipa spirit recommended to her long ago--find her moorings. She is beginning to find them, for the first time, in pathos for the sorry mortals she hasn't always given much thought to. It's her tears, her pathos, that gives strength to others. 

If you wanted a lot more research into the Nine-Tailed Fox, as well as a deep look at the structure of this story, see Karen Carlson's take here.