The Hong Kong Widow
Maybe it’s the influence of the film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), but there seems to be a new generation of novels with very complex plots. Mei, the main character in The Hong Kong Widow, stars in multiple timelines: the frame narrative takes place in Seattle, Washington, and Hong Kong in 2015, where Mei starts her story in first person. She tells about her impoverished childhood and her mother’s disappearance in Jiangsu Province in 1937. This timeline continues in Shanghai, when Mei is given away to a rich uncle. During WWII she marries her first husband, a Jewish magician, discovers her own psychic abilities, and is soon widowed.
There are several widows in the book. The titular widow is Holly Zhang, a silent film star who organizes the séance competition in her dead husband’s Gothic mansion. The competition ends with six people dead, their bodies disappeared. In 2015 Mei’s daughter insists on finding out what really happened and why Mei is the only séance leader to survive the competition.
The dueling points of view help the reader keep the narratives straight but also make things confusing; it was not until the middle of the book that I realized that both viewpoints belonged to the same person. Adding to the narrative density is the theme of possession that is central to the book. We are possessed by the past and we are possessed by ghosts, by the ghosts of our past, and by our own former selves that we prefer to leave behind. Spookiness is added by drawings by Jiksun Cheung.
Complex though it is, the book is unputdownable. In fact, as soon as I finished it, I read it again from the beginning, to savor all the details.
