Ren must find the finger and bury it with his master before the 49th day after his passing, or risk that his master’s soul will forever wander the earth. Ren, a Chinese houseboy whose master died after suffering prolonged and torturous fevers from malaria, is tasked with retrieving his master’s lost finger. The quick-witted Ji Lin is working at a dance hall to pay off her mother’s mahjong debts when she unexpectedly picks up a gruesome souvenir from a client - a severed finger, mummified and preserved in a specimen bottle. This scintillating world that Choo weaves is a world hopelessly entangled in threads of fate and death, ordered along rules of ritual and folklore. In Yangsze Choo’s “The Night Tiger,” it is augmented in unimaginable ways, filled with exponentially heightened colors, dreams, and emotions in a quivering, hallucinatory mystery where local and diasporic mythologies come to life. The world of colonial Malaysia is a pulsing, dynamic land.
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