Officially she didn’t believe in ghosts, but part of her wasn’t a hundred percent sure.” (Ch. Despite her Western acculturation, it was one of the things she’d absorbed passively from her upbringing, like a taste for spicy food and a familiarity with Cantopop standards. “A fundamental belief in the supernatural had permeated the home Jess had grown up in. Lory: I think the main issue that comes up is that what is dismissed as superstition in Western culture is taken seriously in Malaysia. Is this just a minor tweaking of fantasy tropes? Or something specific to Malaysian fantasy? Or even more simply, is it a reference to a basic “fact” of Malaysian culture that only strikes me as unusual because I’m unfamiliar with Malaysian culture? Lizzie: The answer to this question might seem obvious, but it’s still worth considering: What marks BWS as non-western or non-European other than its setting? Is it the novel’s themes? The characters’ assumptions about their world? Something else? For example, events and circumstances that in European fantasy would stand out (such as all the spirits around the temple at the bodhi tree) don’t seem to faze the characters here.
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