On the Fox Roads
Nghi Vo
Huli Jing in the American midwest
On the Fox Roads is a story by Nghi Vo, available free from tor.com here. It tells the story of twentieth century bank robbers Chinese Jack and Tonkin Jill Lai and our first-person narrator. The narrator is a teenage Chinese-American girl. If her name was ever mentioned, I missed it. Lai calls her "em yêu", which is Vietnamese for "darling" or "honey". As bank-robbers Jack and Lai and Honey have an advantage, because they can use the Fox Roads, which take them away from where they robbed the bank to some new and distant location.
On writing this review, I realized that, embarrassingly, I have learned about Asian fox spirits only from reading about them in fantasy by North American writers, such as Guy Gavriel Kay, Ken Liu and one or two others whose names I do not at the moment recall. And now I can add Nghi Vo to the list. The versions most familiar to me are Chinese Huli Jing (狐狸精), Korean kumiho (구미호), and Japanese kitsune (狐). (Kitsune is just the Japanese word for an ordinary fox like the little red foxes you see out in the countryside, which have just one tail apiece, and as far as I know are not immortal, but have lifespans on the order of four years, and do not turn into bewitching women who drain men's souls. To be honest, I've never checked, not being personally concerned, but that just sounds like the kind of story men make up to disguise their own inadequacies.) Honestly, I would barely know where to start looking for the original stories, which makes me sad.
At any rate, this is a beautiful story that adds to my visions of diasporic fox spirits.