All these young people writing books about young people! (Your correspondent exclaims, from the antique vantage of not-yet-forty.) Aunt Tigress, the Calgary-set debut novel of Canadian author Emily Yu-Xuan Qin, is a book about young people and their relationships to their families and their communities, about their experiences as immigrants, as First Nations, as white or white-passing, and about epic supernatural drama.
Tamara “Tam” Lin is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to Canada. Her grandmother, her father’s mother, was a great tiger spirit back in China. Her father and her aunt inherited in their own way some part of that tiger power, but where Tam’s father was—before his death—a gentle, unassuming person, her aunt, the titular Aunt Tigress is ambitious, manipulative, filled with a hunger that can’t be filled, and bitter that the supernatural world of Canada has its own traditions and doesn’t bend to her the way she thinks it ought. She’s family, and Tam is fascinated by her. Loves her, too. After her father’s death, as a teenager, she spent a lot of time with her Aunt Tigress—until she realised that what Aunt Tigress was doing, what she was doing with Aunt Tigress, were things that she didn’t want to be part of any more. Now Tam is an anxious college student, falling in love desperately quickly with confident, fearless fellow-student Janet, with whom she’s been open about her ability to see the supernatural.
But then Tam is told that Aunt Tigress’s body has been found, violently dead. Tam is her heir. There’s something stalking Tam across the city. And what Tam has inherited is a whole set of problems, for—thanks to Jack Little, the young First Nations man who works for Calgary’s one supernatural lawyer, a being of contracts and bargains—she learns that Tigress might not be dead after all. Instead, Tigress might be trying to turn herself into one of the great powers of the land, through violence, theft, and exploitation.
Janet, it turns out, is linked to one of Tigress’s crimes, one of the ones that Tam helped her with: a crime against Janet’s mother, who now spends all her time in a hospital, deathly sick but never quite dying. Janet sought out Tam on purpose, to try to understand if there’s any solution. But their romance took Janet, too, by surprise. Though it’s hard for Tam to believe that.
Family—mothers, in particular—is also central to Jack Little’s part of the story. His story is also bound up with Tigress: His mother disappeared, and in search of justice or vengeance or both he made a bargain at eight years of age with Calgary’s supernatural lawyer, a bargain that severed him for ten years from all memory of who he had been. Little is First Nations. His supernatural amnesia recalls the real traumas of deliberate language and cultural suppression, such as the historical residential schools as well as more recent and more subtle erasures.
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Aunt Tigress
Qin’s characters are well-drawn and compelling. We see them largely from Tam’s point of view, but there are a number of interludes where the narrative steps back from Tam’s point of view to deploy an omniscient narrator, or an alternate viewpoint, in order to provide context or insight. It’s an interesting technique, one that largely works, but also serves to emphasize just how packed Qin’s narrative is. Qin is attempting to do a great deal here, and while much of it works in context, some of it leaves the novel feeling overstuffed—such as the fact that in addition to everything else, Aunt Tigress’s use of names explicitly references Tam Lin, which feels a little like over-egging the pudding.
Thematically, this is a novel suffused with familial anxiety and familial guilt: a young adult’s guilt, the guilt of failing your relatives, of letting them down, of hurting them, of not living up to their (competing, contradictory) expectations. The anxiety that is part and parcel of young adulthood—of being between states, neither entirely dependent nor fully independent, of growing into the self that you will become—is complicated in Aunt Tigress by the anxieties of an immigrant experience, in straddling two worlds and being wholly at home in neither. These multiple-identity anxieties are literalised in the protagonist’s involvement with the supernatural: Because of her heritage and because of her and her family’s choices, she can literally see things that most people can’t. Her complicated relationship with her blended family (mother, step-brother from her mother’s second marriage) and her worries about publicly demonstrating affection with Janet add to this sense of in-between-anxiety, an anxiety about belonging, which is also emphasised by Janet’s performance of “perfect daughter” for her hospitalised mother—a daughter neither brash nor queer. Similar but different anxieties—about loss of belonging and loss of connection, as much as or more than about visibility and strangeness—are given form in the person of Jack Little. Meanwhile, within Tam’s family, her (dead) father and her (living) aunt provide a tension, a thematic argument between ideas of “good” and “bad” immigrant, between confident but non-threatening community focused behaviour and resentful, ever-hungry ambition, a tension that also engages with Canada’s history of colonialism, violence, and erasure in ways that emphasise the need for accountability and restitution. Yet I can’t help but feel it’s ultimately ambivalent about the possibility of both.
Aunt Tigress is a complex, fascinating novel, one that reaches for the register of epic while remaining grounded in Calgary’s cityscape. It clips along at a good pace, and doesn’t wrap its ending up with a neat bow. It’s ambitious, at times almost sprawling, spilling out to render its thematic arguments with force and urgency. It’s untidy and vigorous. I enjoyed it a great deal, and I’ll look forward to seeing what Qin writes next.
Aunt Tigress is published by DAW.
Liz, I’m blown away. Your review of Aunt Tigress is my favourite, and I cried when I read it.
Your words made me feel that all the themes and things I ruminated on weren’t just in my head, that they made it onto the page. Thank you so, so much!