There’s an eerie tension at the centre of the short stories in Ho Sok Fong’s collection “Lake Like a Mirror” but it’s not a conventional tension to do with plot. It’s more an uncertainty about how reality might bend around the perspectives of the characters involved. They might be consumed by plants or become amphibious or escape in an air balloon. Some stories slide more into the surreal while others confront harder realities such as women who are institutionalized or teachers who are dismissed for teaching liberal ideas. These tales revolve around the lives of different Malaysian women who are trapped in certain circumstances often to do with religious or social pressure. The title story is one of my favourites as it delicately describes a sense of how other people’s distressed lives touch upon our own and how we’re sometimes powerless to help them. But I also enjoyed the unsettling humour of the story ‘Summer Tornado’ where a woman attaches herself to a family at an amusement park and forces them to continue going on rides with her in manic desperation. Although many of the characters seem trapped in a sluggish existence there’s often a frenzy bubbling beneath the surface which warps the world around them in surprising and, sometimes, terrifying ways.
