The Night Tiger

The figure of the weretiger and the mythology surrounding the Five Confucian Virtues most strongly communicates the theme of a moral separation between humans and animals. Dr. MacFarlane, a pawang, is cursed in death to remain in his weretiger form, killing humans randomly and brutally. Ji Lin, Shin, Ren, and Yi—four members of the set of five—must work together to reunite Dr. MacFarlane’s finger with the rest of his body.

Throughout their endeavor, the main characters are periodically reminded that, according to the mythology of their set of five, they must come into awareness and harmony with each other or risk living their lives in a savage, ignoble way that is more akin to animal life than human life. Through this set-up, Choo erects a strong binary between the animal and the human. The thing that Ji Lin, Shin, Ren, and Yi must save Dr. MacFarlane from is the fate of being an animal that lacks human rationality and hunts and destroys life, rather than cultivating it. In so doing, they bring their own humanity to fruition and successfully separate themselves from the primal, violent world of animals.

Choo clearly sets up the binary of colonized and colonizers in the same way that she does humans and animals. As William notes in one of his letters to Iris, the British werewolf turns from man to beast, turning his skin inside out, then goes to the forest to hunt. The Malay weretiger reverses this myth: The tiger dons the skin of a man, exits the wild, and preys on the villagers. It’s poignant that William adds the Malay often think of Colonials as “beast men,” or those who would come to prey on them.

In the world of the novel, William’s point is significant because he, as a European colonizer, preys on the village women, Ambika and Nandani, and is little concerned when they both turn up dead. He notes that these are just “locals,” as opposed to Iris, who was European and whose death had real consequences for him. Williams’s European peers feel similarly, with Rawlings suggesting that the women may have accidentally taken some “fool remedy,” which criticizes the local culture. Lydia, the real huntress of the living Europeans, had no qualms removing the women she saw as mere obstacles. Meanwhile, Dr. MacFarlane is the actual monster, and he is also European. The way that the novel’s European characters view the locals’ lives as less valuable suggests that the Malay are right—the Europeans are beast men who have come to devour them.

The colonizers aren’t just devouring the locals’ lives, however, as the novel also indicates that they are destroying Malay’s culture. Choo drops several small hints that the Malay way of life is changing due to the European encroachment, as when she notes that the Malay now recognizes summer as a season due to the prevalence of “foreigners.”