The Night Tiger

“Forty-four is an unlucky number for Chinese. It sounds like ‘die, definitely die,’ and as a result, the number four and all its iterations are to be avoided. On that ill-fated day in June, I’d been working my secret part-time job at the May Flower Dance Hall in Ipoh for exactly forty-four days.” 

In this quote, Choo announces the important motif of numbers. For much of the plot, we see the characters struggling as an incomplete set of 4. The fact that the number 4 should be avoided also telegraphs the forward movement of the plot. The four members are motivated by a desire for the order and harmony of the number five.

“If my mother owned a big shophouse like this, she wouldn’t have had to remarry […] I imagined the two of us growing potted orchids in the courtyard, making nian gao, the sweet sticky new year’s rice cake together as we’d done before. We would have been just fine by ourselves.”

In this quote, Ji Lin imagines that her mother’s life could have been peaceful if the material and social conditions of patriarchy weren’t so inescapable. In this society, unmarried women cannot own property, and Ji Lin’s mother had to make a practical choice to marry Ji Lin’s stepfather. The cost is that they must endure Ji Lin’s stepfather’s callousness and physical abuse.

“But I didn’t see any point to dressing up to please my stepfather, who only wanted us to look good to complement himself. We were a chocolate-box family, I thought. Brightly wrapped on the outside and oozing sticky darkness within.”

In this passage, Ji Lin articulates the theme that things are not always as they seem. On the surface, her family has everything that society says they should. However, Ji Lin knows that her stepfather’s penchant for cruelty makes her family life dark and unhappy.