The Ghost Bride

by Yangsze Choo

The Chinese considered the moon to be yin, feminine and full of negative energy, as opposed to the sun that was yang and exemplified masculinity. I liked the moon, with its soft silver beams. It was at once elusive and filled with trickery, so that lost objects that had rolled into the crevices of a room were rarely found, and books read in its light seemed to contain all sorts of fanciful stories that were never there the next morning.

When I was a child, I particularly liked moonlit nights. You have to be quite far away from the city to avoid the glare from city lights, but when we visited my grandparents, who lived on the outskirts of a small town in Perak, you could quite often see the moonlight washing like clear water over the landscape. I remember getting up at night for a drink of water and peeking out of the slatted glass louvered windows, through the mosquito netting. Everything would be bathed in a pale silvery glow, sometimes bright enough that you could even read by it. Things looked different in the moonlight. The road in front of my grandparents' house, and the vegetable fields beyond took on a mysterious allure, as though enticing you to get up and run away down some faint twisting road into a strange land. I never quite had the courage to that, but I often thought about it!