Postcolonial Hauntings and Urban Gothic in Singapore and Malaysia: The Serpent’s Tooth (Lim, 1982), The Bondmaid (Lim, 1992), Haunting (Lim, 1981), The Black Isle (Tan, 2012), Ponti (Teo, 2018), House of Aunts (Cho, 2014), The Crocodile Fury (Yahp, 1992)

Writers from Singapore and Malaysia revitalise the issues of trauma underlying many ghost stories and consider how they grow from and express different histories, cultures and contexts. Their work considers the ghosts of rebellion in Malaya, and of war, in the Japanese invasion of Singapore. Sandi Tan’s work, in particular, looks at women’s vulnerability and power when acting as ghost seers through these crises and reveals the damaging effects of ignoring the everyday city and village ghosts when glitzy malls and housing estates are built over graveyards, displacing their inhabitants. Everyday Chinese household ghosts and creeping capitalism predominate here and in Shirley Lim’s and Catherine Lim’s work. Catherine Lim exposes brutal acts resulting from the worthlessness of girl children and the sexual and domestic abuse of women, particularly bondmaids. In several Southeast Asian tales, the vampire ghost, the pontianak, reminding us both of Latin American La Llorona and the woman in black, takes both a very broad and a specific revenge.