A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality
Once a year I give myself permission to indulge in real tenderness. I dip an overripe fig in honey and eat it with yogurt. Then I allow some man to worship me. I make him go down on two knees and pray.
“Pray for what?” he’d whisper.
“Pray for whatever you like, as long as you pray to me,” I’d reply. “I am your goddess.”
Then I’d fan my hair out on my bed, splay my legs, and he’d dip his head down, put his palms together, and purse his lips in concentration. Sometimes he wouldn’t know what to pray for, because his prayers had been answered. Sometimes he’d recite a novena he remembered from childhood. Sometimes he would take too long, and I’d watch him bend against the bed, his brows furrowed in thought. Sometimes he would start weeping, though this was rare. Then when he finished praying he would put his lips to my thigh and I’d arch my hips forward, and time would begin again.
Summer is a series of aches heightened, sharpened into blades. I watch it spin itself to the ground—the simmering sounds and scents of the city: lamb skewers frying on halal truck griddles, girls in puff-sleeve dresses with their manicured toes crunching over subway grates, Chinatown dumpsters full of baby’s breath and rotten rambutan and slimy cockles, the sheen of sunscreen and sweat on the foreheads of commuters heading to Jacob Riis or Brighton or Rockaway. I smell and hear and see it all. I am always aching for meat. Months and months of listlessness culminate into a raw, bloodletting hunger. My sport is almost too easy for me, so I fantasize about switching roles, becoming my own prey. You look at your body in the mirror and want to consume it yourself. The taste of your own sweat, your own saliva, more thrilling than the taste of any other. The feeling gives you the impulse to go out there and find opportunities to defile yourself. To be defiled. To defile another.
I’m what they call a nine-tailed fox. A hulijing, huxian, fox spirit, fox fairy, fox demon, fox seductress, exquisite fox, all the names I can and can’t claim as my own. Enchantment is my sport, and this city of ten million people and twice as many rats is my arena. I’m not heartless—I feed on the wicked. I observe from the margins—this in-between, this unseen place between dawn and dusk, this cockroach-infested apartment, this fur, this skin. I love this perch from which one can survey the world, gather the infinite wisdom of the city. Every street, every café, every gym or club or hotel lobby—all fair game for bad men who come out to play. I’ve noticed in particular how straight men are not cautious. They don’t care about the potential dangers of inviting strangers into their homes or walking out in public spaces. They don’t think twice like most others do.
My home is a studio apartment on the edges of Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, close to Broadway Junction and the sounds of the aboveground J crisscrossing the A, C, and L. It was vacated half a year ago by its owner, this whole complex up for foreclosure, then gut renovation. Last month, as soon as the windows were boarded up and the last squatters departed following an infestation of centipedes, I moved in and made my den. Just one flea-bitten mattress on the floor is all I need. Until the developers begin their gentrification, I am free to live in this liminal place and work. By work, I mean writing down all I learn from observing humans’ habitations, their conflicts with foxes, the politics of it. My current project is a guide to help other fox spirits like myself get what we want: Love. No, scratch that. Revenge. Eh, I mean immortality, transcendence. It’s a self-help book, if you will, a work in progress. Foxes are notoriously too proud to seek help unless from an actual god, so I fib a little here and there, like the lie that I’m already an immortal, that I already have nine tails. But we all lie sometimes to survive, isn’t that true?
The rest of the time, I spend hunting.
I locate my targets with precision and caution. Certain men believe they are systemically oppressed because women won’t have sex with them. They write manifestos about how unfair it is that they can’t find someone willing to fuck them, how humiliating, and they blame this on women. According to the logic of these poorly written manifestos, if a woman is sexually active, then she is a slut and deserves to die, but if a woman does not sleep with these manifesto-writers, she is a bitch.
And some men move through this world with an ease that tells you vaguely what kind of life they lead, what kind of car they might drive, what kind of sheets they sleep in. When they wake up in the morning and walk outside their condos, they treat the larger world just like that—like the sheets they make love to their wives on, these men so wholly at home in what they do. And some men quit their jobs to go backpacking in Thailand or teach English in China, to distract themselves from their self-loathing, drown themselves in debauchery and local women that they feel free to exploit because life in such countries is not real to them.
And still some other men post long eloquent screeds on Facebook citing the statistics attached to sexual assault, yet in private, talking to the woman they’re sleeping with about her previous trauma, they ask her if she reported her rape to the police—if not, then why not? Is it really trauma if you haven’t been diagnosed?
Sometimes they are ordinary men, too. Most of the time, that’s all they are. Men.
A HUXIAN’S GUIDE TO SEDUCTION
Vixens and enchantresses, you’ve come here from all walks of human life to learn how to seduce mortal men, extract their energy, their power, and acquire the elixir of transcendence that allows you to become huxian (divine fox transcendent) so you can get the hell out of the festering foxhole called Earth and ascend to Heaven.
If a vixen lives to the age of a thousand and gathers enough human essence, she will reach divinity and transform from hulijing (fox spirit) to huxian (immortal nine-tailed fox). The word xian connotes a blissful being, a perfected and immortal creature. Huxian, blissful transcendents, are free agents, unattached to any one house or temple or grave, and they live forever in their divinity and beauty, gaining the coveted nine tails. The huxian enters the cloud forests of Mount K’unlun, and above, the seven stars of the Big Dipper that she has worshipped all her life, which joins Heaven and Earth. After you arrive at the goal of transcendence and immortality, you forsake all human relationships.
To reach xian-hood, there are several ways. The first is self-cultivation—to isolate oneself on a mountain, refine the self in perfect solace, and study the classics. It’s a process of meditation and purification, and those foxes who master this for one thousand years achieve true huxian status.
The second is a combination of self-cultivation and spirit possession—these foxes might haunt human residences, abandoned boardinghouses, and other liminal spaces. Sometimes at night, a fox might use their magic to possess a human’s body and extract a bit of their life force. Sometimes they shape-shift into doppelgängers and steal life force from those unfortunate people’s families. This is usually not fatal, but it sure leads to conflict. If caught and exorcised, these fox spirits are expelled from their residences. But if feared or worshipped, then they might enter into an agreement with a spirit medium and deliver their wisdom that way. I myself don’t like to half-ass things, so this is not my preferred way.
The fastest, easiest way to reach xian-hood is through praying to the Big Dipper and metamorphosizing into beautiful women, bewitching human men and absorbing their life essence and yang force through sex and enchantment. This third, infinitely more dangerous path is the boat we are on, the way we have chosen.
There was a man who drove a truck. Every so often he picked up hitchhikers and took them to motels.
There was a man who ran a Fortune 500 company. Every so often he traveled and conducted his affairs discreetly.
There was a man who studied at the local law school. Every so often he drove to the park looking for girls.
I do not ever visit the graveyard, the cemetery where I was born. From the place dead bodies are buried, I came out, sprang forward, fresh-faced, peaches in my cheeks, a young girl with shapely limbs and a leonine prowl, hands and feet crawling on the earth. My metamorphosis began with the scent of rain-torn Easter lilies, all those deathly white flowers, some of them plastic, polluting the sacred ground of the dead.
People waste so much time on grief. People waste so much energy trying to please the dead, revere the dead, remember the dead. All those tangerines wasted on ghosts without the stomachs to enjoy them. But I do. I eat them whole, oily rinds and all. The citrus segments, the acids cooling all the cinnabar heat in my body. It was my first human meal, the tangerines left on a young girl’s headstone.
I dug her skull up from the earth. I placed it over me. The contours of her bone fit snugly over my head, but its heaviness surprised me. Then I gathered all the flowers, all the dead bouquets, all the plastic roses and lilies, and mixed them with the wet sycamore leaves. I laid them out over my body and then I slumped down beneath a cypress tree. The night was clear, every planet naked and feral in the sky. Under the Big Dipper, I counted the holes between each star and worshipped my constellation until the leaves and flowers whistled through my fur. I summoned the oily pearl in my throat, closed my eyes, and imagined a mountain, K’unlun, the mythical Palace of the Sun and Moon where the heavenly nine-tailed foxes lived in harmony among hot springs and verdant waterfalls, all of them huxian, all of them divine.
Instead, I dreamt of clothes being ripped apart—wonderful hand-sewn clothes, stitched with the best fibers and selvages, torn to pieces. Instead, I dreamt of a hand reaching inside a silk robe and grabbing. Instead, I dreamt of mad violence in a field of lavender.
The girl whose skull I wore was only nineteen when she died. I could not imagine departing the world at such an age. All night, I dreamed of violet fields stained with rope and silk burns. Then I woke up, and I was a woman.
The dead girl was the third-generation daughter of a shoe repairman. Her father fixed and smoothed any and all of the scratches, scuffs, and burns that this city could inflict; her mother was a tailor and a laundress. They had a tiny laundromat and shoe repair shop in Sunset Park between a dollar dumpling joint and a day spa where the dead girl used to get bad copper highlights for ten dollars. The dead girl loved the smell of leather. The dead girl knew how to fix a zipper caught in linen, how to untie the most impossible knots, how to flame someone on an Internet forum.
One day she was out at Brooklyn Bowl with her friends, and an older man of about thirty-five approached them. She recognized him—he was one of the old regulars at her father’s shop, always bringing in his broken shoes or old leather jackets. He was friendly with her father, often sliding him an extra five-dollar bill here and there, but a few years ago he had moved out of Brooklyn. The last time she had seen him was probably three years ago, when she was sixteen.
“Fancy seeing you here!’ ” he said, as if they were actually friends. He reached out for a hug, and she half patted him on the back, thinking that would be the end of it as she went to take her turn.
As soon as her ball fell with a thud into the gutter, the man began to give her some “tips,” some “pointers.” He demonstrated, with his arms, how to throw the ball, even though she didn’t ask him, and she certainly did not feel comfortable when he came up behind her and tried to maneuver her arm such that she was holding the ball a certain way. Her friends intervened, and finally batted the man off by escorting her to the bathroom, where she explained in hushed whispers who he was—a “family friend,” she said uncertainly.
But that was not the end of it. The man showed up at their shoe repair store a week later with a pair of scuffed leather oxfords that needed fixing.
“Look at these laces, they sure need an upgrade,” he said, loosening the laces from the shoes, their discolored tongues hanging out. She removed the laces and sifted through the shoelaces on sale, then handed him a new pair. “I ought to properly thank you sometime,” he said.
She did not politely say, Sorry, but I’m not interested, because she’d seen what happens to girls who reject men aloud, what happens when men’s feelings get hurt, and so she was friendly, even asked him a few questions about himself, which he of course interpreted as interest, as flirting. So then when he asked her to go to the cineplex with him on a date of sorts, she did not decline, and when he said he’d pick her up at the store when her shift was over, she did not protest. Perhaps she was flattered, because he wasn’t such a bad-looking man, and she had no idea why he would take an interest in her, a gawky Chinese teenager who didn’t even get asked to senior prom.
It was a Sunday, late summer. Later, this man pulled up in the parking lot across the street at seven o’clock sharp just as he’d said he would, and she thought, Who cares, it is just a movie, I do not have to even talk to this person, I can just focus on the movie—if anything, this would be a funny story to tell, this creep whose shoes were always inexplicably broken. Within hours her thoughts would turn to regret. But then it was still before, and this man was smiling, because he had her in his car.
This man is you. You are the man I’m looking for.
A HUXIAN’S GUIDE TO REVENGE
Inevitably, on your journey, you will meet bad seeds who will test your capacity for patience. You will meet men who have committed crimes for which they were never punished. You will meet men who have never learned accountability, and in fact become indignant at the very thought. When the urge to take vengeance boils, try your best to remain coolheaded. If revenge is your mission, the best advice is to treat the man in question like any other man. Then proceed. Study your desire for vengeance. Study your anger. Examine it from another point of view. Remove yourself from your body—imagine you are a spirit floating in space, imagine yourself unencumbered by any weight, human, fox, or otherwise. You are on the top of the mountain now, the mountains from the classics and the poems, all blanketed with snowcapped spruces and a layer of shimmering mist. Are you still angry? Does the anger reside in both your being and your bones? If you find that this is the case, then you may keep going.
When seducing them, act completely ignorant of who they are, but once you have them in an open and vulnerable position, such as beneath you and tied to the bedpost, make it clear. List their crimes so they know and are aware that you are punishing them for a reason. Use your shape-shifting powers to scare them. Burn their own transgressions into their brains. Deplete them of their vital essence until you are sated, until you have gained enough breath to fill you. If they display insolence, show them what your powers are. If their arrogance persists, remind them.
Do not question your right to take revenge, nor second-guess yourself. Karmic debts will always be paid with karmic retribution. Remember that you are only practicing for your inevitable ascendance from hulijing into huxian. The journey from ordinary fox spirit to divine transcendent is an arduous one, but it is worth taking in the name of justice. Since huxians live in Heaven, they can deal heavenly justice. Remember, you are only exacting your vision of what you are on the verge of becoming.
I locate you on a Sunday afternoon on a dating app. I am making my breakfast and drop the raw egg in the frying pan, where it sizzles and hisses. Your pictures say a lot about you. On the outside, you appear to be a pretty normal guy. Some would describe you as handsome-ish: a pronounced jawline, a trim figure, and a lustrous full head of hair. In the first picture, you are holding a weight at the gym. It is a very basic photo. In the next photo, you are posing with someone else’s dog. It is a very fine dog—wet-nosed, with long silky hair, a husky with ice-blue eyes. John, 29, Manhattan. To no one’s surprise, you lie about your age.
I look very young. I list my age as eighteen. You chat me up immediately after we match. We talk about the weather, we exchange numbers. In our text exchanges, you don’t mince your words. You immediately start commenting on my body. Do you do any sports? No reason, baby, just your legs, they look so long.
And when I comment on the beauty of your dog, you reply, sweetly, not as beautiful as you, and immediately after, counter that with: would you like to take my dog’s place?
How many men have you slept with?
When was the last time you had sex?
What positions do you like?
Because it is a dating app, you do not question whether it is appropriate to ask questions like that. With her, you were what you consider gentlemanly, but with the girls on this app, you don’t need etiquette or artifice.
I’m just being honest, is your defense. Why beat around the bush, why not just get to the point?
After all, it’s not sexual harassment if the app is for sex, right? After all, why am I on the app if I’m going to be such a frigid bitch, right?
So I relent. I eat my sunnyside-up egg, cut it in half with my fork and knife. The runny yolk oozes out like the sun, a sudden shot of clarity.
There was a man who wrote a guide to picking up women and fancied himself and his followers “pickup artists.” He held seminars in hotel conference rooms where he charged his followers something to the tune of two grand to hear his cheap pickup strategies and whine to each other about “the game.”
There was a man who taught English in China and liked to have sex with his students. He posted on message boards online about how easy it is to sleep with these women, how American women were fucked by feminism but women in China were submissive and feminine and do whatever you want them to do.
There was a man who pushed his wife out of a window. When he called the police, he claimed that she killed herself. Later, he was acquitted of all charges and continued his illustrious career as a sculptor.
You were on your date with the girl who is now dead. You suggested a theater, the Regal Cinema on Second Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street. In the middle of the movie, you took the girl’s hand in yours and rested it on her lap. She thought about how to get out of this without hurting your feelings. She considered whispering in your ear to let go, but that could be read as playing hard to get, so instead she politely pretended to drink her Diet Pepsi, slipped out of your grasp to grab her cup. The cup stayed in both her hands for the whole rest of the movie. You were inching toward her ear, wanting to whisper all the dirty things you wanted to do to her, but she was so fixated on the film that you stopped yourself. You figured you’d save it for later.
The movie you chose was an indie film, Simon Killer, about an American man who goes to Paris. There was a scene where the man was getting a lap dance from a stripper, and you glanced over at her to see her reaction. Your date was visibly cringing, biting her tongue.
On-screen, the man begged the stripper to take him in because he had nowhere to stay, and she relented out of pity. The man called his mother in the kitchen while his new host was at work and cried. Then the man met a younger, paler girl at a café, and soon he started arguing with his stripper girlfriend. Even though she was housing him, he suddenly felt disgusted by her, he suddenly felt a deep disdain for her that perhaps had been his feeling all along. At the end of the movie, he killed her.
Because you paid for the movie tickets, you insisted that she come back to your home for a drink to discuss the movie. “I have to get going,” she said.
“Just one drink?” you pressed. “Look, my apartment is just over there.” You had chosen this movie theater specifically for its proximity—only about fifty meters—to your place, and its distance from the D train—at least a fifteen-minute walk. You squeezed her hand. You did not intend to let go, so she sighed in exasperation.
“One drink. Then, really, I have to go.”
You suggest our first meeting be at your home in Kips Bay. You do not think this is presumptuous, and this is your first mistake. In privacy, sealed away from the public, you assume you have the power in any situation. Plus, you’re lazy. What’s the point of traveling even three stops on the subway? When I express a reasonable human hesitation about meeting a stranger at his home for the first time, you ridicule me, attempt to coax me out of my own discomfort.
Come on. Don’t you want to have some fun?
Then you send me an unsolicited dick pic. A disembodied thing, bathed in thick yellow light. It was taken in a hotel bathroom with pink marbled floors. In the background, I can see your toes, which need a pedicure.
I do not respond to you for a while. Then, just to fuck with you, I Photoshop a National Geographic image of a yawning red fox next to your dick and send it back to you. It looks like the fox is about to bite it off.
So you into furries now? you reply.
Oh, you have no idea.
No one wants to see your dick pic, loser, I reply.
I’m sure this makes you both horny and angry, so you send me a flurry of messages.
So you want to see it in person then. I got it.
You want to play with it? Come on, you know you do. Want me to open my fly so you can taste it?
Do you want me to come over and **** you? Huh, you little *****? You little ****?
As soon as she entered your apartment, you poured her a glass of gin. It was clear you didn’t really want to talk about the movie, but she went on about it in a fury, complaining about how much she despised the protagonist and his ilk, how movies like this don’t serve any purpose except to sensationalize violence against women. When you disagreed, asking her to consider the nuances of this character, his complexity and humanity, she flinched, but you didn’t notice this. You continued—this protagonist wasn’t all bad, like look how even though he killed the prostitute in the end, it was evident he missed his mother throughout the movie. He was meant to be sympathetic, look at how many times he cried! Didn’t she see, you exclaimed, that he was clearly hurting, that he needed help, he was lost, searching for himself in another country? Couldn’t she at least relate to that?
And then she put down her glass, and that’s when you went in, you planted a kiss on her lips. She saw that coming. After a second, she pulled away. But it was too late, according to you, it was too late for her to leave now, too dangerous out on the streets, and so you put down your glass and poured her another.
“I’ll be a gentleman, I promise.”
She went quiet, knowing what your intentions were, staring out the window into the fire escape of another apartment building, where a couple of teenagers were drinking beer and smoking. You got up and pulled down the shades. She must have been thinking about the last time she saw you in her neighborhood, how you bantered with her father as you collected your shoes, how he called you Johnny even though you never said that was your nickname, how he treated you as his “VIP customer” and gave you silver-foiled holiday cards and free packs of cigarettes. How on some days when you picked up dry cleaning from her mother, you winked at her, then still in high school, and snuck her a candy bar or a pack of Twizzlers, how her mother smiled at you and covered her mouth as she talked, suddenly self-conscious about her accent. Perhaps something about your full adulthood, the tidy austerity of your apartment, how your pots and pans were hanging off hooks from your kitchen, turned a switch on her mind and made her acutely aware of her own youth, how far apart you were from her, how you suddenly seemed like another planet altogether, an escape from what she had always known, yet just familiar enough.
You put an aux cable on your phone and asked her, “What are the kids listening to these days?” And she laughed nervously, but when her song came on she danced, even taking a few swigs of the gin, and you laughed and danced with her, swaying her, putting your hand on her hip. And perhaps she was lulled, nodding along to your overtures—she let you kiss her some more, shove your tongue down her throat and pull her to your bed even before the song was over.
When your hand wandered somewhere under her shirt, she began to protest, again, and then you whispered, “Ugh, baby, you’re so beautiful, you turn me on so much,” and you coaxed and coaxed her until she began to sigh in exasperation and mumbled, “Fine.” When she finally relented, letting you take off her clothes, didn’t you take it as a small triumph—another conquest, another notch?
But then there were some things you did that she didn’t give you permission for, weren’t there? Like when you took your phone out to record, no, that part was pure impulse and you wanted to capture her in the heat of the moment, you couldn’t help yourself, you needed to record it so that you could always remember what a slut she was, that part she didn’t consent to, isn’t that true? And then when she turned around and noticed, screaming at you to get off, were you surprised? Were you unnerved to find her writhing, grabbing fistfuls of your covers like she was drowning?
“What are you doing?” she asked. And for the first time, you had no answer.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, the sob in her voice like a pulse. It was too late to say anything. She forced you to delete it from your phone and then immediately called an Uber, gathering her dress and her bag and slamming the door—and how did that make you feel? Ashamed? Regretful? You didn’t protest when she walked out of your apartment building in the cold, did you? Tell me, was the night too dangerous then?
There was a man, a security guard who worked the night shift, who saw an attractive woman trying to exit the building, and so he decided to lock the door.
There was a man, a nurse, who was charged with impregnating a twenty-six-year-old woman in a coma.
There was a man, a famous film producer, who regularly invited young aspiring actresses to his hotel room to “discuss his new scripts” over cocktails.
To the gentlemen scholars of yore, the ways of fox spirits were mysterious. These erudite men were perplexed, flummoxed by our loveliness, they mistook us for lustful demons when it is not lust but a need to ascend to heaven that drives most of our actions on earth. They were fascinated and terrified of our femininity, saw it both as an object of desire and as a pollutant to their male vitality, their essence or yang, the precious nectar of life, according to them. A fancy way to describe semen, if you ask me.
So these men wrote tales about us in their records of the strange—they stripped us down into demure playthings or demonic wenches, described us as divine beauties and wanton temptresses, and yet they never did speculate on our motives, our feelings and thoughts, our whereabouts beyond the bedchamber of their gentlemen-scholar protagonists. They never assumed we had any interiority or fears or desires or friends or lives. We were mysteries to them that they were unwilling to pick apart. Ji Yun, a writer of fox tales, never attempted to enter our minds or harness our thoughts, for even his most sympathetic fox women in the end were still aliens.
When the gentleman scholars gave us sympathetic roles, our virtue only depended on how much we pleased their male protagonists. Virtuous fox women selflessly gave up their chances at immortality to take care of the men they met. Miss Ren, a beautiful fox woman portrayed by Tang scholar Shen Jiji, uses her divination abilities to help her lover make money in business and pull him out of poverty. Miss Li, another beautiful fox woman portrayed by Tang scholar Zhang Du, marries a scholar and becomes a perfect wife and mother. She fulfills her family duties for twenty years, giving birth to seven sons and two daughters, and finally dies in the end. Pu Songling, another famous chronicler of strange tales, invented Lotus Fragrance, a fox woman who selflessly nurses her lover back to health even after she discovers he’d been two-timing her with a ghost woman.
By virtue of their stores of male energy, the men’s place in the world is fixed—as protagonists, their belonging never wavers. But fox women are and will always be aliens who prove themselves to be worthy under patriarchy, and time and time again, they are punished. Even the most overpraised and virtuous fox women suffer bad fates. After Miss Li’s death, all seven of her children die, too. And the brilliant Miss Ren, in the end, dies after being mauled by a dog.
The day after she left your apartment, something started going viral that made you angry, didn’t it? You didn’t think she could be so savvy, did you, that as soon as she got home, she’d cried for a long time and poured herself a bowl of cereal, then found your LinkedIn, your Twitter, and your company website that listed your boss’s contact information? You didn’t know, did you, that she had an audience of her own, this quiet, shy girl—that she curated a persona, if you will, on a popular video app, and amassed quite a social media following—she could upload anything to a sea of strangers, all of whom were eager to validate her every thought and whim.
The girl had posted about her experience with you on her vlog. It was a fifteen-minute video of her at her most raw and vulnerable: Her voice cracked as she sobbed. “How many other girls and women experience this? It is not okay!” She’d included screenshots of your Tinder profile, your messages with her, all kinds of receipts. On the screen, she seemed like a different person. Not meek at all—in fact, she was angry, snarky—she mocked you openly even as she despaired. How violated she felt, how it was a disgrace that you should be employed after what you did to her. Then, under the video, she tagged your employer, your boss, your colleagues, even your ex-wife. (How did she even find her?) The comments rolled in, calling you a rapist and a predator, calling this girl brave and strong, a survivor.
But you’re not like that at all, you wanted to protest, you are a nice professional man. You, dear John, did not feel ashamed or regretful for your actions—and now something else was on the line, wasn’t it. You may have deleted the video from your phone, but you had a spycam set up in your room for backup. For more angles, sure. If she had the nerve to tag your employer, you were right to send the video to your friends on the group chat, the chat room, put it online in your own anonymous account for all the world to see, have a laugh, all in the name of good fun, your name cleared, where’s the harm in that? Look at how willing she was! A sex tape surely discredited everything she said on her vlog. Clearly, she was asking—no, begging—for it.
And when the evidence traveled through cyberspace and infiltrated the rest of her life, were you watching from afar? You didn’t even have to do that much work—the online mob loved to see an outspoken Asian woman shut up, and so they did it for you. The petite Chinese American girl from Sunset Park had to open her mouth, so now she was all splayed for the online trolls to see. And how they loved it: a shiny new piece of meat. Now the anonymous accounts were flurrying to her profiles, posting links to this video of her. Now the anonymous accounts all called her a faker, a liar, a hack. Kill yourself, the new comments read. You do not deserve to live.
Now the trolls doxxed her and found her dorm, her RA, they found her school pictures and posted an entry about her on a website. She was afraid to go to class now—she didn’t know who among strangers or new classmates would have seen her. Aw, man, come on, just one drink. Just one kiss. Spy cams, video clips, screenshots, angles, wasn’t all of that just a good time? Didn’t your friends resoundingly approve, weren’t they admiring and envious, didn’t they call you such a “lucky man”?
The next week, she was dead. And the fact that you are still living your miserable life, going about your daily routine, eating bagel lox sandwiches and sweating at Equinox, commuting to the office to enter some data and in the evenings having beers in the East Village with the guys: well, John, I can’t have it.
There was a man who got a thrill out of groping strangers on the street. He would strategically park his car somewhere close as he walked up and down the street looking for potential victims.
There was a man who thought that his predilection for teen girls was a basis for great art, great films, and he enjoyed a long and illustrious career making the same movie over and over again, year after year, even after such movies fell out of taste, even after it was revealed this man was an abuser.
There was a band of men who rose up in the ranks of the highest courts in the land. One of them sniveled and spat about his love of beer when confronted with allegations of sexual assault. One of them sexually harassed a woman and for decades after accepted private jet vacations and yacht trips from billionaire tycoons. One of them cited Sir Matthew Hale, a seventeenth century jurist who hunted witches, in his written opinion that ended the civil rights of child-bearing people across America, overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to determine whether any of us deserve the right to safely access reproductive health care and autonomy over our own bodies.
I take the J to Canal Street and transfer to the 6. On that narrow platform, I take out my compact mirror and apply my lipstick, NARS in Vixen, a deep carmine matte shade. It is Friday, a balmy autumn night. Teenagers guzzle vodka in plastic bottles and pin each other against subway poles, their breath short.
I arrive at your apartment at eleven-fifteen p.m. I am wearing a cropped shirt and a skirt, silk hose that shows off my long legs, with an exposed seam running down the middle. In my leather satchel I’ve brought supplies: silk rope for light bondage, a tailfeather, a pair of handcuffs, a pair of shearing scissors, a cat-o’-nine-tails, and a foxtail anal plug.
When you open the door, you greet me with a smile, and then throw me on the bed. Immediately you paw at me, my clothes. Then you point at your belt buckle and nod. When I say nothing, you point again. Your next mistake is that you assume that your delight is my delight, your pleasure my pleasure. You shove my head down toward your buckle. I am angry, but I do not show it, not yet.
“Wait,” I say, sweetly. “I want to play a game. I want to tease you a bit.” I take out the feather and stroke your cheek with it, imagine you dead.
“Oh, you’re a little freak, aren’t you? A little Asian slut?”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know your type. You know, I once knew another little Asian slut like you. It’s weird, but you remind me of her.”
I try to control myself, because good foxes always do. But in that moment something snaps inside me like a twig under the weight of a too-heavy animal, and I clamp my hands against your windpipe, the sweat on your neck sliming down my knuckles. I relish this rage, this moment when your face pales with shock that I could have such marvelous power. I decide that I will prematurely enchant you—I wave my hand, letting go of your neck, and your body is paralyzed instantly. I take out my silk rope, handcuffs, and scissors, cuff your wrists, and then rope you to the bedposts with silk. Obedient now to the laws of physics, you are supine in your briefs, and I feel almost sorry for you.
“Son of a bitch,” you wheeze as I cut your perfectly coiffed hair, the hair you take so much pride in. Somebody once said to never underestimate the illusive powers of a tall white man with a full head of hair. You definitely fit the bill. Nothing about you is handsome or good, your facial features are indistinct, foggy even, but you skate by with your arrogance because of that hair.
Brown tufts of it fall on the pillow. It is like weeding, my hands on your scalp, it is like planting a garden. You are trying to cringe, but in your paralyzed state you cannot. It takes massive effort for you to say anything, but I don’t want to hear you, so I pull out the foxtail anal plug and put it in your mouth. The bushy synthetic fur of it gushes out of your maw like a wise man’s beard.
“Do you even know the name of that Asian girl?” I ask. “Did you bother to remember her name before ruining her life?”
Even despite the spell, you are trembling now, shuddering like a leaf, and saliva drips down the anal plug in a pathetic trickle.
“She was Lee’s daughter. You knew him, didn’t you? Why don’t you say her name?”
Of course, you can’t say it, you can’t say anything because I’ve shut your mouth, and your dank green eyeballs are barging out of your face as I recite your crimes. I dust the tailfeather against your stomach because I know you are ticklish, you want to laugh but can’t, you want to cry and scream but can’t.
I take out the cat-o’-nine-tails, with its knotted leather thongs, nine in total just like I’ve always coveted, like this whip is already a huxian. Your nostrils flare with a mixture of dread and—if I’m not hallucinating—anticipation, as if this is what you’d wanted all along.
So I flip you over and pull your pants down. Your ass looks like a desolate moon, round and silvery with sweat, perfect for a flogging. One lash leaves a beautiful scarlet welt on your skin; with each stroke, with each thrust of this delicious, knotted leather, I cite a choice you made, starting with a drink you drugged on a night long before the night at the bowling alley, leading all the way up to the night at the movies, and then the night she died. Three blows, four blows, do you like it? Did you know she jumped in front of a moving train shortly after her classmates and her whole school got ahold of the video? You must have known, did you not?
And then I say her name, again and again, until you finally choke on your own spit.
Not all fox women are virtuous like Miss Ren or Miss Li. There are some infamously dangerous fox women in our history and folklore. In his sixteenth century novel Investiture of the Gods, the writer Xu Zhonglin invented Daji. As a young girl Daji was possessed by a nine-tailed fox and rose up the ranks of the emperor’s favor. Eventually she became his queen. Daji, acting as empress to the corrupt Emperor Zhou, the last of the Shang Dynasty, had the hearts of her enemies served to her on a platter. Daji was cruel and inhumane, but she was also controlling the emperor with her enchantment, and he, in turn, abused his power, leading to the fall of the Shang Dynasty.
Other fox spirits simply act like foxes. In Korean myths, the gumiho eats the livers of young men. The classic tale “Fox Sister” describes a young man going to his family’s field and discovering their maimed cows. Night by night, one by one, the cows die with gashes across their bodies where their livers were torn out. Then his brothers start dying off, too, and he realizes it’s their younger sister who is doing the tearing and the eating.
In so many of these myths, wicked fox women are almost always exorcised, dealt divine punishment from the gods or the men they have wronged. As a hulijing myself, when I read these tales of destruction and calamity I can’t help but scoff at their misunderstanding, their nerve: Could these fox demons maybe have had important motives themselves, like living? Livers are very nutritious, and so are men, presumably. The difference between a xian (divine transcendent) and a yao (a demon) then feels illusory, arbitrary.
So, my dear foxes, don’t count on men for recording your stories, demonizing you as if you were some beautiful, thoughtless monster drunk on blood. They do not understand you; they were always too fearful to, anyway.
There was a man, a public figure, who did not apologize for his actions involving violating multiple underage women’s consent, and his publicist (God bless) issued a statement: He is sorry that his actions made her feel this way.
There was a man who blamed women for not having sex with him, so much that he loaded several pistols that he stored in his basement in case one day he should go ahead on a murdering rampage.
There was a man who blamed women for having sex with him, so much that he loaded a nine-millimeter firearm and drove to three massage parlors, murdering eight people, including six Asian women. He claimed that the parlors were a “temptation he wanted to eliminate.” At the press conference, the police officer told the murderer’s side of the story: “He was pretty much fed up and had been at the end of his rope. And yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.”
Finally, when you can’t take it anymore, I remove the fox plug and bend down to suck the breath from your throat with a long, furious inhalation.
I steal your breath, and in stealing your breath, I steal your voice, I steal your ability to scream for help, I steal your ability to express your fear or contempt or disgust for me, for women in general. I steal your disdain, your spite, your propensity for speaking over women, your impulse to belittle and abuse. I steal your whining, I steal your begging, I steal your spit, I steal your tears, I steal your apologies, until I empty you and you are a husk of a man, not too different from what you were before. In the end, when I’ve taken all your breath, I put the foxtail plug back in your mouth.
When will these dog days of summer be through? I am tired of men like you, yet every night I hunt. Only once in an epoch of the moon do I take long, drawn-out breaths like this. Usually I am good at containing myself—usually I do not feast or indulge, because there are always consequences for women who feast, even in the spiritual realm.
But here I am, taking your breath away, breathing in your life with all the fury and glory of my gluttony. Dear John. I am moved by this transaction. I will ascend to heaven now. This is a love letter.
You ask me how it feels to take these men’s lives. Honestly, this is how it feels: like the moment you kill a mosquito, flatten it with your free palm. When you smear it against the white sheet, it leaves a bloodstain. And then you realize the stain is your own blood.
The night after our rendezvous, I am in the mood for love. I watch a Wong Kar-wai film about star-crossed lovers who never consummate their affection for one another. I admire Maggie Cheung’s poise in her qipao, the way she tilts her face away from the object of her desire, the way she bathes in muted pink light at the window. What’s the point of all that yearning? I wonder.
I go searching for someone, because it’s that time of the year, when revenge has filled me up to the brim and I seek out something true, something real. This time, I find a man—he might work a shift at a bar in the city center, he might sing in a choir somewhere. We are stranded on the street in front of a grocery store that also sells hydrangeas and orchids in pots and he might ask me before he kisses me on the mouth, to which I say yes, and cup his face in my hand. I might buy a bouquet for myself, which he’ll pretend to give me, we might share an ice cream, honey-flavored, the candied honeycomb leaving an aftertaste like rain in our mouths. This time, I might take him home, to my den on the fifth floor, to my unmade bed that is the only piece of furniture in the whole apartment, with its cold sheets and the window spitting out cold squares of light, a breeze that reminds us that summer will end.
This time, I am touched so tenderly, he makes love to me like I am already immortal, and by morning he is gone, he kisses me on the temple and disappears back into the grime. As I rise, he’s already leaning against a subway pole, reading the news on his phone, his bloodshot eyes soft in the morning light.
I’ve spared him. I’ve set him free.
A HUXIAN’S GUIDE TO IMMORTALITY
When a fox dies, she faces the direction of the place where she was born. No matter how many metamorphoses, no matter how many cycles of life, she cannot forget her origin.
Because you are an exquisite fox, and because you are an exquisite woman, you hover in the in-between—you are the golden mediatrix between the day and the night. You are the crepuscular phenomenon of the Heavens taking on an animal form. Betwixt and between, you can then either cycle back into the earth or become huxian, a Celestial fox. The Celestial fox has gained the nine tails that signal transcendence and moves into the Palace of the Sun and the Moon. She has mastered the rain and the wind, time and space. She is no prisoner, she is no prey.
Nine life cycles in, when you’ve exacted your revenge and are satisfied with the men’s essence you’ve gathered and collected, make a pilgrimage to your original birthplace—likely a mountain covered in mist. There, you will self-cultivate and finally meditate, refraining from all sex and basking in perfect solitude. This could have been your whole life, but it is not the one you chose.
After a hundred days, you may come across a frozen river or lake. Put your head down next to the ice and listen to the sound of the water underneath. Below the ice is the region of the yin, the female element, and the dark world of death. Obtain effluvia from the sun, the moon, the stars, the Big Dipper, and mix these with your collected essence to brew an elixir, the essence of immortality that you will place inside your pearl.
You can now shed your physical body, and escape into immortality by shijie, a simulated corpse. A gateway to Death will open up. You were never afraid of such a gateway, but if a shiver fleshes itself through you, keep going. Remember how you transformed—a midnight ritual in the graveyard with a skull. You must enter Heaven through this threshold of Death.
For a moment, you might feel brief hesitation to let go of this world. After all this time, you’ve never felt at home. And yet, there have been so many moments when you’ve carved pleasure out of sorrow, beauty out of ugliness, that you overwhelm yourself with sudden feeling. Nostalgia might sicken you as you remember all the love you’ve made on this earth, and how in the end you really couldn’t find that one Love so legendary. So you linger for a moment, shocked that after all your efforts, you still hesitate to let go of that desire that made you so weak.
Is that just the condition of being a wanderer, an immigrant, a woman? The entrance is open. Go, go, go before the ship departs—
—because once you ascend to Heaven and step into the Palace of the Sun and Moon, you can observe how different the air is. How good it feels to live inside a place not designed by and for the folly of men. As a Celestial fox, you have let go of all human relationships, and instead you can roam in the open sky, transcending both the divine and human worlds. After living a confusing life as a transient human, how good it feels, to kick back!
To be free, and yet home, at last.