We chat with author Meihan Boey about The Enigmatic Madam Ingram, which sees Miss Cassidy returns to nineteenth-century Singapore to help solve another dazzling supernatural mystery.
Hi, Meihan! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m from Singapore, born and raised! My family is Chinese Singaporean and I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Singapore’s very mixed community, which loosely comprises of people of Malay, Chinese, and Indian heritage, as well as distinct cultures like the Peranakans and Eurasians. There is a huge array of different religions and spiritual belief systems in Singapore, but we all have one common, healthy fear and respect of hantu.
Like many Singaporeans, I grew up with ghost stories – they are part of our lives, because for most of us, spirits, ghosts and gods of land and sea are everywhere, all around, all the time. Hantu is a handy Malay word that refers to ghosts, monsters, and malevolent spirits. My family is Buddhist on paper, but Southeast Asian Buddhism is quite distinct from the ‘standard’ understanding of Buddhism, and incorporates lots of older gods, rituals and beliefs. As a child it was completely normal for me to get exorcised now and then, have talismans stitched into clothes, and have a nun trying to cure my asthma with a bath in flowers.
When I grew older, and especially when I met my Scottish husband, I started to realise how startling our way of life must be to those who have no equivalant traditions. I started imagining what it would be like for someone who had no knowledge of Southeast Asia, to come into our community and be immediately beset by one of our much-loved, much-feared hantu. And that’s when a story idea started form!
When did you first discover your love for wriBng and stories?
I’ve loved writing and stories for as long as I can remember! I first wrote my own ‘book’ when I was about seven, written and drawn on foolscap and stapled together. It was about a haunted doll. I grew up with ghost stories, and they’ve always been my absolute favourite.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The first English books I owned were Ladybird books: I remember Cinderella in three dresses of pink satin, blue silk with silver net, and finally an enormous sparkling white and gold dress. Also a version of the Magic Paintbrush which was full of what would now be considered horrifically racist caricatures of Chinese people, but we didn’t know better then! I remember being perplexed, because I didn’t know a single Chinese person that looked anything like those characters!
- The one that made you want to become an author: I can only choose one? Oh dear. Probably some combination Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre and Carrie, if we’re just talking English language books.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: That’s a lot! But I’ll go with Jane Eyre.
The Enigmatic Madam Ingram is the sequel to The Formidable Miss Cassidy and it’s out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Monstrous Malay Magic Woman’s… Daughter.
For readers who haven’t picked up The Formidable Miss Cassidy, what can readers expect?
Don’t worry, The Enigmatic Madam Ingram can be read on its own! The tale partly investigates the mystery of how Miss Cassidy, the slightly-magical Scots governess, ended up in Singapore in the first place. Apart from that, Madam Ingram – the daughter of a Monstrous Malay Magic Woman, and bearer of a particularly horrible curse – has her own tale to tell. It crosses from the Scots highlands to the islands of the Malay Archipelago, through the tea planatations of Kerala and right into the bustling port of colonial Singapore.
And for those who have, what’s to come in the sequel?
More Malay magic, light and dark; more mysteries to be solved; more ghosts to appease; and most of all, Southeast Asia’s most terrifying female hantu.
Another mysterious British woman has arrived in Singapore, but this time she isn’t a governess. Letty Ingram carries a strange curse that she believes is connected to her Malayan mother, who crossed the seas to conquer high society in Great Britain over fifty years ago. She’s now returned to colonial Malaya and Singapore to see if she can solve the mystery.
Meanwhile, a certain Singaporean Chinese merchant has been seeing a strange, dancing wayang kulit ghost. Who is she? Why is she haunting him? What’s her connection to Letty Ingram… and what is the secret of the lady bomoh, Letty’s mama, that binds them all?
Also, can he convince Miss Cassidy to get involved? Purely to help Letty, of course, and not for any other reasons at all…
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed wriBng or exploring further?
I enjoy writing all my characters! In this book, I also included a character who is a real historical person – Cora Pearl, at one point the world’s most famous and fabulous courtesan, of whom I’ve always been an admirer.
I especially loved constructing the character and story of Bungadarah (which translates to Blood Flower), because she represents many forms of monstrousness, rage, rebellion, and all-encompassing, all-destroying love.
Did you face any challenges whilst wriBng the sequel? How did you overcome them?
This story takes place across multiple timelines, and this was very tricky to navigate. My editor, the incredible Jason Erik Lundberg, suggested creating an Excel spreadsheet to coordinate them, which worked great! On top of that, because Cora Pearl is a real person, I used known reference points in her life and career to fix certain immutable dates, and that formed the basis of a lot of important plot points.
What’s next for you?
The third book of the trilogy, The Mystical Mister Kay, is currently in the process of making its way to the U.S and U.K!
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up? Any you’ve read so far this year that you’ve enjoyed?
That’s a lot of books again, haha! I will take the chance to plug a couple of other Singaporean writers:
The Archaelogy of Falling Worlds by Megan Chee, a really fun cyberpunk-style save-the-world adventure through a wild and amazing universe, set in a place where people (loosely speaking) and artefacts and whole buildings just fall from the sky, and nobody knows why. She has wings, he’s a clone, the cat is not a cat.
Small Bites, by Eliane Boey – a short and gloriously strange story about a woman juggling family expectations and cultural obligations, who loses the ability to feel hunger, and wonders if she might be going slightly mad. There’s a spider.
Delay – A Comics Anthology – a collection of extremely moving stories presented in graphic novel form by the publisher Difference Engine, on the theme of what it means to be ‘delayed’, in life, love and everything in-between.
