Guest post written by Aunt Tigress author Emily Yu-Xuan Qin
Emily Yu-Xuan Qin has a Master of Arts from the University of Calgary. She is a first-generation immigrant to Canada. As a child, she was sluggish in learning English—until she picked up her first Animorphs book. She can be found online at EmilyQin.com or @EyxQin on X.
About Aunt Tigress (out March 18th 2025) : From debut author Emily Yu-Xuan Qin comes a snarky urban fantasy novel inspired by Chinese and First Nation mythology and bursting with wit, compelling characters, and LGBTQIA+ representation. Readers of Seanan McGuire, Ilona Andrews, and Ben Aaronovitch will devour this gory story—and the sweet-as-Canadian-maple-syrup sapphic romance at its monstrous heart.
Concerning tigers.
Tigers are the largest Asian cat, with an iconic roar (appropriated by the MGM lion) and such robust musculature they’re known to remain standing after death. They are charismatic megafauna displaced from ninety-seven percent of their original territories, hunted and trafficked like the exiled royalty from so many period dramas. Tigers allow their young to feed first, have immense vocal range, and their stripes are as individual as human fingerprints.
Tigers predate the human species by more than a million years, and for much of our shared history, Chinese cultures worshipped and feared them. They are man eaters, our mythologies told us. They are honorless and gluttonous brutes. And once, a female tiger from the Anhui Province ventured from her mountain and took on the form of an old woman to infiltrate human society.
Or at least, that’s the tale originally penned by Huang Zhijun during the Qing dynasty (1636-1912 A.D.) of China. This story traveled, as stories do, to the small island of Taiwan, where it proliferated, becoming the popular folktale of Auntie Tiger. Similar archetypes of a tiger grandmother or aunt can be found across China, Korea, and Japan.
The most common variant of this folktale explains that tigers must consume children in order to achieve immortality–a pursuit described in Chinese philosophy as ‘cultivation’. The folktale describes one such aspiring tigress, who stole down from her mountain. Cloaked and bipedal, she lingered at the edge of a rural village and eavesdropped until she found a house with a mother and a pair of young siblings. The mother was headed out for the night, the tigress learned. So she waited for enshrouding darkness and the siblings to be alone before scratching at their window.
“I am your aunt,” the tigress claimed. She was let into the house and she curled next to the children as they slept, her eyes bright in the dark.
The elder sister woke to crunching from the other side of the bed. She flinched at the snap of bone and cartilage. She asked, “What are you eating, Auntie?”
“Peanuts,” tigress answered and tossed the girl a handful of her sibling’s fingers.
The frightened sister claimed she needed the washroom and escaped from the house, climbing a nearby tree. Tigress realized and gave chase, circling the bottom of the tree and scratching through the bark and trunk. The sister clung tightly to the branches as the tree shook.
“I’ll taste better if I’m cooked! I’ll even do it myself!” she shouted, which gave the curious tigress pause. Tigress had never eaten cooked food before, and much about humans fascinated her. The sister convinced the tigress to boil a pot of oil and hoist the pot up into the tree. “Close your eyes and open your mouth,” she coaxed the tigress.
After the tigress foolishly obeyed, the sister poured the pot of oil down the animal’s throat and killed her.
The popularity of folktales like Auntie Tiger may have stemmed from a specific socioeconomic necessity in Taiwan: to warn latchkey children with working parents against strangers. Removed from that context, tigress becomes less menacing and relevant. While rewriting folktales and classics capitalizes on a sense of nostalgia and the uncanny, many writers also use established stories to explore new themes. The Aunt Tigress of my novel is driven to attain power and immortality at any cost–while she breaks into homes and consumes children like her original counterpart, my version of the myth also breaks through protective cultural barriers and consumes local stories and powers. She is a brutal metaphor for cultural appropriation.
I came to Canada when I was nine years old. Too young to understand that cultural barriers extend beyond language, codifying parenting trends and children’s games, values and perspectives and mannerly friendships. In Taiwan, I’d rehabilitated bats with school-provided milk, pushed boys into ponds for killing tadpoles, raised silkworms, and picked ants between the floor paper of our apartment. All of my memories and the stories I grew up with seemed at odds with a social landscape as alien as Canada’s. The schools I attended had very few Chinese students, so I lingered outside groups of established friendships, just as tigress did: an eavesdropping outsider.
Years later, even though I now consider myself as much Canadian as Chinese, I never forgot that initial period of alienation, of being on the outside looking in. With the prevalence of the internet, travel, and the rise of diversity in media and fiction, accessing and learning about other cultures feels easier than ever. I sometimes fall into the trap of believing I understand another’s culture and perspective, when I’m simply projecting my own. In those times, memories of those early cultural barriers keep me grounded.
I very much needed that reminder when writing my debut novel Aunt Tigress.
In writing Aunt Tigress, I quickly pivoted from familiar western fairies and ogres. If I’m writing about the mythology of Canada, I needed to put Indigenous culture at the centre. The City of Calgary, where the novel is set, sits on the traditional land of several First Nations, most prominently the Blackfoot Confederacy. While researching, I once again felt that distinct sense of being an outsider. I cannot truly understand Blackfoot beliefs and perspectives and stories without living their lives and walking their paths. But unlike when I was a child, I recognize the importance of barriers.
That inability to fully understand or immerse in another culture is not a failing. Cultural barriers are often portrayed as negative, as obstacles to immigrant success or sources of miscommunication. But they’re not negative. Cultural barriers are just evidence of our wondrous diversity and proof that the perspectives of other cultures are as nuanced and complex as our own. We shouldn’t be allowed easy access to another’s culture. We’re not entitled to their secrets or lives or histories.
I’m no longer scared of cultural barriers, but rather of breaking them. In trying to respect Indigenous cultures, perhaps I am the tigress scratching at the window, claiming to be a friend and demanding entry to someone else’s house. It’s a fine line to walk, and a difficult nuance to articulate. I’m even more nervous now, after my amazing sensitivity reader and consultations with the local Elder Circle, because I’m better educated on how important this is.
The worldbuilding of Aunt Tigress is not rules-based, but inspired by the cultures I drew from. Those cultures are fragmented, intimate, whimsical, and sometimes ludicrously delightful and imaginative. My protagonist doesn’t have access to the mythos of Canada. In turn, the readers don’t have perfect access to the protagonist’s culture. The lack of translation or explanation for certain Chinese language or mythological elements in the novel is intended to alienate. Both myself and readers only have access to what is willingly shared. It’s in the sharing of half-understood memories that the characters of Aunt Tigress connect with each other. Even at the end, my protagonists understand the events of the novel in vastly different ways and learn different lessons. I hope that where the tigress from the original folktale trespasses and harms, my protagonists meet each other on common ground and their stories are shared safely.
