The setting for most of The Girl With a Thousand Faces is Kowloon Walled City. This was a real place, a six-acre unregulated pile of buildings in the middle of Hong Kong. Its densely packed, precarious passageways were home to as many as fifty thousand people, and inspired the cyberpunk landscapes used in Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell. Sunyi Dean attended high school in a “former seminary built on the edge of the original Walled City.” Since Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993, she probably knows it well only from her grandparents’ stories.
The Girl With a Thousand Faces imagines Kowloon Walled City in 1975 as a sort of above-ground underworld. Not only is it rife with street-gang intrigue, it is the place where the numerous ghosts of Hong Kong accumulate. Mercy Chan is an enforcer for the strongest gang in the Walled City, and very useful because she is able to talk to its most troublesome ghosts. Accompanied by her ghost cat, she navigates the dangers of the Walled City’s multilayered streets and passageways without fear.
Mercy Chan is a badass, middle-aged woman, with no memories of her past and very little to lose. But she is not a nice person. She is willing to allow ghosts to take violent revenge on the living in order to free themselves. But she may be marginally nicer than the ghost that turns out to be chasing her.
To find out Mercy’s past, the reader is taken thirty-three years and told a somewhat different side of Mercy’s story. This one is beautifully and very effectively narrated (in second person, present tense) by Kwun Yam (Guanyin), the Goddess of Mercy. Chinese Ghosts may resort to violence, but they are not necessarily evil. Kwun Yam tells a ghost story from the point of view of a ghost.
Thirty three years ago is 1942, towards the end of the second World War. The coast of China near Hong Kong is haunted by millions of refugees, and an unknowable number of ghosts. Both are being driven into the slum that is Kowloon Walled City. In traditional Chinese ghost stories, vengeful ghosts are a natural and expected result of untimely death and mistreatment of the dead. War creates a massive number of unburied, unmourned, enraged dead. In this modern story, the ghosts provide an account of the generational trauma inflicted by war.
The Prologue of The Girl With a Thousand Faces says merely, “Do you like ghost stories, little sister? Sit down, get comfortable. You haven’t heard this one before.” This is good advice.