Of Monsters and Mixedness: the Profound Metaphors Within Claire Kohda’s Vampire Novel “Woman, Eating”

If you’re looking for a new read, perhaps while enjoying all the vampiric hullaballoo with the new season of What We Do In The Shadows, then you have to read Claire Kohda’s debut novel, Woman, Eating. This novel has been making the rounds of various “Favorites” lists, and for very good reason: it’s a personable and unique take on what modern vampirism could look like.

However, for mixed-race women like me, it holds another meaning to it altogether. Rarely do I find good novels (or media in general) that can accurately portray my experience as a half-Asian person, both living in a city and otherwise, so imagine my surprise when I found such commonality in a vampire novel, of all things. Kohda wrote this novel during the height of anti-Asian violence, resulting in a truly unique, insightful, and impactful novel about what it means to be mixed-Asian in the modern world.

With all that bloodsucking intrigue, of course.

Vampiric Hunger

Woman, Eating is about a young vampire named Lydia, who recently graduated with a degree in studio arts and is living in London. Her mother has been around the block for a couple centuries (literally), but after cosmetically dulling her fangs, she’s started losing her sense of reality. As a result, Lydia has moved her into an assisted-living facility for a short amount of time while she figures out what comes next.

With her childhood home on the market and no better option available to her, she starts secretly living in a rented studio space in a refurbished warehouse, where she meets Ben, the sweet building manager with whom she shares an awkward affection. Concurrently, she begins an internship at a high-stakes gallery that ends up being underwhelming, in multiple ways.

The most egregious aspect of all of this, though, is that Lydia doesn’t know how to feed herself. She’s never eaten human blood, never been allowed to, always subsisting off a steady supply of pig’s blood that was illegally provided by her old town butcher. Now, she’s starving, unable to die from starvation alone but unable to function “normally” without sustenance.

It’s a fascinating, yet somehow relatable thing that Lydia goes through, regarding her hunger. She feels as though she cannot succumb to her urges, even though they’re omnipresent in her everyday life, because she simply isn’t worthy. This becomes even more complicated when she can’t tell which urge she’s feeling: does she want to sleep with Ben, or literally eat him? Does she want to yell back at her boss, or is her neck looking extra appetizing, and hey, she deserves it?

This becomes even more complicated regarding her relationship to human food, specifically Asian food, which is everywhere on Instagram food blogs and looks incredibly delightful. She’s an expert on human food, has even made it a few times just for the fun of it, but she knows she can’t eat any. She watches mukbang videos with tteokbokki and ramen, grass jelly and boba, and she feels as though she’s going to lose her mind with hunger and desire.

But the most compelling element of this equation is how her mother plays into it. Lydia’s mother is half-Malaysian, half-white, having been born as a consequence of British colonialism. To make matters more complicated, her father—a colonizer—was her vampiric sire. So Lydia’s mum is not only ashamed of the history behind her ethnicity: she’s also ashamed of what he literally made her, ashamed of how bestial and “disgusting” she is. This is why she only eats pig’s blood, not out of a sense of morality, but out of a sense of duty. They’re disgusting beasts, after all; why should they indulge in a good meal?

Now, you might be thinking, Okay, but I still don’t see how any of this has to do with mixedness. And in any case, she’s in London—don’t mixed people feel right at home in major cities?

If that’s how you feel, then you’ve either been very lucky, or you’re kidding yourself just as much as Lydia is.

One Foot In, One Foot Out

To be mixed, especially mixed-Asian, is to feel as though you belong to no world and every world, all at once. It’s very likely that you’ll never meet anyone who looks like you, and only other mixed people will see you for what you are. People in your own family will accuse you of only being one or the other, as if they’ve never seen you with both parents in the same room. It’s an incredibly isolating, alienating experience that’s difficult to put into words, because we don’t have many words to go with.

We do, however, have centuries’ worth of vampire material to work with, which is why Kohda’s debut works so well. The parallels are perfectly aligned: that constant hunger for the “right food?” We feel that all the time, especially if we don’t live in big cities. That feeling of beastliness compared to others? Oh, yes: some of the most gorgeous people I’ve ever met were half-Asian, but they’re convinced they’re toads compared to the majority of people around them. Even that familial shame, that generational trauma of origin and consequence, is so brilliantly represented in Lydia’s poor mum. My own mother is a tough lady who doesn’t like to let her insecurities show, but I know all too well how it looks when she’s lamenting the way she is, compared to others. It’s a tragedy, and a unique one at that, altogether more complicated and painful than simply wishing you looked like someone on a magazine cover.

Perhaps the most painful aspect of this book isn’t even that she’s starving. It’s that she tries so hard to hide herself away, yet life can’t help but knock her sideways. Men leer after her at night, when she’s walking home. Her boss, Gideon, is a colossal pervert. Even Ben is a frustrating presence, since he can’t seem to stay away from her, despite his engagement to—you guessed it—another Asian woman. And isn’t that just the way of it as women of color? We’re taught to minimize ourselves as much as possible, because we see that the world isn’t ready to accommodate us, yet it can’t seem to help but get in our faces and fuck with us. “Goddamn you half-Japanese girls,” man, how about goddamn you, Weezer???

In the end, though, all this build-up of frustration, fear, and famine is released in the most gloriously bloody way: Lydia finally has her first meal. Her first proper meal. It’s as though every shackle containing her has finally snapped away, and she’s finally using that inner power that’s just been trying to protect her all along. She drains Gideon dry, leaving him dead on the very floor where he groped her. Then she rips out the tongue and throat of a man who attempts to assault her in a back-alley. And when finally confronted with Ben, one last time? She reveals herself to him fully, but lets him live, as she packs her bags and gets ready to move on to the next part of her unlife.

I can’t stress how cathartic this entire book was, from start to finish. Even the other major details that I haven’t mentioned, like the absence of her Japanese father, or the memories she’s forced to endure when she consumes any living creature’s blood, feel perfectly interwoven with the other major themes of the book. But more than anything else, I love that Lydia—a mixed-race woman, a survivor of abuse, and an outcasted artist—is allowed to be who she is by the end of the story. While some may see her succumbing to her urges as a failure, I see it as a triumph. Lydia didn’t “succumb,” she accepted. She is no villain, she’s just trying to survive.

And yes, one must exercise caution in reading into the juxtaposition between mixedness and literal monstrousness too closely. After all, being mixed does not equate to being a monster, and if you have to be convinced of this as a non-mixed-person, then maybe you ought to have a vampire suck out the part of your brain you’re not using.

But to me, the metaphor was as clear as day: Lydia was a mixed-Asian woman who learned how to be true to herself, to empower herself, to live unshackled to the colonialist society that had contained her for far too long. And now, she could finally live, not as the beast she was raised to think she was, but as Lydia, a clever, creative, and cunning young woman.

And hallelujah, that woman is eating.

(Featured Image: Stefan Visan)