This is the sixth in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.
Previous reviews:
- Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
- Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
- Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
- Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors
- Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (5): Thuận, Chinatown
Dorothy Tse, Owlish
This book mildly violates the rules for a course in Modern Southeast Asian Fiction because, as we will see shortly, this books isn’t really about Southeast Asia. But we all know that Southeast Asia is a social construct, an imposition of order and logic from the outside-in. Change any of the relevant details in Asian and colonial history and “Southeast Asia” would denote a different set of countries, places, and regions. And as we’ll see, Dorothy Tse‘s debut novel Owlish is definitely about a southeastern something.
Owlish is ostensibly about a fantasy world in which dolls can come to life and humans can fall in love with them. It is told from the vantage point of Professor Q, who lives in a coastal region called the Nevers, in the southern region of Ksana. Nevers sits across from Valeria Island, separated by Valeria Harbour, first developed by the blonde-haired and blue-eyed Valerians. On the other side of the mainland sits the Vanguard Republic. Professor Q immigrated to Nevers as a small child, and teaches in the university there. He spoke a different language at home than he did at school. He has led an OK life, he has married an ordinary Valerian named Maria and entered middle age, but the Professor Q whom we meet was never happy, never fulfilled. Never, that is, until he discovered a life-sized mechanical ballerina named Aliss.
Spoilers start here. So, OK. Obviously this is a novel about Hong Kong. It is also a novel about fantasy: it is a fantastical tale, about a man’s fantasy love life with a doll, and the fantasy of one’s social life and social position within a society that is strange and familiar all at once. The recent New Yorker review summarizes Nevers like this:
a shadow zone, a dream world behind or beneath the first. “Dangerous” but “full of unknown potential,” it hosts Q’s fecund—and unabashedly filthy—fantasy life. Tse’s prose curls around Q like a vine, dropping him in landscapes that are equal parts Bosch and Freud, lush and deranged. Imagine an after-hours cut of Disney’s “Fantasia”; Alexander Portnoy on acid; a Losing Your Virginity theme park brought to you by Mephistopheles.
It is not easy to parse out the meanings and metaphors in Owlish. In the words of my student, this is a book that “demands to be over-interpreted and over-read.” Aliss definitely takes us through the looking glass, to a wonderland, but more specifically she takes Professor Q through the looking glass. The novel’s title references a mysterious force in Professor Q’s life who takes the name of Owlish: is Owlish just Aliss pronounced differently?* Ksana is Sanskit term that, in Buddhist cosmology, refers to the smallest possible moment in time, an impermanent moment like the instant between waking and sleeping (see 刹那 and क्षण and kṣaṇa). That must be on purpose, but what does the author Dorothy Tse mean by naming this place Ksana? There are countless questions of this form.
For most of the novel, you can focus on the characters themselves, on Professor Q’s obsessions and perversions and his ill-fated attempts to act upon them without disrupting his marriage and the life he leads. Professor Q’s professional life is of passing interest to someone with an academic background: his application for a promotion is denied, his teaching comes up from time to time, and the university where he teaches is personified by grim and unresponsive superiors (whom he knows he must fear). Valeria Island and Nevers have their own atmosphere as well, which might as well be a character in the novel: the physical structure of the city with its mountains and waters and islands, the heat and humidity and smog, its crowdedness and the jangly streets of the urban core, the little islands with decaying old churches that are evolving into bedroom communities.**
Near the end of Owlish, though, you discover that at the same time that Professor Q is having all of these moments with Aliss, Valeria is beset by university student protests. These are quite obviously the Hong Kong student protests. And Professor Q finds himself in trouble despite the fact that he actually has nothing to do with them. As a reader, this part of the novel doesn’t feel like the author is just describing another part of the atmosphere. Rather, this seems to be “the point” of the novel, in some way.
So how might one tie all of these things together? Recalling my student’s admonition that this novel is just begging to be over-read, here is my own over-reading of what’s going on in this book about a fantasy of a place and a fantasy of a doll who comes to life in a place that is obviously real at a time of great turmoil. I believe that Owlish is about Hong Kong society, and that Tse is trying to describe an impossible fantasy of what Hong Kong can be in the wake of the 1997 handover.
Amidst all the surreal and fantastical elements, Tse’s novel is telling us a story of an ordinary person working within a social structure that is tolerable but unfulfilling. He finds fulfillment in a bizarre perversion that he must hide, even as he desperately wishes to share it. The more that Aliss comes to life, though, the more impossible his life sounds, and the more obvious it is that his fantasies will never be made real. Social structures and institutional constraints are more powerful than any one person.
This is an interpretation of the handover and what has come after, as told by someone who is intimately involved in the exact political processes that revealed the limits of autonomy. Just as Professor Q dreams of explaining to his wife that he can maintain his job and his marriage and also carry on a love affair with a wooden ballerina, one dreams of a Hong Kong that is free of colonial rule, the fantasy of a separate system in which Hong Kong is part of the PRC but not bound by it. As an individual, you could make your way through this obvious contradiction, but just until the student protests. This, I think, is the fantasy that Owlish is designed to reveal.
NOTES
* I will admit to having looked up the character list in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to see if there was an owl involved. There was no owl in the book, but several adaptations have feature a character called “The Owl.”
** I have only limited experience visiting Hong Kong, but even I can notice the places: Wan Chai is Valeria Island’s entertainment district with the foreigners and the bars, Lantau is where the Nevers people go on hikes, the little island where Professor Q stashes Aliss is someplace like Cheung Chau, the New Territories are the parts hard up against the border with the Vanguard Republic.
