Category: Asia

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:

1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
3. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
4. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors
5. 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.

This is the fifth 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:

1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
3. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
4. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors

Thuận, Chinatown

When you pick up this slim and dense little book, you might infer that the basic theme would have something to do with overseas Chinese. Perhaps upon seeing the diacritics in the author’s name, you might infer that it is about a Chinese community in Vietnam, or Vietnamese of Chinese descent in some other country, like the US.

You would be right, but Chinatown is so much more than that. Thuận has written a novel that reads, in the words of my student, “like a fever dream.”* It is about identity, about place, about connections across distance, about memory and loss and sadness.

To understand why it reads like a fever dream, start with the literal structure of the novel. Chinatown is written as a single, 170 page-long paragraph. There are no indents, there are no chapters. I normally enjoy any kind of art in which the form represents the content, and here, the sentence-after-sentence-after-sentence with no breaks definitely forces you to read breathlessly, hurriedly, as if you’re in the middle of one long fever dream.

So it works—form represents content—but it is a tough read! You have to put the book down to catch your breath, because you cannot read it all in one go, but there’s no natural breakpoint in the book. Picking it up after a day or so you find yourself thrust right back into the fever dream. It is disorienting, which is obviously the point.

The content is more than just some fever dream, though. Chinatown is the daydream thoughts of an unnamed Narrator, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman living in Paris, where she teaches English. She finds herself stuck on the Métro one afternoon after an abandoned bag is discovered at a station, so everyone has to wait for the police to come and destroy it.** As she waits, the thinks about her son Vĩnh, who is the same height now as her long-lost lover and husband Thụy, Vĩnh’s father, whom she hasn’t seen in twelve years.

The book is 170 dense pages of Narrator’s rumination on her longing for Thụy, how she waits for him, how she wonders where he is, how her life has progressed in parallel with his, from Hanoi to Leningrad and back to Hanoi and then to Paris. Narrator has been moderately successful in her life, doing well in school and winning a scholarship to study in the Soviet Union, from which an opportunity to live and work in France subsequently followed. But she was unlucky to fall in love with Thụy, who is (was?) a Vietnamese of Chinese descent.***

I’ll pause here with a long aside. Hanoi, Leningrad, Paris… Chinatown is a special book because it is one of the most prominent novels about modern Vietnam that is available in English and which is not about the United States at all. I think the US war (*ahem*, the Second Indochina War) might be mentioned once or twice in passing, but only obliquely, and not as a plot point. The relevant war in Chinatown is the Third Indochina War, part of which included a short conflict between China and Vietnam. You might imagine that a Vietnamese of Chinese descent like Thụy would have a tough time in northern Vietnam under such conditions, and you’d be correct.

Chinatown is thus unlike the outstanding new English-language fiction on Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora by such authors as Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ocean Vuong, in which “Vietnam” is mostly the south, and there is a massive historical break at 1975. After that break, “Vietnam” is not just in Vietnam itself, it is also in Westminster, CA and Hartford, CT—to say nothing of Paris or Hong Kong. In Chinatown, though, “Vietnam” is the north, centered around Hanoi and Thụy’s hometown of Yên Khê, also in the north, in Nghệ An province. Chinatown reminds us that Vietnam’s history continued after the war with the Americans. Vietnam’s transnational history and diasporic linkages have an entirely non-American history too.

That said, I am an American reading about Vietnam. And, I am just barely old enough to be a member of the generation of Americans who have some passive knowledge of Vietnam through pop culture and the general milieu of the late 1970s and early 1980s: words and phrases like Tet, Cholon, Tan Son Nhat, Hamburger Hill, Rolling Thunder, Da Nang, Khe Sanh, Viet Cong each vaguely connote something having to do with Vietnam, even if you don’t know what exactly they refer to.**** There is no Khe Sanh in Chinatown, no mention of Hamburger Hill. Rather, the only possibly familiar term to an American of my age that shows up in Chinatown is Cholon, or in Vietnamese, Chợ Lớn, the Chinese quarter of Ho Chi Minh City whose name translates literally to “Big Market.” Click the link in the previous sentence to be reminded about why Americans talked about “Cholon.”

Narrator thinks about Chợ Lớn because that is where Thụy goes after struggling to make a life with her in Hanoi. Thụy’s family name is Ấu, which is a distinctively Chinese name, even thoughnearly all ethnic Vietnamese names have Sinitic origins. Narrator’s parents do not acknowledge Thụy, although they do acknowledge their grandson Vĩnh. Whereas Narrator ha a chance to further her education in the Soviet Union, Thụy faces constraints on his education and career options given his ancestry in the time and place where he lives. Moving to Chợ Lớn is a way to start a new, but it is also a way to leave his marriage with Narrator.

Throughout the book, Narrator recounts her time together with Thụy, but also her life abroad and apart from him. That Chợ Lớn is a “Chinatown” is not immediately obvious unless you are familiar with Vietnam, but it becomes clear as the novel progresses. Because Vĩnh has Chinese grandparents, Narrator also daydreams of his future as a representative of a Chinese company. Vĩnh, for his part, wonders why his mother never followed his father to Chợ Lớn, which Vĩnh calls “the most important Chinatown in all of Asia.”

The parallels between Thụy’s unknown life in Chợ Lớn and Narrator’s life in Paris are rather subtle, but she does remark that from the Parisian perspective, she and Vĩnh and every other Southeast Asian is basically Chinese. Vĩnh takes Chinese lessons (not Vietnamese lessons), Narrator has her hair done by a Chinese woman, she notes the Chinese shops across Paris with their waving prosperity cats, and so forth. As we read,

Narrator has gone to Paris, but for her, it is a Chinatown too.

It’s hard to summarize a fever dream, so there are many more details to this story. What I take away is how tangled the diasporic webs of identity and place can be, across borders, within borders, across oceans, and within families.

NOTES

* From our experience, I would not recommend reading this after having received your seasonal flu and/or COVID shots.

** The book was first written in 2004, so this makes a lot of sense.

*** I recommend googling Viet Hoa, which is Vietnamese for “Sino-Vietnamese,” to discover how many places of business around the world, from Minnetonka to Perth, have that name. Even the big Asian store in my home town of Harrisburg, PA is Hoa Dong [đông = east].

**** I propose that one way to demarcate the difference between Generation X and anyone who comes after is whether or not you generally know what Bruce Springsteen is talking about when he sings, in “Born in the U.S.A.,” that he had a “brother at Khe Sanh.” This generational distinction jumps out at me every time I hear Courtney Barnett‘s “Depreston,” which is about buying a house at an estate sale in the Australian suburbs in the late 2010s, and includes these lines:

Then I see the hand rail in the shower
A collection of those canisters for coffee, tea, and flour
And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam

Time marches on. When I was in college, I took a course on the history of the Vietnam War that had an enrollment of 200 students, almost none of them heritage students. This would be impossible today. But again, time marches on. If you’ve read this far, I give you permission to laugh at the observation that in Australian English, man, van, Vietnam, and Khe Sanh all rhyme (see, for example, Cold Chisel’s “Khe Sanh“). And actually, the Australian pronunciation of Vietnam is closer to the original Vietnamese than the American English is!