Psychic Exile

Cher Tan on Ouyang Yu

‘Perhaps I’d never be comfortable anywhere, such is the fate of migrants.’
—Brian Castro, in an interview with Ouyang Yu
Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing

‘Darkness gives me a pair of dark eyes with which I watch for light.’
—Gu Cheng (trans. Ouyang Yu)

 

Ouyang Yu is full of shit. In a particularly humorous reference early in his 2010 novel The English Class, Jing, whose story the book revolves around, has a go at teaching a child an English word. The son of intellectuals dislocated by the Cultural Revolution in Huangzhou (‘Yellow Town’, a literal translation in the book), Jing spends many aimless days working as a labourer carting deliveries in various lorries, where he uses his idle time as an opportunity to teach himself English words and phrases. One day, he is asked to deliver a load of human excrement to a nearby village, a job his co-workers refuse to do. Upon arriving at the village, Jing is thanked profusely by the village head and invited for a meal; in his absence, the lorry is swarmed by children, one of whom grabs a stray piece of paper lying by the windshield:

‘Put it back,’ Jing shouted at the kid, smiling.

‘What’s this?’ The kid said, pointing a dirty finger at the English word ‘shit’.

‘It’s “shit”,’ Jing said.

‘“shi”?’ ‘“shi”?’ The boy said, trying to get his tongue round this difficult sound, managing to come out with something that sounded surprisingly like ‘yes’, ‘yes’ in Chinese.


This shit moment foreshadows the wordplay to come. The English Class, after all, is about Jing’s journey into the English language, a Chinese man determined to master English at all costs. He sets himself a daily task, ‘to commit to memory 100 new words or more a day.’ The mission? ‘English seemed to be the only escape to a world beyond his reality.’ Jing puzzles over homonymical similarities in English and Chinese, such as ‘I’ and ‘aì’ (爱 / love), as well as the mystifying discovery that ‘the connection to poetry is death in sound’ when his childhood friend Pi retells a dream story in which the double meaning in ‘si ju shi’ materialises (‘四句诗’—‘four lines of poetry’ against ‘是具尸’—‘is a corpse’).

Does this make sense? On the phrase, Jing wonders to himself: ‘What a weird way of expressing things! They make love; they make believe; they make haste; they probably even make hate or do they? They can make anything but they wouldn’t make sense in the Chinese sense.’ Jing eventually sees a path towards escape when he gets accepted into the English cohort at Wuhan’s East Lake University, leading to a series of events which results in him eloping with his white Australian teacher’s estranged wife, Deirdre, to Melbourne.

It’s a perfect example of an idealised happy life, English being a form of upward mobility in more ways one can imagine: through the acquisition of the language, the main character has finally broken free of their stifling eastern shackles. Hooray! Jing becomes ‘Gene’, living ‘at the foot of the Dandenongs’ in a leafy suburban home with Deirdre. But we grow to realise disaster has struck—Jing/Gene is now suffering from schizophrenia and begins to develop delusions that see ancestral history and present-day diasporic reality collide. Did he really go on a trip to Burma Town to try and find his father’s ghost? Did you really think he was going to escape his mind?

The English Class is not a straightforward novel of ideas. Interspersed between each chapter about Jing’s life, the author’s voice interjects throughout the book, a metafictional gesture that give the reader the impression that we are reading a diary of the novel’s progress, as well as Ouyang’s thoughts on the disjunctive rifts between English and Chinese. At one point, Ouyang asks:

‘You asked yourself is there not a racial way of seeing? […] Does second-language writing, if there is such a thing, reduce its importance by placing it on the same level as that of second-language teaching? Does it make it second-rate, secondary? How do you use the English language to write the local accent of Yellow Town, for example? Like Zhang Guruo translating Thomas Hardy into a Northern-Chinese accent? Making Hardy’s characters like Tess speak a heavy Chinese accent? Thus making them Chinese?’

In another of these chapters, Ouyang comments, ‘You feel that you are not doing the conventional thing, not even the right thing. You feel that somehow you have to concentrate on telling a story about the past instead of letting the present come in from time to time’. The linguistic play in The English Class prefigures and accentuates the dizzying levels of play that Ouyang experiments with throughout his body of (English-language) work. A prolific author and translator of English to Chinese and vice versa, and who has published more than 100 books in both languages, a largely monolingual ① I’m one of those anglicised writers of Chinese descent who writes only in English, having Mandarin Chinese as a second language of sorts acquired through fourteen years of rote-learning in school in Singapore. I rarely think in Chinese, let alone use it. What’s the story? I might write about it one day. Regardless, reading Ouyang’s work makes me excited about the possibilities of language especially as he lets the bilingual (or in my case, semi-bilingual) reader into the text. They are inside jokes that I relish; he surrenders to the perspacities of language and yet twists them too. critic like myself wonders if the Chinese for ‘shit’ —‘shĭ’/‘屎’—features as often in Ouyang’s Chinese language material. After all, as he has mentioned, ‘[…] bowel movements are perhaps innately connected to the act of creative writing. If your bowels refuse to move, your mind is full of shit and you look shitty’, ② Ouyang Yu, in Terri Ann Quan Sing, ‘Interview #177 — Ouyang Yu’, Liminal, 31 May 2021. and that he ‘finds inspiration everywhere, even in the shit’. ③ Ouyang Yu, interview with The Victorian Writer, June 2006, reproduced in Ouyang Yu, Beyond the Yellow Pale: Essays and Criticism (Melbourne: Otherland Publishing, 2010). Maybe my question is irrelevant. We shit out the work nonetheless. Sometimes we're constipated. Sometimes it feels as if you’ve taken a laxative. 我拉肚子了!

Naturally, Ouyang’s latest books—The White Cockatoo Flowers (2024) and All the Rivers Run South (2023), the former a collection of short stories (his first in English) and the latter a novel—feature shit by the bucketloads. If there are resonances between the above-mentioned ‘shĭ’ and ‘shī’ (诗, poetry), then there are also resonances between ‘xiě’ (写, write) and ‘xiè’ (泻, as in ‘xie du zi’, pouring out stomach/bowels). Yet for all its repetitions, the shit is only a minor recurrence, for other preoccupations are drawn together and form a miasma that pervades Ouyang’s work, be it fiction, poetry, nonfiction or otherwise; these ‘genres’ only serve as loose containers for the shit. In this Ouyang’s work asserts a defiant unclassifiability. As one of the main characters, Zhang Baohui (known as ‘BH’), a creative writing PhD student in Melbourne, writes to his supervisor halfway through the novel:

I don’t think I have found any theories adequate enough to address my kind of fiction that mixes poetry, cross-writing, cross-translation, cross self-translation, autobiography, biography of an imaginary character, and posthumous writing (i.e. writing as if posthumously).

This could be one way to describe All the Rivers Run South, a novel not ‘about’ anything other than Ouyang’s preoccupations, of which include literary form, the interplay between English and Chinese, cultural transplantation and racism. No plot, no resolution—just minds imprinted on minds as the ghosts of a non-autonomous history continue to bear on us. Here we are faced with the seemingly unbridgeable distances between English and Chinese, even if a close observer may conclude that Anglo and Chinese hegemonies form two sides of the same coin—what Ouyang presents as parallel ‘in its backwardness and its fear of the new and unknown,’ ④ Ouyang, in Sing, ‘Interview #177 — Ouyang Yu’. the Australian literary establishment ‘exactly the same as the established, authorized and government-funded Chinese literary journals that reign supreme in a Communist regime aimed at silencing any fresh and new voices on the pretext of elegance, propriety and so-called ‘literary quality.’ ⑤ Ouyang Yu, ‘Multicultural Poetry as Unwritten in China’, Five Bells, 1999. It is this funhouse mirror image that animates much of his work, from his debut The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2001), and later in Loose, A Wild History (2008), The English Class and Diary of a Naked Official (2014). But it is only through his self-published ⑥ Otherland, Ouyang Yu's publishing press, has put out essay collections and anthologies such as Bias: Offensively Chinese Australian (2001), Beyond the Yellow Pale (2010), Bastard Moon (2003) and Memories and Voices (2024), as well as literary journals and other unclassifiable books such as Thought Is Free (2023). nonfiction that Ouyang more explicitly hacks away at this exasperating fabric, where the Chinese, ‘ironically the most diasporic of all diasporas’, ‘were exiles in their adopted countries.’ ⑦ Ouyang Yu, ‘Axis of Exiles: Writing and Teaching between China, Australia and New Zealand’, Landfall, no. 214 (2007). This tension arises from, of course, an anxious tendency nurtured and exacerbated in British colonies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US), where the Chinese and other Others are ranked according to internal, arbitrary hierarchies that pit one against another, at once regarded with fascination and distaste. Since the Gold Rush in so-called Australia, Chineseness in particular has remained within an ideological spectrum that continues to veer in wild directions based on any number of Eurocentric geopolitical moods and movements at any given time. We can chart this from the 1881 Chinese Restriction Act to the 1901 White Australia policy to the Darwin Lands Acquisition Act in 1945, and to the resurgence of western interest in China and Chinese people vis-à-vis the ‘Asian Century’, for this enthrallment to dip into overt racism after the outbreak of COVID-19, which among other anxieties such as a perceived lack of legibility has reignited projected resentment against ‘Chinese money’. This is further complicated when juxtaposed against CCP glorification by tankie certain sections of left-wing thinkers in the global north.

In what Ouyang considers a ‘self-review’ of The White Cockatoo Flowers, a piece made up of a series of questions akin to a self-conducted interview, he notes how he has been regarded in both China and Australia. In China he is met with:

‘[…] contempt or jealousy or both, in the form of such unvoiced thoughts: Who do you think you are? Is your English good enough? Is your Chinese good enough? Is your work good enough? Don’t you know that the best translators would only translate the best work of the best authors? Wouldn’t it be best to wait twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years till you are world-famous when all the best translators of the world come rushing towards you and pounce on you as a most delicious piece of translatable meat? If you translate your own shoddy work into English, what hope is there of it ever getting published? And what’s the point of wasting your time, energy and resources?’


Whereas in Australia:

‘[…] translation in this country wasn’t a big thing. Translators, as a rule, do not have their names featured prominently side by side on the cover with the authors they translate when their translations come out. Little did I expect my self-translated work to be rejected again and again until I realised, a decade or so after, that there must be something wrong with the approach I had adopted, and that no one liked self-translated poems, in my case at least. What followed when I changed my ascription to “By Ouyang Yu” was more successful.’


These clashing attitudes towards translation form some of the undercurrents in All the Rivers Run South, arguably Ouyang’s magnum opus as his work approaches ‘late style’ after 2017’s Billy Sing, a highly experimental novel that can be considered both an ‘anti-memoir’ as well as an ‘alternate history’ of the titular character, a real-life Chinese-Australian soldier known for his sniping skills during WWI. Early in All the Rivers Run South BH commits suicide, leaving behind his thesis—the above-mentioned ‘my kind of fiction’, a novel about a nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant named Ah Sin—to his supervisor Stacey Ahsin (the surname here a nod to the anglicised surnames many early Chinese settlers were forced to adopt and thereafter passed on to their descendants). As Ouyang’s novel progresses, Stacey’s interventions become increasingly frequent, with parts she deems ‘inappropriate’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘unfair’, ‘no good’, ‘dribble’ or ‘uninteresting’ removed. ‘Too much talk about racism’, goes one such intervention. Sections written in Chinese are completely crossed out. Just as it is with the mechanisms that accompany censorship, we never get to see the original text. The gatekeeper ends up having the final say.

It goes without saying that the strange and delightful rifts between English and Chinese feature in The White Cocktatoo Flowers too. A lonely student by the name of Luo Wenfu is misheard as ‘Lone Wolf’, and a rainy day in Melbourne becomes a ‘Yu-day’ while hilarious misunderstandings that highlight the rigidity of English ensue. As Ah Sin says to his Irish lover in All the Rivers Run South, ‘English is so boring a language that you want to make it new all the time.’ The collection—with many stories written between 1994 to 2017, some of which self-translated from Chinese—evinces a continuity that has permeated Ouyang’s work: his characters are often at once self-loathing and self-righteous, all borne of a discontent with their interstitiality that they are painfully aware is only so because of their illogical, dichotomous surroundings. More often than not they ruminate alone, writing diaries and poems to make sense of selves that are at once strange and familiar. A parochial reader may dismiss his work as ‘autobiographical fiction’ but pay more attention and one realises his characters are improvised renderings of the Chinese psyche as it is deformed by Australia, which he acutely renders in the essay ‘Where Have All the Hua Gone’. ⑧ Ouyang Yu, ‘Where Have All the Hua Gone: Individuals Ejected from Australian History’, Southerly 67, no. 3 (2007). While it is ostensibly about the critical silence around his 1995 poem ‘Fuck You Australia’, it is crucially about the suffering endured by Chinese student migrants, some of whom ended up taking their own lives.
Although the essay was published in 2007, we can still easily apply this quagmire to the present-day, where the subject of English fluency is still regarded as something unchanging and categorically different from other structural barriers Chinese and Asian migrant students come up against, some of which have been exacerbated post-2020. We have seen pictures of students lining up at food banks. We have read news articles about their premature demise while working under the gig economy as delivery cyclists. As René Hà notes, ‘[…] despite the branding of being “international”, I would often like to come back to calling myself as a temporary migrant under a visa term that constraints our rights and safety in a foreign land. […] We exist amongst everyone, but only as an afterthought or a pawn for a corporate diversity poster, a political posturing campaign, a sob story or a target without dignity’. ⑨ René Hà, ‘The Leftist Case for International Students’, 31 July 2023.
Ghassan Hage in The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism writes about ‘the right to oscillate’, a temperament most evident in Ouyang’s work. ⑩ Incidentally, Ouyang has written about what he calls ‘malticulturalism’, which he explains as ‘becoming almost “mal” as in the sense of malfunctioning’. Even if similar motifs repeat ad infinitum (think Annie Ernaux’s search for her own emotional truths throughout her fifty-year corpus), Ouyang’s body of work resists stagnation and fixity. The many criss-crosses of Ouyang's English/Chinese preoccupations result in a psychedelic quality, conjuring a dream-like atmosphere not unlike reading Gerald Murnane, who interrogates similar questions of self and history, wherein a conflict persists between an internal self and the external surroundings. While Murnane’s fixations are resolutely different—horse-racing, marbles, Catholicism, the mystery of a far-flung ‘America’—the two authors are preoccupied with who they are as a result of peculiar coincidences, and play with this knowledge in an effort to shatter all meaning—or, at the very least, lean into its myriad ambiguities. If Murnane’s style is, as critic Merve Emre writes, ‘highly finished’, ⑪ Merve Emre, ‘The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters’, The New Yorker, 25 July 2022. then Ouyang's is ‘raw’—not in the sense of it being ‘undercooked’ but rather fresh, à la Jing in The English Class, who observes that ‘new words’ in Chinese becomes ‘raw words’ if translated to English directly. It’s a ‘raw’-ness that is arguably the antithesis of Murnane’s fastidious and overapplied form. While the latter’s style is surely a residual effect of Euro-American literary inheritances, Ouyang’s work is at odds with this type of ‘perfect’ sensibility; he has written numerous times against ‘correctness’, preferring to relish failure and mistakes. As Jing ponders to himself in The English Class, ‘This sort of obsession with English grammar sickened [him] to the point of nausea. In learning Chinese, he remembered, he never read any grammar books. He had never encountered any grammatical problems. He could say anything he liked.’
For these authors, the borders between fiction and nonfiction are porous, arbitrary. Considering the form of the essay, Adorno writes that it refuses ‘to be intimidated by the depraved profundity according to which truth and history are incompatible and opposed to one another.’ ⑫ Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, Vol. I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Columbia University Press, 1991). And so it goes. To Deirdre, Jing says that ‘only people like you make a distinction, a category, a border, a title,’ while Murnane’s narrator in Border Districts tells us that he is ‘not writing a work of fiction but a report of seemingly fictional matters’. This sentiment is outlined from the get-go in Loose: A Wild History, a novel tangentially about Ouyang’s brother Ming who was tortured to death by the CCP for Falun Gong-affiliated activities: ‘Fiction is nothing but a realisation of the imagined reality. It is truer than or as true as the reality.’ Indeed, Ouyang’s form is a loose container for the shit, as we see again in a poem written by Ah Sin in All the Rivers Run South: ‘if history is a calculator, fiction is a pervert / I can’t be bothered with either / I live, and that is all’. The novel, then, becomes part of an oeuvre that forms a type of fictional record, their reasons for existing simply being that—as Svetlana Alexievich, a writer who similarly resists classification, observes in Chernobyl Prayer—‘Facts alone were not enough; we felt an urge to look behind the facts, to delve into the meaning of what was happening’.
There is, too, a quality to this psychedelia not unlike Jia Zhangke’s films, where the symbolic is used to manifest a realism of the imagination, the question here not so much what's ‘real’ or ‘unreal’ but what has occurred in history that has resulted in the accumulation of incongruities and apprehensions—what Terri Ann Quan Sing has once observed as ‘the liveliness of a life beyond the false-transparency of realism.’ ⑬ Terri Ann Quan Sing, ‘Fuck You Australia: A Review of Ouyang Yu’s Billy Sing’, The Lifted Brow Review of Books, 2018. The overarching affect is simultaneously funny and droll, because that is the banality of it all. Here I’m reminded of a particular scene in Jia’s Ash Is Purest White (2018), where the protagonist Qiao, having come out of a five-year term in prison for aiding and abetting her boyfriend's crime of unlicensed firearm possession, travels across the country to look for him only to discover he's moved on from the relationship. She walks out of the building in tears, coming across a band busking in the neighbourhood square, the singer crooning a popular ballad then bending on one knee to present her a rose. Holding the rose, she walks away, distraught. Meanwhile the shot lingers on a tiger and lion inside a cage nearby. I’m laughing as I recall this. Do you see what I mean?
Ouyang’s work has a claustrophobic quality, apt for the ‘migrant miner’ ⑭ Ouyang Yu, ‘Creative Migration: “to emigrate inwardly”’, Overland, 8 October 2021. who, in his quest to escape the labyrinth made up of the self as dictated by history, continues to come up against walls. For a colony hellbent on preserving its binaries and classifications, Ouyang’s work is deemed unclassifiable, unpalatable, unmarketable; as he writes, ‘I have been living like a shadow’. ⑮ Ouyang Yu, ‘Words inside Words’, Island, 14 August 2024. It doesn't fall for the whims of capital, rejects the logics of capital, refuses to bend to capital's seduction. A sense of resentment prevails. To bring it back to ‘rawness’ once again, Ouyang’s is a style that is not easily assimilated; against the backdrop of colonial capitalism in particular, we are encountering an English developed in a racist, politically amnesiac Australia dissected by a Chinese. Why would the white establishment that has long ruled the creative industries in this colony want to stare at that head-on? There is hardly any mysticism or urbanity ⑯ Yet his prose when describing the Chinese landscape or retelling an classical Chinese story is a delight to read. to Ouyang's writing—it's all take it or leave it. Naturally Australia will choose to leave it, assuage that discomfort. While his 2020 poetry collection Terminally Poetic won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award the following year, a poem titled ‘Award’ within it goes, ‘I don’t want it / you idiot […] you never gave me / when i most desired it / and most deserved it / now you spite me / to honour me / as i am near my death’, sharing a sentiment reminiscent to Antigone Kefala—whose brilliance was only further recognised posthumously outside obscure academic contexts—in The Alien (1973): ‘I am tired, living at home among strangers, / sitting at the same tables, / waiting for an acceptance that never comes, / an understanding that would not be born, / the measure in us already spent’. Likewise, in Ania Walwicz, who condemned the ‘big ugly’ and ‘big awful’ in her now-famous poem ‘Australia’ (1982), ⑰ Ania Walwicz, ‘Australia’, in Island in the Sun 2: An Anthology of Recent Australian Prose, ed. Anna Couani and Damien White (Sea Cruise Books, 1981). we trace this lineage again, of the first-generation migrant writer who in contemporary terms is regarded rather slurringly within the Australian monolingual monoculture as ‘ESL’. So Ouyang says it more simply: ‘fuck you Australia’. ⑱ Ouyang Yu, ‘Fuck You Australia’, Westerly 40, no. 1 (Autumn 1995).

This bluntness is reminiscent of writers such as Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešiç, carrying a tone intent on passing on the writer’s inherent blunt force trauma, a result of the fractured psyche that the exile inhabits. None of these writers give a shit about the attenuating ideologies surrounding ‘genre’: it's two systems at war, angering and devastating, yet ultimately the dual conflict and alienation is distilled into a future-past that lends a spectral tenor, a bid at collapsing the borders of time. In All the Rivers Run South, when Baohui’s supervisor gives editorial feedback on his thesis and points out certain novelistic conventions that are generally understood to make narratives more easily assimilated into the marketplace, you get jolted back into your current reality reading the book. Baohui and his character Ah Sin's interlocking narratives collide past and present, the present reality being that Chinese people—men, especially, due to the way East Asian men are generally read through a western lens, and more so if they are refuse to assimilate to western expectations of masculinity—continue to be discriminated against in small and humiliating ways. Here we are presented with a manuscript that passes from one mind to another, both in fiction and outside it, a palimpsest of textures that form and spread, form and spread. In this way time becomes elastic; we see the past as a cascade of futures. It is a heady rendition of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’—literally ‘space-time’—where the inexplicabilities that make up time and space permeate the indiscernible fabric of fiction, influencing the thoughts of its inhabitants. The predominant question in Ouyang’s work appears once more in All the Rivers Run South, when BH puts together a ‘found poem’ that ends with the lines, ‘Experimental fiction is / like a foreigner in a / new land—a / stranger who doesn’t know / the social etiquette’. All of this is to say that racial identity, just like writing (duh!), is historically situated, and therefore subject to unique colonial histories; like Kefala, like Walwicz, this is the crux of Ouyang’s overarching project. He did, after all, look into how Chinese people have been depicted over a century of Australian literature for his doctoral thesis.

Works cited

✷ Adorno, Theodor. ‘The Essay as Form’ . In Notes to Literature, Vol. I. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Columbia University Press, 1991.
✷ Emre, Merve. ‘The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters’. The New Yorker, 25 July 2022.
✷ Hà, René. ‘The Leftist Case for International Students’. 31 July 2023.
✷ Said, Edward W. ‘Reflections on Exile’. In Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays. Granta, 2012.
✷ Sing, Terri Ann Quan. ‘Fuck You Australia: A Review of Ouyang Yu’s Billy Sing’. The Lifted Brow Review of Books, 2018.
———. ‘Interview #177 — Ouyang Yu’. Liminal, 31 May 2021.
✷ Walwicz, Ania. ‘Australia’. In Island in the Sun 2: An Anthology of Recent Australian Prose, edited by Anna Couani and Damien White. Sea Cruise Books, 1981.
✷ Yu, Ouyang. ‘Axis of Exiles: Writing and Teaching between China, Australia and New Zealand’. Landfall, no. 214 (2007).
———. Beyond the Yellow Pale: Essays and Criticism. Otherland Publishing, 2010.
———. ‘The Case for China or a Self-obituary’. Meanjin, 2021.
———. ‘Creative Migration: “to emigrate inwardly”’. Overland, 8 October 2021.
———. ‘Fuck You Australia’. Westerly 40, no. 1 (Autumn 1995).
———. ‘Multicultural Poetry as Unwritten in China’. Five Bells. 1999.
———. ‘Where Have All the Hua Gone: Individuals Ejected from Australian History’. Southerly 67, no. 3 (2007).
———. ‘Words inside Words’. Island, 14 August 2024.

 

Cher Tan is an essayist and critic. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, Runway Journal, Overland and Cordite Poetry Review, among others. She is the reviews editor at Meanjin and an editor at Liminal. Her debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, was released in May 2024 by NewSouth Publishing. She lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri land.

 
Cher Tan