Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing 9819930634, 9789819930630

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Xiao Xiong

Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing

Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing

Xiao Xiong

Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing

Xiao Xiong Central China Normal University Wuhan, China

ISBN 978-981-99-3063-0 ISBN 978-981-99-3064-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3064-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments

Completing a book is a long journey with unexpected incidents, during which I have received various supports. First of all, my deep gratitude goes to Springer Nature which has been supporting me to publish this book, especially the editors Ms. Alexandra Campbell, Ms. Aldeena Raju, and Ms. Hani Wang who have given me sincere advices and help. As this book is based on my Ph.D. thesis, I would also like to thank other parties who have greatly helped me integrating a myriad of ideas and experiences into the thesis and then turning it into this book. My deep gratitude also goes to my family members who have been unconditionally supporting me by sharing and relieving my pressure and making my research life less monotonous. They are my wife Ms. Xi Yang, my daughter Miss Xinzhu Xiong, my mother-in-law Ms. Hanzhen Xu, a mild-tempered and considerate accountant, my father-in-law Mr. Weiping Yang who used to be a manager and now rests in Heaven, my mother Ms. Yanyan Deng, a teacher in chemistry, and my father, A. Prof. Shibin Xiong in biology, and, last but not least, our newly born son Mr. Hansong Xiong. My special thank goes to my wife Ms. Xi Yang, a beautiful, considerate, and kind-hearted lady, who, also a university lecturer, always works hard to improve herself and to support our family and encourages me when I am facing thorny issues. My gratitude also goes to my Ph.D. supervisors, Prof. Wenche Ommundsen and Dr. Michael Griffiths. Through their supervision, I not only complete this book but also gradually realise that any language or/and culture are in fact in a dynamic state with multiple realms in which old elements are forever being partially erased or/and replaced by new elements. Thus, there is no ground for the sense of superiority based on a language or/and a culture. I also cherish the support from my fellow colleagues “living” at the Research Hub and Room 2046 of Building 19 on the main campus of the University of Wollongong, especially Mr. Sean Quinn who has shared with me a lot of knowledge about world politics and Mr. Nicholas Surany who share similar interest in food and migration. I also cherish the support from the administrative staff members of the Faculty of Law, Humanities, and the Arts (LHA) and the Graduate Research School (GRS), including Ms. Leonie Clement, Ms. Kirsty Greatz, and Ms. Ryah Perkiss. v

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Acknowledgments

I also cherish the support from Ms. Darinka Radinovic and Ms. Vimala Colless with the Multicultural Services of Wollongong City Council. I really appreciate their work which is aimed at helping residents from various cultural backgrounds and building a harmonious multicultural community. Thank them for giving me the opportunities to put the theories on hybridity and palimpsest into practice so that people from various cultural backgrounds are able to know more about each other. Thank them for giving me the opportunities to be the Master of Ceremony at a multicultural festival event, to give a speech at the OZ Day in the Gong Dinner, and to have my portrait exhibited in the city centre. Through working with them, I have gained a deeper understanding about multiculturalism in Australia. I also cherish the support from Ms. Megan Wilson with Wollongong City Council and Ms. Vicki O’rourke with Wollongong City Library. I would also thank the Multicultural Communities Council of Illawarra which is always ready to help various cultural communities. I would also thank the Wollongong Senior Chinese Association which invites me to be one of the honorary chairmen. I also cherish the support from Mr. Bosui Li, an electrical engineer and one of my best friends, who has unconditionally helped me and Mr. Rui Wang, also a university lecturer and one of my best friends, who has shared with me his understanding on poetry. There are also many others who have helped me but are not mentioned here. Please also accept my sincere gratitude. At last, I would like to thank myself for my courage and resilience in overcoming academic and administrative issues. As one of the very few Chinese scholars who pursue the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature in an Englishspeaking country, I have had to trek through a very rugged road and move forward in a myriad of uncertainties as there are very few forerunners on this road. Compared to those Ph.D. candidates who are not married and not bound by work contract, I had to at all times keep a balance between affairs related to my research, my family, and various administrative departments. At the threshold of the completion of this book, I would like to quote one of Robert Frost’s (2012) lines, “[t]wo roads diverged in a wood, and I/I took the one less travelled by/[a]nd that has made all the difference” (p. 1). This is also one of the reasons that I choose to address Chinese Australian writing from the perspective of haunting—a road less travelled by. However, the completion of this book is not the end, and I do not come this far to only come this far. I will keep reading and walking on this road, and I believe that the beauty of life lies within in its unpredictability.

Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 Haunting as Trauma in Birds of Passage and Her Father’s Daughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3 Haunting as Languaging in Ouyang Yu’s the English Class and Selected Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 Haunting as the Supernatural in the Crocodile Fury and Playing Madame Mao . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

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Chapter 1

Introduction

The Oxford English Dictionary (2020) defines “haunt” as “to frequent or be much about (a place)” or “[t]o frequent the company of (a person), to associate with habitually; to ‘run after’”. The implications of haunting in this book are related to these meanings but more often refer to “memories, cares, feelings, thoughts: [t]o visit frequently or habitually; to come up or present themselves as recurrent influences or impressions, esp. as causes of distraction or trouble” or “[o]f imaginary or spiritual beings, ghosts, etc.: [t]o visit frequently and habitually with manifestations of their influence and presence, usually of a molesting kind” (ibid.). The frequent visits by “the imaginary or spiritual beings, ghosts, etc.” may cause the experience of the uncanny which “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror … it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread” (Freud, 1919, p. 1). This claim suggests that the uncanny goes beyond the realm of ghosts and focuses on “all that is terrible” and “whatever excites dread”. Some of the modalities of haunting to be examined in this book are about ghosts or imaginary beings while the others represent some things not directly related to ghosts but also give rise to the experience of the uncanny. Based on the implications of haunting, this book mainly deals with haunting represented in the selected texts by Chinese Australian writers. Chinese Australian writers refer to not only those who were born in (Mainland) China but also those who are of Chinese ancestry. They have various backgrounds: they may be the first, second, or third generation of Chinese migrants in Australia; their families or they themselves are from various places such as Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. The settings of their writing also vary accordingly. Hong Kong and Southeast Asia used to be European colonies and mainland China used to be affected by European colonialism. Thus, the themes of Chinese Australian writing are usually tinged by the legacy of colonialism such as (post)colonial migration and encounters between different cultures. Something might be lost in transnational and transcultural migration; something in the past on the land of former colonies might be erased by the dominant colonial power. Loss, absence, and recollection are manifest themes in Chinese Australian writing. Shu-li Chang (2004) claims © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 X. Xiong, Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3064-7_1

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that “colonialism is a haunting chapter whose violence touches everyone affected by it” (p. 122) which strings colonialism, its aftermath, and haunting. This introduction consists of a history of Chinese Australia, a history of Chinese Australian writing, different theories leading to haunting, and the reconceptualisation of haunting.

A History of Chinese Australia In Yimei Mo’s Harvest of Endurance: A History of the Chinese in Australia 1788– 1988 (1988), the first Chinese arrived in Australia “within the first 50 years of the colony” (p. 1). “[T]he first group of cheap indentured labourers arrived in October 1848 from Xiamen (Amoy)” and “most of them were from the densely populated See Yup (four counties) region in Guangdong Province” (ibid.). Chinese immigration continued till the end of the 19th century. However, Eric Rolls (1992) claims that there had been Chinese immigrants in the colony of New South Wales 30–40 years before the indentured labourers arrived (p. 19, p. 32). No migration is unmotivated. Early Chinese migration was driven by various factors: population increase, food (resources) shortage, the local Canton Hakka-Punti clan wars, the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, global colonisation, and the gold rushes. Almost all early Chinese migrants were poverty-stricken peasants, and all that they could sell was labour. Maxine Darnell (1999) asserts that “[b]etween 1847 and 1853 just over 3000 indentured Chinese labourers arrived in New South Wales ports, the majority arriving during the first six months of 1852” (p. 4). More arrived in Victoria between 1853 and 1877 and became gold miners. These labourers undertook long sea journey in search of a better life. However, dislocation did not change their social status, and they did not earn much in Australia. It was nothing but a fantasy for them to recoup the cost of the journey to Australia, let alone the cost of the return journey to China, by digging gold. They worked hard and sent the gold earned home, but “their different language, appearance and manners made them an easy target for frustration” and “their habit of sending gold back to their families in China was a constant reminder that theirs was a temporary presence” (Mo, 1988, p. 2). Although the Chinese were also early settlers in Australia, they did not have an awareness of the jurisdiction governing the new colonies and always viewed themselves as guests who would return to China one day, perhaps because they were more land-bound in an agricultural civilisation. Thus, China as their homeland had a centripetal force on them so that “[t]he from their families not only led to sadness or depression among the Chinese, but also gave rise to European suspicion of the all-male community” (p. 3) as Chinese women at that time were not allowed to go far away from home. The all-male labourer community attracted the European gold seekers’ attention with regard to gender imbalance as well as economic and social status. Their hard work even triggered the European gold seekers’ dissatisfaction or even resentment which were further intensified by factors such as different appearance, dress, language, eating habits, opium smoking, and mah-jong playing. This sort of resentment later

A History of Chinese Australia

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turned into anti-Chinese violence and riots on mining sites in Victoria and New South Wales such as in Ballarat (Victoria) and Lambing Flat (Young) (New South Wales). It is worth noting that the anti-Chinese resentment was not originally based on physical appearance as different groups had been working peacefully on mines for some time; it was in fact mainly based on competition as Chinese labourers worked harder which resulted in the European gold seekers earning less. The economic imbalance between Chinese and European labourers escalated into the latter’s resentment and violence against the former. In this sense, physical and other differences were not manifest when economic competition was not fierce, but when the dominant group was economically disadvantaged, these differences came to the fore as the target of discrimination. The anti-Chinese resentment and riots were further institutionalised as colony laws: the first Chinese Immigration Act was passed in 1855 in Victoria, and this was followed by The Chinese Immigration Regulation and Restriction Act in 1861 and The Influx of Chinese Restriction Act 1881 passed by the NSW colonial government (Choi, 1975, pp. 26 & 27). The second Intercolonial Conference was held in 1888 for a “further restriction of Chinese immigration…to the welfare of the people of Australasia” (The Sydney Morning Herald 1888). These measures were brought together in 1901 on a national level as the Immigration Restriction Act which was the basis for the White Australia Policy, imposing “a dictation test in any European language” on the Chinese immigrants (Mo, 1988, p. 7). Although by the 1890s, Chinese immigrants in Australia were settled in various occupations, most had little education, and only a few were able to pass the test. Those who failed the test were neither able to have a legal identity in Australia nor able to return to China. Before and after the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was implemented, Chinese immigration decreased steeply. However, there were a small number of Chinese women who were allowed to immigrate. “In the 1890s and early 1900s…the largely male Chinese population declined from 38, 077 in 1891, to 33 165 in 1901, and to 25, 772 in 1911” (Official Year Book of New South Wales 1920 1921, p. 66). Mei-fen Kuo (2013) claims that Chinese immigrants in Australia tended to concentrate in urban areas such as Sydney, Melbourne, and the capitals of other states and territory from the end of the 19th century, and the identity formation of Chinese Australians was based on chambers of commerce and various associations which linked to Hong Kong and their home villages (pp. 14–15). Chinese immigrants moved from mining to artisan occupations and some even started their own business or industry, but few entered governmental institutions due to poor education and institutionalised discrimination. However, several did become lawyers—“William Ah Ket (1876– 1936) became one of Melbourne’s finest lawyers and an outstanding spokesman for Chinese people against restrictive and discriminatory legislation” (Mo 1988, p. 5). Though Chinese immigrants were excluded from Australian politics, they were concerned with political movements in China. They sided with either the monarchists or the revolutionaries around the fall of the Qing dynasty; they supported China’s anti-Japanese war; and they celebrated the founding of New China (the People’s Republic of China).

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The period before World War I also saw that the number of Australian-born Chinese overtake that of China-born immigrants. However, the latter increased during the war when refugees entered Australia from Southeast Asia and China. Since the implementation of the White Australia Policy, Australia had been reviewing its geographical and political positions. Before and after World War II, Australia experienced “invasion anxiety”—impending Japanese invasion. Some Chinese Australians “enlisted willingly and served Australia and the Allies” (p. 9) in the war. The period after 1950 saw an increase in Chinese immigration not only because the effect of the Civil Rights Movement and criticism of the White Australia Policy, but also because of the lack of labour in Australia. In addition, students from Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong were offered scholarships and refugees arrived from Cambodia and Vietnam in the aftermath of war, many of whom were of Chinese ancestry. Though most of the students had to leave after their study, many returned in the 1970s when the White Australia Policy was abolished. The number of Asian immigrants has been rising steadily since then. Since Mainland China opened its door to the world in 1978, an increasing number of Mainland Chinese have been relocating themselves in Australia. A large number of Mainland Chinese students and intellectuals came around the time of the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989 and most of them stayed. Students from Mainland China have become the biggest proportion of international students in Australia. Now immigrants with Chinese ancestry come from different backgrounds including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Chinese is a very general term as everyone with Chinese ancestry can be viewed as Chinese, but they may be from different places with different environments, political systems, subcultures, and influenced by different colonialisms. They come to Australia with their own pasts and stories.

A History of Chinese Australian Writing Around the turning of 1900, the image of Chinese was depicted in some early European Australian writing. In “His Mistake” by Henry Lawson (2012), a Chinese shepherd is mistakenly shot to death by an aboriginal boy. Other examples include “the nameless Chinese in My Brilliant Career” and “a treacherous and obnoxious” (Huang, 1995, p. 56) Chinese cook in We of the Never Never (Gunn, 2010). This sort of orientalist ridicule suggests not only the denigration of Chinese immigrants, but also reflects the inferior position of Chinese immigrants in terms of power. In addition to being distorted and denigrated, positive images of Chinese immigrants can also be found, such as hard-working, honest, and loyal characters in some early Australian writing by Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, Mary Grant Bruce, and Hume Nisbet (Ouyang, 2008). However, these virtues are represented by characters such as cooks, gardeners, and laundrymen, and their loyalty to European Australians is praised. Yu Ouyang (2008) thus comments “Westerners judge Chinese by Western standards” (p. 40) and “[w]hat does not correspond to Western standards gets dismissed as uncivilised, immoral, and barbarian, thus not worth being represented in fiction except as the negative

A History of Chinese Australian Writing

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Other” (p. 50). Compared with Henry Lawson’s “His Mistake” in which discrimination against Chinese immigrants is manifest, the positive portrayal is a rather strategic and recessive discrimination. Except for these cases, the image of Chinese immigrants is nowhere to be found in other early Australian writing. Negligence is the reflection of an absence of Chinese immigrants in the historical narrative of Australia. Chinese voices in Australia were heard in the form of Chinese newspapers in the late 19th century and around the turn of the twentieth century. Kate Bagnall (2015) argues that “[n]ewspapers are one source that provides an astounding array of information about the individual and collective lives of Chinese people in Australia” (p. 1), and Mei-fen Kuo (2013) claims that Chinese-language newspapers were “the windows” on “community formation and everyday historical awareness” (p. 5). The Chinese newspapers in Australia were (in chronological order): the Chinese Advertiser (1856)/English and Chinese Advertiser (1856–1858), the Chinese Australian Herald (1894–1923), the Tung Wah News (1898–1902)/the Tung Wah Times (1902– 1936), and the Chinese Times (1902–1922) (Bagnall 2015). In fact, these newspapers not only posted reports detailing the daily life of Chinese immigrants or advertisements but also published short stories, essays, as well as poems, which can be viewed as the embryonic form of Chinese Australian writing. Zhong Huang and Wenche Ommundsen (2015) accordingly claim that “the Tung Wah Times offers an excellent illustration of the ways literary writing may be used to mobilise a community seeking to define its diasporic identity while under considerable pressure from events in both their home and host countries” (p. 2). The Tung Wah Times featured more literary writing than the other newspapers, which testifies to the fact that the economic and social status of Chinese immigrants had improved and they became confident in making their own voices heard through public media, for instance, The Poison of Polygamy, the first novel by a Chinese immigrant in Australia, was published from 1909 to 1910 in instalments in the Chinese Times. Publishing writing in newspapers was then the best option as it cost less in comparison with publishing it in journals or books, and it was almost impossible for Chinese immigrants then to publish writing in European Australian newspapers, journals, or books. It should be also noted that some of these newspapers adopted strong political positions, for instance, The Tung Wah Times supported the monarchy and the Chinese Empire Reform Association, while the Chinese Times and the Chinese Australian Herald supported the republicans (Huang and Ommundsen, 2015, p. 3). In this sense, Chinese immigrants at the time were still much concerned with the internal affairs of their homeland rather than those of Australia, indicating the centripetal force of China to Chinese diaspora and proving that Chinese immigrants did not have much involvement in Australian political affairs. The period between 1920 and 1960s did not see many outputs of Chinese Australian writing due to the dwindling of the population of Chinese immigrants and the ensuing closing of Chinese newspapers despite the “condescending Sinophilic image” and “politicised Orientalism” dealing with Australian Communism and the Cold War (Atiken, 2009, p. 2) in some Australian works. The post-1970 era has witnessed the prosperity of Chinese Australian writing due to the abolishment of

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the White Australia Policy and an increase of Chinese immigration from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. Although contemporary Chinese Australian writers are gathered under the term “Chinese”. Their works in different genres represent the writers’ various experiences. A rich output of Chinese Australian writing and relevant criticisms can be found in the overviews of Chinese Australian writing such as Mabel Lee’s “Chinese Writers in Australia: New Voices in Australian Literature” (1998). It acknowledges the achievements by Chinese Australian writers who write in English such as Diane Giese and Brian Castro as well as writers from Mainland China who write mainly in Chinese such as Sang Ye. Diane Giese, an editor and writer who grew up in Darwin and graduated from the Australian National University, has interviewed many Chinese Australians and published books on them such as Beyond Chinatown which “is a part of continuing process of collecting and highlighting the often hidden history of Chinese Australians” (Diese, 1995, preface). Brian Castro, born in Hong Kong with Chinese, Russian, British, and Portuguese ancestries and raised in Australia, has published fictions on the dilemmas of Chinese migrants in Australia such as Birds of Passage (1983) and After China (1992). Sang Ye, an oral historian growing up in Beijing, has elaborated, with some translators, on The Year the Dragon Came, which tells the experiences of “young mainland Chinese who came to Australia to enrol in English courses in 1988” (McLaren, 1998, p. 197). Ouyang Yu (2008) has also examined thoroughly the representation of Chinese in Australian literature in one of his books Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888 to 1988 which explores how Chinese Australians are depicted as the Other in Australian fictions. Zhong Huang (2012) claims that “[c]ritics in both Australia and China show a strong interest in the issue of national, cultural and racial identity” (p. 4), but he addresses “Chinese masculinity in Chinese Australian literature from 1978 to 2008”. Some critics also focus on women and femininity in Chinese Australian writing such as Shirley Tucker’s (2001) “Beyond belief: Representation and revolt in Lilian Ng’s Swallowing Clouds”. This book, attempting to uncover “the often hidden history of Chinese Australians” since “the year the dragon came”, has selected works by Chinese Australian writers Ouyang Yu, Brian Castro, Alice Pung, Beth Yahp, and Lau Siew Mei, not only because their backgrounds are diverse but also because their works can be examined with the perspective of haunting based on the ambivalence of identity which has been often addressed by critics. Ouyang Yu, one of the leading Chinese Australian writers from Mainland China, has published fictions and collections of poetry on the dilemma of Chinese migrants caught between Chinese and Australian cultures such as The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002), The English Class (2010), Moon Over Melbourne (1995), Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), Two Tongues, Two Hearts, and Rain-Coloured Eyes (2002), and The Kingsbury Tales (2008). Brian Castro is the first Chinese Australian writer who published a novel in English—Birds of Passage which recounts the traumatic experiences of Chinese gold seekers from China to Australia as well as the hovering discrimination against Chinese Australians in 1960s Australia. Alice Pung, born into a Chinese-Cambodian family who migrated to Australia around 1980, has published memoirs such as Unpolished Gem (2006) and Her Father’s Daughter (2007) which retell her family’s rugged migration from

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Cambodia to Australia. Beth Yahp, born in Malaysia and now based in Sydney, has published the fiction The Crocodile Fury (1992) which addresses the supernatural in colonial Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia and the memoir Eat First, Talk Later (2015) which takes the political situations of Malaysia and Australia as its setting. Lau Siew Mei, born in Singapore and now based in Australia, has published fictions such as Playing Madame Mao (2000) which addresses the political oppression in Singapore through an actress’s playing Madame Mao and The Dispeller of Worries (2009) which tells the stories of two characters entangled in Malaysia, Europe, and Australia. Major critics on Chinese Australian writing are from Australia and Mainland China: Wenche Ommundsen, Ouyang Yu, Yuanfang Shen, Zhong Huang, Beibei Chen, etc. Their essays are mainly focused on cultural and identity issues related to Mainland China and Australia, a sense of homeliness and/or unhomeliness, remembering and memory, and cosmopolitanism. Wenche Ommundsen’s “Too Close to Home: Evelyn Lau, Ouyang, and the Performing Self” (2003) addresses the ethnic stereotypes imposed on Chinese diaspora. Her “Exoticism or Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Difference and Desire in Chinese Australian Women’s Writing” (2019) tests theories such as visceral cosmopolitanism and exoticism against more established models in Chinese diasporic writing. Ouyang Yu’s Bias: Offensively Chinese/ Australian: A Collection of Essays on China and Australia (2007) addresses cultureand-identity-based bias represented in Chinese Australian writing. His On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Speaking English, Thinking Chinese, and Living Australian (2008) travels between the Chinese and English languages and examines their collision. Yuanfang Shen’s Dragon Seed in the Antipodes: Chinese-Australian Autobiographies (2001) represents Chinese history in Australia from 1886 to 1996 through autobiographical writing. Zhong Huang’s PhD thesis “Representations of Chinese Masculinity in Chinese Australian Literature 1978–2008” (2012) and his essay “No Man’s Land: Migration, Masculinity, and Ouyang Yu’s The Eastern Slope Chronicle” (2015) examine Chinese Australian writing from the perspective of sexuality and gender and are more focused on masculinity. Beibei Chen, a newly rising scholar, has the PhD thesis “Representations of Memory and Identity in Chinese Australian English Novels” (2015) which examines Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister, Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing, Ouyang Yu’s The English Class, Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madame Mao, and Hsu-ming Teo’s Behind the Moon. Other criticisms on Chinese Australian writing include “Where are you from?: New Imaginings of Identity in Chinese-Australian Writing” by Peta Stephenson (2005), “Diaspora Beyond Millennium: Brian Castro, Ouyang Yu, and Chinese Australian” by Nicholas Birns (2008), “Chinese Culture Cures: Ouyang Yu’s Representation and Resolution of the Immigrant Syndrome in The Eastern Slope Chronicle” by Dan Huang (2009), “Writing Chinese Diaspora: After the ‘White Australia Policy’” by Deborah L. Madsen (2010), “Preoccupations of Some Asian Australian Women’s Fiction at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century” by Carole Ferrier (2017), and “From Huang Zhou to Australia: Swimming in an Ocean of Literature—An Interview with Ouyang Yu” by Shaochuan Jiang (2018).

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Through the analysis above we can see that most of the criticisms centre on identity issues caused by colonial and postcolonial migration, but the topic about identity seems a little cliched. I tend to examine the texts with haunting—a different perspective based on theories of multiple identities and border crossing. I use haunting as the perspective and the methodology because the texts I examine represent something ghostly that also makes us obsessed with and unsettled by the ghost-like. All of the texts represent the statement that “life is complicated” (Gordon, 2008, p. 3) caused by “a repressed or unresolved social violence” (ibid., p. xvi). Unequal power relations lie beneath the social violence and “are never transparently clear as the name we give them to imply” (p. 3). This book is focused not only on haunting as “a constituent element of social life” that is “neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis” (p. 7) but also attempts to find out the unequal power relations beneath different forms of haunting represented in the selected texts. Firstly, I will introduce some theories that are related to and also lead to haunting. Secondly, haunting causes uncanny feelings so that I will examine the uncanny or “the barely visible” caught presence and absence. Thirdly, haunting is caused by “a repressed or unresolved social violence” “making itself known” (p. xvi); in the present, I will examine unequal power relations beneath haunting. Fourthly, haunting is a dynamic state in which different cultural elements compete with and repress each other so that I will examine how they become each other’s spectre or apparition and how they form a palimpsest.

The Theories Leading to Haunting The current criticisms on Chinese Australian writing mainly address issues of identity and culture related to Chinese Australians. Before I came to Australia, I had been as well focusing on identity issues in Chinese Australian writing with the belief that Chinese Australians were caught between China and Australia and Chinese Australians must be confused about their identity. Some early Chinese migrants in Australia observed that other people were physically and culturally different from them and were “constantly amazed at the bizarre behaviour of the foreign barbarians” (Broinowski, 2001, p. 9). However, while Chinese migrants drew a line between themselves and the Other, European settlers in Australia also “confine the Chinese to the margins of society” (ibid.). In this type of mutual alienation, each cultural group distinguish themselves from the Other as a way of establishing identity. However, it is difficult to find or establish a pure and stable identity in the context of colonial and postcolonial migration. Robert G. Dunn (1998) probes into “the crisis of subjectivity” in the postmodern context in which “meaning” is diversified by “the immense expansion of systems of representation” (p. 88). Migrants may be assumed to represent the culture they come from, but migration severs the link between migrants and land, and they try to establish their subjectivity in the adopted nation. Stuart Hall (1996) comments on “the new kinds of interethnic communities” by referring to “old and new identities”:

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“the old identities which stabilised the social world for so long are in decline, giving rise to new identities and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject” (p. 596). Hall is also prudently positive about “new identities”: on the one hand, new things are always expected and welcomed; one the other, they fragment “a unified subject” by “dislocating the central structures and processes of modern societies and undermining the frameworks which gave individuals stable anchorage in the social world” (ibid.). Migrants are dislocated, and the anchorage which used to define their identities is severed, but it is not easy to build a new link between themselves and the adopted culture. Hall calls the conflict between “old identities” and “new identities” a “crisis of identity” (ibid.). Some theorists claim that multiculturalism can be a solution to the “crisis of identity”. Multiculturalism is a cultural phenomenon as well as a state policy that various cultures coexist within a nation, and each culture should be equally respected. The first official document on multiculturalism issued by the Australian government is the “National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia 1989” which identifies the three dimensions of multiculturalism: cultural identity, social justice, and economic efficiency. It is a sort of “social change” from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and “there are no ‘pure’, original cultures” (Heckman, 1993, p. 245). Therefore, all cultures are of same or similar weight, and they keep encountering each other within a nation which turns from being monocultural to being multicultural. The Australian multiculturalism was initiated in reaction to racism which categorises people into various grades and ranks. Both multiculturalism and racism see differences, but multiculturalism, different from racism, sees ethnic identities as important part of a larger community and endows them with the right to be proud of their own cultures. The first official document is followed by “Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity 2003” and “The People of Australia: Australia’s Multicultural Policy 2011”. Each version highlights equality between races, cultures, and religions, and a succeeding version, made in accordance with the change of social context, furthers and deepens the details of notions on the basis of the previous version. With the initiation and ongoing improvement of multiculturalism, Australia has become a diverse society. However, what needs to be noted is that each official document on multiculturalism emphasises that the unity of Australia is the “first and foremost” and English is the national language. Stressing Australianness, the One Nation Party led by Pauline Hanson claims the Australian Value that “Australia is for Australians and under our constitution only Australians decide our laws and obligations, decide who will enter and live in our country” (2022). Then questions arise: who are Australians? Who should decide who will enter and live in Australia? Multiculturalism also calls for “tolerance” of differences and “friendly and supportive behaviour” “toward others” (Heckman 1993, p. 245), which seems to be fair and beautiful. Then other questions arise: who are tolerating? Who are others? Why are some people tolerating others? Heckman (1993) also argues that multiculturalism is “a political-constitutional principle” stressing “ethnic identities” (ibid.). In other words, ethnic groups and the dominant are still visible in multiculturalism. Ghassan Hage (1998) furthers the ostentatiousness of multiculturalism in his book White Nation by recounting the story of a children’s text “The Stew that Grew” in which an Anglo-Celtic couple

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cook stew for people of different ethnic groups and decide what to put into the stew, seeming to be a very good example of encounters between various ingredients. Hage (1998) argues that this appears to be “a negation of White ethnocentrism” (p. 119) and racism, but the reality is that “most of the migrants not only remain deprived of the capacity to contribute to the actual cooking process, but they are also voiceless” (p. 121). The key issues are who the cook is, who has the power to determine what and how much to put into the mixture, and “[h]ow to get the mix right” (p. 123). This story reveals the nature of the current multiculturalism as the disguise of implicit inequalities and of the consolidation of the “White” nation based on “the construction of the other as an object of spatial exclusion” (p. 48). In other words, members of ethnic groups in multicultural shows are performers for the dominant to view, and encounters are between performers and viewers without in-depth communication. Multiculturalism seems to be a solution to racism, but Sneja Gunew (2004) argues that multiculturalism is “intimately tied to the different colonial histories of these settler colonies (U.S., Canada and Australia)” (p. 33), and there are “colonial seeds” haunting within multiculturalism. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the histories of colonialism feature the genocide of indigenous peoples, the occupation of the socalled terra nullius, the slave trade, etc. These nations are built on scarcely populated land and continuous and large-scale immigration from all over the world. It is because these lands had been wiped out that it became scarcely populated and needed to be filled with immigrants who later form ethnic groups. Descendants of former colonisers are still dominant in number and institutional positions. Multiculturalism is in fact a legacy of colonialism which drew clear political, economic, and cultural demarcations between European colonisers and the colonised and lead to large-scale transnational and transcultural migration to those English-speaking nations. In this sense, multiculturalism is a sort of encounter between colonialism in the past and postcolonial migration in the present. Multiculturalism became less manifest around the turn of the twenty-first century. This retreat “is partly driven by fears among the majority group that the accommodation of diversity has ‘gone too far’ and is threatening their way of life” (Kymlicka, 2012, p. 1). The majority group is still in dominant position, and they are in fact worried about losing their visible or invisible privileges. Its retreat is also due to the fact that “it has failed to address the underlying sources of their (minorities’) social, economic, and political exclusion and may have unintentionally contributed to their social isolation” (ibid.). This reveals the limitations of multiculturalism: still visible ethnic identity, marginalised ethnic groups, and the composition and position of ethnic groups still being decided by “the majority group”. Thus, encounters between “the majority group” and ethnic groups become unilateral: the latter exhibit what the former expects to see. In this sense, multiculturalism is a topological structure with “the majority group” at its centre and ethnic groups as subsets in dotted marginal positions. In this topological pattern, different groups, being separate, see each other, but in fact do not integrate with each other. In other words, each group lives in their own bubble and represents many characteristics of the place where they come from. At the same time, multiculturalism aims at building the nation with the majority group at the centre. The nation in fact belongs to the majority group, while the other

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groups play foil. Ghassan Hage (1998) calls such a sense of belonging “governmental belonging” that “one is legitimately entitled in the course of everyday life to make a governmental/managerial statement about the nation” (p. 46). This is represented in the series of the official documents on multiculturalism that the unity of Australia (nation-building) is the “first and foremost” and English is the national language (English is at the centre of building the Australian nation). Furthermore, descendants of colonisers and English-speaking immigrants legitimately reside at the centre, while other non-English-speaking groups are excluded. Some theorists also propose diaspora as a solution to the “crisis of identity”. Kim D. Butler (2001) offers a simple definition of diaspora: “the dispersal of a people from its original homeland” which is “associated with the dispersion of the Jewish people” (p. 189). Walker Connor (1988) defines diaspora as: “that segment of a people living outside the homeland” (p. 16). In this sense, diaspora refers to a group of people dispersed from homeland but are still more or less related with it, which is specified by William Safran (1991) as dispersal from “a specific original ‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral,’ or foreign, regions” (p. 83). Safran believes that homeland is an original centre as diaspora’s true and ideal home where “their descendants would (or should) eventually return” (ibid.), while the place where diaspora live is something on the “peripheral” which is affiliated and subordinate to that centre. Furthermore, diaspora are not “fully accepted by” or alienated from “their host society” (p. 84) not only because they are endowed with the collective mythology of “their original homeland” (p. 83) but also because the centre has a centripetal force to diaspora. In other words, diaspora itself connotes leaving homeland, living elsewhere, and encountering between homeland and host cultures. However, such an encounter is imbalanced and diaspora restore and maintain their relations with “their original homeland” (p. 84). Ien Ang (2001) argues that “diaspora tends to pull ethnic identification out of the circumscribed space of the nation-state” (p. 199). Ang’s argument implies that diaspora does not highlight the ethnic imprint of the original culture but try to blur “ethnic identification” limited within “circumscribed space” which is in fact the enclave of the original culture though there is no clear and visible border between the enclave and the nation-state. If ethnic identification stands for a sort of exclusive encounter, diaspora is a turn to an inclusive one through which diaspora diffuse into a larger portion of the population of the nation-state though ethnic identification is still visible. In other words, ethnicity gathers together each individual with the same ethnic identity and turns them into an exclusive and defensive community. Thus, encounters take place between communities rather than between individuals, and each individual of this community would be regarded as part of the community rather than as an individual. However, diasporic encounters take place more often between individuals. Lily Cho (2007) further argues that “the turn to diaspora” helps addressing “the complexities of connections between communities” (p. 13). This implies that the connections between communities are more complex than the simple dichotomy and that more encounters between different diasporic groups become possible as they are less bound by their homelands. She also argues that “[d]iaspora must be

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understood as a condition of subjectivity and not as an object of analysis” (p. 15). This is a response to that ethnic groups gradually become performers, while the dominant become viewers in multiculturalism. Ethnic groups are placed as objects by postcolonial and governmental powers, while diaspora are related to but different from them (p. 14). Dispersal from homeland endows diaspora with independence and subjectivity which also lessen their objectivity in the host nation, while ethnic groups are to be observed and analysed as objects by the dominant at the centre of the host nation. It can be further implied that diaspora are to decentralise a migrant nation-state such as Australia as almost everyone is a migrant or the descendant of migrants. However, as quoted above, William Safran (1991) believes that homeland is the original centre as diaspora’s true and ideal home (p. 83). Wherever diaspora go, they are always haunted by racial memory, grieving for losses, and longings (Cho, 2007, p. 15). This implies the complexities and dilemmas between diaspora and the original centre and between diaspora and the host centred. Diaspora as a concept is to disconnect diasporic groups’ affiliation to the original homeland, but it is constructed on the basis that diasporic groups would return and are haunted by memories. Though diaspora as a concept is to decentralise a nation-state, there is always a centre in the forms of governmental institutions and the national language and its native speakers. Given the above, Ang (2003), cautious about the exclusiveness of diaspora, claims that “a narrow focus on diaspora will not help but hinder a more truly transnational, cosmopolitan imagination” (p. 4). This reveals that diaspora is intrinsically a variation of ethnic identity and is still demarcating a visible border between “here” and “there” and between “us” and “them” (ibid.). In other words, encounters between diasporic groups still feature where you are from and where you are at, and they are still away from encounters between cosmopolitan individuals. Homi K. Bhabha’s theories on the Third Space can also be a solution to the “crisis of identity”. He (1994) asserts that “culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational” as “contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement” (p. 247), emphasising the significance of culture in supporting individuals and peoples’ survival and admitting the mobility and the indefiniteness of culture as it is able to cross border and to be translated and adapted to a different cultural context. However, a large part of contemporary cultural displacement is the sequela of colonialism in the past which caused economic, political, and cultural imbalance between former colonies, and their parent states and gave/gives rise to forced or seemingly voluntary unidirectional migration. Postcolonial discourses are imbedded in various cultural migrations from different places and at different times which both contribute to various specific historical narratives. This indefiniteness of culture is further reinforced and complicated by “global media technologies” (ibid.) which give access to easier and more frequent encounters between different cultures. In response to the dichotomy of here and there, Edward Said (1999) discusses the two poles in the lives of exiles by arguing that “exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision…is contrapuntal” (p. 186). He further explains that “two” refers to two homes or environments and “other contrapuntal juxtapositions…diminish

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orthodox judgement and elevate appreciative sympathy” (ibid.). Being aware of at least two is in fact not because there are too many differences between there and here, but because a migrant may be familiar with home and unfamiliar with the host nation. Therefore, being aware of two is somewhat subjective and variable as a migrant may gradually become familiar with the latter but unfamiliar with the former. In this sense, being aware of at least two always goes with a migrant as she/ he is not able to live at the two places at the same time and is always haunted by the differences between being more familiar with one and less familiar with the other. In other words, contrapuntal juxtapositions always exist in migrants’ consciousness, and they are always consciously or unconsciously comparing things at two places. Such ever-going comparisons and the oscillation between being familiar and unfamiliar decentralise migrants’ judgements and leave little room for orthodox judgement. Living in differences makes migrants more tolerant and less insular and endows them with more awareness of seeing beauty from both places. Therefore, contrapuntality blurs the demarcation between two homes and may reverse the positions of the two in exiles’ mind without her/him being aware of it. Simply put, after a certain period of time, the host nation may become home to migrants, while the former home may become an unfamiliar place. Such unhomeliness is similar to Said’s claim that once one gets “accustomed to it (new environment)…its unsettling force erupts anew” (ibid.). However, such unhomeliness applies not only to the former home but also to the new one. In other words, both places are homes and not homes at the same time. Therefore, such unhomeliness as something new is in fact not completely new as it derives from and has countless ties with both homes. In dealing with the relationship and distance between two homes and “‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’” (Gabriel, 2011, p. 122), Said (1999) suggests a stance of detachment, to stand away from “home” (p. 185) so that one may feel “as if one were at home wherever one happens to be” (p. 186). Standing away from home seems to be unhomely and melancholy, but Said turns such in between unhomeliness into omnihomliness (feeling at home “wherever one happens to be”). In response to such cultural in-betweenness, Marisa Parham (2010) introduces “the haunting” in Toni Morrison’s works and claims that it is “in between cultures, in between times, in between spaces—to live various kinds of doubled consciousness” (p. 3). This is to say that “the haunting” itself emerges in in-betweenness and culture features temporality and spatiality. Andrew Hock Soon Ng (2011) views space in Beloved as a metaphor of intervening memory in the narrative and argues that “the haunting entity” and “the haunted space” should be “merged and inseparable” (p. 238). Memory is a sort of representation of the past and a product of time. The role of space as “intervening memory” re-emphasises the close and interwoven relationship between “the haunting”, space and time. Salman Rushdie’s novels set Bhabha (2004) thinking on “migrant and minority space” (xxvii), and space is a recurring image in The Satanic Verses (Rushdie 2008). This brings forward the relationship between space and “migrant and minority” communities, and their space is in fact the focus of postcolonial writing such as the works written by Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. In other words, haunting is embedded in the time (narrative) and space of “migrant and minority” communities who themselves are transcultural. Caroline Victoria Herbert

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(2006) asserts that “Rushdie problematises, contests and resists hegemonic and exclusionary representations of nation in his fiction by reimagining the national and urban space from the position of marginalised and minority communities” (p. 3). What is implied here is that “migrant and minority communities” are marginalised in “the national and urban space” and “representations of nation” have been the privilege of western intellectuals. Thus, the marginalised should have the right to represent the space in which they live. Addressing such marginalised and stratified space, Bhabha (1994) is inspired by Renée Green’s “liminal space” and claims that “the stairwell” in a museum building as “a liminal space” “in-between the designations of identity” which connects “certain binary divisions such as higher and lower and heaven and hell” (p. 5). Based on what has been analysed above, the Third Space is a transnational and transcultural space featuring temporality, unhomeliness, and omnihomeliness. However, it is not simply a space between two homes and between “where you’re from” and “where you’re at”, it is a marginalised and disadvantaged social space of “migrant and minority” communities which is a legacy of colonialism. Some theorists also propose hybridity as a solution to the “crisis of identity”. Elisabeth Bronfen and Benjamin Marius (1997) define “hybrid” as “alles, was sich einer Vermischung von Traditionslinien oder von Signifikaentenketten verdankt, was unterschiedliche Diskurse und Technologien verknüpft, was durch Techniken der collage, des samplings, des Bastelns zustandegekommen ist” (p. 14). Josef Raab and Martin Butler (2008) translate the definition into “everything that owes its existence to a mixture of traditions or chains of signification, everything that links different kinds of discourse and technologies, everything that came into being through techniques of collage, sampling, or bricolage” (p. 1), indicating that the nature of hybridity is not only all-inclusive, but is also different from multiculturalism and diaspora as there is “everything” with no boundaries in hybridity. Furthermore, it is not only a mixture of objects, but also a mixture of superstructures such as “tradition, signification, discourse, and technologies”. Ien Ang (2001) highlights the space of hybridity on the basis of the Third Space by claiming that “hybridity is a concept confronts and problematises all these boundaries, but does not erase them and suggests…an unsettling of identities” (p. 16). On the one hand, hybridity echoes the Third Space in that both problematise boundaries; on the other, it differs from the latter in that it is like an umbrella encompassing differences. Ang (2003) also claims that hybridity is liberated from the “abject position of ‘ethnic minority’” (p. 2) in “an oppressive national hegemony” (Clifford, 1997, p. 255). Josef Raab and Martin Butler (2008) similarly argue that “the concept of hybridity questions ideas of purity and homogeneity and thus opposes essentialist notions of culture or identity” (p. 1). The two arguments indicate that hybridity problematises central/marginalised (dominant/dominated) stratified dichotomy which is still seen in the Third Space. However, some theorists doubt or oppose hybridity. Jonathan Friedman (1997) claims that hybridisation has become a “privileged diasporic” discourse privatised by elite diasporic “postcolonial intellectuals located in the West” (Ang, 2001, p. 70). However, such a claim neglects the fact that WASPs have long been in a dominant

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position in migrant nations such as Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand and they have been in a central or advantaged position in multiculturalism, diaspora, or the Third Space. Therefore, they are seldom the victims of social inequality caused by colonialism. It is the disadvantaged (migrant and minority communities) who need to utter their sufferings and advocate for a more equal society. Multiculturalism, diaspora, and the Third Space are proposed by representatives of the disadvantaged to address social inequality which may be naturally neglected by most WASP intellectuals. In a word, it is not elite diasporic “postcolonial intellectuals located in the West” who want to privatise hybridity; it is an obligation which falls on their shoulders instead. Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) refutes Friedman’s viewpoint by arguing that “to restrict ‘hybridity’…to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogenous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination” (p. 46). This admits not only the fact that there are colonial and neocolonial dominations but also the fact that those dominations are also heterogenous and hybridity exists among them. In Ang’s (2003) view, Homi Bhabha and other “postcolonial cultural theorists” “see the hybrid as a critical force that undermines or subverts, from the inside, dominant formations through the interstitial insinuation of the ‘different’, the ‘other’ or the ‘marginalised’ into the very fabric of the dominant” (p. 9). In other words, Bhabha sees “the hybrid” as a means of “interstitial insinuation” for the marginalised to subvert the dominant. However, the space claimed by Bhabha is based on the very existence of the binary oppositions, whereas Ang (2001) argues that “the cultural context of ‘where you’re at’ always informs and articulates the meaning of ‘where you are from”’ and “the diasporic subject can never return to her/his ‘origins’” in “the third space of hybridity” (p. 35). She (2003) also asserts that “it is no longer possible to say with any certainty where the Chinese end and the non-Chinese begin” (p. 7). Paul Gilroy (1991) proposes “it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at” (p. 3) in order to emphasise the ability to make home anywhere one is at home (omnihomeliness). However, on the contrary, when one pole of the dichotomy is not emphasised, the other pole will be blurred. In other words, it is pointless to emphasise “where you’re at”. Robert Young (1995) echoes this by asserting that hybridity “suggests the impossibility of essentialism” (p. 27). Once there is nothing central or purest, heterogeneity and diversity become possible. Ang (2001) specifically claims that “hybridity marks the emancipation of the diaspora from ‘China’ as the transparent master-signified of ‘Chineseness’” (p. 35). Chinese no longer signifies those who live in China as Chinese nationals; instead, Chineseness becomes an “open signifier” with multiple understandings and propositions. Furthermore, anyone with Chinese ancestry and anything related to China can be labelled Chinese, no matter where they are from. Despite her preference for hybridity over the Third Space, Ang (2001) is also rational about hybridity by claiming that “it is not only about fusion and synthesis, but also about friction and tension, about ambivalence and incommensurability” (p. 200). In other words, hybridity is rather a proposition that admits the heterogeneity of and the borders between different cultures but at the same time blurs the borders and transcends into an open, dynamic, and all-inclusive space. Since the space of

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1 Introduction

hybridity is dynamic and inclusive, every constituent within it keeps interacting with one another and encounters are multiple and diverse.

Reconceptualisation of Haunting Multiculturalism, diaspora, the Third Space, and hybridity do not suffice to be the solution of the crisis of identity, and thus, haunting is brought in. Avery F. Gordon (2008) describes “haunting” as follows: “[h]aunting is a constituent element of social life … neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalisable social phenomenon of great import” (p. 7). This demystifies haunting as being nonsuperstitious and brings it back from the supernatural to the earthly world. In other words, haunting does not go beyond the human sphere and is a product of human relationships. She also proposes that “[i]f haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, … the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence … that tells you a haunting is taking place” (p. 8), emphasising haunting’s ambivalent and border-crossing nature between absence and presence and suggesting that haunting refers to something that can be related to ghost but is also rooted in daily life. Jacque Derrida (1994) introduces “haunting” in his Spectres of Marx and states that haunting is historical and not dated (p. 4). Haunting is about events that happened in the past and are remembered (in written or oral form) in the present, but it is not possible to remember every event in the past, and some may be omitted or disregarded. Haunting is thus about the relationship between the past and the present and how and why some events are omitted or disregarded. The statement that haunting is not dated means that events accounted cannot be dated as they span a long period of time with or without disruptions and without starting and finishing dates. Thus, Derrida puts it as “the time is out of joint” (p. 18). Such untimeliness cannot be easily perceived via reasoning as “being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition” (p. 8). “[B]eing haunted” is affectively perceived rather than via rational sensibility, and it is not as lucid or analysable as knowledge; “being haunted” is not completely controlled by human beings, but it is closely related to individual experiences. However, feeling a reality based on one’s experiences keeps changing as reality not only changes with time but also is the product of the evolution of an ever-changing and ever-increasing past which has been fragmented. One’s mental activities are also affected by time and space which keep changing. Mark Fisher (2012) defines haunting based on timeliness as “a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production” (p. 16). “A virtuality” is a spectre originating from the past, affecting the present, and drifting between them. This spectre conditions expectations based on the present and lead to the future. In fact, the present is also the future of the past and the spectre also drifts between the present and the future. Culture originated

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from the past, stays temporarily in the present, and moves on to the future. In this sense, a futuristic perspective reveals that haunting is not only temporal but also cultural. Culture is constructed on the events in the past which are in fact the product of memory based on the events that happened in separate dots on timeline. In other words, culture is the product of disjointed time. He also sees haunting as something that “happens when a place is stained by time or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter of broken time” (p. 19). Space is constructed on the cognition of history and contemporaneity which are temporally fragmented, and thus space is also fragmented. As a result, temporal and spatial fragments encounter each other. Joanne Lipson Freed (2011) sees haunting as “a wide range of encounters that are uncanny or unsettling, in which unacknowledged connections and enduring differences come—often urgently—to the fore” (v), highlighting “uncanny or unsettling encounters” between different constituents of human life, especially between the seemingly unconnected. She also claims that “unknowability is a fundamental and defining element of the encounters” (p. 5). Encounters between the seemingly unconnected and unknowable bring together elements from drastically different instances of time and space and bring forth a mixture of fragmented time and space. However, Gordon (2008) argues that “haunting is not about invisibility or unknowability per se, it refers us to what’s living and breathing in the place hidden from view: people, places, histories, knowledge, memories, ways of life, ideas” (p. 3). Avery opposes Freed’s claim on the relationship between unknowability and haunting and argues that haunting lies behind everyday life. To put this claim in details, everyone is a product of culture and an evolving past as well as part of the future and haunting runs through everyone’s past, present, and future. Simply put, haunting is life with innumerable encounters. The uncanny is a key aspect that falls in the province of haunting. Freud (1919) claims that the uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror” (p. 1). He also differentiates the experience of the uncanny from the experience of fear by arguing that the “uncanny” is “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (pp. 1–2), suggesting the link between the present and the past. He further questions “in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening” (p. 2), which can be answered by Gordon’s (2008) claim that haunting is caused by “a repressed or unresolved social violence” (p. xvi). However, Freud (1919) addresses the question by introducing the German word unheimlich whose antonym heimlich means “familiar,” “native,” and “belonging to the home” (p. 2). He concludes that “what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening because it is not known and familiar” and “what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny” (ibid.). He also finds something interesting: heimlich does mean “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, comfortable, homely, and etc.” (ibid.), but it also means “[c]oncealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others” (p. 3). In other words, heimlich means staying at a familiar place and being settled but at the same time becoming increasingly invisible and unfamiliar to others. Thus, the word heimlich entails two seemingly contradictory but related implications in the way that “[w]hat is heimlich comes to be unheimlich” (p. 4). Being homely or having

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a sense of homeliness are at the same time being unhomely or having a sense of unhomeliness. Apart from being (un)heimlich, the uncanny also entails the dynamic state between being present and being absent or “barely visible”. Being present or visible implies knowing and can be sensed by our consciousness while being absent or invisible implies not knowing, only present to the unconscious mind. Fisher (2012) claims that “unknowability is a fundamental and defining element of the [uncanny] encounters” (p. 5). He views the uncanny as the unknown and relates it with a sense of mystery or unworldliness, but, as quoted above, Gordon (2008) argues that “haunting is not about invisibility or unknowability per se, it refers us to what’s living and breathing in the place hidden from view: people, places, histories, knowledge, memories, ways of life, ideas” (p. 3). She reminds us that haunting or the uncanny is part of our life though it may hide itself from view. The uncanny arises when we are not able to completely see or know something, but we can feel its existence because it’s “the barely visible” “living and breathing in the place hidden from view”, and it has a tendency to (re)emerge. She (2008) further elaborates on “the barely visible”: Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way … we are notified that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us. (p. xvi.)

It is this dynamic state of a little visibility and/or knowing and the largely partial invisibility and/or unknowing that make us unable to grasp or control the uncanny. However, a further sense of helplessness arises from a repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts — principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character (p. 11).

As the unconscious mind is not ruled by reason, the uncanny can move illogically in the unconscious mind and keep repeating itself compulsively. We can feel intensive activities in the unconscious mind, and our consciousness can sense the impending (re)emergence of the uncanny. It is the impending (re)emergence that drives us into the abyss of a sense of helplessness as if we were possessed by ghosts or demons. As quoted above, Gordon (2008) asserts that haunting is caused by “a repressed or unresolved social violence” “making itself known” (p. xvi). Freud (1919) also states that the uncanny is “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us” (pp. 1–2). These assertions already entail the relations between the past and the present. When the past makes itself known in the present and “something long known to us” becomes unfamiliar in the present, the flow of time has been interrupted by an abusive system of power. The past is fragmented because our memory of the past accommodates only the frightening incident which keeps repeating itself compulsively.

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Power is already lurking behind time that “is out of joint” and “an encounter of broken time”. Gordon (2008) elaborates on power as follows: Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be obvious, it can reach you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present. It is dense and superficial, it can cause bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to touch you. It is systematic and it is particularistic and it is often both at the same time. It causes dreams to live and dreams to die. We can and must call it by recognizable names, but so too we need to remember that power arrives in forms that can range from blatant white supremacy and state terror to “furniture without memories”. (p. 3)

Power, no matter what form it takes, and even if it existed in the past, can reach and exert impact on us. Gordon (2008) thus defines haunting as “one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance)” (p. xvi). It is not only “a repressed or unresolved social violence” “making itself known” (ibid.) in the present but also “abusive systems of power” making themselves known in the present. She also addresses the relations between abusive systems of power and time by claiming that “[h]aunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future” (p. xvi). Haunting challenges and changes the normal flow of time and makes the past re-emerge in and coexist with the present as an abusive system of power always features “the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present” (p. xvi). These abusive systems of power can be “wars, torture, disappearance and captivity” and “state repression” (p. xix). It would be superficial to say that abusive systems of power break time. Instead, it is the system of power that repressed violence in the past, so they make themselves known in the present. Freud (1919) also claims that “[i]t may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition” (p. 15). Haunting is about the repressed returning or “the return of revenants” (Derrida, 1994, p. 57). Gordon (2008) draws on Tony Morrison’s Beloved to examine the return of an unresolved and repressed violence caused by an abusive system of power. A fugitive slave Sethe kills her daughter to prevent her from being taken back to slavery. The dead daughter’s “headstone bears one affordable word—Beloved” (p. 140), implying that the suffering inflicted by slavery is even greater than that of death. The ghost of Beloved returns to visit Sethe’s house at 124 Bluestone Road and lives with Sethe’s family. The ghost’s visit reveals Sethe’s resentment caused by her being killed by her own mother. The resentment targets the abusive system of slavery rather than her mother, and the return marks a partial fulfilment of repressed trauma. In this sense, an experience of the uncanny arises because something familiar has been repressed and

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1 Introduction

re-emerges in a different form. Janice Radway (2008) also asserts that haunting is about “how conditions in the past banished certain individuals, things, or ideas, how circumstances rendered them marginal, excluded, or repressed” (p. viii). When the violence has been repressed into “a past, a history”, it remains “nonetheless alive and accessible to encounter” (Gordon, 2008, p. 66). This suggests that “[h]egemony still organizes the repression and the confirmation of a haunting” (Derrida 1994, p. 46). Haunting can be a manifestation of identity crisis in the postcolonial world. Marisa Parham (2010) claims that haunting is “in between cultures, in between times, in between spaces—to live various kinds of doubled consciousness” (p. 3). Andrew Hock Soon Ng (2011) also views space in Beloved as a metaphor of intervening memory and argues that “the haunting entity” and “the haunted space” should be “merged and inseparable” (p. 238). Both emphasise doubleness and indicate that haunting has the power to merge different times, spaces, and a consciousness split by intervening memory. However, doubleness as hybridity does not suffice to represent haunting. As analysed above, haunting is a multidimensional dynamic state based on hybridity in which various elements interact and compete with each other. Martin Daughtry (2013) further addresses palimpsest as haunting in terms of the relations between the past and the present. He claims that the past is “the result of successive acts of partial erasure and inscription, acts that turn it into a ‘multilayered record’, (Oxford English Dictionary) a trace of multiple histories and multiple authors” (p. 5), suggesting that the present is a palimpsest of different moments in the past. He also claims that “[t]he original palimpsests were previously inscribed sheets of vellum or other types of parchment that were re-inscribed after the original writing had been erased” (p. 4). The sheets or parchment can be compared to the human brain which accommodates “a writing and reading of memory that develops and traverses an iterative structure of layering” (Groote, 2014, p. 109). In the process of successive layering, various elements from the past become apparitions. Groote also argues that palimpsest is a good way to “deal with confused masses of material” (ibid.). Daughtry (2013) agrees with this by claiming that the palimpsest emerged as a rich, interdisciplinary metaphor for the fundamentally interconnected, multiply situated, discursive nature of human experience. The acts of partial erasure and writing-upon-writing that the palimpsest presumes have inspired a vast tropology revolving around themes of temporality, memory, intertextuality, and power. (p. 5)

Palimpsest, multidimensional, trans-spatial, and trans-temporal, is no longer confined by violence and repression. Instead, it sees “partial erasure and writingupon-writing” as a fundamental human experience. In a broader sense, human history consists of ongoing changes, while violence and repression are only parts of these changes. Groote (2014) also states that palimpsest is “a trope for memory and absolute origins that cannot remember its own origins” (p. 110). In the process of partial

Scholarship on the Selected Texts

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inscription and partial erasure, origins have been repetitively rewritten and blurred, so it can be said that there may be no origins. Thomas De Quincey (2003) addresses memory in palimpsest as “the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness”, but “they are not dead, but sleeping” (p. 175). Haunting can be sensed here: previous layers of the past are partially covered by successive ones and the former seem to be forgotten, but they can be awakened by an external trigger and make themselves known in the present. He (2003) further claims that the palimpsest is “not a linear retrieval of the past but a disguised sample of circular logic” and the power of the palimpsest “as a structural image for the memory text resides less in its maps of travel through vertical layers, and more in its imaging the circular conditions of reiteration” (p. 119), suggesting that what the world in the present is in fact a (partial) repetition of the past which is a conjuration of chaotic fragments of memory rather than based on lucid vertical structure. Power which relies on absolute origins and attempts to (re)write history would find its effort in vain due to the playfulness of the palimpsest. Human history is replete with abusive systems of power, violence, and oppression, and the world in the present evolves through its interaction with the past. We gradually realise, through the statement “they are not dead, but sleeping” (p. 175), that something unpleasant has been lurking beneath our seemingly quiet life and has been alive within us as if there were two paralleled time lines or spaces. We also gradually realise, through the statement “more in its imaging the circular conditions of reiteration” (p. 119), that being unsettled is a feature of our life beneath which a myriad of generations and centuries of human faces troubled by abusive systems of power vie to appear, like apparitions or ghosts, on the surface of our history. Though the palimpsest features circularity and repetition, it is forever under change, and the faces of the past that appear in the present have experienced rewriting and alteration. Something new can be created in the process. Addressing “time out of joint”, Derrida (1994) claims that “a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, of the home” is “inaugurated, laboriously, painfully, tragically” (p. 219). As it is not easy to rewrite the past, the palimpsest is circular as every layer is partially rewritten and covered and parts of previous layers are still visible. The palimpsest creates something new as the fragments of memory are reorganised to form transiently new patterns when the past invades the present. The palimpsest does not merely revive the ghost of past violence, and it also provides us with a new perspective to view haunting as “a way of life, or as method of analysis, or as a type of political consciousness” (p. 1822).

Scholarship on the Selected Texts With haunting as the perspective, this book will examine Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage (1982), Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter (2013), Ouyang Yu’s The English Class (2000) and three examples of his poetry, Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury (1992), and Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madame Mao (2000). As analysed above,

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the scholarship on these texts to date has mostly centred around identity issues caused by colonial and postcolonial migration. Then the following part will go through the scholarship on these texts. The English Class, like other works by writers from Mainland China, mainly focuses on identity issue between the Chinese and English languages and cultures. However, this novel does not seem to attract critics’ attention, and, so far, two papers have been found on it—Beibei Chen’s “The Confusion of Bilingualism: On the Dilemma of Migration in Ouyang Yu’s The English Class” (2017) and Lili Zhang’s (2013) “Representing the Self on the Margin of Margin: A Postcolonial Interpretation of Ouyang Yu’s The English Class” (2013). These two papers both examine the dilemma of Chinese Australians as the Other caught between two languages and cultures, but the former also examines translation, memory, and identity. Ouyang Yu’s poetry also deals with troubled identity. Though some commentaries on his poetry can be found, but a few critics in both Australia and Mainland China have published articles on his poetry. In “A Political Radio Poetics: Ouyang Yu’s Poetry and its Adaptation on ABC Radio National’s Poetica”, Prithvi Varatharajan (2016) examines how Ouyang Yu’s poetry regarding nationhood has been adapted into a national radio broadcast series. In “Returnee Scholars: Ouyang Yu, the Displaced Poet and the Sea Turtle”, Kam Louie (2006) examines troubled identity caught between Chinese and Australian cultures in Ouyang Yu’s poetry and poetry translation. Lili Zhang’s “Ouyang Yu: An Eternal Other: On the Transnational Writing by, and Bilateral Reception of, Ouyang Yu” (2015) also falls in the category of troubled identity. Apart from these critics, the Chinese poet named Xie Yang1 has also published a paper about Ouyang Yu and his poetry: “Poetry is a Poet’s River: Record of a Conversation between Ouyang Yu and Xie Yang” (2012), retelling Ouyang Yu’s life and explaining why and how he takes writing poetry as part of his career. These papers all address troubled identity caught between Chinese and Australian cultures. Birds of Passage, Brian Castro’s first novel, also falls in the category of troubled identity, but it involves the historical events of early Chinese gold seekers in mid-19th-century’s Australia. Cathy Bennet (1994) examines the novel from a cosmopolitan perspective and contends that Asians in Australia form “part of an opposition to national boundaries and national restrictions” (p. 145). Marjorie Ambrosio (2012) focuses on transparency in the novel and argues that “[w]hat could be a transparent, easy reading actually seems to be blurred, as if there were layers of veils obscuring the text” (p. 74). This insight is close to the perspective of haunting as she notices that the novel features the encounter of different realms, breaking “the usual boundaries of literary categories” (ibid.) as well as the boundaries between the past and the present. These two papers do mention border crossing and blurring, but they do not go further to examine haunting. Different from the works mentioned above, works by Chinese Australian writers born in Southeast Asia or born into Southeastern Asian migrant families in Australia, though still touching upon issues of identity, are more complex. Her Father’s Daughter, set mainly in Australia and Cambodia, addresses Alice Pung’s father’s 1

杨邪.

An Overview of the Chapters

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memory of his traumatic past and involves the migration of a Chinese Cambodian family to Australia. Anne Brewster’s “Remembering Violence in Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter: The Postmemoir and Diasporisation” (2017) examines the transgenerational memory of “extreme political events” (p. 313) and how the renarration of traumatic memory is complicated in a transnational and transcultural context. The Crocodile Fury and Playing Madame Mao do not manifest their settings, but it becomes clear from their context that they are set in colonial Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore. Playing Madame Mao is also partially set in Mainland China. The Crocodile Fury has attracted greater critical attention. In “Shaking a few tales: the dialectics of hybridity and Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury, Miriam Wei Wei Lo (1999) examines the text from the perspective of hybridity as “an identity split into different ethnic and/or national parts” (p. 56). In “The Arcane and the Ordinary: An Explanation of Patriarchy and the Postcolonial in the Writing of Beth Yahp, Catherine Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim”, Julie Dixon (2002) examines the novel using feminist and postcolonial theories. Similarly, in “An Ecofeminist Reading of Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury”, Chitra Sankaran (2018) examines, with the perspective of haunting, the entangled relations between women oppressed by patriarchy and nature disrupted by colonial power. In “Reading the Postcolonial Allegory in Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury: Censored Subjects, Ambivalent Spaces, and Transformative Bodies”, Grace V. S. Chin (2009) examines the “‘paradoxical doubleness’ in the reading of censorship as a power discourse” (p. 94), touching upon hybridity and ambivalence related to haunting. One paper directly addresses ghosts in the text: in “Gothic Spaces and the Tropical City: reading The Crocodile Fury, Haunting the Tiger, Life’s Mysteries”, and Sathyabhama Daly (2018) suggests that Beth Yahp plays with “the South-East Asian cultural narratives of ghosts and haunted spaces to articulate the impact of colonisation on the shared history of the Malays, Chinese and Indians of the former Malaya – now contemporary Malaysia and Singapore” (p. 19). Compared to the amount of the scholarship on The Crocodile Fury, fewer critics have examined Playing Madame Mao. Eddie Tay (2011) views the novel as written by an émigré outside Singapore writing back home and argues that “home is unmade” (p. 134). In “Tales of Two Cities: Fictions by Lau Siew Mei and Susan Johnson”, Lyn Jacobs (2004) focuses on the city as a social space which “balances contrasting views of people and place, history and the present” (p. 113).

An Overview of the Chapters I originally planned to take hybridity as this book’s theoretical perspective as I personally have strong interest in hybridity as a solution to identity crisis and the binary oppositions in diaspora. However, I find hybridity insufficient to fully address the selected texts as hybridity emphasises the coexistence of different cultural elements but slights the interactions between them, the vertical layering of palimpsest, and the impact of “temporality, memory, intertextuality, and power” (Daughtry, 2013,

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p. 5). Instead, I decide to take haunting as the perspective. Hybridity presents a twodimensional coexistence of different cultural elements, but haunting represents the vertically layered complexity of issues related to culture. Haunting brings in the axis of time involving the past, present, and future and forms a three-dimensional coexistence of different times and spaces. Furthermore, haunting features oppression and resistance caused by abusive systems of power such as colonialism, political oppression, and/or patriarchy. Chapter One will examine haunting as trauma in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage (1982) and Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter (2011). Trauma in the two texts is respectively caused by colonialism and political oppression. This chapter will approach the two texts with Dominick LaCapra’s (1999) theories on trauma by introducing physical trauma and psychological trauma as well as structural trauma (absence) and historical trauma (loss). This chapter will also analyse repressed memory and two representations of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The two texts both interweave the traumatic past with the present, and this chapter will examine how the traumatic past invades the present or how the characters relive the traumatic past. The two texts differ in the fact that Seamus as the protagonist in the former does not know his past and invents one based on a fragmented historical record of traumatic events while Alice’s father as the protagonist in the latter represses his memory of the traumatic past, but it returns to haunt him. This chapter argues that trauma plays the role of a medium connecting as well as blurring the border between the past and the present in a transnational, transcultural, and transgenerational context. Chapter Two will view language, or, languaging, as a kind of haunting through Ouyang Yu’s novel The English Class (2010) and his three poems, “The English Empire”, “Translating Myself”, and “The Doubleman”. This chapter will analyse the encounters between the English and Chinese languages in the selected texts by drawing on Rey Chow’s (2014) elaboration on languaging and categorisation of languaging into embodied, colonial, and creative languaging. This chapter will examine how the protagonist in The English Class is troubled by the two languages and cultures and what solution he finds to his linguistic and cultural schizophrenia. This chapter will also examine “The English Empire” from the perspective of colonial languaging and analyse the repression of the Chinese language and its resistance. It will then examine “Translating Myself” as an example of embodied languaging in which the poetic voice “I” is linguistically, culturally, and physically translated between the Chinese and English languages. It will then examine “The Doubleman” from the perspective of creative languaging: the creation of something new through language. This chapter will argue that the Chinese and English languages are, like other languages, in an ongoing changing state, with old elements being erased or/ and replaced by new elements. With Avery Gordon’s theories on ghosts and haunting, Chapter Three directly addresses ghosts and supernatural beings in Beth Yahp’s (1992) The Crocodile Fury and Lau Siew Mei’s (2000) Playing Madame Mao. The two texts are set in colonial Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore where “the factual and the fabulous” (Gordon, 2008, p. 196) are interwoven. The two nations, due to their

An Overview of the Chapters

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geographical positions, feature a mixture of Malay, Chinese, and Western cultures, represented through diverse supernatural beings which are cultural and social products and dwell in the collective memories of different cultural communities. The main focus of this chapter will be to examine why and how supernatural beings in different cultures are awakened in the postcolonial context and how they haunt the present.

Chapter 2

Haunting as Trauma in Birds of Passage and Her Father’s Daughter

Individual and collective memories can become sites of haunting connecting the past, present, and future. However, not all memories give rise to haunting. Janice Radway (2008) claims that “haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life” (p. xvi), linking haunting and abusive systems of power such as slavery, colonialism, imperialism, racial discrimination, and genocide. These abusive systems can cause trauma to victims and witnesses. This chapter will elaborate on the theories on trauma and examine the haunting as trauma in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter. Birds of Passage is one of the earliest novels in English written by a Chinese Australian writer. Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 and came to Australia alone in 1961 when there were few people of Chinese descent in Australia and the White Australia Policy was still in effect. Seamus O’Young and Lo Yun Shan are the two protagonists threading two story lines. With the hope of seeking gold and a better future, Shan leaves China by boarding a British ship bound for Australia in the mid-nineteenth century and returns to China seven years later. The years before he leaves China witness a decaying empire tortured by the Opium Wars and natural calamities. He and his fellow travellers endure poor living condition on the ship and poor working conditions on the goldfields in Australia. They also suffer racial abuse and attacks. Shan returns to China with bruises and trauma while some of his companions die or stay in Australia. Seamus lives in 1960s’ Australia. He has a mixed appearance that combines Chinese facial characteristics with blue eyes. He does not know who his parents are and where they are from. He calls himself an orphan and a stateless person though he is not really stateless as he holds an Australian passport. He often receives racial abuse in public due to his appearance. Searching for clues about his past, he journeys back to where his adopted parents live and discovers a journal in Chinese script on the fragments of yellow paper. He figures out or, perhaps, assumes it was written more than 100 years ago by a Chinese gold miner named Lo Yun Shan.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 X. Xiong, Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3064-7_2

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The two story lines proceed in parallel before Seamus discovers Shan’s journal. After that, their experiences are more intertwined. Shan manages to survive racial abuse and attacks in Australia while Seamus becomes increasingly more reclusive, later locking himself in his room and murmuring in Chinese. They both narrate mainly in the first person until Shan steps onto the land of Australia with some exceptions: Seamus shouts for Shan in the second person and Shan on several occasions talks to his potential readers in the second person. From the moment Shan comes ashore in Australia, his first-person narration is taken over by the third person and his voice features “quotation marks” while Seamus continues to narrate in the first person. It can be assumed that the script in the journal becomes increasingly blurry and unidentifiable so that Seamus begins to invent and takes control of Shan’s narration. Seamus’s first-person narration is taken over by the third person after he (presumably) encounters Shan in reality or in dream. After this moment the two story lines are both in the third person, and it seems that the power of narration is handed to an anonymous narrator who has been watching over Seamus and Shan. It is the trauma that Seamus suffers in 1960s’ Australia and Shan suffers in mid-nineteenth century’s Australia that connects and interweaves their lives. It is also possible that Seamus projects his experiences in his real life onto the invention of Shan’s story. In this sense, the trauma (Seamus’s) in the present haunts and awakens the dead (Shan) and excavates trauma buried in history. Once the dead are awakened and the past trauma is discovered, Seamus begins to relive the trauma in his present life and the cycle of this shared haunting goes on. Considering the two story lines, the disrupted narrative and trauma theory, this section will examine Seamus’s experiences of being haunted by the absence of the past and Lo Yun Shan’s real or imagined traumatic experiences before and after he arrives in Australia. This section will finally focus on how Seamus is haunted by trauma based on a mixture of historical facts and imagined scenarios. Her Father’s Daughter is Alice Pung’s memoir mixing her family’s life in presentday Australia and her father’s memories of Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. Alice is the main narrator, and the narration is mainly in the third person so that she is able to “own a significantly larger portion of the story” with “a distancing technique” (Pung, 2012, p. 44) through which she is able to, in turn, represent her sixty–year-old father’s voice and inner world. The Pung family are of Chinese descent and fled to Cambodia from southern China’s Guangdong Province in the late 1940s. They led a well-to-do life in Cambodia running a family printing factory. The 1960s and 1970s saw continuous political turmoil in Cambodia with the U.S. bombing and the Khmer Rouge taking over power in 1975 which was then changed to Year Zero. During their four-year rule, the Khmer Rouge drove urban residents to the tropical countryside and forced them to do hard labour. Alice’s father was separated from his family and forced to work on a collective farm for four years during which he saw political persecution, killings, floods, starvation, and burials of numerous dead. He himself even buried some of the dead. He believes he has lost the four years, and his experiences of that time have become his trauma which still haunts him in the present. After fleeing Cambodia, Alice’s parents met in Vietnam and then, at the fall of Saigon, fled by boat to a refugee camp at the border between

Theories on Trauma

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Cambodia and Thailand. They then came to Australia as refugees in the late 1970s via “a rite-de-passage” which allowed Alice’s father to be reborn and “start a new life” (Brewster, 2017, p. 318). Alice was born and has received education in Australia. While growing up, she at first did not understand her father’s overprotection and gradually realised that something haunting him was passed onto her via his overprotective behaviours. As she grows older, she begins to search for the reasons for her father’s odd behaviours which he keeps hidden from his children. Anne Brewster (2017) claims that the memoir is also a postmemoir as it not only narrates “the after-effects of political violence” (p. 313) but also includes the survivor-witness’s daughter renarrating her father’s memory of the past violence. She writes about the daily chores of her family rather than heroic deeds, but her father’s haunting by the past is represented by and sometimes manifested through these chores.

Theories on Trauma Trauma is caused by something painful in the past such as violence and death. Victims, witnesses, and perpetrators are all involved in the experience and analysis of trauma. Victims are the direct recipients of traumatic impact. Thus, they are also witnesses. There are also witnesses who, through the act of witnessing, become victims (Caruth, 1995, p. 102). Trauma can be categorised into physical trauma and psychic trauma, though the two frequently overlap with each other. This chapter focuses on psychic trauma. Judith Herman (1992) states that “traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death” (p. 33). Physical violence can cause not only physical trauma but also psychic trauma which may take the form of fears of injury, harm, and death. Current scholarship primarily deals with psychic trauma involving “intense personal suffering” (Caruth, 1995, p. vii) which remains in victims’/witnesses’ memories. Ruth Leys (2000) describes psychic trauma as “the hysterical shattering of the personality consequent on a situation of extreme terror or fright” (p. 7). Examining the psychic function of trauma, she continues to claim that “[t]he traumatised psyche was conceptualized as an apparatus for registering the blows to the psyche outside the domain of ordinary awareness” (ibid.), suggesting that trauma does not fall into and cannot be understood by ordinary awareness. Psychic trauma and the memory of trauma are so intense that “it refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually re-experienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present” (p. 2). Trauma blurs the distinction between the past and present, turning the act of remembering the past into reliving the past. Trauma that “refuses to be represented as past” can be viewed as a kind of haunting because, as Gordon (2008) puts it, haunting is “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” (p. xvi). What we can infer here is that trauma as a kind of haunting entails repressed memory and remembering, which are the main themes of the two texts: Birds of Passage represents trauma caused by racial discrimination

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2 Haunting as Trauma in Birds of Passage and Her Father’s Daughter

more than one hundred years ago and remembered in the present while Her Father’s Daughter represents trauma caused by political oppression in Cambodia more than forty years ago and also remembered in the present. Dominick LaCapra (2001), in his Writing History, Writing Trauma, categorises trauma into historical trauma and trans-historical (structural) trauma. He claims that historical trauma is “related to particular events that do indeed involve losses” (p. 80). This emphasises the specificity of historical trauma because only some individuals or people such as the characters in the selected texts experience certain traumatic historical events such as wars, riots, and genocide in which the victims/witnesses may suffer injury or/and the loss of family members or/and friends. Historical losses also facilitate identity formation based on a “shared pathological public sphere” or “wound culture” (p. 64). Identity formed on shared traumatic experiences always bears the scars produced by the darkness of society and history. Different from historical trauma, structural trauma is beyond historical specificity and, as LaCapra suggests, can happen to anyone (p. 79) as it is “related to (even correlated with) trans-historical absence (absence of/at the origin) and appears in different ways in all societies and all lives” (p. 78). Structural trauma includes the loss of a beloved, separation from family, etc. As structural trauma is non-specific and universal, it may give the victims/witnesses an impression that they, as human beings, are doomed to suffer such trauma. However, it also needs to be noted that historical trauma and structural trauma can be mutually converted into as “structural trauma (like absence) is not an event but an anxiety-producing condition of possibility related to the potential for historical traumatization” (p. 82). Historical trauma entails structural trauma as war or genocide involve killings, deaths, the loss of a beloved, and separation from family. In the process of the conflation of historical and structural traumas, loss and absence are also conflated. LaCapra claims that “[w]hen absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community” (p. 46). However, such identity confirmation based only on experiencing or/and witnessing traumatic events may not be stable, especially after the event is left behind as time moves on. He further claims that “[w]hen loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately generalised rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia” (ibid.). This conversion accompanies the victims/witnesses during the process of the change from historical trauma to structural trauma, giving them, as analysed above, a sense of being doomed to suffer permanently unresolvable internal trauma. Addressing trauma and repressed memory, theorists such as Susan Rubin Suleiman (2008) “believe firmly in the theory of dissociation … repressed memory, or traumatic amnesia” (p. 277), suggesting that the consciousness of victims/witnesses may dissociate itself from the memory of violence by forgetting it. However, Richard J. McNally (2003) argues that people tend to remember traumatic events: First, people remember horrific experiences all too well. Victims are seldom incapable of remembering their trauma. Second, people sometimes do not think about disturbing events for long periods of time, only to be reminded of them later. (p. 2)

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Victims/witnesses always remember “horrific experiences” and trauma as these experiences refuse to be forgotten or repressed, making themselves known in the present. Leys (2000) addresses recalling “the original traumatogenic event” and claims that trauma, or the experience of the traumatized subject, can be understood as involving a kind of hypnotic imitation or identification in which, precisely because the victim cannot recall the original traumatogenic event, she is fated to act it out or in other ways imitate it (p. 298)

There are reasons that remembering traumatic experiences become complicated. Firstly, the experiences are too frightening to become “part of the ordinary memory system” (ibid.), thus the memory of the experiences exists in disorder or fragments. Secondly, remembering the past involves representing the past. When the memory of traumatic experiences is fragmented and the experiences are so frightening that they become manifest and some other details may be forgotten or repressed, the attempted representation of the experiences can be affected by “imitative-hypnotic suggestibility” which leads to “the ‘fabrication’ of more or less false memories” (p. 299). In this kind of attempted representation, the reality and the fabrication are blurred so the represented reality tends to be less real while the fabricated becomes more real. Though victims/witness always tend to remember “horrific experiences”, it is human nature to try to avoid remembering traumatic experiences. Whether the memory of traumatic experiences is real or fabricated, victims/witnesses postulate that “the memory of these traumas is unacceptable or frightening” and “use the defense mechanism of repression to remove the memory from consciousness” (Kolk, 1987, p. 182). We can see this as an instinctual repression of traumatic memory. As argued above, trauma or the memory of traumatic experiences are incongruent with the normal function of consciousness. Thus, “the defense mechanism” will “remove the memory from consciousness” (ibid.). This process can also be termed “dissociation” which means that the memory of traumatic experiences is dissociated from victims/witnesses’ memories. Nicholas T. Rand (1994) terms this state “psychic aphasia” (p. 17) which means victims/witnesses’ consciousness is silenced from remembering and retelling traumatic experiences. The two texts to be analysed in this chapter involve colonial and postcolonial migration and political oppression. Thus, the external oppression in the texts are mainly caused by colonial power, political persecution, and (forced) migration. Victims/witnesses may be traumatised by an event, but an abusive system of power can exert its influence over a long period of time as if a similar traumatic event keeps replaying itself, or, their impact on victims/witnesses can be felt long after the event. In this sense, the fear of the traumatic experiences and abusive power silence the victims/witnesses. The impact of colonial oppression can be felt through constant traumatic events caused by colonial power, but its long-term impact is more felt by “the oppressive controls of the other forms of social life” (Douglas 1996, p. 42). We

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can sense here that a kind of hegemonic power attempts to transform the other forms of social life in terms of its own criteria and its view of order by marginalising the colonised and denying them “their rightful place in society” (Visser, 2014, p. 126). This marginalisation of the disempowered and disadvantaged is a long-term process based on unequal power relations. Colonialism does involve political oppression, but the latter has a broader range including war, “torture, prison, disappearance, execution, and exile” (Jelin, 2003, p. 77). Abusive systems of power cause not only direct physical and psychic trauma to individuals but also can change “networks and social relations” (p. 82). Oppression can also be experienced in the context of migration. Migration as part of human history is generally defined as “the geographical movement from one place to another” (Küey 2015, p. 58). However, the issue of migration always goes beyond simple geographical relocation. Küey addresses migrants’ status of being the Other as we tend to categorise ourselves into in-groups and out-groups, me and others or us and them (p. 58). The core of this categorisation is a powerful group in an advantaged position which marginalises migrants as the disadvantaged have different cultures, views, and values. Migrants may suffer “a profound sense of grief and loss of leaving one culture behind” and “a sense of loss of belonging” (Ventriglio and Bhugra, 2015, p. 71). The status of being the Other and a sense of loss, plus language and cultural barriers, may silence migrants in an adopted culture. In addition to memory repression, intergenerational trauma can also silence victims/witnesses. Trauma can be transmitted from one generation to another, giving rise to the concept of postmemory. Mariana Hirsch (1999) develops the term “postmemory” which originally represents “the second-generation memory of the Holocaust” (p. 8). However, she (2012) also argues that we have no “literal ‘memories’ of others’ experiences” and “one person’s lived memories cannot be transformed into another’s” (p. 31). Thus, postmemory is more about the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up (Hoffman 2005, p. 5).

The “memory” of the traumatic past which the “generation after” can get access to consists only of “abrupt but broken refrains” of “stories, images, and behaviours” (p. 9). The second generation grows up in a different context from that of the traumatic experiences, which further hinders them from better understanding the past and the victims/witnesses from telling the traumatic past to their children. Apart from the structural disorder or chaos of fragmented remainders of the traumatic past, Gayatri C. Spivak (1992) also proposes the concept of “historical withholding” as another factor preventing victims/witnesses from passing on their traumatic memory. She addresses the trans-generational passing-on of traumatic memory from mother to daughter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and finds that “a certain historical withholding intervenes” (p. 792). Parents’ withholding of past trauma is not only out of human nature but also because of “an intergenerational memorial fabric that is severed by catastrophe”

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(Hirsch, 2012, p. 32). When the past traumatic experiences are extremely frightening, the victims/witnesses attempt to delete the memory from their mind, let alone pass it on to the next generation. However, “historical withholding” touches the level of despair and a sense of helplessness in which victims/witnesses attempt to forget the traumatic events but are not able to and attempt to protect their children from the impact of the trauma but are not able to either. In this sense, the traumatic past becomes a ghost dissociated from but also dwelling in the victims/witnesses’ mind as if they were possessed by it. When the memory of traumatic experiences cannot be truly or fully represented, it has to keep replaying itself in an illogical way. The vehement internal struggle is displayed through odd symptoms. This process is termed Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which, as Ruth Leys (2002) puts it, is “fundamentally a disorder of memory” (p. 2). Leys also claims that [t]he idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories (ibid.).

The past event is so traumatic that the memory about it becomes illogical, fragmented, and overwhelming by keeping replaying itself. Victims/witnesses are lost in and possessed by those fragmented memories. However, some experts also argue that PTSD is not completely discontinuous by presenting it as “a timeless diagnosis, the culmination of a lineage that is seen to run from the past to the present in an interrupted yet continuous way” (p. 3). This assumption reflects the controversy of PTSD: on the one hand, victims/witnesses attempt to forget or repress the traumatic past; on the other, they cannot help keep rehearsing the past. PTSD is the culminate and explosive product of the accumulation of the dilemma between forgetting/ repressing and remembering. Forgetting/repressing and remembering trauma also lead to another feature of PTSD—belatedness. Writing about the effects of the Holocaust, Leys claims that “it was not until some years after the war that survivors and psychiatrists alike began to be aware of the devastating long-term psychic and medical costs of the experience of the concentration camps” (p. 15). When PTSD does not occur, it does not mean that the traumatic memory has been erased. Instead, the memory is repressed like a ghost beneath the victims/witnesses’ consciousness and may reemerge when incurred. Addressing PTSD, LaCapra (2001) elaborates on acting out and working through the past (p. 47). He argues that “mourning might be seen as a form of working through and melancholia as a form of acting out” (p. 65). Mourning is the memory of historical loss while melancholia is caused by permanent absence as if there were no past. We need to be focused on victims/witnesses’ unwillingness to remember the traumatic past as human beings tend to forget/repress unhappy moments. LaCapra claims that “the past is performatively regenerated or relived as if it were fully present

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rather than represented in memory and inscription and it hauntingly returns as the repressed” (p. 63). This indicates that acting out relies on corporeal performances to release the accumulation of repressed traumatic memories so the past becomes alive in the present. He further argues that “in acting out, tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene” and “[a]ny duality (or double inscription) of time (past and present or future) is experientially collapsed” (p. 21). In acting out, the distinctions between the past, present, and future are blurred by victims/witnesses reliving the traumatic past which, as a repressed or forgotten memory, invades the present. LaCapra also argues that victims/witnesses can be divided: “in acting out, one relives the past as if one were the other, including oneself as another in the past—one is fully possessed by the other’s ghost” (p. 148). This reifies the abstract past as the other self always living in the past, giving rise to two seemingly split halves dwelling in two separate but conflated realms. When we say that the past is invading the present, it is in fact the ghost of the other or the past self invading the present to haunt the living self. As the past is too traumatic and the sense of a natural flow of time is disrupted, the invasion of the traumatic past or the other self cannot follow a logical order and cannot be a one-off haunting. Instead, the past and the other self must continue to invade the present to form “the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes” (p. 58). It is this repetitive return of the traumatic past that Gordon (2008) refers to as haunting: “haunting is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” (xvi). The unresolved social violence may never be completely resolved so it has to repeat its return until time soothes it. Addressing his notion of “working through” trauma, LaCapra (2001) claims that it is “an articulatory practice: to the extent one works through trauma … one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one” (p. 22). Working through trauma is an attempt to remember trauma through consciously retelling or/and writing down the traumatic experiences so victims/witnesses are aware of the distinction between the past and present. Working through traumatic experiences includes rituals of mourning which “can viably come to terms with (without ever fully healing or overcoming) the divided legacies, open wounds, and unspeakable losses of a dire past” (p. 45). Working through, in this sense, is aimed at solving the repressed or unresolved problems caused by the past traumatic events. He also elaborates on working through as follows: [t]his complicated past was now to be disclosed truthfully in order for a process of working it through to be historically informed and to have some chance of being effective ritually and politically in creating both a liveable society and a national collectivity. (p. 44)

Working through trauma, as a possible solution to acting out, entails the attempt to truthfully remember/represent historical loss and reconcile to the traumatic past as a form of conscious mourning so victims/witnesses can be relieved of its burden. Furthermore, “it is via the working through that one acquires the possibility of being an ethical and political agent” (p. 144). Working through equips victims/witnesses

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with a conscious mind to evaluate and judge the traumatic experiences from ethical and political perspectives. However, LaCapra also argues that in an ethical sense, working through does not mean avoidance, harmonisation, simply forgetting the past, or submerging oneself in the present. It means coming to terms with the trauma, including its details, and critically engaging the tendency to act out the past and even to recognise why it may be necessary and in certain respects desirable and at least compelling (ibid.).

This statement indicates that coming to terms with the trauma means neither forgetting the past nor exclude acting out, which has to remain as part of the process. Working through includes retelling or/and writing down the past traumatic experiences. A person who hears or/and reads this retelling may be traumatised, becoming a secondary victim/witness as “the historical past is the scene of losses that may be narrated as well as of specific possibilities that may conceivably reactivated, reconfigured, and transformed in the present or future” (p. 148). Memories of violence, death, and other traumatic experiences are passed down from one generation to another via verbal and written narratives or even through corporeal representations, which can be viewed as the trans-historical transference of trauma. LaCapra also argues that “traumatic events must involve empathic unsettlement” (p. 47), suggesting that trauma can be transferred to secondary victims/witnesses: “the virtual experience involved in empathy gives way to vicarious victimhood, and empathy with the victim seems to become an identity” (ibid.). However, this kind of identification based on “vicarious secondary victimhood” is precarious as it is questionable whether the secondary victim/witness living in a different context can truly feel and understand the trauma directly caused by some events in the past. Furthermore, retelling and writing as representation can be affected by the narrator’s personal experiences and a degree of “objectionable self-dramatisation” (p. 102) may also be added. The secondary victim/witness may resist “full identification and the dubious appropriation of the status of victim through vicarious or surrogate victimage” out of their fidelity to the real victims/witnesses (p. 71). In this sense, secondary victims/witnesses undergo not only “empathic unsettlement” but also “muted trauma” which can lead to both acting out and working through.

The Absence of a Past The beginning of Birds of Passage indicates that the protagonist Seamus has no past: every category in Seamus’s passport such as place of birth and “visible peculiarities” (Castro 1983, p. 3) is left blank. The only information is the name: Seamus O’Young. He is caught in a dilemma: “there was no country from which” he comes and “there is none to which” he can return (p. 8). This absence not only refers to an unknown nation but also refers to unknown ancestors and cultures.

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Seamus is rejected and discriminated against by European Australians. His visible characteristics are seen as signs of where his ancestors presumably came from. Wherever he goes, these signs are with him and consistently make him a target of abuse: the children in the boys’ home mock him by calling him “Ching Chong Chinaman” (p. 19); a UK customs man calls him “one of these bloody Chinese-born Australians” (p. 8); a European-Australian old man in a park shouts at him: “You bloody chink. Garn. Go back to where you come from” (p. 36). However, the ancestors of European Australians were also migrants from outside Australia. When certain visible characteristics are encoded with identification and acceptance, a person like Seamus with mixed visible characteristics is likely to be alienated. Seamus is, as Cathy Bennett (1994) claims, “haunted by his sense of difference from those around him” (p. 146). The exclamation “go back to where you come from” implies that people like Seamus do not belong to Australia and should go back to where their ancestors came from. All those people who shout racial abuse at Seamus are disconnected, but their abuse is driven by an abusive system of power which disadvantages Seamus and the like. Though he is discriminated against by European Australians, Seamus also feels the distance between the Chinese community and himself as if he were “contagious” because of his “foreignness” (Castro, 1983, p. 27). Furthermore, “the strange tones” of the people in Chinatown also isolate him (p. 8). However, it is noteworthy that Seamus takes pleasure in such dissociation (isolation) (p. 27). This can be understood as that he intentionally keeps a distance from the Chinese community who were disadvantaged in 1960s. He seems to have internalised the abusive system of power rooted in the white supremacy and its racial hierarchies, relaying the discrimination against him to the community to which he is assumed to belong. As a victim of the exclusion based on identity, Seamus admits that “[p]eople are very curious about nationality” and “will go to great lengths to pigeonhole someone” as “they think this knowledge gives them power” (Bennett, 1994, p. 11). Troubled by the power to “pigeonhole someone”, Seamus is haunted by a dual sense of non-belonging. His trauma of the absence of a past drives him, an orphan with mixed facial characteristics, into “frenzy and apprehension” (Castro, 1983, p. 3). He tries to find any records of his past by running away from the boys’ home and going to live with his adopted parents Jack and Edna Grove in an attempt to establish a sense of belonging. However, Jack and Edna are both alcohol-addicted. Jack dies from mistakenly drinking brake fluid and Edna is hospitalised, indicating that the adopted parents fail to provide him with a sense of belonging. In line with LaCapra’s (2001) claim on absence, Seamus without a past “faces the impasse of endless melancholy … and interminable aporia” (p. 46). His trauma is represented by his self-negation and self-nullification based on the fact that he does not believe Seamus O’Young is his real name (Castro, 1983, p. 3). When his unsettlement becomes unbearable, he seeks to journey back to where his past may be hidden. The only thing he knows before he finds any record of his past is that he is a victim of abuse, but his trauma is caused not only by the real abuse but also by his imagination. He assumes that people in public spaces stare at him and think “there is a bloody Chong … [g]et rid of him” (p. 37). Real abuse and an absent past strengthen his sense of non-belonging.

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Journeying back to the past is a search for the roots of his unsettlement as well as something that could complete the puzzle of his unanchored identity. Seeking a seemingly invisible and unknowable past is entering what Gordon (2008) calls a “place hidden from view” (p. 3). Journeying back to the past also turns the inborn and permanent melancholia over absence into a mourning over a specific event in the past as anxiety-producing absence foreshadows “the potential for historical traumatisation” (LaCapra, 2001, p. 82). The train Seamus rides becomes, in this sense, a time tunnel carrying him back to the darkness of the past as well as the darkness of a hidden memory of his and the like’s. He arrives in a small town “at the foot of the hills near some old gold mines” (Castro, 1983, p. 39). “[O]ld gold mines” suggest that Seamus has come near a place in the past which witnessed the life of migrant gold seekers, including those who came from China. However, Seamus does not feel that he has arrived as he is closing up on what he has been looking for but some distance still lies between him and the past. He has to rip off what he calls the “new skin” (ibid.) to fully arrive at the past. The new skin refers to the present while the past is “embedded in the soil” (ibid.). He has almost come close to his past, but ripping off the new skin will be painful as it will lead to a place where the past trauma is hidden. Seamus’s search for his past continues. In his foster parents’ house, Seamus finds “hundreds of pieces of fine yellow paper” (p. 53) used as backing to a mirror. While observing his reflection in the mirror, it falls onto the floor and cracks. He sees faint marks “looking like Chinese or Japanese script” (ibid.) on the pieces of yellow paper. “Faint marks” on fragmented paper from the back of a mirror suggest that both the record and Seamus’s identity are fragmented and filled with a sense of loss. He links the script and the yellow paper to his Asiatic features in the mirror and identifies the faint marks as Chinese or Japanese though he is not able to read Chinese. This speculative link between himself and the script is based on the imposed assessment of his facial features: his best friend once depicts him as having a moon face, slit eyes, a flat nose, and yellow skin (p. 10). Such phenotypic stereotyping is further encoded as a “cultural production” of the “visual economy of race” (Browne, 2009, p. 132). It echoes the categorisation of Chinese people as the yellow race at the end of the eighteenth century when the Empire of China was economically declining. Seamus’s self-labelling is caused by the fact that his surrounding keeps reminding him that he is Chinese because his visible characteristics are deemed to be Chinese. Such repetitive stimuli force him to accept that he is Chinese and to wonder what he lacks. He must be Chinese in comparison with European Australians in terms of Frantz Fanon’s (2008) concept of “epidermalisation” (p. xiii). The imposed racialised body and criteria of judgement are internalised as his identification of his own Chineseness and of anything that looks Chinese. His internalised racism forces him to believe that the faint marks are directly connected with himself. The dissociation between the external world and himself reinforces his association with the Chinese script.

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Historical Facts and Fictive Inventions The absence of a personal past leads to Seamus’s obsession and identification with the script. He reads, rereads, translates, and retranslates the script of the journal, placing it next to his passport, suggesting that he uses it to build a link between his present identity and the past. These pieces of paper can be viewed as the gravestones that hold “the secrets behind the lives” (The Gympie Times, 2015) of the past. He attempts to decipher the script by learning Chinese, but some of the characters have been blurred by time while some are not properly transcribed or mistranslated by someone who has read this journal. What is present to Seamus is a version which, as a palimpsest, has been rewritten and retranslated through time. The first sentence of the journal is “time has become the journey” (p. 55). Seamus journeys back to the past by train and discovers something left from the past behind the mirror. The train and mirror both become time tunnels for the encounter between Seamus and a possible past. In this respect, deciphering something left from the past also forms a time tunnel. However, as the script in small pieces is blurred by time and has been rewritten, it can be viewed as a piece of writing which includes facts as well as inventions, lapses, and gaps. In order to make it readable, what Seamus needs to do is not only to decipher what the script means but also to fill those lapses and gaps by threading the fragments into a logical temporal sequence and by inventing certain details. Though Seamus claims that “Shan’s journals, real and imagined, have merged” (p. 58), we are not sure whether some parts are imagined by Shan or by Seamus. If the journal is left by Shan who really exists, Shan and his countrymen’s trauma will never reach its full existence until it is discovered by someone in the present so that the past trauma is able to swarm into and haunt the present. If the journal is never discovered, the trauma hidden in it will always dwells in a kind of void and remains meaningless. What can be clear is that Seamus is aware of the distinction between the past and present at this moment as he is aware that he has to journey back to the past and is eager to fill his absence. He may consider it his duty to bring Shan’s sealed words to the light (p. 93). The journal, like a ghost, is awakened by Seamus’s reading and deciphering based on his own experiences. Similar incidents can be found in the two parallel story lines: Shan leaves his home after his mother dies and Seamus leaves the boys’ home to join his adopted parents; Seamus leaves his adopted home after his adopted father dies and his adopted mother is hospitalised and Shan boards a British ship bound for Australia; Seamus hears a call for help and Shan has a nightmare; Seamus arrives in Europe and Shan arrives in Australia. In addition to these parallels, Seamus has been silent for four years (p. 65) and so has Shan. Seamus is imprisoned by “books and languages” at his foster mother’s home and has learnt how to give his life direction (ibid.). During these years, his invention of Shan comes to a halt when his mind is settled by focusing on reading and learning with direction, suggesting that Shan and his experiences are being invented when Seamus has no life direction and his mind is in the state of “frenzy and apprehension” (p. 3). Seamus asks whether one has to suffer the agony of the inner life being composed of words in order to “flesh out another

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existence” (p. 65), suggesting that he attempts to invent his other self out of words. Ernst Jentsch (1997/1906) addresses the uncanny and uncertainty in storytelling and claims that “one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him” (p. 13). We are not sure whether Shan as a human being really existed in history or is only Seamus’s invention, following the latter’s direction like an automaton. The invention of Shan’s experiences based on historical facts functions as a release of Seamus’s repressed suffering through the abuse suffered in the present and the absence of a past. McNally (2003) claims, addressing the memory of trauma, that people sometimes do not recall disturbing events for long periods of time, only to be reminded of them later (p. 2), suggesting that the fragments of paper trigger Seamus’s repressed memory of the abuse suffered in the present. His trauma has been searching for an object onto which the trauma can project itself and the journal on the fragments of the yellow paper happens to become the object. Whether Shan really exits or not, trauma becomes the link that takes the place of the fantasised (or real) blood tie between Seamus and Shan and a dialogic exchange becomes possible through the link. Seamus raises a series of questions to Shan: “shall we come to know each other through such adjustments?” (Castro, 1983, p. 62) “Shan, what was your fate in that land? Why did you become silent as I have been for the last four years?” (p. 65). Recurring questions reflect not only Seamus’s anxiety to know his own past but awaken Shan and bring his story to light. It is through these repetitive inquiries that Seamus’s suppressed desire is projected onto the past, enabling Shan to narrate things that he “would not have been able or inclined to write or say initially” (LaCapra, 2001, p. 41). Once Shan begins telling his story, he is revived as if he were talking to the readers without Seamus’s intervention. In other words, Seamus recedes when Shan begins to narrate his story. The journal is purported to record Shan’s experiences of travelling from China to Australia and in Australia. Shan leads a well-to-do life in a village in China’s southern province Kwangtung (Guangdong). He is also a teacher “between a monk and an administrator” (Castro, 1983, p.1), suggesting that he is a man of knowledge with a certain social status. His father is a poet and an eccentric opium-addict, largely absent from Shan’s life. Then comes the drought-stricken year which witnesses “the second war with the foreigners” (p. 8), the Second Opium War of 1856–60. Shan sees soldiers thundering “through the village on horseback”, and groups of young men looting houses (p. 18). His mother also dies in that year. Thus, he is traumatised by the losses of wealth, social status, mother, and home. Having to look for an alternative life overseas, Shan boards a British clipper bound for Australia. After the ship departs, “this experience of China receding from the faces of her [China’s] men, smiles breaking out on their lips, memories stored away for the future” (p. 31). They leave China in the hope of making up for losses by finding gold and a bright future. However, they are not aware that Australia is a colony settled and governed by the U.K. which leads two Opium Wars against their country. Their misery in China is partially caused by a series of unfair treaties imposed on China by the U.K. as well as other imperialist nations. As a result of the wars and unfair

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treaties, China was turned into a subaltern nation and so were its people rendered subaltern, foreshadowing a dim future for those Chinese gold seekers as their status as the subaltern will remain in Australia. This is perhaps why Shan “cannot share their happiness” (p. 57) when all other Chinese gold seekers on the ship are happy with the news that they will arrive in Australia. Being the only literate among all his fellow men, he may have sensed that there would be more suffering ahead given their poor living conditions on the ship. Chinese gold seekers’ experiences in Australia prove Shan’s premonition. They are tortured not only by changeable weather and rugged roads but also by racial abuse and attacks. Some even lose their lives. Shan feels obliged to write down the traumatic experiences “for somebody who can understand” as “every single Chinaman aboard this ship is illiterate” (p. 57). Knowledge and language competence not only endow him with “the privilege of being the spokesman” (p. 49) for his people but also make him the only recorder of the experiences. The recorded experiences can be preserved and rediscovered so they will not be obliterated from history. On the ship, the death of the old man is caused by poor living conditions below deck and the lack of enough food and fresh air, but the ship master’s main concern is “a disease called cholera” (ibid.) as Chinese were vilified as “the source of various diseases” (Welch, 2003, p. 194) and diseases have been used to demonise particular groups throughout history. Eliminating Chinese gold seekers in order to purify Australia became an established practice on the goldfields and attacks against them were thus rationalised and gained the support of European gold seekers. Then attacks escalated into overt riots and killings. The killing of a Shanghainese gold seeker is recorded by Shan: “[a] rope flew down over his head” (Castro 1983, p. 111) and he is hauled to death by horses. The riot in Lambing Flat is also mentioned: “A brass band led the mob into the battle. They spurred their horses into the tents … A fire was started … the rain smelt like blood. Old men and cripples were trampled by horses” (p. 133). While Shan himself may be a fictional character, his experiences are based on historical facts. Shan leaves his hometown in Kuwangtung (Guangdong) for Australia in 1856 (p. 1) and travels to Robe (p. 78), Ballarat (ibid.), Bendigo (p. 98), Burrangong (p. 135), and Bathurst (p. 151); the living conditions (sleeping below deck) on British ships (p. 31) are poor; an old man dies on board and is buried in the sea (p. 55); “[a] license of £1 a month” is charged to every Chinese gold seeker (p. 76); they are discriminated against by European gold seekers and the anti-Chinese resentment evolves into riots (pp. 107–119); an anti-Chinese riot breaks out in Lambing Flat near Burrangong in June 1861 (p.133); Mary Young (an Irish woman) stays with Shan (pp. 122–124) for some time. All these events can be traced in various historical records. It needs to be noted that historical writing does record historical events/ facts, but it normally presents only years, names of places, approximate numbers of casualties, and general and objective descriptions. The traumatic effect which historical documents are able to generate is limited. LaCapra (2001) addresses the possibilities of the representation of historical losses and argues that “they may be narrated as well as of specific possibilities that may conceivably be reactivated, reconfigured, and transformed in the present or future” (p. 148). Inventing characters and details is one such possibility. Fictionalising historical writing on traumatic

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events increases the possibility of historical trauma being transformed into transgenerational trauma by turning the record of traumatic experiences into storable memory. Shan’s story is a mixture of historical facts and Seamus’s personal experiences. The description of the discrimination against and the torture of Chinese gold seekers is partially fictionalised such as the chase and torture of Shan and his fellow countrymen by an Irishman named Clancy who used to have a relationship with an Irish woman, Mary Young. However, she later becomes Shan’s lover. Cathy Bennett (1994) sees Clancy as “a symbol of Australian nationalism” as “he is a survivor of the Eureka Stockade1 and bears the name of Paterson’s2 romantic hero of the Outback3 ” and “[t]hrough this character, the image of the Australian hero is explored and the notion of a tradition of Australian egalitarianism is questioned” (148). Though Clancy in the text is also a migrant to Australia, the image of Clancy in Banjo Paterson’s poem “Clancy of the Overflow” has been regarded as “the ideal Aussie bushman” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2014). In this sense, Clancy in the text, representing the European Australians, may view himself as the inheritor and protector of the Australian land and thus “directs his anger about the failure of the Eureka Stockade towards the Chinese gold diggers” (Bennett, 1994, p. 148) who are believed to threaten his possession of the pastoral land as well as European women. Clancy’s action is thus not only out of racial discrimination but also out of jealousy. Clancy shouts at the Chinese gold seekers “No gold! Go back to where you came from” (Castro, 1983, p. 85), in the way that the old man in the park shouts at Seamus. Interestingly, the brother of Seamus’s foster father Jack is named Clancy. He inherits his brother’s property and stays with Edna. Seamus regards Edna as his mother substitute and sanctuary, but Clancy turns up to take Edna away from him, in the way that Clancy attempts to take Mary Young from Shan. In Shan’s story, however, the opposite happens: Mary leaves Clancy and runs away with Shan, later giving birth to 1

Clare Wright (2013) describes the Eureka Stockade as follows: “At 3 am on Sunday 3 December 1854, a band of British troops and police stormed the rough barricades recently erected by a mob of armed miners. A few days earlier, the diggers had burned their mining licenses in protest against the tyrannical rule of local authorities and pledged, in the words of their hastily appointed leader, Peter Lalor, to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties. The simple fortification of timber, barrels, and upturned carts was intended to protect unlicensed miners from arrest. In the twenty-minute armed conflict that followed the surprise military attack, at least four soldiers and twenty-seven civilians were killed. The rebel stronghold was taken, and their blue and white flag–-bearing the symbol of the Southern Cross–-hauled to the ground. Following the shortlived battle, authorities continue to harass people within close proximity to the barricades, fearing that renegades might be hiding in surrounding tents. Home and business were torched, suspected rebels and their protectors were pursued and cut down, hundreds were arrested. This event we have come to know as the Eureka Stockade.” (pp. 2–3). 2 “Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson (1864–1941), poet, solicitor, journalist, war correspondent and soldier, was born on 17 February 1864 at Narrambla near Orange [in New South Wales, Australia]” (Semmler 1988). 3 “Banjo Paterson’s poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, published in 1889, contrasted the lives of men enjoying the freedom of the bush and its ‘vision splendid sunlit plains extended’ against that of the city dweller working in a ‘dingy little office’ breathing ‘the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city’.” (Bollen et al., 2008, p. 18).

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a child with black eyes. If Shan is Seamus’s invention, the former makes up for the latter’s loss through a reversal of events. Seamus, who is impotent, seeks to rebuild his wounded ego and regain his lost potency through Shan. Seamus channels his unspeakable trauma through Shan who manages to survive poor living conditions and racial attacks and successfully avenges himself by killing his abuser Clancy. In the competition over the Australian land, the Chinese man Shan who is traumatised by the loss of his country and home defeats the Irishman Clancy who claims Australia to be his country and home. However, both Shan and Clancy may be invented through Seamus’s imagination. In comparison with Shan who takes revenge with courage on those who hurts him, Seamus is weak, avoiding a confrontation with Clancy who takes possession of Edna as well as her house. Shan’s narration is calm and matter-of-fact, without any complaints or criticism, reflecting his “fatalism” (p. 137). However, his repressed trauma can be detected through the descriptions of events and the historical facts as well as through parallels with Seamus’s experiences. The next section will focus on Seamus’s post-traumatic disorder caused by his suffering in the present and Shan’s past.

Post-Traumatic Effects Seamus is traumatised by his own experiences of loss and absence as well as by Shan’s experiences partially invented based on the journal. Seamus directs the trauma inwards and transforms it into a kind of self-denigration by labelling himself “a victim and a cannibal” (p. 83), which is a post-traumatic effect featuring a “split or dissociated” mind (Leys, 2000, p. 2). He is a primary victim of racial discrimination and a secondary victim of the historical traumatic events experienced by Shan and the like. Seamus is unable to release his trauma which leads him to behaving in exaggerating and ironic ways such as eating a frog which is a laboratory material (Castro, 1983, p. 83) and telling the headmaster of a school that he has Thalassaemia and emphasising that “it’s highly contagious” (p. 87). As a victim he should have gained sympathy from others and it is obvious that he is aware of the abuse against him, he responds, however, to it by stigmatising himself. A sense of suffocation and deeper trauma is hidden behind the seeming abnormality and madness. As stated above, the first-person narration is replaced by the third-person after Shan arrives in Australia. Seamus as both a direct victim and a secondary victim projects his own trauma onto Shan whose experience is figured as Seamus’s “traumatic memories” (Leys, 2000, p. 3). It is in this timeless context that some post-traumatic effects emerge. Timelessness means the past and the present coexist and interact with each other. Time brings Shan to the present and enables Seamus to live “the way old people live, in the past” (Castro, 1983, p. 93). He notices changes in his facial characteristics caused by premature aging when he looks into a mirror (p. 86). It is possible that the overwhelming trauma causes physiological decline in his body. It is also possible that his sense of time is disordered by trauma so that he feels as if he had aged and

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sees a man with grey hair and a wrinkled face in the mirror. Apart from premature aging, sexual impotence is another physiological post-traumatic effect. Premature aging produces a decline of normal physiological functions due to the loss of vitality and virility, but Seamus’s impotence is more socially, culturally, and historically produced, as is his premature aging. He has been virtually castrated by the absence of a past, by his experience of being abused, as well as by Shan’s trauma. Seamus and his wife Fatima have a non-sexual relationship as “immense gratification was possible only through absences” of touch, proximity, and any sexual contact (p. 80). He spies on Fatima in the way that he has earlier spied on his foster mother Edna and on the Chinese women factory workers in order to derive sexual gratification as well as “power and control” (p. 81). Voyeurism may be a means for Seamus to regain sexual and social power, but Freud (1905) sees voyeurism as a sort of “sexual pathology” (p. 149) and claims that “the force that opposes voyeurism” is shame (p. 157). Seamus has not been physically abused, but his absence of a past, his suffering of verbal abuse, and Shan’s traumatic experiences cause psychological trauma which in turn produces physiological traumatic effects. The psychological effect Seamus suffers is “paranoid schizophrenia” (p. 99), suggesting living as two halves or in two realms. As analysed above, he takes over the narration of Shan’s experiences and blurs the demarcation between the past and the present after Shan arrives in Australia, for example, he says that he has “a fairly clear picture of Shan struggling towards Ballarat in the heat of the day” (p. 80). While Shan endures hardship on his journey in Australia, Seamus is trekking through his mental hardship. Seamus identifies with Shan, and may be inventing Shan’s arduous journey. In Shan’s story, the racial attack against Chinese gold seekers reaches its peak when the Shanghainese, one of Shan’s companions, is killed by Clancy and his followers. Thus, Shan runs for his life. In Seamus’s present, he locks himself in his room and murmurs words that sound like Chinese (p. 100). His normal reading of Shan’s journal and other texts is turned into vehement and uncontrollable acting out as the empathetic unsettlement in Seamus becomes increasingly stronger. As LaCapra (2001) writes, “[i]n acting out, tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene” (p. 21). Furthermore, trans-historical trauma distorts the linear temporality of the past, present, and future and entraps “us in the prison house of repetition compulsion” (Schwab, 2010, p. 2). The traumatic event is played and replayed in Seamus’s mind in the time–space in which those events took place. Thus, Shan is revived, incarnated in Seamus who in his own body experiences the past violence against Chinese gold seekers. Seamus tries to resist it but fails, which brings him “closer to suicide” (p. 110). He wonders whether the suffering is the cost that he has to pay to “flesh out another existence” and whether Shan is “his reason for being” (p. 65). He excavates the fragments of Shan hidden in passages of different books and assembles them into “a good picture” (p. 52). At the height of his trauma, Seamus is hospitalised. After he is discharged, he stays at one of his neighbours Mrs. Bernhard (Anna)’s home and keeps murmuring phrases in Chinese. He writes: “A Chinaman, when he is ruined, destroys himself” (p. 149). The traumatic experiences of thousands of Chinese gold seekers like Shan

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are still hidden and history consists of puzzles that may never be resolved. The personal journal is incapable of filling the absence, but it has functioned as the first step to rip off the new skin. Still being haunted by the past discrimination, he is so engrossed in Shan’s story (whether Shan really exists or not) and so traumatised that he is not able to distinguish between the past and the present and between reality and imagination. Seamus is psychologically and physiologically traumatised and in need of a sanctuary. Women, representing motherhood, become his sanctuary: “[t]he first thing he experienced when he was allowed to leave the hospital was the affection and the company of women” (p. 146). His foster mother Edna, his wife Fatima, and Anna move into Seamus’s house and take care of him together. Edna and Anna’s husbands have both passed away and this absence of males other than Seamus himself reflects his fear of other males and his desire for exclusive possession of women. He has earlier lived for three years with Edna who teaches him all she knows (p. 59). He reads many books under her guidance and learns how to give his life direction (p. 65). During these three years, he becomes more focused on the present and less unsettled by the absence of a past. He also develops feelings towards Edna. However, she is still addicted to alcohol and sleeps for much of the time. In this respect, she resembles Shan’s father who is a poet and an opium-addict. Fatima, Seamus’ wife, maintains a non-sexual relationship with him but cultivates a friendship with Edna. However, neither Edna nor Fatima can be the sanctuary Seamus has been seeking. It is Anna who finally comes to Seamus’s rescue, releasing him from his “other self” (p. 155), almost curing his sexual impotence. He seems to have found sanctuary in Anna’s arms. At this point, premature aging, sexual impotence, and paranoid schizophrenia are conflated. Once he is released from the other self, it seems that all these post-traumatic effects are no longer haunting him. However, Seamus shouts “Edna, Edna” when he is in Anna’s arms and Edna is always in sleep, implying his desire that Edna becomes his ultimate sanctuary and mother substitute will never be fulfilled and Edna’s role in his life is over (ibid.). Thus, he will be long or permanently haunted by the absence of a mother as well as a past. Similarly, in Shan’s story, he returns to China only to find his father and home gone, his country decaying, and his loss will never be recovered. At the end of the text, Shan seems to have “just woken from a dream” and feels “the presence of the future” (p. 156). This adds to the readers’ uncertainty: we don’t know whether this is Seamus in present-day Australia who invents Shan’s story or whether it is Shan in the past who dreams about the future. In the latter case, both Seamus and Shan’s stories can be read as a record of Shan’s dream based on the trauma triggered by his mother’s death, his father’s absence, and his decaying country inflicted by war and famine. Following this logic, the text then becomes a record of Shan’s posttraumatic dream in which he is able to travel back and forth between the present and the future. Furthermore, Shan even encounters Seamus who is the descendant and reader after Shan kills Clancy with a meat-cleaver as revenge for their abuse of and attack on Chinese gold seekers as well as for taking Mary Young away from him. Through the act of revenge, Shan’s trauma is released and his journey in Australia is completed. It is at this moment that he sees a blind man (Seamus) “lying naked in the sun” (p. 143). It is thus possible to read either Seamus as Shan’s invention or Shan as

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Seamus’s invention. For Shan, killing Clancy is the only way to survive; for Seamus, killing his opponents in his imagination is the only way to release his obsession. Trauma has nearly stripped their veneer of civilisation and Seamus reaches for “the only article of clothing left to him” to “maintain the last small vestiges of human civilisation” (p. 144). Thus, a sense of shame emerges to haunt him. Shan’s journey in Australia is completed and so is the journey in Seamus’s conscious and unconscious mind. Haunting as trauma arises from the uncertainty whether it is Seamus who returns to the past through trauma or it is Shan who comes to the present through trauma. Two spaces separated by time are conflated through shared trauma, twisting the sense of certainty, and making multilayered world possible.

Father’s Overprotection and Silenced Trauma In Her Father’s Daughter, Alice’s father is haunted by his experiences of torture and easy death in 1970s’ Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge and casts an overprotective veil over his children. He always remembers how cheap life and easy death were then. Thus, he sets a curfew, ruling that all his daughters must return home before 8 p.m., and he will not go to bed until all are home. He shuts all doors and windows tight before going to bed and would like to see his daughters stay at home rather than move out. He thinks of death when he sees his daughters “mucking around with plastic bags” as “his kids had no idea how easy it was to die” (Pung, 2011, p. 107). Ten years after the family arrived in Australia, Alice’s mother “decided it was time” and bought a new knife for the first time (p. 94). However, her father still hid “all the knives in the kitchen drawers every evening before bed” and sawed off “the pointy tip” (ibid.) of the new knife with another knife. With easy death still haunting his mind, he even orders the Australian Legal Will Kit as soon as his eldest daughter turns eighteen (p. 99). What Alice’s father does amounts to building fences around home so his daughters can feel safe and her father expects that these fences will somehow be able to move with them wherever they go. When Alice was young, her father did not speak of his reasons for doing so and Alice did not understand it and thought it interfering: “her parents were not like other parents” (p. 99). As she grows older, she began to realise that her father “saw depravity in places where other people wouldn’t even bother to look” and “his world was peopled with paedophiles and perverts” (ibid.). She realises that her father has gone through something that many others have not, an experience which has shaped what he is and does. His behaviours may be viewed as paranoid: “[e]verything he does is permeated by inordinate levels of anxiety” (Pung, 2012, p. 45). However, he currently lives in a relatively safe and friendly society of Australia in which people do not need to be deeply worried about danger, harm, and impending death. Despite this, Alice’s father still sees dangers lurking everywhere around his daughters as his mind is still haunted by the frightening memories of the past. Reliving these experiences turns him into who he is. Though he keeps silent about the reasons for being overprotective of his daughters long after his family have

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migrated to Australia as refugees, keeping the past to himself does not delete it from his memory. The past visits and revisits him, especially when incidents in the present trigger his memory, such as his children playing with plastic bags, coming home late, or being approached by a man. The past violence keeps reminding him of easy death and finds expression in various forms of interference in his children’s life. The incident that strikes Alice most keenly is when he finds an employee messing with Alice and fires him, “apoplectic with rage” (Pung, 2011, p. 95). This was the first time that she saw her father so enraged and she looked at him “like he was the monster” (p. 109). Alice later realises that her father has dreamt of “Black Bandits pulling a little girl away” and smashing her back of the head of one of them with an axe (p. 105). He is, as LaCapra (2001) argues, reliving the past as if he were “fully possessed by the other’s ghost” (p. 148), fantasising that those Black Bandits pulling his own daughters away. The more he resists the reemergence of the repressed memory, the more likely he is to have the past “performatively regenerated or relived” (p. 63) and act out the memory in the form of overprotection. At such moments, according to LaCapra, the duality of the past and present is “experientially collapsed or productive only of aporias” (p. 21). The past and the present are conflated, producing a temporal disjunction, but acting out the repressed memory as an implosion does not relieve the trauma. Once one implosion is over, another begins to brew. Alice’s father has repressed his memory of the past for a long time and “never wanted his children to know” (Pung, 2011, p. 109). He never mentions “death” or “si4 (death)” as he wants to deny the past by keeping it to himself. Rand (1994) calls this kind of silencing “psychic aphasia” (p. 17). It is also described by Hirsh (2012) as “an intergenerational memorial fabric that is severed by catastrophe” (p. 32). He later reflects that he and his wife have tried “their best to give the children a happy childhood, but he realised that … they had replicated life as they knew it to be—filled with knuckle-cracking cruelties that were inevitable” (p. 99). His memory has been imbued with death and he is not able to keep scenes of death (of animals as well as human beings) out of his children’s reach. A stray cat wandering around Alice’s parents’ house dies after giving birth to kittens which are later cannibalised by “their aunties and uncle” (p. 98). This is the first time Alice and her siblings see death and its “knuckle-cracking cruelties” (ibid.). The fact that the kittens are eaten by their relatives reminds Alice’s father that a person under the Khmer Rouge was betrayed by his/her family. His refusal to work through the past violence leads to a silenced trauma which may be as traumatic as the violence itself. She senses his unsettlement and “a chaos of emotion” associated with his experiences of trauma (Hirsch 2008, p. 111) through his behaviours projected onto her in the name of love. Alice also finds another reason for her father’s silenced trauma: being ChineseCambodian in Australia. As members of Chinese-Cambodian diaspora and refugees in Australia, Alice’s father and his fellow people live in “tightly coiled” communities to support each other, restoring each other’s fragmented cultural identity. They have been “driven from place to place”, “destined never to feel a sense of belonging”, and “knowing they would never be a part unless they kept themselves apart and hid 4

The Chinese character 死 means die or death and its pronunciation is similar to that of si.

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what was most important of their heritage inside the home” (Pung, 2011, p. 194). As quoted above, diaspora is described by Walker Connor (1998) as “that segment of a people living outside the homeland” (p. 16), a position between the homeland and the adopted nation. Lily Cho (2007) also asserts that “to be diasporic is to be marked by loss” (p. 19). Alice’s grandparents fled from China to Cambodia in the late 1940s to avoid war and famine. Horrified by the rule of the Khmer Rouge, the Pung family came to Australia as refugees in the late 1970s. The Pung family had always been in exile before arriving in Australia where they finally found shelter. Alice’s father wished to be reborn on this new land. However, as Chinese in Cambodia which used to be a French colony and as Chinese-Cambodians in Australia which used to be a British colony, they have made survival their primary concern by focusing on their business and livelihood as well as by pushing the past to the back of their memory. “They led tightly coiled lives, in tiny communities” (Pung, 2011, p. 194) and ensconced themselves in Australia where they are physically settled but not incorporated in the adopted culture. Lily Cho (2007) also claims that “diaspora brings together communities which are not quite nation, not quite race, not quite religion, not quite homesickness, yet they still have something to do with nation, race, religion, longings for homes which may not exist” (p. 13). As Alice’s family have been economically and culturally unsettled, they are unwilling and unable to speak of their loss. Their subjectivity is affected by dislocation, and they are destined to always exist on the silent margins. After the experiences of serial political unrest, they do not have the power to control their destiny and can only drift in the vortex of political unrest and be swept towards places they may have never expected. Alice’s father is well educated and able to speak English and French. However, such knowledge was useless against the overwhelming abusive systems of power which have driven them from place to place and marginalised them. For the Pung family, their life in Australia is restricted: Alice’s mother would “closet herself in the garage, working, chipping away at the decades with her peeling tools and her peeled hands, making her jewellery” (Pung, 2011, p. 77). To them, Australia is nothing but the small communities of their own people—Chinese Cambodians. Alice’s father’s trauma may also be silenced by the cultural tradition that his family inherits. Brought up in different nations and cultures, parents and children develop different social behaviours. Visiting Cambodia, Alice and her sister shake hands with and smile at strangers, while their father believes this behaviour is “too foreign” (p. 204). “Too foreign” here means that his daughters do not behave in accordance with the Cambodian and Chinese (Confucian) traditions which impose self-restraint, introspection, and a sense of strict hierarchy. Alice’s father was born in Cambodia, a Buddhist nation, and is used to enduring tribulation without complaint: “One thing those who came from Cambodia were good at was keeping quiet, and listening” (p. 112). In line with the Buddhist worldview, “silence and acceptance in the face of suffering is an index of strength rather than weakness or insufficiency” (Kidron, 2010, p. 211). Thus, as a Chinese-Cambodian refugee in Australia, Alice’s father believes “you need a short-term memory” “to live a happy life” (Pung, 2011, p. 5) in order to attempt to forget the past trauma. He also says to himself “stop begging and make yourself useful” (p. 75). Similarly, Confucius (2010) encourages

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people to “require much” from themselves and “little from others” (p. 147). Alice’s father would like to focus on family business rather than speak of the past as he believes that talking leads to nothing and nowhere (Pung, 2011, p. 197). In addition to the influence of the Chinese-Cambodian traditions, the violence that Alice’s father has experienced and witnessed has destroyed his trust in strangers and made him unwilling to share his memories with others. Brewster (2017) acknowledges that there may be value in not speaking of the past and criticises the hegemonic psychological model of always working through past trauma (p. 315). When Alice and her siblings were still young, her father wanted to look forward to the future rather than to let the past haunt the family. He was probably waiting for them to grow up before telling his stories. However, silence and concealment do not pacify the trauma which invades his present as his overprotective behaviour indicates. It seems that the Chinese-Cambodian way of dealing with the past does not work and even stirs up another kind of trauma.

Remembering Violence and Narrating Trauma Alice’s father’s unsettlement is transferred to Alice via his excessive protection which turns her into a secondary victim. Troubled by her father’s strange behaviours, Alice seeks her father’s past which has been silenced and hidden at the back of his memory. However, her own experiences make it difficult for her to get access to her father’s memories. Born and educated in Australia, Alice behaves differently from the way her father does. She shakes hands with and smiles at strangers, comes home after 8 p.m., and moves out of her parents’ home, all of which reveal her trust in other people and her sense of security. Alice is unaware of violence and has language competence which enables her to move out of the diasporic community, leaving her diasporic identity behind and getting an “office job” that has “nothing to do with the family business” (Pung, 2011, p. 55). With her knowledge of English and her sense of certainty of her surroundings, she is also able to defend herself against her father’s interfering overprotection and to suspect “in a dreadful, deep-seated way, that her parents were not like other parents” (p. 99). However, despite her effort to break away from her family and her father’s overprotection, she respects the Chinese-Cambodian tradition of not speaking of trauma and criticises “whatever rubbish Western psychologists had made up to stop a person from moving on in life, to extract exorbitant sums by sitting them down and making them talk” (ibid.). Alice indicates that working through the past trauma seems to quiet the victims down to remember and narrate the past in a logical way but in fact hinders them from moving on towards the future. In other words, working through still confines the victims in the past. As a memoir, this text presents her father’s memory of the past violence, but does so through Alice’s renarration of her father’s remembered violence. Her father had kept the traumatic past to himself for a long time before sharing it with Alice. As Alice grows older, she challenges him to tell her whatever comes to his mind and

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insists that she should visit Cambodia (p. 193). It is possible that her father thinks the family has settled in Australia for more than ten years; it is possible that they no longer scramble in factories or picked fruits on farms (p. 194); it is also possible that his children come home from school speaking English (ibid.) so they may have the competence to make his repressed memory received by the public. Alice’s father’s way of sharing his traumatic memories differs from the Western psychological approach which takes the form of working through. Instead, he “took her to visit his friends in suburban houses … and they would tell her tales of survival” (Pung, 2011, pp. 110–111). Brewster (2017) argues that “the private space of the home is a repository of survivor memory and the embodied generational aftereffects of political violence” (p. 317). Telling the story of the past in “the private space of the home” turns the telling itself into a kind of trans-generational inheritance and a family ritual. In addition to her father as storyteller, several other storytellers as victims-witnesses are able to create a relatively complete picture of her father’s experiences of the violence that occurred before Alice was born. When violence is remembered, it remains in the past; when it is narrated, it is dragged from the past to the present. Remembering violence is private while narrating it makes it open to public scrutiny. Alice’s father has been living in the melancholia of repressed trauma before he can share it, but narrating it draws a distinction between the past and the present and turns melancholia into a mourning of a locatable loss in the past. The scenes of the past violence flood into the present and scramble to be the first to be told after the flood gate of repressed memory is opened. Alice’s father’s sense of loss is heightened by the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to rearrange time and create a new world. The Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot “had visions for a brave new world that would grow green over a cratered old one” (Pung, 2011, p. 115) and turned the year 1975 into Year Zero. Christian God created the world as recorded in the Old Testament and the Khmer Rouge attempted to create Year Zero in a similar way: “in the beginning, there would be only the earth and the sky” and all creatures were made “to serve the Base Man” (p. 129). The Khmer Rouge replaced the Gregorian calendar with their own calendar beginning with Year Zero and smashed all clocks and watches. In this way did they attempt to destroy history and tradition and to wipe out the past as the leader of the Khmer Rouge wanted time and history to begin with him. In addition to smashing time, the Khmer Rouge attempted to reform “city folk” into New People like “peasants who were tough and didn’t feel pain as much” (p. 153). The Khmer Rouge destroyed properties, confiscated reading glasses, and sent city folk to the countryside as they thought that property-owners and intellectuals were too soft and easily hurt. They divided people into separate all-men, all-women, and all-children work groups, attempting to turn each individual into a senseless part of a large machine. All that belonged to the past and all that was too soft and non-revolutionary had to be wiped out in the new era. After the properties and traditions had been destroyed, the city folk became New People with no past, non-thinking walking machines with holes “for the filling with food”, “for the smelling of danger”, “for the seeing of which part of your body might drop off from infection”, “to release excrement”, “for the expulsion of sex secretions”, and “for the hearing of Angkar dogma” (p. 162). The New People were

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dehumanised and objectified, only to follow the orders of Angkar which refers to the Organisation of the Khmer Rouge. In this sense, killing a person was nothing more than destroying a part of the large machine. It is therefore not surprising that the Black Bandits shouted “we don’t care about killing all of you” (p. 139). In fact, they themselves had been “atomised, separated” and “were not part of any family unit anymore” (p. 129). However, they did not shoot when they were to execute someone, instead they forced the victims to dig their final resting place. Property owners (capitalists), intellectuals, and officials of the former government were the first to perish. Anyone who disobeyed Angkar (Organisation) was to be buried. Alice’s father was often assigned to bury the dead and Alice’s Chicken Sister was ordered to bury her own brothers. At such moments, they were not only witnesses/ victims but also became part of the perpetration. It is not only because the Black Bandits needed to save bullets but also because burying the dead by some New People would transmit a signal of horror to others as “the Bandits liked having an audience” (p. 142). Thus, the New People would become tamed and there would be no trace of the dead once the burial hole was covered with dirt as if the dead had never existed. Furthermore, the flesh and bones of the dead who used to be walking machines without souls would degrade into mere fertiliser. However, a brave new world cannot be created by destroying time, cutting off the link with the past, separating family members, and persecuting people. Alice Pung comments that “when the government of a country declares that it will uproot time and start from the beginning of history, you know that there is indeed fear in a handful of dust” (p. 126). If people think they are able to uproot time, they just consider the externality of time which is represented by dates and years and shown on watches and clocks. However, they overlook other ways in which people have developed “time calculation”, “the everyday, vulgar understanding of time” as Martin Heidegger puts it (1996, p. 391). Temporality plays a key role in our experience of existence, and we are able to sense time without watches and clocks because a sense of time has been internalised as part of our consciousness. The Khmer Rouge were not aware that our internal temporality would work even without watches or clocks. The past cannot be wiped out by destroying property either. The past adhered to people and traditions as well as to property and other objects. Destroying property also destroyed the subtle fibre of everyday life and the traditions which adhered to property linking the present to the past and facilitating human existence. The visible and tangible past can be destroyed, but the invisible and intangible past in the form of people’s memories cannot be easily wiped out. The Khmer Rouge soldiers who smashed clocks and watches, destroyed properties, and persecuted people were also dehumanised and objectified. As children without knowledge and taking orders without critical thinking, they were also victims of an abusive system of power. When they tried to read documents “in their hands upside-down”, they could not read the documents and showed “distinctive fake intensity of illiteracy” (p. 134). When Chicken Sister yelled out to them that her brothers were hungry, their reply was that everyone was hungry (p. 145). The Black Bandit chairman told Alice’s father that he “would never go to the Khmer Rouge Cadre hospital” as he “almost died from that medical treatment” (p. 154). In this sense, everyone is a victim in an

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abnormal and dehumanising abusive system led by a madman and no one is able to escape trauma. Thus, Alice’s father’s memory of the past includes not only the violence against the New People but also the violence against the Khmer Rouge soldiers and their leaders. Alice’s father’s loss is also experienced in relation to time. When he met Alice’s mother in Saigon in 1979, he thought “life had gone on here, while for him it had stopped” (Pung, 2001, p. 181). He had lost four years of his life on the violent field of the Khmer Rouge base. The four years featured torments, killings, deaths, and burials which had so severely traumatised him that these scenes keep playing themselves out in his mind. Alice thus comments: “[t]he years dragged, like the leaden legs of the bodies they buried that were too heavy to lift.” (p. 144). The four years were endless cycles of persecution, killings, deaths, and burials while time was stretched out and life became endless and meaningless. This is why Alice’s father thinks he lost the four years and laments “the problem of suffering … was that there are too many senses” (p. 70) to take in various signals of violence and store them in his memory. He believes that “to live a happy life … you need a healthy short-term memory, a slate that can be wiped clean every morning” (p. 5). However, it is obvious that his memory has not been wiped out and that he is haunted by his traumatic past. He remembers the period of time as a loss not only because he lost some of his relatives and property but also because the memory is so strong and painful that it disrupts the normal processes of his life and becomes a hole in which his trauma dwells. Alice commemorates and narrates the trauma of the violence in her father’s memory by internalising “the bodily and psychic after-effects of the trauma” that her parents have experienced as well as by turning it into her postmemory (Brewster, 2017, p. 315). Postmemory implies not only that her memory comes after her father’s memory in terms of time but also that the narration of the memory enables her to reconstruct and represent the past with a wider lens. In Alice’s case, her postmemory includes not only her father’s traumatic memories but also the trauma transmitted to her through her father’s overprotection, her father and other ChineseCambodians’ trauma caused by dislocation, and the trauma suffered by all Cambodians (including the oppressors) who had lived through the Khmer Rouge regime. This can be summarised by a Chinese saying, “no individual can escape the disaster that befalls the group”. Being more than an interviewer and a secondary witnessvictim when facing her father and his friends who are survivors-witnesses of the past violence, Alice feels a strong sense of duty to bring the trauma of a small community into public view. However, while writing and publishing her text of postmemory, she is not only exposing her father’s trauma but also turning the transnational, transcultural, and trans-generational trauma into a “social memory” (Brewster, 2017, p. 321) which may trigger many people’s memory of their own trauma caused by migration or/and various kinds of past violence. Alice Pung (2011) thus writes “perhaps it was time for her to take a stab in the dark” (p. 112). Her (post)memoir takes a stab into the silent trauma of her father and many others like him.

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Memory and Dismemory Addressing memory and dismemory, Alice Pung (2011) writes “there should be a word for a memory that you have deliberately forgotten to remember”, “a Dismemory” (p. 191). Memory is the representation of the past in one’s mind while dismemory is, as Alice defines it, “a memory that has been amputated like a phantom limb” (The Monthly Video 2013). Alice’s father has attempted to repress his memory of a certain period in the past but has failed. His memory is repressed but not forgotten, etched into the back of his mind in a way that unsettles him. Transnational and transcultural dislocation reinforces his memory rather than blurs it. Alice also notices that her cousins’ parents “raised in Hong Kong or Singapore” are different from her father as they are “polite and calm” (p. 99) and her father is not like her relatives in Cambodia either. When Alice visits Cambodia for the first time and confesses that she’d like to “find out more about recent Cambodian history”, her aunt sighs and says that “there is nothing to say about those bad times … thinking about them only makes you feel sad all over again” (p. 202). When she visits her uncle’s company in Cambodia, she sees handsome young Cambodian managers who are ambitious and aggressive, representing “the future of this country” (ibid.). It seems that her family members and the new generation in Cambodia have already forgotten what happened, seemingly contradicting McNally’s (2003) claim that “victims are seldom incapable of remembering their trauma” (p. 2). However, it seems that they choose to deliberately disremember the past rather than forget it. Alice’s father’s attitude towards the past violence is different from that of her relatives in Cambodia because first-generation Chinese Cambodians in Australia have been dislocated and live in “tightly coiled” communities in the adopted nation. What has shaped them does not have much to do with Australia. It is what they experienced in their home nation that shaped who they are. Thus, they have to rely on remembering the past in their home nation to consolidate their current existence as the experience of diaspora is an “ongoing process of discovering and mending an always tenuous relationship to the past” (Phung, 2016, p. 2). However, their past is imbued with violence that keeps haunting them, making them even more unsettled. Thus, they fall into a dilemma between remembering and disremembering the past. Alice’s relatives in Cambodia, on the contrary, seem less unsettled by the past as they live on the land where the violence took place. Though it used to be a land of violence, they know that they are able to change it with their effort as it is their land whose past, present, and future are closely connected with them. They choose to look to the future rather than being haunted by the past, which is why Alice’s aunt says: “there is nothing to say about those bad times” (Pung, 2011, p. 202). Whether dislocated or not, there is a big hole (disjuncture) in their memories, but they react in different ways: Alice’s father who has been dislocated has to relive the traumatic past and is constantly haunted by it; his relatives in Cambodia choose to deliberately disremember it. It is a part of their memory, but it is not connected to the other parts as it is too traumatic and illogical. It is gripped by an overwhelming abusive system

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of power in an ambivalent state between being taken away from their memory and being kept by a tenuous connection to other parts of their memory. When Alice, her father, and their relatives stand on the field where Alice’s father buried the dead, the most striking image is that of her aunt’s reaction. Although she says “there is nothing to say about those bad times” (Pung, 2011, p. 202), she trembles with “the memory of her mother” (p. 216) after bowing to the field where her mother is buried. She has chosen to deliberately forget the past, but in fact it has never been wiped from her memory. As for Alice’s father, all he feels about the field is “nothing” or “emptiness.” He believes that all his life “had been about filling this emptiness” (p. 214). Filling the emptiness is the attempted representation of the traumatic experiences which is affected by “imitative-hypnotic suggestibility” (LaCapra 2001, p. 299). To him, the four years on the farm of the Khmer Rouge Base are like a dream filled with fragments and chaos which have been dashing without logic in his unconscious mind. However, he also sees on the edge of the field some coconut or sugar-palm trees from which he used to get fruits. In fact, Alice’s father and aunt’s memories about the violence are not fully forgotten or empty and they do remember something about the past when they revisit the field, suggesting that dismemory does not eradicate memory and that the period can be brought to the fore when, as on this occasion, they visit the site of the disremembered traumatic events. Memories of the past may have been hidden, but they lurk in survivors-witnesses’ unconscious mind and can be triggered when they return to the site. A site of violence and death is forever associated with the traumatic events, freeze-framed during the time of the violence. Thus, the field now exists solely for preserving the memory of the violence. As for Alice, her feeling as she stands on the field is different from but related to her father and aunt’s feelings. Feeling the distance between the dead and the living, she is in fear of losing those she loves. This is not the land where she has grown up and accordingly she does not feel a direct connection to it. However, as part of the second generation of the witnesses-survivors, she obtains “dissonant heritage” “which causes disquiet, anxiety and often alienation” (Pung, 2011, p. 214). She can sense the “dissonant heritage” from her relatives’ feelings towards the field though she is not directly linked to it, which is perhaps why she feels “exposed” and “stripped” “of all certainty” standing on the field (ibid.). In this sense, the site is endowed with a power of ritual that functions as an intergenerational transmission of trauma and entering the site is entering the procedures of the ritual. However, this intergenerational transmission is not uni-directional as it not only imposes the past on the present generation but also provides a path of access through which she is able to challenge her father about the past in order to know more about the nation to which she has a strong connection though she was not born there. It is, as she puts it, a “country she would never understand, but that had shaped her father and made him who he was” (p. 217). Though her own existence has little to do with this nation as she was born and grew up in Australia, her father’s past is entangled with this nation and she has been influenced by the paranoid fatherly love. Though the memory of the past is traumatic, time can soothe the hatred between former victims and perpetrators. Alice notices that her father and uncle talk to an old

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man who used to be the head of “the children’s army in their collective”. They talk “so calmly and casually, as if he were some ordinary neighbour who had shared a street” (p. 216). Alice is shocked by what she sees as, in her eyes, they are talking to a “murderer of children” (ibid.), indicating that the survivors-witnesses have (partially) forgiven the perpetrators or have realised that both victims and perpetrators were the victims of an overwhelming abusive system of power. When the power that once dehumanised them is gone, their relationship returns normal, suggesting that their disremembering/forgetting is directed at institutions rather than individuals and those who used to be the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge are not different from other Cambodians as they also have children and are able to love. Norma Saadi Nikro (2011) relates the dilemma of remembering and disremembering the past to “the proximity … between amnesty and amnesia” (p. 4). Alice’s father and relatives do not lose the capacity for memory. Instead, they intentionally disremember it. Alice also notices that all her uncles’ bodyguards are “ex-soldiers” of the Khmer Rouge (p. 215), suggesting that the former perpetrators have become protectors. All this is difficult for Alice to understand: the distinctions between perpetrators and victims, between remembering and disremembering, as well as between the past and the present, are increasingly blurred. In this sense, dismemory goes beyond merely forgetting the past as it is a state in which people dispossess themselves of memory or get used to living with the memory of the past. However, repressing memory or dispossessing themselves of memory may trigger trauma. The site of violence is always there, and the dead are always present underground. The more survivors-witnesses deny the memory of violence, the more unsettled they become. Thus, the significance of dismemory lies in the fact that survivorswitnesses learn to reconcile themselves to and live with the memory of the past violence and move on towards the future. Constantly returning to the past means holding the hatred and mourning, overlooking the present and future. Alice realises that “the real miracle … was not that he (her father) had lived … [it] was that he could love” (p. 217). To her, it is her father’s existence and present love that matter most.

Conclusion The two texts analysed in this chapter address colonial and postcolonial transnational and transcultural trauma caused by past violence and its legacy haunting the present. Birds of Passage presents a consonance of trauma at different moments in history caused by physical violence and verbal discrimination connecting the two protagonists as well as the past and present. The trauma represented in Her Father’s Daughter is not only transnational and transcultural but also trans-generational. It is the fatherly overprotection that brings the daughter to the fore of the trauma suffered by her father’s generation. Through trauma, different times and worlds are conflated and become each other’s apparition, creating a kind of “imitative-hypnotic” (LaCapra, 2001, p. 299) context in which the characters are haunted.

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The two texts not only represent haunting as trauma on surface but also excavate their causes. It is because the traumas have been repressed that they return to possess and unsettle the characters. Seamus cannot resolve his trauma in present-day Australia while Alice’s father’s trauma has been repressed as the legacy of postcolonial transnational and transcultural migration has silenced her father’s generation. The two texts explore not only the history of the Chinese diaspora in Australia but also the important part of Australian history which deals with the past of migrants who (or whose ancestors) came from different parts of the world. The two texts expose a national wound caused by the discrimination and violence against early settlers in colonial Australia as well as by the trauma brought in by later migrants from various backgrounds. The trauma which took place in Australia or was brought to Australia by migrants continues to unsettle all Australians through memories of the past which may keep invading the present. Some of the past traumatic events have not been fully acknowledged and still haunt this nation. Silence and disregard do not pacify these memories which may constantly emerge as post-traumatic effects. It is only by exposing the repressed national trauma that it can be brought to public scrutiny. However, it is still not enough to represent trauma and excavate its causes. The texts discussed in this chapter also seek healing, a solution to traumatic haunting. In Birds of Passage, Shan returns to China only to find that his father and home no more and Seamus is mentally collapsed in Australia. Haunting, as Gordon (2008) claims, is “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” (p. xvi). To Shan and Seamus, there seems to be no end to the repeated reemergence of “repressed or unresolved social violence”. In Her Father’s Daughter, Alice’s relatives in Australia and the younger generation in Cambodia look towards the future rather than indulging themselves in trauma. Though Birds of Passage exposes trauma and brings it to public scrutiny, it does not offer a path towards healing. Her Father’s Daughter looks towards the future while acknowledging that the past still lives in memory and in the soil under our feet.

Chapter 3

Haunting as Languaging in Ouyang Yu’s the English Class and Selected Poetry

Chapter 2 has discussed haunting as trauma which, while located in the past, still unsettles the present. This chapter will examine another kind of haunting, located in language, through the examination of Ouyang Yu’s novel The English Class and key works within his poetic oeuvre which engage with the question of languaging. Each text deals in its own way with the coexistence of and the competition between the English and Chinese languages which can be seen to haunt each other. This chapter will elaborate on the theories on languaging and examine, in Ouyang Yu’s The English Class and his poetry, how languages emerge as haunting when they encounter and erupt into each other and become each other’s spectre. Jing, the protagonist in The English Class, is caught between and troubled by the Chinese and English languages. The novel begins with his experiences as an intellectual youth1 at the truck team of a factory. The description of the factory is dark and rusty, indicating a dim future for the factory as well as its workers. However, Jing’s white skin is emphasised, as a contrast to the factory’s darkness, foreshadowing that he has a different and bright future. His father, an intellectual who used to be a former Kuomintang2 official and now working as a librarian at a university, has a relatively low social status in the context of the Cultural Revolution. Thus, Jing endeavors to change his circumstances through learning English as his father tells him that it is the only way out. Though driving a truck or a car in 1970s and 1980s’ Mainland China was a privilege, Jing aspires to passing the forthcoming National University Entrance Examination through learning English, which is discouraged and even despised of by his mother and workmates. Despite the discouragement and the despising, he regards himself as a little aristocrat at the truck team.

1

During the Cultural Revolution, high school students as intellectual youth were encouraged to go to as well as assigned to the rural and mountainous regions (上山下乡, shangshan xiaxiang, literally translated as going up mountains and going down to countryside) to work on farms and in small factories and receive reeducation from farmers and workers. 2 国民党,Guo Min Dang or Kuomingtang, the Nationalist party, the former ruling party of China before 1949 when the Communist Party of China took power. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 X. Xiong, Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3064-7_3

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Jing manages to pass the examination and becomes a university student majoring in English at the East Lake University where he meets professors and classmates from all over Mainland China. He used to believe that the English language was superior to the Chinese language and worked hard to learn English in order to shake off his Chinese identity. However, during the process of learning English at the university, he, along with some of his classmates, gradually discovers the superiority of the Chinese language. Their wish to defend their mother tongue against the invasion of English becomes increasingly strong. They even argue with their teachers Mr. Fu and Dr. Wagna (who is from Australia) about which language is superior. Wei, one of his classmates, takes the defensive stance to extreme and commits suicide, striking Jing with a shock and driving him into a daydreaming experience in which he mixes and plays with the words and characters of the two languages. Though Jing attempts to prove that the Chinese language is superior to the English language, he still wants to leave China. He has an affair with Deidre, Dr. Wagna’s partner, who helps him defect China to Australia. He changes his name into Gene in Australia. However, he is not happy living in Australia as he feels he is rejected by the world of the English language. He can only resort to the imagined sense of superiority based on the Chinese language to substantiate his subjectivity in the English-speaking country. Thus, he is always troubled by competing notions of linguistic superiority. Troubled by seemingly irreconcilable dilemma, Gene falls ill and is diagnosed with linguistic schizophrenia by Deidre’s father, a psychiatrist. Gene is suggested to take medications which he does not believe in. Deidre understands him and knows that his schizophrenia is caused by the state of living between two languages and cultures. The poems selected for analysis are “The English Empire”, “Translating Myself”, and “The Double Man”. The first expresses the poetic persona’s concern about the influence of the English language in Mainland China as well as his worry that traditional Chinese is dying out. Simplified Chinese, reading from left to right as English does, replaced traditional Chinese in Mainland China many years ago. In the poetic persona’s view, traditional Chinese represents the past and ancient China while simplified Chinese represents the present and anglicised China. English, a language from afar, has become a standard to judge the Chinese people: those who are good at English are more likely to be promoted. The poetic persona is worried about this kind of self-colonisation and argues that anglicised China is going to die. He believes that traditional Chinese outside Mainland China is the heir of the Chinese civilisation. The poetic persona in “Translating Myself” compares himself to the Chinese language and claims that translating himself is a problem. He asserts that his body and identity are constructed with the ancient language and he is not able to translate himself into the English language as the body and identity are difficult to be erased and English is so transparent. He also supposes that there are two halves respectively represented by the two languages and translating himself from one language into the other is in fact (re-)creating the other half. However, there is always a barrier such as the tongue between the two languages, making a complete and real translation impossible. Thus, a translated body and language is only an existence with this language under the disguise of the other language.

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The poetic persona in “The Double Man” loses his home in translating his surname from “china” into “australia”. Though his name “china australia” seems to be the same after being translated from Chinese into English, the reading order and meaning have changed. Thus, the poetic persona with one name has two connotations and identities and falls into a dilemma: it seems that he belongs to two countries and two cultures and has two identities while at the meantime it seems that he belongs to neither countries, neither cultures, and has neither identities. He is troubled by the doubled and mixed senses of homeliness and unhomeliness. However, he begins to realise that this kind of multiple and ambiguous identity is common and the sense of unhomeliness in fact means the sense of omni-homeliness.

Theories on Languaging Haunting challenges our conventional way of looking at language, and this chapter will look at three modalities of haunting in language. As haunting in language is about languages competing with and erupting in each other, the ways in which languages encounter and interact with one another need to be examined. The encounter between languages can be termed languaging. Becker (2000) states that languaging “combines shaping, storing, retrieving, and communicating knowledge into one open-ended process” (p. 9). In line with this definition, languaging refers to the process from memory or “conscious thought” with “phonological form” (Jackendoff, 2007, p. 82) to a systematic discourse as language. The first modality is embodied languaging as human body is the carrier and the habitat of language and language production relies on a system of bodily movements involving vocal apparatus, facial expressions, and gestures. When two languages compete for expression, the body parts which have always been accustomed to one system have to be adjusted to fit that of the other. However, when either of the two is being spoken, our body may be out of control and produce utterances or movements in line with the requirements of the other language as if the latter erupts in the former which is being spoken. From the perspective of one language, the other may be “a kind of virus inhabiting the body” (Gunew, 2004, p. 61). One may try to expel the other out of the body but be unable to do so. Thus, our body becomes a site of haunting where different languages compete to be used and our bodily movements unsettle our linguistic identity. The second modality is colonial languaging as colonisation involves not only occupation, domination, and large-scale human migration, but also linguistic dislocation. In this modality, the power behind language becomes more manifest, specifically, the dominant position of European languages in the colonies. Gunew (2004) summarises Talib and Willinsky’s arguments and claims that “the embeddedness” of the English language “within various pedagogical and disciplinary regimes of subjugation (whether these relate to colonisation, neo-imperialism or migration) … cannot function neutrally as a world-wide lingua franca” (p. 51). The colonised are forced to learn the coloniser’s language through education system and may be punished in various ways if they fail to do so. Thus, haunting arises when

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the colonised feel the oppressive power of colonial languages which dominate over the mother tongues of the colonised. However, colonial languages are also haunted by the mother tongues of the colonised as the linguistic elements of the latter erupt into the former in a manner reminiscent of the psychoanalytic notion of a return of the repressed. The third modality is creative languaging which reminds us that each language is dynamic, always in a state of a myriad of languaging processes. Haunting, in this respect, refers to something new playfully created in this state, in which “the faint trace” of past languages “lie on or just beyond the periphery of audibility” (Daughtry, 2013, p. 9). In the process of languaging, complicated chemical reactions and physical activities take place in our brain and body in the form of a series of cognitive and representative processes influenced by the current socio-cultural context as well as our understanding of the past. This may lead to certain patterns in our thinking and certain rules controlling our bodily movements. In this respect, languaging between two languages is more complicated as it involves the interaction between two sets of thinking and bodily movements. Embodied languaging can be felt through our mother tongue resisting the invasion of another language. While learning another language, we may try to approximate our ways of speaking and writing to the imagined norm of the new language, but our mind and body have been used to the norms of our mother tongue which seem to come in the way. Eva Hoffman (1998), who migrated from Poland to Canada and then to the U.S., describes this resistance while learning to speak English: “[m]y voice … does not seem to emerge from the same parts of my body as before” and “[i]t comes out from somewhere in my throat, tight, thin, and mat—a voice without modulations, dips, and rises that it had before” (pp. 121–122). A sense of panic or fear can be sensed through this experience as an unfamiliar voice arises from her throat and comes out of her mouth. The fear of an unfamiliar language becomes the fear of her body. However, what frightens her most is that this unfamiliar voice is still produced by her body which is also able to produce her mother tongue. Gunew (2004) describes this kind of languaging as “a kind of corporeal linguistic violence” (p. 62). She also shows how the violence is displayed in Hoffman’s body parts other than her vocal apparatus: [t]he use of English, located within a particular version of Canadian Englishness, animates her [Hoffman’s] body in new ways where she learns not to gesticulate too much, to sit on her hands when she’s talking and to tone down her expression of emotions (ibid.).

Hoffman used to gesticulate while speaking her mother tongue Polish which she views as her habitat and she feels unconstrained and settled when speaking it. However, she has to discipline her body to fit in the context of the English language. This feeling and experience may be familiar to everyone who learns another language. When a new language encounters our mother tongue, we feel that the former is beyond our control and is invading our mother tongue and our body. It is due to, as Gunew puts it, “the meanings we first encounter in a specific language that structure our later

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lives physically and psychically and at the same time provide a prophylactic against the universalist claims of other linguistic meaning structures” (p. 125). However, it seems difficult to resist the invasion of a new language. Thus, the new language comes to change the thinking patterns and the bodily norms we have been used to. Embodied languaging may also be caused by a new language resisting our mother tongue. The new language is gradually incorporated into our body as we learn more of it. As time goes by, we adopt to the new language and it claims its own habitat in our body. The new language may then disturb our mother tongue and claim its control of our body. Learning a new language is the process of internalising that language as well as structuring our subjectivity in a different way. Thus, the competition between the two languages escalates and our mind and body seem to be split by the dual control. When the border between the old/own and the new/alien is blurred, the two languages become each other’s apparitions as they are both vying to inhabit our body. It seems that we are walking away from the norms of our mother tongue and at the same time nearing those of the new language, but the process will never be completed as the two habitats continue to coexist and erupt in each other. Thus, the two languages, like ghosts, manifest themselves through our body. Embodied languaging occurs when learning any second language, but colonial languaging is restricted to specific socio-historical contexts. Colonial languaging, as the term suggests, refers to languaging between a colonial language and the native language(s) of a colony. Colonial power is encoded in such languaging. Rey Chow (2014) asserts that colonial languaging is “a type of prostheticisation” which is “impermanent, detachable, and (ex)changeable” (pp. 15–16). In her words, the advent of a colonial language as an abusive social and cultural system of power further complicates languaging by imposing the colonial language onto the colonised who, instead of choosing to learn another language, are coerced by the colonial power into learning the colonial language. It was this power that turned the English language, along with the colonial expansion of the British Empire, into “a language— the language—on which the sun does not set, whose users never sleep” (Quirk, 1985, p. 1). “English as a world language” not only twists its natural relations with other languages by repressing them into the subaltern position, but also, as Gunew (2004) argues, acts as “a force undermining the linguistic and cultural diversity” (p. 52) of colonies. Language thus “becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated” (Ashcroft et al., 2002, p. 8). The colonised, while learning, say, the English language, are always aware that there is an invisible and overwhelming power which, like a spectre, disturbs or threatens to disturb their daily life constructed on their mother tongue. The repression imposed by colonial languaging can cause fear among the colonised. Chow (2014) elaborates on the fear caused by the English language through describing the English education she received in 1970’s Hong Kong: “[t]o enforce the speaking of English, the school authorities implemented what they called ‘English-speaking Days’” (p. 43) when “we sang Anglican church hymns…and listened to passages from the King James version of the English Bible” (p. 44). Chow claims that those days were “annoying” and “the ‘E’ sign” “put up everywhere” functioned as a reminder and a warning (ibid.). The English language was imposed onto

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the Chinese population in Hong Kong through educational administration as part of the British colonial power. “Warning” implies an impending punishment for those who did not follow the provision of the regulation. The colonial “warning” as a threatening spectre triggered the colonised’s fear of being punished. The fear of not knowing when the punishment would fall was even more dreaded than the punishment itself. Colonial power which used to be enforced through military conquest was realised through administration and education, but its nature as an omnipresent oppressive and threatening spectre remained unchanged. In other words, the colonial language was always ready to jump out to disturb the lived reality of the colonised, but the most dreaded aspect was the fear of being punished implanted in the mind of colonised children through education. The repression imposed by colonial languaging may turn the colonised into culturally alien subjects in the land to which they were born. Colonial languages which came from afar should be a cultural alien in colonies as “the new language” was “a foreign, dead language cut off from everyday activity” in their native community (Cheah, 2003, p. 123). However, “the new language” was not dead, and it came alive and made itself felt through the overwhelming colonial power. Colonial languaging enforced through education became an overwhelming power, and, as Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’O (1986) sees it, “resulted in the dissociation of the sensitivity” of those children from their “natural and social environment” (p. 17). Ng˜ug˜ı further argues that colonial languaging “became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music, where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe” (ibid.). The link between the colonised and their mother tongue was severed by colonial languaging through education. Furthermore, the colonised were not able to see Europe which was far away, but they could feel it through the repression imposed by the colonial languages as Europe loomed increasingly large, like an overwhelming ghost. The more they learnt the colonial languages, the more repressed they felt and the more they were assimilated into an imagined Europe, which magically turned the colonised into the culturally alien and ghostly beings on the land to which they were born. This situation is described by Ng˜ug˜ı (1986) as one of “being made to stand outside himself to look at himself” (ibid.). The colonised were no longer themselves in terms of cultural identity and had been converted into the Other, the Europeanised version of themselves. This other self appeared as an apparition repressing and marginalising their original self. This apparition is produced through the haunting of colonial languaging as a manifestation of colonial power. Colonial languaging also caused the fear of being unable to speak in the way that colonial masters spoke. This is perhaps why Jacques Derrida (1994) claims that “[h]aunting belongs to the structure of every Hegemony” (p. 46). When there were unequal relations between colonial languages and the colonised’s mother tongues, they experienced a sense of “error, failure, defacement, disappointment, non arrival, and so forth” (Chow, 2014, p. 15). It was social violence that coerced the colonised into learning the norms of colonial languages. Those who failed to follow the norms were judged to be inferior. However, it would be difficult for them to resist learning colonial languages as theses languages as oppressive colonial power implied impending punishment. This is where haunting within colonial languaging lies: the

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colonised were unable to arrive at the norms of colonial languages and at the same time were unable to discard them. However, in a manner similar to embodied languaging, colonial languaging also gives rise to mutual haunting. The mother tongues of the colonised were also able to alter colonial languages and reshape colonisers “psychically and physically” (Gunew, 2004, p. 125), which can be described as the return of the repressed. Colonial languages were gradually incorporated into the culture of colonies and provided new habitats for the colonised. Colonial languages were gradually localised as the official/recognised languages in colonies, “altered to suit” the new surroundings and “able to carry the weight” of the colonised’s experience (Achebe, 1975, p. 62). As the colonised consciously used colonial languages as their new mother tongues, the original mother tongues became spectres which could erupt in the language use by the colonised at any time, reminding them of not forgetting their mother tongues. This can also be termed the localisation of colonial languages. However, localised colonial languages which were in “communion with” the “ancestral home” (Achebe, 1975, p. 62) of colonisers may still manifest their colonial characteristics. Thus, the colonised may still question the legitimacy of the imported colonial languages. Embodied languaging and colonial languaging are different aspects of the unsettlement caused by the experience of being caught between competing languages. Then questions may arise such as whether there are alternatives to the unsettling effects of living between languages and whether there can be language haunting without trauma. A language may not be as solid and unified as it appears to be, which can be revealed through the respective evolution of the English and Chinese languages. Languages evolve by taking in elements of other languages throughout history and this process can be compared to a snowball getting increasingly large while rolling forward. The history of the English language has seen a complicated evolution from Old English as a branch of the Germanic languages to Modern English incorporating the elements of Celtic, Latin, Danish, and Norman French. Richard Hogg and David Denison (2008) also claim, based on “some sources of English words”, that “Dutch, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Hungarian, Cherokee” can be added to the sources of the English language (p. 2). As for the Chinese language, different states used different languages (despite their similarities) before Qin Shi Huang3 unified central China. After the unification, Chinese as a language emerged based on “the small seal script [小篆/Xiaozhuan]” (Dong, 2014, p. 172) at the expense of languages used in other states. The history of the Chinese language has also seen a complicated snowballing of language elements from neighbouring tribes (especially the northern tribes who invaded the Central Plains from time to time) as well as other cultures. Among them, “translations of Buddhist canons” from the Sanskrit language (p. 8) brought some Buddhist words into the Chinese language. Their transliterations have been secularised and are used in daily life. The modern Chinese language also features the contribution of the Japanese translation of Western concepts into kanji (Japanese writing based on Chinese characters) (p. 150) as well as of many loan words from the English language. 3

秦始皇, the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty of China.

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The evolutions of the two languages indicate that the process of languaging is complicated and that language is always a hybrid of the old and the new. Pit S. Cordor (1978) asserts that interlanguage can be viewed as a restructuring continuum in which the elements of a language are gradually rubbing against and being replaced by those of other languages. Thus, some elements of a language have been erased or altered while some are kept through a complex history of languaging. Chow (2014) sees this process as the “creative domain of languaging” or “the xenophone4 ” (p. 59), emerging from the ongoing contact between languages. This domain, she further argues, “draws its sustenance from mimicry and adaptation and bears in its accents, the murmur, the passage of diverse found speeches” (ibid.). The creativeness or newness of the xenophonic domain lies in its mimicry and adaptation that feature resemblance (familiarity) and difference (unfamiliarity) at the same time. Thus, a language is a hybridised phenomenon behind which the spectres of “xenophonic memories” (ibid.) of different languages vie against each other to be manifested. In other words, each current language, as an unstable and dynamic process or state in a long history of evolution, is a hybrid mixture in which old elements and “xenophonic memories” are always being reorganised and reprocessed to make it new. As dynamism is in the inherent nature of language, no language can be our permanent habitat and there should be no need to worry about our mother tongue being “infected” by other languages. It is this forever-changing nature of language that turns language into a permanently temporary habitat. Postcolonial migration accelerates and further complicates such creative languaging. Languaging in the context of postcolonial transnational and transcultural migration is, as Chow (2014) puts it, “rendered ever more complex by concurrent forms of dislocation such as … forced or voluntary exile, and legal or illegal migration as well as by the ubiquity of newer media and communication technologies” (p. 41). Postcolonial migration and modern technologies accelerate the transfer of “xeno-phonic memories” and diversify the patterns of their reorganisation. Thus, the imagined centre of the English language is disseminated through its progressive localisation around the globe, from London to New York, Sydney, Vancouver, Wellington, Singapore, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and so forth. When more cities become the habitats of English as a language, London as its original centre no longer functions as the sole centre. Furthermore, it is also impossible to view London as the centre of the English language as “a culture never has a single origin” (Derrida, 1992, p. 10). Thus, each localised version of the English language may feature its own norms consisting of the “xenophonic memories” of both English and other languages. Each localised version may be both similar to and different from other versions. Thus, the English language is haunted by various localised Englishes which can be viewed as “new” or creative Englishes with their own norms. To put this in the context of Australia, Australian English as a product of a myriad of languaging processes (between English, indigenous languages, and other languages) belongs to Australia and all Australians rather than to the British and the U.K. as Australian English carries the history of this nation and is used to describe the natural 4

The xenophone refers to unknown or newly created language elements.

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and social history of this land. As for the Chinese language, it is also quite diverse not only because there are various domestic regional forms of speech (dialects) within mainland China but also because the Chinese language has been disseminated to many parts of the world through a succession of Chinese migrations. Thus, various versions of the Chinese language have also taken shape through languaging between the Chinese language and different languages around the world. There are currently more than one million Chinese Australians and languaging between the Chinese and English languages in Australia dates back to more than 150 years ago. Chinese migrants from different communities in and outside Mainland China bring into Australia different versions of the Chinese language such as Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, the regional dialects of other provinces, as well as Mandarin (Putonghua).5 However, it also needs to be noted that such creative languaging represents only a short period of history and is also forever undergoing change. Works by Chinese Australian writers feature the distinctive experiences of various Chinese migrations. Ouyang Yu comes from Mainland China whose official spoken language is Putonghua. Some of his works such as The Eastern Slope Chronicle and two of the selected poems, “The English Empire” and “Translating Myself”, express his puzzlement over and resentment at being rejected by both China and Australia. However, some of his works such as The English Class and one of the selected poems, “The Double Man”, seem to go beyond the melancholia over a sense of homelessness between two languages and show the enjoyment of playing with them, attempting to depolarise and deconstruct them. Addressing the sense of unhomeliness in language, Ouyang (2004) suggests that we wade into “uncharted waters” to “embrace both without relinquishing either in more challenging ways than ever” (p. 52). He also writes that “a new flower blossoms on two stranded hearts”6 (2012). These arguments emphasise the newness or creativity of languaging which lies in new and old elements being reorganised into new patterns. There is no stable language as each language is forever in a dynamic state in which something new is emerging while old elements either remain or are altered or/and erased. Thus, a language is a dynamic palimpsest under which lies a seething presence or “the faint trace” of other languages (Daughtry, 2013, p. 9).

The English and Chinese Languages: Repression and Resistance Jing, the protagonist of The English Class, gains a sense of superiority through being a driver and learning English. An educated youth who has stayed in the countryside for years during the Cultural Revolution, he gets a chance to become a driver in a Truck Team. Being a driver (chauffeur) in 1970s and 1980s’ Mainland China was 5

Putonghua, literally translated as the common speech, is the national spoken Chinese language developed based on Mandarin, a northern Chinese dialect. 6 异心啮合“异花”开 (yixi niehe yihua kai).

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a respectable job and “a great privilege” as it means having “a transporting vehicle in one’s control and the convenience of manoeuvre” (p. 68). However, this job does not fulfill Jing’s dreams and he always holds an English book in hands (p. 74) as he feels that learning English may be the only way to change his circumstances. However, he does not know “where these English words would eventually lead him” (p. 17). The reason why he takes learning English as a way out is not clear. He has only a vague idea that he would one day go away (ibid.). It may be because Jing’s father says learning English “could lead to a great future” (p. 47). His father, who used to be “a Kuomingtang officer7 ”, works in “a university-attached library” (p. 191) where Jing can get access to many books about English and the West. With his familial background, the books he has read, and learning English, Jing feels “a total stranger” in the Truck Team which is “crisscrossed with intricate human relationships, a network of invisible intrigues and infighting for petty gains” (p. 17). In this sense, learning English not only reinforces his aloofness from other drivers who from time to time crack dirty jokes (p. 99) but also becomes a symbol of an (imagined) superior identity. Jing regards himself as a “little aristocrat” (p. 9) in the social context shortly after the Cultural Revolution. Bonny Norton (2010) claims that “an investment in an imagined community assumes an investment in an imagined identity” (p. 3), suggesting that learning a second language helps forge a transspatial link between the learner and the language’s native speakers. In this sense, learning a (foreign) language is not only for social betterment but also for identity reconstruction. As argued above, some languages are privileged while others are disadvantaged. Mainland China was economically and politically disadvantaged when the Cultural Revolution ended. The policy of reform and opening-up was introduced in the late 1970s when the West was more developed. The hierarchy in terms of the degree of development is represented in Jing’s effort to learn English for a better life or even to become a Westerner, though he does not admit overtly that he feels the English language to be superior to the Chinese language. Mr. Fu, one of Jing’s teachers, also says that English is to become “the international language and it would be of great benefit if one could master it as soon as possible” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 76). Thus, Jing’s sense of being disadvantaged through speaking and being Chinese has been internalised with the implication that speaking English means being more developed. Speaking English, in this sense, defines what it means to be civilised and modern (Sadar, 2008, p. viii), but this is based on a set of Western criteria. There can be different criteria to judge language and culture. When a language and culture is heightened as the best and the dominant based on one set of criteria, other languages, cultures, and the relevant criteria may be lurking behind/beneath the dominant to challenge its legitimacy. Thus, the dominant is nothing but based on an imagined sense of superiority. Predictably, Jing’s imaginary sense of superiority based on learning English is fiercely challenged by the Chinese people around him either in the Truck Team or 7

In other words, his father is an intellectual with a problematic past according to the dogma of the Cultural Revolution.

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the Education Commission where he works. They do not understand why he has to learn English and some even despise him for it. Gu, one of the staff members in the Truck Team, even curses the English language as “ying ge la xi, Englishit” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 63). When Jing is at home, he occasionally blurts out English words such as “ridiculous” (p. 46) or shrugs his shoulders during a conversation with his mother who accuses him of “imitating a Western man” (p. 21) and speaking “beautiful Chinglish” (p. 47). The reason for the retort is not simply that she does not like the English language or she thinks her son is showing off his competence to speak another language, rather, she believes it is rather exotic or even weird to speak English or behave like a Westerner in front of his own mother and among a group of Chinese speakers who are familiar with and proud of their mother tongue which is claimed to have existed for thousands of years. A kind of enclosed language sphere is formed within which these Chinese speakers firmly believe that the Chinese language inherently belongs to the land of China and that the Chinese people have long possessed the Chinese language as a kind of sacred cultural capital. There is then a sense of superiority attached to being one of its speakers. Fanon (2008) claims, in this regard, that “a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language” (p. 9). Any other language or any foreign gestures in Mainland China, would appear abrupt, unnatural, or even ear/eyepiercing, especially if produced by a Chinese national or anyone looking Chinese, indicating that a language and its related corporeal registers have been internalised and legitimised as inherent and inseparable parts of the speakers of the language. In other words, foreign languages and their sets of somatic rules, deemed as exotic prostheses, are unnaturally imposed on their Chinese leaners, based on the hypothesis that Chinese is an independent and pure language. Learning foreign languages in Mainland China suggests the construction of exotic identities and may be deemed as a challenge, an offence, or even “a kind of linguistic corporeal violence” (Gunew, 2004, p. 62) against a seemingly stable Chinese identity. Thus, any foreign language which attempts to repress the Chinese language will be met by forceful resistance. Some Chinese people who, like Jing’ mother, do not learn foreign languages would rather tear off the prosthesis of foreign languages from those who have learnt or are learning foreign languages in the way that she angrily orders him to “stop shrugging your shoulders like a foreigner” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 21). When some or most Chinese people view themselves as natural and legitimate inheritors of China as well as the Chinese language, a logic is formed in such a context: one’s body is Chinese, one’s language is Chinese, one’s soul must be Chinese too.8 Wei, one of Jing’s university classmates, showcases in an extreme way a sense of superiority based on being a Chinese speaker. He has an open argument with Mr. Fu in class by claiming that Chinese is “infinitely better than English” (p. 177). This firm belief makes Wei take up a strong defensive stance against the English language by repeatedly stressing the advantage of the Chinese language and the disadvantage of the English language. In other words, he adheres to the hypothesis that the language into which he is born to 8

Adapted from “[h]is body is black, his language is black, his soul must be black too” in White Skin, Black Masks, Fanon 2008, p. 139.

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is better than other languages. However, the reality is that he has to learn English as his major. This is possibly why he tells Jing that he is “often troubled by this intense conflict between the two languages” and it is “as if his mind is being torn apart” (ibid.). Obsessed with his sense of superiority while troubled by the harsh reality, the two halves of Wei’s consciousness cannot compromise with each other, resulting in his “jumping from the library building” (p. 179). He may see himself as a martyr of the Chinese language and his sense of the superiority has been resisting the invasion of the English language, haunting Wei like a ghost. Wei’s suicide and his ghost keep haunting Jing who spends daydreaming “the next couple of semesters” (p. 180). Wei has passed on a strong message of defending the Chinese language to everyone who has witnessed or hears of his suicide. Most of Jing’s classmates reject the message, but Jing is obsessed with it that leads to an open argument with Dr. Wagner who is from Australia over the question which language is superior. Jing uses Wei’s examples to deconstruct the English language: pronouncing “receipt” as “re cee pt”, “bombing” as “bom bing”, changing “birds’-eye view” to “rats’-eye view”, and using an adjective as a verb in sentences such as “[h]e bads my good thing”, all of which are aimed to prove that the English language is absurd (p. 270). The reason Jing is most affected by Wei’s message may be that he has long regarded the English language which is superior to the Chinese language and can better his life. Before Wei’s suicide, Jing has been consciously marginalising and devaluing the Chinese language, but the people around him have been degrading and devaluing the English language. The repressed English language reemerges in Jing’s dream as if someone were giving him a difficult test and he were going to fail (p. 124). Freud (1997) claims that “[t]he motive-power behind the dream-formation must be furnished by a wish belonging to the unconscious” and “the unconscious dreamforming wish belonged to repressed material” (p. 396). In this sense, the English language is the “repressed material” in Jing’s unconscious mind and tortures him so that he hears “death” in his dream and struggles to say its equivalent in Chinese, “si”, but is not able to (p. 124). At this point, Jing is deeply troubled by the two languages: on the one hand, he attempts to heighten his social status by learning English; on the other hand, he also enjoys a sense of superiority based on the Chinese language and attempts to defend it. Wei’s suicide turns the internal conflict between the two languages into a drifting ghost and Jing becomes its prey. Both Wei and Jing, at this stage, are unconsciously troubled by but do not see clearly the restrictive power of both languages.

Whiteness as Spectre: Learning English and Embodied Languaging In some social circumstances, skin colour can be associated with language learning. Whiteness, as a skin colour, is not only a somatic attribute, but also, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000) asserts, “white race privilege … is an invisible

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omnipresent norm” (p. 348), suggesting that whiteness has long been racialised as an indicator of Western identity with a dominant position in the power hierarchy. Furthermore, English has long been in the dominant position among all languages. Thus, whiteness, Western identity, and speaking English are strung together. It also needs to be noted that whiteness, rather than being a somatic attribute, is in fact politically constructed. For people like Jing, becoming white is a “barely visible” (Gordon, 2008, p. 44) spectre always attempting to make itself known. Though Jing has questioned the superiority of the English language, he still wants to leave Mainland China (Ouyang, 2010, p. 291) and become a Westerner. Learning English not only endows him with an imagined sense of superiority but also makes him obsessed with whiteness which, traditionally, is not a criterion for a superior identity in Mainland China. At the beginning, Jing’s white skin is occasionally foregrounded such as “a large square white face,” “how come he is so white,” “did he originally come from the cold north,” or “was there a foreigner in his family?” (p. 10) One way of interpreting these comments is to say that Jing, much whiter than many other Chinese people, appears to be somatically different. There is also an inference about his origin as Chinese people in “the cold north” normally have whiter skin than that of the people in China’s other regions. Finally, this also leads to probing into his ancestry as “a foreigner” which normally referred to a “white”9 Westerner in 1970s and 1980s’ Mainland China. The last two issues suggest that difference in skin colour is a matter of geography—people who were born in different natural conditions tend to have different somatic attributes. However, some people may link different somatic attributes such as whiteness to a place or a community where these attributes are supposed to belong to. Chinese people at that time were not aware of the (post)colonial transnational and transcultural migration which was going on outside Mainland China and caused a myriad of issues of belonging. They may have also not been aware that many people who were born in the same region in countries such as Australia and the U.S. may have different somatic attributes. As mentioned above, the environment of the Truck Team where Jing used to work before he goes to university is negatively depicted: an eye-assaulting “ironclad ramshackle affair”, “a strip of muddy ground strewn with sand and cut with deep dry ruts”, and “a tiny little specimen” that “could neither be called a car nor a truck” with “all its paint gone” (pp. 13–14). The depiction of darkness and rust poses a sharp contrast to Jing’s whiteness, suggesting that he does not belong to the Truck Team and foreshadowing that he has a different future compared with that of his workmates. The depiction also reveals a kind of “colour-caste system” (Hunter, 2007, p. 239) in which Jing enjoys his imagined sense of superiority which may arise from his familial and educational backgrounds. Jing, born with a fair skin tone, feels that his whiteness signals a higher social status compared with the dark and rusty environment of the Truck Team and his workmates, most of whom are poorly educated. Here, whiteness is the criterion which marginalises non-whites and marks them as poorly educated. However, his workmates do not think highly of him, not only despising his learning English but also scorning his “xiao bailian, small white face” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 63). 9

In fact, the skin colour of many Westerners does not appear to be white.

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In the Han Chinese culture, a man with a white face, traditionally deemed soft and weak, is believed to rely on women for a living and is looked down upon. In this case, being white or having “light skin may be viewed as a disadvantage with regard to” “legitimacy or authenticity” (Hunter, 2007, p.244) in the Chinese cultural context. Thus, we can see that two viewpoints and ways of thinking regarding whiteness are competing with each other. When Jing begins to learn English, Chenfang, Jing’s ex-girlfriend, is also surprised at his white skin: “You are so white” and “[y]ou’ve got such an egglike smooth white skin!” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 99). After he has spent one term as an English major at the East Lake University, Jing bumps into one of his friends, Gao, in his hometown. The latter tells Jing that he has become “more and more like a foreigner” with a “high nose” and deeper-set eyes (p. 206). It is possible that Jing’s skin is truly whiter than that of many other Chinese people’s, but it is also possible that he is obsessed with the idea that he is whiter than others, especially after he begins learning English. The obsession is gradually internalised in Jing’s mind and body so he exhibits some of the somatic attributes associated with the language. Gao has not seen Jing for only one term and marvels at the changes in Jing’s facial features which resemble a Westerner’s.10 Is half a year long enough to produce such obvious changes? If what Gao observes about Jing’s facial features is true, receiving a formal English education may have the magic power to change its learners’ somatic attributes. Ziauddin Sardar (2008) addresses Frantz Fanon’s argument that “[t]o speak means … above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation” and also claims that “[h]e becomes proportionately whiter in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language” (p. xv). This link between learning a language and somatic change can be applied to Jing’s situation in which he “becomes proportionately whiter in direct ratio to his mastery of” English. Furthermore, the hyperbolic descriptions of Jing’s whiteness can be described as “the bleaching syndrome” and “the internalisation of a white aesthetic ideal” (Hall 1994). In this imagined ideal, being white is the most beautiful and can be more advantaged. One of the consequences is that some people who are not white tend to bleach their skin. These views based on imagined aesthetic criteria reinforce Jing’s self-perception that his skin is whiter than many others’ in Mainland China. In a nonwhite community, whiteness is like a spectre attempting to make itself known and assume its legitimacy as a constituent of a dominant power. Immersing in the English language changes not only Jing and others’ perceptions of him(self) but also his views on others. Jing is more interested in Zhenya than his other female classmates as she has “fair skin” and is “plump but not fat” so that she “could be compared with a Westerner” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 164). Jing gradually becomes obsessed with white or fair skin and feels closer to those who have lighter skin tones. When Mr. Fu from the East Lake University visits Jing at the Truck Team for an interview for his admission, the former is admired for speaking “in a perfect English accent” (p. 121). However, not long after Jing and his classmates begin their study at the university, they complain about “the poor quality of teaching 10

In 1970s and 1980s’ China, “a foreigner” always referred to someone with white skin, high nose, and deep-set eyes who came from the West.

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and the lack of a native speaker” (p. 184) and even despise Mr. Fu for having studied English in Malta rather than in “the USA or the UK” (p. 186) where “pure” English is spoken. Jing claims that the foreign teacher has to be “a white native speaker” (p. 187) no matter where she/he is from. Thus, Mr. Fu’s English competence is questioned as he is neither a white native English speaker nor has he studied in “the USA or the UK” where “pure” English is spoken. Jing and his classmates assume that being white is closely related to speaking pure English and that the USA and the UK are two centres representing “pure” English while different inauthentic versions of English are used in other English-speaking countries. Jing further envisions a foreign teacher as “someone tall and handsome, a bit Karl Marx-like, with ponds of knowledge, speaking impeccable BBC or Voice of American English, coaching them in a way no other people did or were able to” (p. 216). Thus, when Dr. Wagner, Jing’s foreign teacher who is short with “little hair but a large head and a strange dint immediately under his lower lip”, walks into the classroom, the whole class become “visibly disappointed” and later call him “Little Foreigner” (p. 219). It is obvious that Dr. Wagner’s appearance does not match Jing and his classmates’ imagination of a Westerner—white, tall, and beautiful/handsome with golden hair. The class is full of “unasked questions” such as why the university does not recruit “a genuine English person to teach English” and why they would “find someone from Melbourne, Australia, not New York or London” (p. 220). These questions reinforce the assumption that New York and London represent “pure” and “standard” English as a norm. Jing’s class hold prejudice against Dr. Wagner, and so his arrival has “little effect on Jing” except that he is “made aware daily of a foreign presence on campus” (p. 234). To Jing, it is not important that Dr. Wagner is white or not as he is not from the USA or the UK. Jing says to one of his friends, Pi, that his writing “in Chinese in English disguise…needs genuine testing by a genuine English person” (p. 96). Thus, whiteness and authentic English competence can be strung together as the criteria for cultural and personal judgement. Even though Dr. Wagner is not highly thought of, the description of Deidre, Dr. Wagner’s wife, is quite different from that of Dr. Wagner. Deidre has “a small white face, with eyes faintly lined” and her appearance takes “Jing, more than anyone else, by storm” (p. 280). It is obvious that Jing is attracted to her whiteness and beauty. After Jing starts an affair with Deidre, he asks himself how he “could have done this with a foreign woman, a white woman from Australia, a white woman married with a white man but having an affair with her Chinese student?” (p. 292). It is the first time that Dr. Wagner’s whiteness is mentioned. Jing finds it difficult to relate Dr. Wagner who is short and bald to whiteness which implies being tall and handsome, suggesting that being white means possessing “beauty and virtue” (Fanon, 2008, p. 31). The question that Jing asks himself exposes a power hierarchy in which he, as a non-white, is disadvantaged. This unequal power relation has been internalised and affects both his self-evaluation and his judgement of others. People like Jing who are from non-English-speaking countries may question the whiteness of people like Dr. Wagner who do not match these criteria. Jing sees foreignness in his friend Gao who is tall and constantly attempts “to make eye contact with nice-looking women on the streets” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 206) as these attributes are deemed to be Western.

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Although Jing views his affair with Deidre as the “crime of crimes”, he enjoys “the satisfaction of being the master” of a Western woman” (p. 292). Jing may take this as “a certain tang of proud revenge” (Raman, 1947, p. 185) which reflects his twisted reasoning in terms of the hierarchy based on skin tone and language. Conquering a white Western woman becomes a way to release his repressed anger at his own perceived sense of inferiority.

Self-Salvation: A Sense of Unhomeliness Martin Daughtry (2013) claims that a palimpsest is “the result of successive acts of partial erasure and inscription, acts that turn it into a ‘multilayered record’” (p. 5). As each language and each of us as subjects are constructed in this way, Jing himself is also a palimpsestic habitat for languages on which the Chinese language is partially erased and altered while the English language is partially inscribed. The two languages compete with and erupt in each other, each becoming the other’s spectre. Being haunted by language may lead to different consequences: Wei commits suicide as he is not able to reconcile himself to accepting the English language while Jing, unlike Wei who has to learn English “against his better judgement” (Ouyang 2010, p. 179), does not hate it as he believes “it would provide him with a way out” (p. 181), though he is troubled by the question which language is superior. His split mind results in his playing with the two languages, diagnosed as having “a Chinese-English linguistic and cultural conflict” (pp. 364–365). Playing with the English and Chinese languages begins, in the first class at the university, with Tian Ma’s translation of his own name into Horse Sweet, Swift Horse, and Swift Marr (p. 129). Since then Jing and his roommates are constantly caught between the two languages, for example, Xin is obsessed with issues of English grammar such as “I am going to go” and “we have been being someone” (p. 140). These questions set Jing thinking about his different attitudes towards the two languages: he never encounters “grammatical problems” and can say anything he likes in Chinese (ibid.), but he has to pay a lot of attention to English grammar. Jing also invites his classmates to play the game of translating the seemingly untranslatable “ten rules that the university stipulated for the students” (p. 142). They are all obsessed with how to translate “buxu tan lian’ai”11 into English. Jing directly translates it into “don’t talk love” which seems to make no sense in English. Ma concludes “that’s how language works because it works by not making sense” (p. 144) and tries to translate it into “thou shalt not talk love” in the style of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament. They also discuss different greetings in both Chinese and English: Chinese speakers greet each other by asking “ni chile ma?” (“have you eaten?”) while English speakers normally greet by asking “how are you?” (p. 145) 11

Its version in Chinese is “不许谈恋爱”. During the 1980s, many Chinese universities did not allow female and male students to establish intimate relationship. However, this was not a strict ban. More often, this rule referred to the prohibition of public display of affection.

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Thus, Ma argues that the effect of “ni chile ma” equals that of “how are you”. In this sense, Jing asks himself whether “languages could express the same things in the same way” (p. 140). He also plays this game with Dr. Wagner who introduces himself to Jing’s class saying that he eats beef, drinks beer, and gets bored and Jing summarises this as “B-B-B-” (p. 220). Dr. Wagner also playfully translates Jing into Jean in French (p. 221). Jing, his classmates, and Dr. Wagner consciously or unconsciously wade into the borderland between the two languages as they attempt to express the same idea in the other language. However, they find either that direct translation into English does not make any sense or that the same idea has to be expressed without being translated directly. Thus, it is not as simple as that “languages could express the same things in the same way” and an expression in one language cannot fully cover or erase the expression in the other. Something must be added or lost in the process of translation, making the translated version seem familiar and unfamiliar to the source text at the same time. Daughtry (2013) summarises Freud’s claim on palimpsest by arguing that it “provides a model for the mechanism of memory, and the relationship between conscious perception and the unconscious” (p. 5). When an expression is translated into the target language, the expression in the source language is repressed and lurks beneath the expression in the target language as well as in the unconscious mind of the speaker/translator. However, the expression in the source language is not fully erased and its remnants attempt to make themselves known by (re)emerging in “conscious perception”. After Jing arrives in Australia, he turns his name into Gene, which foreshadows his doomed destiny. Since then, his expression becomes less grammatical and more fragmentary. For example, he omits the predicate in “I black or white?” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 302) and insists on saying “chiyao, eating medications” rather than taking them (p. 351). Furthermore, he insists on imposing his surname onto Deidre’s and turns it into Deidre Sandringham Gene (p. 310), sometimes playfully shortened as “Gene Dee” (p. 307) and “D. S.” (p. 310). Although he hates China (p. 291), he continues to speak English in a Chinese way or Chinese in the disguise of English. This could be viewed as playing with the two languages, but unlike his happy playing with them in Mainland China, this game is traumatic in Australia where he has no choice but to speak English. His mother tongue is repressed in Australia, but erupts in different ways into his speech. If learning English in Mainland China builds a link between Jing and his imagined English-speaking communities outside Mainland China, defending the Chinese language in Australia retains and reinforces Jing’s link with all that is Chinese. He needs to rely on something Chinese to support his existence and his imagined identity, the Chinese part of his identity. Furthermore, imposing his surname onto Deirdre’s reflects not only his insistence on patriarchal control but also his sense of insecurity in Australia as he says that the language he runs into never accepts him (p. 367). However, Deidre hates Chinese names (p. 354), challenging the only thing that he thinks he can control. We also learn that Gene and Deidre have not had sex for years (p. 355) as that Gene is afflicted with impotence after arriving in Australia. Gene seems to be facing an abyss full of contradictions: English and Chinese, the language barrier in Australia, his hatred of China, a dual

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sense of both superiority and inferiority, longing for power and lack of power, and potency and impotence. Gene’s father-in-law, Mr. David Sandringham, a psychiatrist, diagnoses Gene’s condition as “a Chinese-English linguistic and cultural conflict”: exhibiting such symptoms as a difficulty in switching back into a “foreign” culture after living in his “mother” culture for a brief time; a constant need to assert the superiority of his former culture over the present culture in private; and a perennial sense of victimisation that he did not enjoy full rights as his other fellow citizens did because of his “wrong” skin colour, his wrong shape of eyes and his wrong gait. He was dogged by the conviction that he was born of foreign-Chinese, possibly English-Chinese parentage, although he was emphatically opposed to a DNA test. From the history Mr. Sandringham got out of Gene, there was nothing to suggest that he was born of Chinese-Western wedlock. There was still less evidence to suggest that he was an illegitimate son, possibly of a poor Chinese soldier who had a one-night stand, in Gene’s speak, One Night Lie, with an American nurse serving on the Burma Road. The only problem seemed to have come from his having learnt English, learnt it as a Chinese. (pp. 364–365).

According to this diagnosis, the white English-speaking mother is nothing but a figment of Jing’s own imagination, caused by learning English together with the low social status of his family during Mainland China’s Cultural Revolution and his subaltern status as a Chinese migrant in Australia. He has to invent a white Western biological mother to heighten his social status. He is caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, Gene’s different somatic attributes make him feel that he is alienated and even discriminated against in Australia so that he imagines that he were white as a way to overcome the sense of being an alien. He has internalised the unequal power hierarchy based on skin tone and is aware that Chinese somatic attributes are inferior; on the other hand, he believes that the Chinese language is superior to the English language and imagines himself to be the owner of a superior cultural capital which endows him with a sense of dignity. Gene’s consciousness is torn in two: his wish to become a white English-speaking Westerner and to keep his Chinese cultural capital at the same time. He believes learning English has the power to change his identity “through and on the body” (Lim 2010, p.147). While some somatic changes such as the change of gesture may occur through language learning, others may emerge from the language learner’s imagination. It is his perception of his identity rather than his skin colour that is changing by absorbing new elements into the structure of his self-perception. In David’s view, Gene is mentally ill and has to be treated with medication which is the fruit of “the most advanced technology produced by the Western mind” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 365). However, Deidre is aware that Gene suffers from bitterness: everything had gradually reversed for him, day became night, the sun became the moon, what he had once regarded as ideal become hellish,

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happiness turned into bitterness, English, perversely, had become Chinese … It was almost as if he was Gene of bitterness, gene of bitterness … [h]e was never happy with anything, more so than ever in Australia … He was born a creature of non-comforts. It was a state of non-happiness that he enjoyed, an inability, it seemed, to come to terms with what Gene called “the English-instilled Australianness,” an antibook of whatever that was Chinese except for one thing: materialistic pursuit, the mad money instinct (p. 362)

Deidre knows that Gene is haunted by a myriad of contradictions and that his mental illness cannot be cured by medication as it is a linguistic and cultural illness rather than a psychiatric condition. However, Gene’s “gene of bitterness” is caused by his being “un whole” and “being able to resist the temptation to fall into delightful peaces [sic]” (p. 372). Being “un whole” and “a traitor to everything he once held dear” suggests that Gene realises that the Chinese and English languages as two centres are collapsing and he is no more caught between the two languages. This is possibly one of the reasons why he insists on going “ho me” (p. 308) which, split into two, suggests that he has no home to go to. As mentioned in the Introduction of this book, Freud (1919) states in his “The Uncanny” that heimlich not only means “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, comfortable, homely, etc.” (p. 2) but also means “concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others” (p. 3). In this sense, it is the imagined home that Jing dreams of that makes him feel unhomely in the way that “[w]hat is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich.” (p. 4). Thus, we can infer that Gene cannot have a sense of homeliness in either Mainland China or Australia. In fact, the name “Jing” has foreshadowed his sense of unhomeliness. Jing’s classmates call him “E-E-E”: the pronunciation of E Jing is similar to that of Yi Jing in Chinese and I Ching (The Book of Change) in English (Ouyang, 2010, p. 235). The reference to Yi Jing implies that everything, including Jing, is forever undergoing change. Nothing is stable or whole: neither the two languages nor himself as a Chinese or English speaker. The two languages interact in his mind and body and erupt into each other, severing the relations between language and identity. The more he learns English, the more changes take place in him, but he will never become a native English speaker as his Chineseness cannot be fully erased. Thus, Gene himself becomes a haunted house, “a ‘multilayered record’” caused by “successive acts of partial erasure and inscription” (Daughtry, 2013, p. 5). It is also a state of “ni zhong you wo, wo zhong you ni [you in me, me in you]” (Ouyang, 2007, p. xiii). In this sense, being unhomely, uncanny, or haunted blurs the distinction between there and here as well as between the English and Chinese languages. It is perhaps because of Deidre’s company and cross-cultural understanding and Jing’s attempt to “make senses [sic], in two languages” (Ouyang, 2010, p. 378) that the haunting of the two languages does not destroy him as it does to Wei. It may be possible to view the sense of unhomeliness from a positive perspective: having no permanent home while being able to find home everywhere. The palimpsest of erasure and inscription becomes our permanent home. This palimpsest, rather than

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being destructive, becomes a new pattern or paradigm for our complicated life and may be able to give birth to something new. This is possibly why Gene asks Deidre whether they are going to have a baby (p. 393) at the end of the novel.

“The English Empire”12 : (Post-)Colonial Languaging Jing/Gene in The English Class is trapped in a dilemma due to an imagined sense of superiority based on either the English or the Chinese language. The reason Jing in Mainland China feels the weight of the English language is the influence of global British colonisation. This section will examine Ouyang Yu’s poem “The English Empire” (2012) as an illustration of haunting by colonial power which, in the postcolonial era, is realised through administration and (language) education. English as a colonial language has invaded most parts of the world, challenging local cultures and threatening native languages. The simplified Chinese script was introduced into Mainland China after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Thus, the poetic persona claims that the traditional Chinese script represents the past while the simplified script represents the present. This poem begins with the claim that “this [Chinese] civilisation is going to die” and “they[postgrads I teach] don’t want anything to do with the past”. The poetic persona mourns the dying civilisation and regrets the younger generation’s dismissal of the past. “Going to die” suggests that the traditional script is on the verge of dying out but is in fact not dead yet. What he specifically laments is the endangered Chinese language in “the traditional script” “written vertically from right to left”. The traditional Chinese script is a symbol of the dying civilisation, replaced by “the simplified script” which is “written from left to right, like English”. One reason for discarding the traditional script was that the written order of the English language has come to represent modernity, convenience, and civilisation. The poetic persona stresses the unequal power relations by asserting that “Talking about English it’s like an English empire/That covers, covers up, the whole of China”. Under the impact of the English language, the traditional Chinese script becomes a spectre, lurking beneath the simplified script as well as the English language. The poetic persona also claims that the “English empire” has become an absurd institution, a system” in Mainland China, where a public servant has to sit for an exam in English Before he becomes one, a professor like you, specialising in mechanics Must sit for one before you become one, a student in oil paintings Must sit for one before he can be allowed to get his degree

Many Chinese people have to pass English exams in order to be considered for promotion. Their upward mobility may be compromised if they fail these exams, 12

Ouyang Yu (2012). The Kingsbury Tales: A Complete Collection. Kingsbury, Victoria, Australia: Otherland Publishing, p. 266. Please refer to Appendix 1 for this poem.

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no matter how talented they are in their specialised field. In this sense, “English has become a gateway to education, employment and economic and social prestige” (Guo and Beckett, 2007, p. 118) and it sifts those who are qualified and talented in other fields. Thus, the English language as a legacy of colonial power disrupts the traditional power structure in Mainland China and imposes itself onto the social hierarchy. Guo and Beckett further argue that “[t]he increasing predominance of English works to devalue Chinese languages” (p. 121). Chinese people are always reminded that a foreign language has the power to decide their present and future life. In other words, Chinese people’s career is manipulated by norms created in English-speaking nations far away. Due to the differences between the two languages, people often feel uncomfortable about or even terrified by English tests. The English language not only has the ability to disempower but also imposes a sense of dislocation. The poetic persona questions the unequal relations of power: “can you imagine the same thing happening in UK or USA or Canada or Australia/Where everyone sits for an exam in Chinese before they are allowed to proceed?” If the two languages have equal power, many Westerners would also be required to take Chinese exams. Unfortunately, power relations are not equal and it would be unimaginable for everyone in these countries to spend time and money to sit for “an exam in Chinese before they are allowed to proceed”. Máiréad NicCraith (2007) elaborates on the binary opposition of the dominant and the dominated in terms of English as a “natural” global language: “individuals and groups speaking global and majority languages have considerable advantages over their counterparts whose mother tongues are ranked low on the social scale” (p. 2). The former possess more cultural capital including “prestige, honour and educational credentials” (ibid.). Thus, the poetic persona says that it is “suicide” to colonise oneself, indicating that colonisation has been internalised in the collective consciousness of Chinese people and has deprived them of the ability of thinking without being controlled. The traditional Chinese script representing the past has been repressed by the English language and the poetic persona says that the postgrads he teaches “don’t want anything to do with the past”. Is this repressed past gone forever? The poet offers an alternative: but it’s good because one day you’ll find China elsewhere overseas that’s where they still keep the old script, the old culture, the old relics

The poetic persona suggests that modern China and the modern Chinese script, the dummy of Western culture and the English language, have occupied the space in which traditional China and the traditional Chinese script should reside and have driven the latter overseas where they become scattered, diasporic relics of the old and authentic Chinese culture. The repressed Chinese culture is not dead, but it has been relocated and may return in other forms. The poetic persona calls present China “Chingeland”, “the largest English country founded in China proper”. Thus, China has become a haunted house of languaging where the English language and the simplified Chinese script have repressed the traditional script but are not able to completely erase it. Though the poetic persona criticises the colonial power that disrupts the order and the power structure of China,

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it also detects new possibilities for the processes of languaging: “who knows this may not happen in 500 or 5000 yeas, who knows?” The speculation about a future “Chingeland” and “China elsewhere overseas” reminds us that the concepts of China and the Chinese language we refer to today are also the result of the processes of languaging and cultural hybridisation through 500 or 5000 years. The Chinese language and China have always been, are, and will always be under partial erasure and inscription. “China elsewhere overseas”, referring to the vast Chinese diaspora, indicates that the traditional Chinese script and culture will be reborn outside China. Repression, death, and rebirth form a temporal cycle foreshadowed as “500 or 5000 years.” Temporal cycles are reemphasised in the last line “it’s 7th now, 2 min past the midnight”. Midnight is generally regarded as the witching hour when ghosts (re)emerge. As Derrida (1994) claims that haunting happens when “the time is out of joint” (p. 25), midnight means the end/death of the previous day and the beginning/ rebirth of a new day, and it is the moment when the flow of time is broken (out of joint). The past is dragged into the darkness of midnight, but does not completely disappear, only (re)emerging in a different form in the new temporal cycle. It will keep changing in the new day until the next midnight when again something is erased, something is altered, something remains, and some new elements are added. Such a process of repetition goes on forever. The midnight in the poem indicates not only the witching hour of the transition between two days but also applies to ghostly transitions and ongoing change in language and culture. As analysed above, what China and the Chinese language mean today is the result of a myriad of repetitive transitions between the old and the new with a myriad of spectres lurking beneath. The ongoing inscription of the new and partial erasure of the old are also represented in the poem by the use of pinyin such as “bu shi ma13 ” and by expressions which follow Chinese grammar are unidiomatic in English. When we read this poem in English, we feel the presence of the Chinese language lurking like a ghost beneath the poem in English.

“Translating Myself”: Embodied Languaging Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (2002) summarise Walter Benjamin’s argument about translation as “[t]he task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original” (p. 258). True translation assumes that there are mutually independent languages and a disjunction between source and target texts. The poetic persona views himself as a language which can be translated. The first two lines of this poem read as follows: I translate myself into English As if I were a language 13

不是吗?(Isn’t it?).

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This poem goes beyond translation between two languages by comparing body to language. Walter Benjamin (2002) argues that “languages are not strangers to one another, but are … interrelated in what they want to express” (p. 255). What is stressed here is that meaning connects the source and target languages and it is body that connects the two languages if meaning is corporealised. The question is whether body can be truly represented by two languages. Thus, the poetic persona continues to ask but am I not Chinese am I not that ancient language that/resembles myself

The poetic persona compares himself to the Chinese language in order to set up a link between language and identity. However, this question challenges the link. This section will centre around language, body, and identity, specifically, whether the poetic persona’s body accommodates only one language and one identity. A translator seeks the closest equivalent in a target language. The issue is whether it is possible to express in the target language the same idea as that represented by the source language. As a language is socially and culturally encoded, there is also the question of whether equivalents can fully express all the social and cultural connotations encoded in a single word/character of the source language. Thus, translation entails two challenges: locating the exact word (if there is one) of an expression in the source language and finding the best equivalent (if there is one) in the target language. Similar but different meanings lurk, spectre-like, beneath the signifier while similar but different expressions in the target language lurk beneath the chosen equivalent. Thus, the translatability of both meaning and body troubles the poetic persona. Simply put, is he truly Chinese if he uses the Chinese language or can the language truly represent him? Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall (2010) argue that “associations between language and identity are rooted in cultural beliefs and values” (p. 21). However, people are able to speak different languages and language, which, like automatons, can travel across national and cultural borders. Furthermore, large-scale postcolonial migration diversifies and complicates languages, cultural beliefs, and values within a country’s border, challenging the authenticity of certain languages and the dominant positions of some identities. The link between language and identity becomes unstable. When language is not able to truly represent identity, we may move on to look at whether body as corporealised meaning is able to represent identity. True translation of meaning requires two mutually independent languages. Thus, true translation of body also requires two mutually independent physical appearances. The question is whether physical appearance can be completely erased after being translated. This is perhaps the reason why the poetic persona continues to ask: is myself, is the birthmark on my face that makes you comment to your friends without even looking that he is Chinese or dismiss him as a bloody Chink or Chow or burst into Ching Chong Chinaman rhyme…

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However, such speculative judgement based on appearance “without even looking” suggests that the traumatic past has never completely gone and its remainders are still haunting the present. The judgement dates back to more than one hundred years ago when early Chinese settlers in Australia were stigmatised because of their different language and appearance.14 Discrimination against Chinese people is historically encoded in the stereotyped description of their “birthmark” as well as those taunting rhymes as shown in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage. Appearance, similar to language, can also be diversified within the boundaries of a country by postcolonial migration. Thus, appearance cannot be bound by cultural identity and citizenship and the link between appearance and identity also becomes unstable. Troubled by the Chinese language and traumatised by his appearance, the poetic persona finds his body a burden and a shackle in translation: I mean how can I turn myself into another language without surrendering myself without betraying myself without forgetting myself without forgiving myself without even losing myself in a different con/text

The poetic persona’s identity is constructed within the Chinese language which has been evolving in a context different from that of the English language. In order to truly translate himself, he has to completely forget himself or even lose himself “in a different con/text”, suggesting that translation refers to not only replacing expressions in a text with (quasi-)equivalents in another language but also a complete transplant of the translator’s mind into another culture. However, the poetic persona’s answer is manifest: it is betraying himself and he cannot forgive himself if he surrenders himself. Thus, translating himself is impossible as his body and mind are constructed in the Chinese language. These Chinese remainders will return like repressed ghosts after the poetic persona is translated into English. I mean how can English be so transparent as not be able even to hide my china-skinned identity I mean how can a language be so indestructible that it remains itself while being turned into another

In addressing the link between language, appearance, and identity, Lim (2010) argues that “[e]very cultural change is signified through and on the body” (p. 147). The poetic persona attempts to erase or hide his “china-skin” by translating himself into English, but this skin is still visible after translation. On the one hand, it is not able to alter his appearance which indicates his “china-skinned” identity; on the other, the Chinese language is still visible beneath the English disguise. After being translated into English, the Chinese language should be gone. However, as Gordon

14

Please See the analysis of Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage in Chap. 1.

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(2008) puts it, “that which appears not to be there is often a seething presence” (p. 8). The apparition of the Chinese language proves that it is “so indestructible”. The indestructible language and appearance suggest that it is impossible to fully translate text and body. Facing the (partial) untranslatability of both language and body, the poetic persona seeks a reason: or is this body of mine really two bodies one English the other Chinese translating myself is but re/creating myself with languages or bodies a discourse between two knowing halves or wholes each the interpreter of the other

His body is split into two bodies “one English/the other Chinese” because it, like “a multidimensional, multisensorial screen” (Lim, 2010, p. 147), absorbs a multitude of Chinese and English linguistic elements. Though it is impossible to completely translate oneself into the other self, the newly absorbed elements of bodies or languages together with the remainders left after translation are able to re/create a self/body. It needs to be noted that “creating myself” suggests that something new will emerge from the process while “re/creating myself” suggests that the process of creating myself will repeat itself in the way of partial erasure and inscription. The “discourse” refers to the communication and interaction between the “two knowing halves or wholes.” More daringly speaking, everyone’s body is born a linguistic and cultural haunting site/house. “[T]wo knowing halves or wholes,” either texts or bodies, compete with and reflect each other by incorporating part of each other. They further form a kind of palimpsest in which the two halves or wholes are familiar with but at the same time different from each other. The poetic persona furthers this kind of multiplication: this awareness of what is being written in another language this awareness of what is being concealed in what is being translated given up for gained or lost for both this helpless feeling of subjection to a bilingual force moving in between

This part not only reiterates that something is concealed, gained, and lost in the process of translation, but also reveals a sense of helplessness caught between the two languages. This sense of helplessness is awakened by the source text’s involuntary repetition due to its incompetence in exactly targeting and hitting a (quasi-)equivalent in the target language. Thus, something rejected by the target language and something lost, concealed, or repressed may dash to and fro in the darkness between the two languages and form “a bilingual force” which is based on the two languages but at the

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same time different from them. This bilingual force has gained some independence from the two languages and become a partial automaton. However, besides a sense of helplessness, the poetic persona also gains something from the process of translation: translating myself I get double paid by imagination and twice removed from the original in the mind and on paper

Getting double paid, going beyond monetary gain, refers to something new gained via the imagination for both languages/bodies in the process of translation. The source text has to undergo double processes: decoding the source text in his mind and encoding it with the target language. When the source text goes through the mind, something is screened due to omission, misunderstanding, likes and dislikes, and cultural barriers. When the meaning is converted into the target language on paper, some factors such as the poetic persona’s competence in the target language and some cultural or political taboos would also stand in the way of freely translating the source text. After the double process, the source text has been “twice removed from the original.” Thus, the target text may always resemble the source text, but the former can never be exactly the same with the latter because they tend to convey the same meaning, but various linguistic, cultural, and political factors prevent the true and ideal translation from happening. In this sense, the text in the target language is and can only be various haunting resemblances/apparitions which are forever in the process of approximating the source text. During the process of the approximation, all these resemblances/apparitions and the source text reflect and interpret each other as if there were numerous mirrors. The poetic persona continues to address the relations between translation and mirror: doing a simultaneous translation of myself as if having a simultaneous orgasm both in your body and in your head is easy in the mirror except for the awareness of the thing in between

As one’s image is immediately produced in the mirror, being reflected in the mirror is like “doing a simultaneous translation” and “having a simultaneous orgasm”. In this sense, he perceives his image in the mirror and builds up a link between part of his body and his awareness of identity. Mirroring and simultaneous translation and orgasm, all short, transient, and eruptive, are the outcomes of long accumulation of linguistic and physical forces which have been waiting beneath the two languages to be released. In addition, the mirror image is never a complete reflection of his body as the image is two-dimensional while his body is three-dimensional, which means that some parts of the body are lost in the process of reflection in the way that some information is lost in the process of translation. The poetic persona is aware that mirror is in the way of a complete reflection in the way that language barrier is in

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the way of a complete translation. It is because of language and mirror that produce multiple versions of translation and reflection. Ouyang (1995) also represents the palimpsest produced by mirror in his another poem “Seeing Double”15 : you can’t help but translate everything back and forth so many times that it becomes unrecognizably fascinating as a doubled, tripled, multiple double

The poetic persona sees that both language and mirror have the magic power to turn a translated version and a reflected image into “doubled, tripled, multiple” apparitions haunting the source text and body. In this sense, translation and reflection “make things up in the interstices of the factual and the fabulous” because something “absent, neglected, ghostly” (Gordon 2008, p. 196) is dashing back and forth between two languages or between the body and the reflected image. It can be concluded based on the analysis above that true translation between any two languages or bodies is never possible. The poetic persona accordingly claims: I translate myself from Chinese into English disappear into appearance of another existence looking back across the barrier of tied tongues at the concealed image of the other body

As true translation is never possible, the poetic persona is only able to translate himself into the apparition of the English language or into the Chinese language under the disguise of the English language. Furthermore, he can also see “the concealed image” of the other body when he looks back, suggesting that the source text/original body is, through the process of translation, also changed and influenced by the target text/the other body. Thus, the mind, the pen, the tongue, the bodies/texts as agencies of translation all work together to create a palimpsest of a myriad of meanings and reflections.

“The Double Man”: Creative Languaging Translation, as argued above, is never fully impossible and can produce multiple meanings. Thus, Ouyang (2012) claims that translation is like “a new flower blossoming on two stranded hearts16 ”, suggesting that two hearts/languages interact with 15 Ouyang (1995). The Moon Over Melbourne. Ferntree Gully, Victoria, Australia: Papyrus Publishing, web, https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/ouyang-yu/poems/seeing-dou ble-0282021, retrieved on 15 March 2019. 16 “异心啮合异花开” (yixin niehe yihua kai).

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each other and something new can be produced. This section will focus on Ouyang’s poem “The Double Man” in light of this idea of creative languaging. This poem mainly centres around the poetic persona’s double/multiple senses of homeliness. Ouyang Yu, a Chinese migrant in Australia, has long been haunted by the concept of home. In his The English Class, as analysed above, the protagonist Jing is haunted by two (imagined) homes: China and Australia. In the poem “The English Empire,” as analysed above, China becomes the (imagined) home accommodating the traditional and simplified Chinese scripts and the English language. In the poem “Translating Myself,” as analysed above, the poetic persona’s body becomes a home accommodating both the Chinese and English languages. In the poem “The Double Man,” the poetic persona is again haunted by two (imagined) homes: my surname is china my given name australia if i translate that directly into English my surname becomes australia my given name china

Name, consisting of given name and surname, indicates a person both as a unique individual and as “a member of a particular group, his or her family” (Elias, 1991, p. 184). The poetic persona’s former name is “china australia,” suggesting that he has a double identity but at this moment the Chinese culture dominates over the Australian one. Translation of the name here is beyond a mere reversal of words. The poetic persona’s Chinese surname is passed down from his male ancestors, assuming more power and historical right than given name does. In light of the Chinese naming rules, his surname precedes his given name and the surname “china” is in a dominant position while the given name “australia” is repressed in a subordinate position. After this name is directly translated into English, in light of the English naming rules, the surname “china” in Chinese naming rules is turned into the subaltern given name while the given name “australia” is turned into the surname. Norbert Elias (1991) claims that a surname represents “we-identity” while a given name represents “I-identity” (p. 184). He further claims that there is no “I-identity” without “we-identity” (ibid.). Thus, in the Chinese name “china australia”, the surname “china” as the symbol of “we-identity” is more visible and prominent than the given name “australia”. However, the repressed given name “australia” needs to make itself known by being translated into English and becoming the surname. We cannot say that it is a completely different name because the words and the word sequence remain unchanged, but the name is already an expression in a different language and encodes different cultural connotations. Thus, the remainders of Chinese elements in the translated name keep reminding us of the name’s past. A name with double connotations suggests the poetic persona’s dilemma: i do not know what motherland means i possess two countries or else i possess neither

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The poetic persona is haunted by two names/nations which his body accommodates, but they may vie to manifest themselves irregularly. Thus, the poetic persona’s recognition of himself becomes chaotic so that he falls into a sense of unhomeliness. Addressing the sense of unhomeliness, the poetic persona wants to draw a clear demarcation between the past and the present by claiming that. my past motherland is my past my present motherland is my present

However, he finds that both China and Australia can be his homes: when i go to china i say i’m returning to my home country when i go to Australia i say i’m returning to my home country wherever i go it is with a heart tinged with two colours

China represents his past, but he still sees going to China as returning home possibly because part of his Chineseness “still refuses to be translated” (Ouyang, 2007, p. 73) so that he can still find partial sense of homeliness in China. In other words, the past has never completely gone and is always there haunting him with the return of the repressed memories. In this sense, China as an agent of the past invades the present and thus turns the poetic persona into a haunted being “with a heart tinged in two colours” (ibid.). To the poetic persona, both China and Australia seem familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Though the poetic persona claims that he has two homes, he may be viewed as a sort of “han jian” (traitor to China) by some Chinese people as he leaves his (past) motherland and becomes a foreigner in terms of citizenship. He also claims that. although there is han jian in Chinese there isn’t ao jian in english

The comparison between the attitudes towards migrants reflects the fact that China is more culturally occlusive while Australia is more culturally diverse and more tolerant towards migrants. The poetic persona is just one example of many migrants with various pasts who come to Australia and turn them into many haunted houses where different pasts are variously erased and incorporated into each other. Thus, there is not much ground for one who leaves Australia to be called “ao jian” (a traitor to Australia). However, the stigmatised title “han jian (a traitor to China)” may always haunt the poetic personae after he leaves China. In this sense, the difference between the two homes lies in that China rejects the poetic persona while Australia does not reject him while there is still a lack of sense of homeliness in Australia. Despite the difference, the poetic persona addresses the similarity of his motherlands:

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He may feel that he is not accepted by the English language in the way that Jing in The English Class feels (Ouyang, 2010, p. 367). In fact, it is Chinese, his mother tongue, that impedes him from being accepted by the English language and thus (partially) nullifies his sense of homeliness in Australia. The letter M in upper case suggests that something sacred is encoded in it so that the poetic persona may render it dear. However, turning it into lower case suggests that the two motherlands are no more sacred so that the poetic persona may not be bound by them. This change can be described as “[w]hat is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich” (Freud 1919, p. 4). In this sense, the poetic persona is an outsider to both homes as he decides to nullify both of them by depolarising the two centres and thus to turn himself into a homeless/motherless being. The poetic persona has also “set up a home”, a new home is different from the two homes mentioned above. However, what the poetic persona appears to be in the present is constructed on the two homes and languages. His Chineseness as the remainders of his memory may occasionally erupt in the new home to make it seem less new. In another poem “Speaking English in Chinese”,17 Ouyang (2008) addresses this kind of becoming less new in Hong Kong and Singapore which are both the entrepôts between the West and the East and between the Chinese and English languages: “Don’t disturb” is turned into “Don’t harass” as their Chinese equivalents share one character rao18 and “lend” is replaced by “borrow” as there is only one character jie19 in Chinese “for both lend and borrow”. Chinese thinking can be sensed behind these expressions though they appear in (broken) English. The newness of the new home can also come from Australianness. As time goes on, Australianness in the new home will also become old. Thus, in this new home, the poetic persona becomes a “double man” who does not know “what motherland means”. This “double man” who is both/neither here and/nor there belongs to both/ neither China and/nor Australia and speaks both/neither the Chinese and/nor English languages. In order to further challenge “authentic language” as well as “authentic identity”, the poetic persona claims that in two hundred years’ time i shall be the father of the double man

This may not be only a prediction of the consequence of creative languaging and it may also be an indirect criticism of Australia’s entrenchment in English monolingualism and lack in the acceptance of non-English speakers. Captain James Cook 17

Ouyang, Yu (2012). The Kingsbury Tales. Kingsbury, Victoria, Australia: Otherland Publishing, pp. 108–109. 18 扰. 19 借.

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who spoke English found and landed on the Australian continent about two hundred years ago. Australians in the present are descendants of migrants who came to this land in different periods of time. Thus, Australians are in fact the production of repetitive partial erasure and inscription brought by generations of migrants. In this sense, the double man refers to the production of the multilayering of different cultural elements.

Conclusion This chapter has examined haunting in language in Ouyang Yu’s The English Class as well as his poetry. Haunting in language means language is not as stable as we assume and can cause an experience of the uncanny. What a language appears today is in fact the product of a series of language encounters and interactions in which some elements remain while some have been erased or altered. When a language is spoken, many traces of other languages or language elements are lying behind it as apparitions to remind us that this language is neither independent nor pure. Furthermore, language encounters and interactions are forever going on so that the language we speak at this moment may turn different moments later. It is the feeling that we are speaking another language or elements of other languages when we speak this language that causes an experience of the uncanny. This chapter has examined haunting in language through three modes of languaging. Embodied languaging means that two languages compete with each other to control and possess our body so that the other language is always haunting when one language is spoken. In Jing’s case, on the one hand, he assumes that learning English can better his life—a process that is figured through a metaphor of skin whitening; on the other hand, he assumes that the Chinese language is superior to the English language and the people around him views the English language as a prothesis and would rip it off. In “Translating Myself”, the poetic persona also finds it difficult to translate his body into English. The invasion of another language and the resistance of our mother tongue make our body beyond control as if the invasion caused “a kind of corporeal linguistic violence” (Gunew, 2004, p. 62). The resistance emerges from, as Chow (2014) argues, “an entire habitus cultivated through the semiotics” (p. 16) of our mother tongue. The competition between two languages is, in fact, the competition between two linguistic systems manipulating our body. Colonial languaging as another mode of languaging is also present in the postcolonial context. It is about not only the English language as a colonial legacy repressing the less empowered languages such as Chinese but also the elements of the latter (re)emerge in the former. The repression of the Chinese language is represented by the facts that Jing has to learn English to better his life while Chinese professionals have to sit in for English exams. Unequal power relations underlie the competition between the two languages and “a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated” (Ashcroft et al., 2002, p. 8). As Gunew (2004) has argued, English as a colonial language undermines “the linguistic and cultural diversity” (p. 52) and colonial languaging in

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fact causes two kinds of fear: firstly, the fear of becoming an alien on the land to which one is born as “being made to stand outside” oneself to look at oneself (Ng˜ug˜ı, 1986, p. 17); secondly, the fear of not arriving at the norm of colonial languages. Colonial power is still underlying beneath these fears in the postcolonial context. However, the experiences of the uncanny are also caused by the Chinese language’s resistance to be forgotten. Jing can never speak English like a native speaker because the Chinese language that he can never forget prevents him from becoming a native English speaker. Furthermore, some Chinese expressions also suddenly emerge in the poem “The English Empire”. Embodied languaging and colonial languaging both feature the competition between one’s mother tongue and other languages and the haunting of one language by elements of other languages. However, languaging as haunting is not always fearful and negative as it can create something new. In Jing’s case, he has been playing with the two languages and the poetic persona in “The Double Man” also indicates that he will become a double man in two hundred years. This kind of creative languaging, as Rey Chow (2014) puts it, features adapted “xenophonic memories” which “are not quite containable within the illusorily unified histories” of “the colonial or imperial registers of standard or proper English, French, Spanish, or Chinese” (p. 59). Unified histories of languages are illusory because “xenophonic memories” are not containable and they keep (re)emerging. Thus, any language can be altered through creative languaging and turned into many versions of this language such that one finds various versions of the English and Chinese languages rather than a single version. In other words, any dominant language, in the process of creative languaging, not only undermines “linguistic and cultural diversity” (Gunew, 2004, p. 52) but also can diversify this language. Through the evolution of the English and Chinese languages, it can be proposed that any current language is, in fact, the product of a myriad and ongoing process of creative languaging.

Chapter 4

Haunting as the Supernatural in the Crocodile Fury and Playing Madame Mao

The previous chapters have examined haunting through the lens of trauma and languaging, respectively. The two modalities of haunting are interrelated not only because they possess the mind and the body but also because they give rise to multilayered hybridity in which elements haunt each other as apparitions. This chapter will examine the supernatural as another kind of haunting in Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury and Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madam Mao. The Crocodile Fury does not clearly indicate its setting through “specific labels and names” (Chin, 2009, p. 96) though some traces such as “Mat Salleh” (Yahp, 1992, p. 21) and “a pontianak ghost” (p. 76) suggest that the setting is Malaya. Similarly, names of places such as “the pasar malams” (Lau, 2000, p. 110) and “Queen Astrid Park” (p. 174) reveal that Playing Madame Mao is mainly set in Singapore. By obliquely naming specific locations, the authors of these novels may attempt to “avoid being bound to a particular nationality, or country” (Chin, 1999) and to present issues that appear across multiple (post)colonial contexts. Malaya has long been a connecting point between different parts of the world and the two texts address different kinds of supernatural in Malaya. Thus, there are a myriad of encounters between the realities of Malaya and different supernatural beings nurtured in Malay, Western, and Chinese cultures. This chapter will go through a history of and the supernatural in Malaya, elaborate on the theories on the supernatural, and examine, in Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury and Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madame Mao, the powers behind the supernatural in Malaya. The Crocodile Fury by Yahp (1992) is set in colonial Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. Yet, while it is recognisably situated in these spaces and times, “specific labels and names” are removed for the sake of creating a universal1 colonial and postcolonial setting (Chin, 2009, p. 96). In this setting, names of places are replaced by the obscure binary opposition of here and afar and names of characters are replaced 1

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak criticises “universal” in an interview (Sharp and Spivak 2003) on representation in world literature by arguing that the so-called “universal” and “universalisation” are achieved by reduplicating Europe.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 X. Xiong, Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3064-7_4

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by general terms such as Grandmother and Mother. The novel is a multilayered, multivoiced, and nonlinear text narrated by a nameless young girl “I” as the protagonist who tells the stories of other characters (Grandmother, Mother, the bully, the nuns, the rich man, the lover, the King crocodile, and the Lizard Boy). Grandmother as a matriarch with Chinese descent is a ghost chaser and storyteller with a voluminous memory. When she is a young girl, she works as a servant in the rich man’s mansion and is maltreated by the other servants. She rescues Mother from a brothel and snatches the protagonist from Mother’s womb before the protagonist is naturally born. Grandmother sends Mother to the convent school as well and hopes that the latter can become an assistant to her ghost chasing. However, Mother is Christianised and does not believe what Grandmother says anymore. Grandmother also sends the protagonist to the convent school and hopes that the latter can grow up to become her assistant. The protagonist meets the bully and the nuns at the convent school. The protagonist in fact retells the stories told by Grandmother, Mother, the bully, and the nuns. The narration moves between fragments of these stories. A rich man from afar builds a mansion at the peak of a hill named Mat Salleh—a literal translation into Malay of the phrase, Mad Sailors (Ani, 1992, p. 13). He takes a lover out of the sea and brings her into the mansion which is later laid waste and then turned into the library of a Christian convent school, but it is always haunted by ghosts and hill spirits including the King crocodile. Grandmother believes that the maltreatment she received in the mansion opened her extra eye so that she is endowed with supernatural power to see ghosts. Her ghostchasing business and storytelling constitute her reservoir of ancient Chinese culture. However, her business wanes as the colony is increasingly overrun by Christian evangelism and people consequently do not believe in her supernatural power. She is particularly pre-occupied by the lover’s ghost and the King crocodile. The rich man locks the lover up in the mansion as if she was his property. The lover then shows her beast-like face and flees and the rich man is scared to death. The ghost of the lover henceforth is haunting the convent school. The land crocodile is always lurking in the jungle between the convent school and the city. It can take on different forms to scare the city residents and the convent girls. The Lizard Boy who is abandoned by his parents and raised by the nuns is from time to time possessed by the land crocodile and thus causes havoc in the convent. The nuns preaches the Christian worldview that the convent school is the only haven in the land and life outside is full of dangers and enemies. However, the bully who is an orphan and an outcast at the convent school is confused by this teaching. As a muscular girl, she stops growing at the age of fourteen, but she is familiar with the jungle and loves taking photos. Together the protagonist and the bully attempt to discover the hidden history of the convent school and the hill despite the nuns’ prohibition. They become good listeners and inheritors of Grandmother’s unfinished stories. At the end of the novel, the protagonist herself merges into the lover who can travel through time. The text, as Dixon (2002) argues, is “a story of the arcane, the supernatural … it deals in both the magical and the mundane” (p. 25). The text’s haunting effect arises not only from the way that ghosts, spirits, and all kinds of

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supernatural beings inspire fear, but also from the fact that they become each other’s apparitions, each confronting the other.

Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore) Malaya features a mixed culture. Before the European colonisers’ arrival, Malaya, specifically Melaka, had seen traders from China, India, and the Arab world (Hooker, 2003, p. 4). Thus, Malaya has long been a connecting and transfer point between “multiple cultures and civilisations” (ibid.). Since the beginning of the Age of Discovery, Malaya has undergone “the Portuguese Era”, “the Dutch Era”, and “the English Era” (Hooker, 2003, p. 6). This last era (1786–1941) lasted the longest and exerted the greatest influence on Malaya. In A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West, Virginia Matheson Hooker (2003) views “the British presence” as “interference” “brought about by the ‘unstable’ political situation of the Malay states” (p. 7), suggesting that the British rule brought a kind of order to the political instability of Malaya. Within this order, as Edmund Kee-Fook Chia (2001) claims, the three distinct communities dominant in Malaya were divided basically along labor lines: the Malays remained as peasants and smallholders in their farmlands and kampungs (villages), the Indians toiled as rubber tappers in secluded rural settlements, and the Chinese worked the tin mines and controlled trade in the urban areas (p. 80).

He further argues that “the division of labor along ethnic lines reinforced the social-cultural differences between the communities and the spatial segregation exacerbated the already tense inter-ethnic relations” (ibid.). The segregation of the communities also foreshadows the coexistence of and the competition between the supernatural nurtured by these cultures. This kind of “divide-and-rule policy” also refers to the invisible and manipulative power which maintained the order. However, Hooker (2003) also argues that this order represented “a new administrative system which was in conflict with the traditional Malay system of values and administration” (p. 7). The British colonial order or system is imposed onto the communities in Malaya, especially onto the Malays who resisted “British rule from the mid-nineteenth century up to the late 1940s” (p. 8). Though Malaysia and Singapore gained independence in 1957 and 1965, respectively, they have been greatly affected by their colonial legacy and by powerful nations in and outside the region. The Malays’ resistance against the British colonial rule and the Malay nationalist movement led to “The Federation of Malaya” and “The Emergency” which continued onto the “Proclamation of Independence” in 1957 (p. 9). Thus, different cultural groups such as the Malays, the Chinese, and the Indians were gathered together as a nation under the name Malaysia. However, the postindependence 1960s still saw political unrest caused by the colonial legacy, ethnic disunity, and foreign interference and “[t]he territory of present day Malaysia is

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based on colonial boundaries” and “its sovereignty is based on colonial foundations” (p. 11). The British colonial influence is also represented by the fact that English is a nationally recognised language and its political system follows the British model. However, the imposed political system which tried to bring different groups together found it difficult to fit in the mixed cultural context. Violent postwar clashes between the Malays and the Chinese continued and led to the Independence of Singapore as well as the 13 May 1969 Incident which was an event of ethnic violence mainly targeting the Chinese. One of the differences between Malaysia and Singapore is that the majority of the Malaysian population are ethnic Malays, while ethnic Chinese forms the majority in Singapore. Foreign powers such as China and the U.S. were also present behind several events of political unrest including the Communist Insurgency in Malaysia during 1968–1969. Constance Mary Turnbull (2009) calls this “interventionist politics by the more powerful and bigger nations from which Singaporeans had emigrated” (pp. 1–2). Given the fact that Malaya has been through a complicated history shaped by different powers and cultures, Malaysia and Singapore take different approaches towards the past which have been fragmented. Malaysia has a strong desire for a “national ideology of unity” (Hooker, 2003, p. 10) which mainly relies on the past. The official version of Malaysian history is focused on “evidence of Malay or Malaysian achievement and ‘progress’” (p. 3). However, Singapore attempts to cut the tie with the past. Turnbull (2009), introducing modern Singapore, quotes “a popular and proud slogan” after independence: “SINGAPORE HAS NO HISTORY. SINGAPORE’S HISTORY BEGINS NOW” (p. 1). Newly fashioned Singaporeans, she writes, particularly the young, reject “past history as irrelevant” (p. 1). The reasons for the rejection of the past were that the past was too traumatic and fragmented and also that the colonisers had already erased much history before colonial settlement so that “little was known about pre-colonial Singapore at the time of independence” (ibid.). As for the history of Singapore, Turnbull (2009) also claims that The term “new Asian” came into vogue, to describe an ideal Singaporean, who would combine Western modernity with “Asian values” derived from cultural roots: “Although Singapore is a young nation, we are an ancient people, whether we are Chinese, Indian, Malay or Eurasian. (pp. 2–3)

Malaysia is Malay-centred while different cultural groups in Singapore enjoy more equity based on the concept of “new Asian”. However, no matter how hard Singapore attempts to erase the past, the two nations are both caught between the past and present, the West and the East, and subjected to continuous ethnic and cultural conflicts. The complicated histories and the cultural and political instability turn Malaysia and Singapore into multilayered spaces where supernatural beings nurtured in different cultures encounter and entangle with each other.

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The Supernatural in Malaya James Noel McHugh (1959) examines the Malay ghost in his Hantu: an account of a ghost belief in Modern Malaya and claims that for Malay believers in the supernatural “everything that exists in the contemporaneous world, whatever its form, shares a common life-force, or semangat” (p. 15). This indicates that the Malay belief in the supernatural is, unlike monotheistic Christianity, a kind of animism. Mohd Taib Osman (1989) views the samangat [semangat] as “an impersonal force vital to the well-being of men and things” (p. 79), indicating that the semangat is independent from but vital to “men and things”. Farouk Yahya (2015) examines the Malay supernatural and defines the semangat as follows: It is found in everything, i.e. not only in living beings such as humans and animals, but also in inanimate objects such as rocks, metals, and even constructed structures such as houses. A lack of semangat leads to a person being vulnerable to attack by spirits, and as such medical treatment entails not only expelling the spirits but also restoring the semangat (p. 23).

There are two key points here: firstly, the semangat is universal and even animals and houses have semangat as human beings do, blurring the demarcation between different realms; secondly, spirits can invade and possess a person when he/she is vulnerable, suggesting that spirits can travel between the human and supernatural realms. Yahya also argues that the Malay cultural environment is believed to “be populated with numerous kinds of spirits (hauntu)” (ibid.). Jan Knappert (1992) defines hantu as the “spirits of the dead” and “any legendary invisible being, such as demons” (p. 61). Amin et al. (2014) claim that these omnipresent hantu are “the opposite element of God” and “the bad element” while tuhan means god in a monotheistic belief system such as Islam and represents “the good element” (Amin et al., 2014, p. 33), indicating that the Malay supernatural has been influenced by Islam but also that there is binary opposition between the good and the bad in the Malay supernatural. Nicholas (2013) also claims that hantu as “a natural part of Malaysian life” are “supernatural beings that co-exist and occasionally participate in day-to-day interactions with humans” (p. 163). In this sense, Hantu may not be a kind of “strange unseen power” (p. 16) as McHugh argues as hantu as spirits are “a natural part of Malaysian life”. The Malays mainly “remained as peasants and smallholders in their farmlands and kampungs (villages)” (Chia, 2001, p. 80). Thus, the Malay supernatural is more related to rural areas and nature. Since hantu are “a natural part of Malaysian life”, Harvey (2008) examines hantu in the Malay tropical environment and argues that “Malay folk beliefs are firmly contained and displaced within a rural, untamed, tropical space” (p. 26), suggesting not only that hantu are integrated with nature but also that they are marginalised and oppressed by (colonial) urban space. Under (colonial) oppression, the marginalised hantu may re-emerge to lament the loss of the land.

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One of the key hantu is the pontianak. Nur ‘Maulod (2009) details the pontianak in Malay folklore as “the ghost of a woman who died during childbirth” “often characterized as having long, tangled black hair, and being clad in flowy white robe” (p. 1). Death during childbirth suggests that the woman resists the turn from girlhood to motherhood and it can also be understood as a process that has not been finished. The pontianak in Malay folklore re-emerges in contemporary Malaysian and Singaporean media and literary texts. Tan (2010) addresses the loss of the pontianak’s baby and states that the pontianak represented in movies often appears at night in a tree, accompanied by wailing or sobbing (p. 153) which reflect her mourning over the loss of the child as well as her life. However, Tan also argues that the pontianak represents “repressed national anxieties” (ibid.), suggesting that the pontianak represents not only the loss of a child but also the loss of the land and the past on both of which a national identity could be constructed. The repeated representations also indicate that the pontianak as a Malay supernatural being is the product of an “unresolved or repressed violence” (Gordon, 2008, p. 8) in the past. Her re-emergence in media or literary texts, as Tan (2010) argues, is “irresistible, protective and vengefully aggressive” (p. 156) as she is represented as seeking revenge on her own loss as well as the national loss. Tan (2009) thus views “the revival of the Pontianak in contemporary Malay communities” as “a legitimate and embodied social actor within the community” (p. 3), suggesting that the return of the pontianak fulfils the social need in Malaysia and Singapore for something from the past bearing the mark of national anxiety. The pontianak thus becomes a symbol connecting the Malays and the Singaporeans and the land and her embodiment in media or literary texts become the “flesh of memory” (Young, 2002). Colonisation always carries with it religious influence. Christianity began to exert its influence in Malaya in the sixteenth century when Spanish and Portuguese colonisers brought Catholicism. This was followed by the Dutch and the English who brought Protestant churches. As for the evangelisation of Southeast Asian colonies, Goh (2005) argues that “Christianity did not spread in Southeast Asia under coercion by the colonial governments” (p. 6). He further argues that the English, “after using military means to secure their dominance”, “were often content to leave local customs and everyday life alone, so long as the peace and commerce of the colony was not disturbed” (ibid.). Goh believes that the (British) colonial dominance brought a kind of “socio-political order” to Malaya. However, the colonised may not be willing to accept the colonial “socio-political order” based on colonial military conquest. The colonial and Christian “social-political order” was maintained and strengthened through establishing Christian institutes such as convents and (missionary) schools and the expansion of cities in line with (Western) urbanisation. The Christian supernatural thus appears more as an invisible power behind the colonial “socialpolitical order”. Addressing “the Civilisation Mission” “along with the European acquisition of the coastal cities in Asia”, Wong (2014) asserts that missionaries were originally sent to “the colonies for the pastoral care of the military, servicemen, and merchants” (p. 202). As the colonies expanded, the roles of European missionaries also expanded to “the local linguistic expertise, cultural translators, and most of all, as founders and teachers of Christian schools in the colonised territories”

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(ibid.). These “civilised” educators “dispatched to the native population ‘modern knowledge’ with its deeply embedded Western values” (ibid.). “[M]odern knowledge” was dispatched and the colonised were converted to Christians under the name of Christian God. Goh (2005) addresses the social hierarchisation caused by Christianity in Malaya and argues that “[m]ission schools” which were normally “well-reputed” represented “the close association of Christianity with middle-class identity (indicated in higher educational levels and correspondingly higher incomes and Anglophone competence), and the economic and organisational cachet” (p. 35). This gave rise to imbalanced power relations between the Christian supernatural and the other kinds of supernatural in the colonies: evangelisation as part of colonisation brought about a binary opposition between Christian believers/the enlightened and non-believers/the unenlightened. If missionary educational institutions represent spiritual control over the colonised, urbanisation of colonies is the materialisation of the spiritual control. Focusing on Christianisation in Southeast Asia, Angela (2014) summarises Julius Bautistas’ views that “the creation of the new nations and trade ports … resulted in both a degree of rationalisation of governance and a large disintegration of precolonial communities, ethnic minorities, and various indigenous traditions of culture” (p. 198), suggesting that Christianisation and urbanisation as both “rationalisation of governance” and the abusive system of power invaded colonies and severed their ties with the past so that “new nations” can be created. Furthermore, “rationalisation of governance” suggests that there used be no rationality before the arrival of the colonisers. However, these new nations, as Bishop et al. (2003) argue, can be viewed as “a uniform or homogeneous outgrowth from Europe and America, belatedly affecting Africa, Asia, and South America” (p. 2). In this kind of global homogenisation, Europe and America are heightened as the templates and standards for “Africa, Asia, and South America” to observe and imitate. It is also worth noting that (Western) urbanisation means its invasion and encroachment into the rural areas of Malaya. The Chinese in Malaya mainly lived in cities, while the Malays lived in rural areas. Thus, it was the Malays who felt the overwhelming weight of urbanisation which devoured their land. The urban–rural confrontation can be viewed as the oppression of the nature-bred Malay supernatural by the invisible Christian supernatural. Though the contacts between China and the Malay peninsula and Borneo date back to a long time ago, large-scale Chinese migration to Malaya occurred in the nineteenth century as China was then poverty-stricken and many Chinese left their homes to “seek livelihood elsewhere” (Hooker, 2003, p. 26). They also brought their beliefs in the supernatural into Malaya. The two selected texts involve Haung Di (the Yellow Emperor) and ghost chasing which are related to traditional Chinese belief systems such as Chinese Buddhism and Taoism. The Chinese call themselves the descendants of Yan Di (the Yan/Flame emperor) and Huang Di brought together different tribes into a country by defeating some opposing tribes and established order in the name of Huaxia (Cathay, another name for ancient China). Thus, they are deified as the fathers of the Chinese nation and “the starting point for an ancient Chinese ideology” (Schipper et al., 2011, p. x). The

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Yellow Emperor as a demigod who rose from the human world is also viewed as “the Supreme deity of the Taoist pantheon” (Birrell, 1993, p. 130), and it is believed that only those who have good deeds can ascend to becoming (demi)gods. The folklore of the two gods is the primal status of Chinese belief system and it is also the primal status of the concept of Chinese ghosts. Huang (2016) examines the evolution of Chinese ghosts and argues that this primal status was a “creational chaos in which resided multiple life forces or spirits that couldn’t be clearly differentiated from one another” and both gods and ghosts during this status “were enclosed and mingled in this one broad concept of ghosts, as well as other concepts, such as souls, spirits, demons, or monsters” (pp. 148–149). The concept of the Chinese supernatural at this stage was similar to that of animism on which Taoism evolves. The basic Taoist principle is the binary opposition of Yin and Yang.2 Chao (1982) addresses Taoism and argues that “the substantiating principle Ch’i [vital force]” “works in the form of Yin and Yang principles” (p. 51). Here, Ch’i as the vital force of life is similar to the semangat in the Malay belief, and the binary opposition of Yin and Yang also has similarities to that of hantu and tuhan. Yin originally refers to the moon and now means dark, gloomy, negative, the Nether world, or femininity, while Yang originally refers to the sun and now means bright, positive, the human world, or masculinity. The Taoist binary opposition of Yin and Yang has detached itself from the primal status of the concept of Chinese ghosts. As time went by, the concept of ghosts was gradually humanised. After examining the definitions of the Chinese character 鬼[gui]/ghost in The Dictionary of Oracle Bone Script,3 Huang (2016) claims that Chinese ghosts can refer to “living, humanlike creatures as material others” and “human ghosts as immaterial others” (p. 149). The first definition can be understood as some human-like monsters or “anthropoid animal or barbarian … attached with a solid physical existence and a strong sense of otherness in contrast to (Chinese) humans” (p. 150); the second can be understood as the “post-human or post-living condition, which further shaped the building-up of human-ghost worlds” (p. 151). The changing definition suggests that Chinese ghosts were gradually becoming part of or coming closer to human life. The shaping of human–ghost worlds as two interrelated but different realms is a representation of the Yin and Yang binary opposition. Huang also notices “the Chinese character ‘ghost’ (gui鬼) partakes of the connotation of ‘return’ (gui 归) based on their being near-homophones” and finds that ghost is interpreted as “that which returns” in the Erya4 and “what humans return to” in the Shuowen Jiezi5 (p. 151). 2

In fact, Yin and Yang are not completely separated from each other. In the Yin–Yang diagram, Yin is represented by the black half and Yang is represented by the white half, but there is one black dot in the white half and one white dot in the black half, indicating mutual transformation and integration between Yin and Yang. 3《甲骨文字典》 (Jiaguwen Zidian/The Dictionary of Oracle Bone Script). 4 The Erya 《尔雅》 ( ) is “the earliest Chinese glossary compiled in the third century BCE” (Huang, 2016, p. 151). 5 The Shuowen Jiezi 《说文解字》 ( ) is an early Chinese dictionary.

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The human–ghost worlds are further complicated by the hierarchy in Buddhism which originated in India and entered China in the first century A.D. Teiser (1996) examines Chinese Buddhism and argues that “[l]ife takes six forms: at the top are gods, demigods, and human beings, while animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings occupy the lower rungs of the hierarchy” (p. 14). The present concept of Chinese ghosts is also heavily influenced by hungry ghosts. “[T]he fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month” is called “The Feast of the Hungry Ghosts” and it is said that “[d]uring this month, the gates of Hell are opened and its residents are free to wander at will” (Oldstone-Moore, 2003, p. 79). The presence of hungry ghosts in the human world means that the border between the human and ghost worlds is conflated and ghosts coexist with human. The conflation of the human and ghost worlds is also represented by reincarnation—another major feature Chinese Buddhism retains. Teiser (1996) addresses reincarnation in Chinese Buddhism and argues that human existence did not end simply with a funeral service or memorial to the ancestors, that humans were reborn in another bodily form and could thus be related not only to other human beings but to animals, ghosts, and other species among the six modes of rebirth (ibid.).

Reincarnation turns the ghosts of human as the immaterial other are turned into, through reincarnation, the material other in different forms. It transcends beyond not only the border between human and ghosts but also the border between human beings, “animals, ghosts, and other species”. Furthermore, reincarnation strings separate existences in human and other forms into endless life cycles which turn history into a multilayered structure. Different from traditional Chinese beliefs, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism has been revered as the sole-dominant ideology of China for more than two thousand years and has greatly influenced the Chinese view about the supernatural. Confucianism is, unlike Taoism, a worldly school of thought composed of moral and ethical teachings. It is characterised by “its deep involvement in politics, aspired to by its ambition to bring order and peace to the world” (Yao, 2000, p. 34). In order to achieve this political ambition, “[t]he Master did not speak of strange occurrences, feats of strength, political disruptions, and spirits” (Confucius, 2015, p. 32). Confucius (2015) clarifies his attitude towards the supernatural in The Analects by advising that people should be “attentively respectful towards ghosts and spirits but keep them at a distance” (p. 27). He does not, however, clearly deny the existence of the supernatural. It also needs to be noted that women are ranked low in the Confucian hierarchy. In other words, both the supernatural and women are marginalised in the Confucian system. For over two thousand years, the dominant ideology of China has been Confucianism which proposes working hard for a better life and serving society and avoids mentioning the supernatural. Thus, the belief and the representation of ghosts in writing were marginalised by dominant Confucian teaching. Ghost narratives emerged in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (around 2000 years ago) when China was invaded

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and unsettled by neighbouring tribes. This was a time when the Confucian influence supported by the imperial court was weakened by political turmoil. This period of time saw the emergence of zhiguai6 which means record of the strange or the supernatural (Huang, 2016, p. 154). In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record 7 by Gan Bao in the Eastern Jin Dynasty is a zhiguai book about ghost chasing. One of its famous stories is “Sung Ting-po [Song Ding-bo] Catches a Ghost”. Ghost chasing may also date back to “Zhong Kui8 ” who “was one of the most popular exorcist deities of late imperial China” and he “originated as the personification of the zhongkui,9 a ritual hammer for killing demons in the hands of ancient exorcists” (Idema & West, 2016, pp. 1–2). There can be two roles for ghost-chasing stories: first, they represented the dominant Confucian teachings which repelled and marginalised ghosts; second, as Huang (2016) argues, “the role of ghosts, ghost beliefs, and ghost narratives” is “an absolute but intimate ‘other’ in mirroring Chinese people and society” (p. 148). Thus, the emergence of ghost stories shows that the society is unstable and fragmented so that the border between the human world and the underworld becomes fragmented and ghosts would return to the human world. Though Song Ding-bo and Zhong Kui were both men, the era after the Tang dynasty, as Zeitlin (2007) finds in her exploration of ghosts and gender in later imperial times, saw “the increased prominence of women in supernatural literature” (p. 81). The reasons can also be that there was tighter rule under Confucian teachings and women were further marginalised in later imperial times. This can explain that those who do jobs related to the supernatural such as ghost chasing and fortune telling in overseas Chinese communities are mainly (old) women. Ghosts and women are believed to pertain to Yin and they have been both oppressed by the Chinese Confucian dominance. In other words, they are both marginalised in Chinese communities. Chiew (2018) addresses mediumship between the human and the ghost worlds and argues that “women are more likely to see paranormal beings” such as ghosts and spirits as women tend to have an “yin yang eye” which can see things in both the human world and the underworld. These women are often called “gui po” (ghost woman/amah). However, ghosts emerge as a mirror of the sociocultural context which nurtures it when the narratives of Chinese ghost chasing are transplanted to another country and another sociocultural context. Playing Madame Mao by Mei (2000) is set principally in 1980s Singapore (represented as “the city” in the text), a part of the former colony Malaya and, today, an independent nation-state. 1980s’ Singapore was governed under the tight rule of Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew (represented as “the Chairman” in the text) who aimed at building a new city free of foreign interferences. The text to a large degree focuses on “the Marxist Conspiracy” in Singapore in May and June of 1987 in which “twenty-two suspected activists” were arrested and accused of “participating in a Marxist Network” under the name of “Operation Spectrum” (Turnbull, 2009, p. 338). 志怪, a kind of literary genre of ghost narrative. 搜神记. 8 鍾馗. 9 終葵. 6 7

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The activists were “Roman Catholic priests and church social workers, Workers’ Party supporters, lawyers, and members of an avant-garde theatre group” (ibid.). The oppressive rule under Lee is compared to Mainland China during the Cultural Revolution (1960s–1970s) under Chairman Mao’s rule. Operation Spectrum took place twenty-two years after Singapore gained independence from colonisation and foreign interferences in 1965 while the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966, seventeen years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Both similarities and differences can be found in the parallel between the politics in the two countries: Operation Spectrum was aimed at intellectuals who were believed to attempt to subvert the Singaporean government in the name of a Communist movement, while the Cultural Revolution targeted the intellectuals who were believed to subvert the Communist government. This novel tells the story of the actress Ching playing Madame Mao on the stage in the city (Singapore). Thus, it is necessary to know something about Madame Mao’s complex life. Her legendary life saw her rise to the highest echelons of Chinese society under the Communist party and also to suffer its ire and approbation. Madame Mao was born as Shumeng Li in a poor family but was ambitious. She used different names at different stages of her life. When her name was Yunhe Li, she attended an art school and read the part of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and thought of herself as “a Nora who knew very well that she wanted to smash the doll’s house” (Terrill, 1999, p. 27). When she was in Shanghai, she became an actress with the name Lan Ping and played Nora on stage. In Shanghai, Lan Ping also met one of her husbands, Tang Na, who “had liked Nora very much” and “was the sentimental arts critic for the newspaper Dagong Bao10 ” (p. 63). Tang Na was born into a well-to-do family and was well-educated. Due to different backgrounds and personalities, Lan Ping and Tang Na always quarrelled with each other, resulting in that Lan Ping later went to Yan’an where the headquarters of the Communist Party of China (CPC) were located and changed her name to Jiang Qing, the name known as Madame Mao. She courted Chairman Mao and finally became his wife, Madame Mao. However, many leaders of the CPC did not allow her to get involved with politics, so her identity as Madame Mao was not officially announced at the time of their marriage. Madame Mao stepped onto the central stage of power in 1960s Beijing as Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and Madame Mao persecuted both Chairman Mao’s and her own political enemies in the name of Chairman Mao. The stage in Shanghai did not provide Lan Ping with a sense of power, but in the Cultural Revolution she turned Mainland China into a big stage where she was both the director and played the leading role. She was “ruthless toward any artist who held opinions differing from her own” and attempted to dominate the world of literature and art (Yan and Dao 1996, p. 401). Madame Mao’s power was shown through causing “trouble to people (zhengren11 )” (p. 164) and the notorious case was that of Shaoqi Liu, then President of the People’s Republic of China, who was persecuted to death not long after the beginning of the 大公报, a Chinese newspaper founded in 1902 in Tianjin and its headquarters was in Shanghai when Lan Ping was there. 11 整人, political persecution. 10

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Cultural Revolution. His wife, Wang Guangmei, was arrested and persecuted along with Liu. Through the persecution of her foes, Madame Mao stirred the big stage of Mainland China and stepped onto the apex of power which was granted by Chairman Mao, the real seat of power. However, Madame Mao was arrested and imprisoned after Chairman Mao passed away in 1976 and committed suicide in prison in 1991. The main characters of the novel are Chiang Ching (Jiang Qing, an actress who has the same name as Madame Mao’s), Tang Na (Ching’s husband and an editor of a Catholic journal which he helps to found, in an obvious resonance to the life of the historical Madame Mao), and one of Ching’s friends Roxanne (a name that recalls that of Roxane Witke, the only Westerner who interviewed the historical Madame Mao and wrote the biography Comrade Chiang Ching). Ching’s background is similar to Madame Mao’s: she was also born to a poor family and is also ambitious; she is also an actress and plays Nora on stage; her husband’s name is also Tang Na and he is also an intellectual working for a journal; and Ching is also rebellious, while Tang Na is also mild. Furthermore, the fact that Ching used to be the Chairman’s lover before she married Tang Na and still keeps a close relationship with the Chairman after her marriage is also a partial resonance to the experience of Madame Mao. The Chairman of the city also launches a political movement against his political enemies in the way that Chairman Mao did. The Chairman attempts to establish a new city by erasing the city’s past which has been influenced by Western and Chinese cultures. Accordingly, he rules the city with authoritarian power and encourages the city’s residents to pursue monetary gain only. Ching’s husband Tang Na, as one of the city residents who resists the oppression, writes articles criticising the Chairman’s policy in the Catholic journal. Ching thinks he is weak and should fight the regime in a more brave way. The oppression escalates when Tang Na and others who oppose the Chairman are taken away by government agents, accused of being Communists and attempting to subvert the government—a veiled reference to Operation Spectrum. Ching resists the oppression through playing Madame Mao, representing the persecution of intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution on stage in order to mock political oppression in the city. She also perceives the city as being invaded by what the novel calls “mirror creatures”, a concept borrowed from Jorge Louis Borges’s reinvention of the story of the Yellow Emperor in Chinese mythology. According to Borges’s (2002) narration, the mirror creatures as the specular used to live in harmony with human, but they invaded the earth and were repulsed, imprisoned in mirrors by the Yellow Emperor. Thus, they were forced to imitate and repeat “all the actions of men” as if in a dream (p. 68). However, one day they will not imitate human any more and “break through the barriers of glass or metal” (ibid.) to live side by side with human. After Ching’s husband is taken away, she sees cracks appearing in mirrors and the distinction between the mirror and human worlds is blurred. The mirror creatures invade the city through both her stage performance and the reflections in the city’s glass buildings. The mirror creatures include the ghosts of women warriors in Chinese history such as Madame Mao, Wu Zetian (the first empress in China’s history), Hua Mu Lan (a woman warrior who, in the disguise of a man, fights in battles on behalf of her father). Their re-emergence in the city marks this novel as

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magical realist, which, according to Strecher (1999), features “a highly detailed, realistic setting … invaded by something too strange to believe” (p. 267). In fact, Ching sees the city residents without souls becoming possessed by the mirror creatures, including Tang Na and Roxanne. They are very different to Ching in personality and they, like Ching’s audience, observe her words and deeds in real life. Ching’s performance not only mocks the political oppression in the city but also reminds us of the oppression against women in Chinese history. Ching, like Madame Mao, longs for power and seizes power from the director on stage. In real life, she becomes the Chairman’s helper in persecuting their political enemies to gain power. However, like Madame Mao, Ching is in fact the Chairman’s puppet and a victim of male power. After the Chairman’s opponents are brought down, Ching is imprisoned and persecuted by the Chairman’s followers, which is similar to Madame Mao’s fate after Chairman Mao’s death. The difference is that Madame Mao committed suicide while Ching flees the city to Australia. This novel is entwined in the relationships between Ching and Madame Mao, between the city and Beijing in Mainland China, between the present and the past, and between the reality and performance. Thus, it features nonlinear and fragmented narrations. This novel begins with the prologue told by Ching that her husband is dead and then the section “Dance of the Red Machines” in which Ching describes her final performance as Madame Mao—a revenge against the Chairman’s oppression after her husband is taken away. After this, the main part of the text is narrated alternatively by Ching, Roxanne, Tang, and an omniscient narrator. Ching narrates mainly in the first part and at the end of the text. Her narration in the first part deals with her playing Madame Mao on stage, her life with Roxanne, Tang, the Chairman, some heroines in Chinese history, and the mirror creatures. In this part, the omniscient narrator inserts some background information and details of these characters and their relationships. The omniscient narrator dominates the second part, attempting to observe the political oppression in the city and Ching’s life from a relatively objective perspective. However, when Madame Mao played by Ching is tried on the stage after Chairman Mao’s death and when Ching is tried in the city, Ching takes control of the narration again. When Roxanne and Tang narrate, they mainly observe Ching’s daily life and performance on stage or describe the same incident from another perspective. Throughout the novel, Ching conflates her playing Madame Mao with her own reality in the city so that Roxanne often senses that Ching dramatises herself (Lau, 2000, p. 48).

Theories on the Supernatural The supernatural, as Murray Leeder (2017) explains, “derives from the Latin Supernaturalis, meaning ‘above or beyond nature’ and was usually associated with religion before the beginning of the nineteenth century” and later became more associated with “ghosts and the like” (p. 5). Some theorists view the supernatural as a production of the human world and argue that the former coexists with the latter.

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Gordon (2008) claims that the ghost is “a social figure” (p. 8), suggesting that ghost is produced within human relations. The supernatural, according to Bushnell (1910[1858]), “meets us in what is least transcendent and most familiar, even in ourselves” (p. 31). In line with this interpretation, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena dwell in or with ourselves and the demarcation between “natural” and “supernatural” is blurred. Addressing the supernatural in the literary genre of the fantastic/fabulous, Todorov (1975) views the supernatural as an intervention that “constitutes a break in the system of pre-established rules” (p. 166). The rules can be understood as the demarcation between two seemingly paralleled realms and the supernatural as the uncanny breaks the pre-established rules/boundaries between the natural and the supernatural. Leeder (2017) further argues that the supernatural functions by “blurring boundaries of faith and science” (p. 5) which are also the boundaries between the fantastic/fabulous and the factual. Castle (1995) also locates the intervention of the uncanny “with the internalisation of the supernatural into the mind, where once external forces were turned into phantasmic ‘inner pictures’ (p. 132)”. Here “external forces” which can be interpreted by science are conflated with “inner pictures” which are related to faith. Leeder (2017) then claims that “the modern experience of the supernatural … often involves layers of intellectual hesitation, so often framed in optical terms, is what I am seeing ‘real’ or is it all in my head?” (p. 5). This kind of double or multiple visions gives rise to a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty as one vision is always challenging and haunting the other and different visions are vying to be manifested. This chapter examines the supernatural with the assumption that different kinds of the supernatural are culturally equal. Some theorists define “supernatural” as “an order of existence beyond what is pragmatically visible and observable, an order of existence that is paranormal in the sense that it supposedly defies the laws of nature” (Anderson, 2003, p. 125). This definition implies a binary opposition between what is natural and the realm outside nature. However, Anderson (2003), addressing the supernatural in the Western context, views it as “a concept entrenched in the IndoEuropean languages of Europe and the Americas” (p. 125). He questions whether this definition of the supernatural coined in the Western context can apply to all kinds of the supernatural around the world. Klass (1995) furthers this challenge by arguing that the remorselessly unavoidable ethnocentric judgment of supernatural: that there is on the one hand a natural — real — universe and on the. other hand there are notions about aspects of the universe that are situated. outside the natural and real and are therefore labeled supernatural by. the person who knows what belongs in which category. (p. 25)

Ethnocentric judgement of the supernatural can lead to essentialist and stereotypical categorisations of different kinds of the supernatural nurtured in different cultures. Furthermore, “the person who knows what belongs in which category” maintains a Western point of view and has the power to decide which kind of the supernatural is superior and which is inferior. This binary opposition is also expressed

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by terms such as “the West/the rest, Christian/pagan, natural/supernatural, true/false” (Anderson, 2003, p. 126). Leeder (2017) examines these binary oppositions in the context of the modern supernatural and argues that “belief in the supernatural” is “often consigned to those on the margins: women, children, ‘savages,’ the superstitious lower classes, the rural, and so on” (p. 4). The very idea of this “belief in the supernatural” can thus be viewed as constituted through the oppression of the disempowered by the empowered which is thematised in the two texts to be analysed. The analysis above suggests that the supernatural as a cultural product coexists with the human world. Though the supernatural nurtured in different cultures is supposed to be culturally equal, there still exists the repression and marginalisation of some kinds of the supernatural. The supernatural’s characteristics such as coexistence, competition, ambiguity, marginalisation are often addressed in the literary genre of magical realism and the two selected texts will be examined as magical realist texts. The supernatural in magical realist texts, as Zamora and Faris (1995) claim, “is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence— admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism” (p. 3), suggesting that the supernatural is neither “too strange” nor far away from the human world and it has become part of “the rationality and materiality” of reality. Addressing the reasons for the blurring of the demarcation between conventionally enclosed spheres such as the real and the magical, Strecher (1999) describes the encounters between such binary realms as “a highly detailed, realistic setting … invaded by something too strange to believe” (p. 267). Here “something too strange” can be understood as the magical. Though magical realism as a literary genre is often believed to have originated in Latin America, it is “especially alive and well in postcolonial contexts and now is achieving a compensatory extension of its market worldwide” (Zamora and Faris, 1995, p. 2). Slemon (1995) suggests in his “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse” that the concept of magical realism was “closely aligned with that of the ‘marvellous’” (p. 407). The marvellous which corresponds with the fabulous/fantastic/magical refers to something magical, strange, and extraordinary, while realism refers to the factual representation of the world. However, magical realism is not confined by reality and departs from realism (ibid.). As for the uncommon/the unnatural and the common/the natural, magical realism, as Zamora and Faris (1995) claim, admits “a plurality of worlds” and magical realist texts “often situate themselves on liminal territory between or among those worlds” (p. 6). The plurality of worlds include “mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female” and “these are boundaries to be erased, transgressed, blurred, brought together, or otherwise fundamentally refashioned” (ibid.). Some texts about the supernatural can be viewed as magical realism as the supernatural as the uncanny also breaks pre-established rules/boundaries between the natural and the supernatural. Faris (2004) further suggests “five primary characteristics” for “investigating the nature and cultural work of magical realism”:

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First, the text contains an “irreducible element” of magic; second, the descriptions in magical realism detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world; third, the reader may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events; fourth, the narrative merges different realms; and finally, magical realism disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity (p. 7).

Faris explains that the “irreducible element” in a magical realist trope is “something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe” (ibid.). In other words, magical realism goes beyond our established understanding of the universe and is based on our senses or immediate experiences rather than on rational thinking. It entails border crossing and blurring in contradictory encounters between different realms such as the common/the natural and the uncommon/the unnatural. Thus, it challenges conventionally enclosed spheres of “time, space, and identity”. However, the question is what turns the familiar or the everyday into the magical or the supernatural. Addressing the reason for the rise of magical realism, Salman Rushdie claims that realism “can no longer recount or express the absurd reality of the world we live in—a world which has the capability of destroying itself at any moment” (Harrison, 1992, p. 12), suggesting that the modern world has been fragmented by abusive systems of power which have destroyed and challenged conventional modes of life and thinking. Zamora and Faris (1995) further explore the reason for the absurdity of the world and argue that “hallucinatory scenes and events, fantastic/phantasmagoric characters are used … to indict recent political and cultural perversions” (p. 6). It is assumed that such “political and cultural perversions” give rise to the supernatural so that the latter invades reality and attaches itself to the “most familiar”. Colonial power or any other abusive system of power have disturbed “received ideas about time, space, and identity” and fragmented our knowledge about the universe. We can view magical realism as the representation of the abusive systems of power and as a subversive assault on the “basic structures of rationalism and realism” (ibid.). The coexistence of and the competition between the magical and the “most familiar” caused by “political and cultural perversions” echo the emergence of the supernatural in the human world caused by the oppression of the disempowered.

Colonial Oppression In order to explore the reason for the (re)emergence of the Malay supernatural in The Crocodile Fury, it is necessary to examine the various tropes of power that awaken the supernatural. Colonial power invades the colony and disrupts its original order, leading to discontinuity and confusion so that the Malay supernatural re-emerges in the Malays’ collective memory. In The Crocodile Fury, the rich man who “cut back the jungle and built the mansion” (Yahp, 1992, p. 4) at the peak of the hill is an intruder who disturbs with

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force the harmony and order of the jungle and represents a colonial power from afar which comes to dominate the land. The peak of the hill is a sacred place to the locals, but the mansion which represents an imported cultural force has occupied this position and its “ridged roof” “over the dark shapes of the jungles trees” (p. 3) reminds the locals of the manifest presence of the dominant colonial power. The rich man is the lord of the mansion as “When he stood in sunlight the natives were moved to silence” (ibid.) as they are awed by and dare not speak in front of his overwhelming power. In order to strengthen his power and protect his territory from potential dangers, the rich man “built a fence around his hill, fixed a stake to its foot with a sign bearing his name”, and “hired soldiers to patrol his boundaries, to keep both bandits and jungle spirits out” (p. 70). The sign “bearing his name” shows his possession of the land and the boundaries patrolled by soldiers reveal his fear of the surrounding jungle. The fence is, as Grace Chin (2009) argues, “the sign of ‘difference’” and “a permanent reminder of [the] marginality” of “the postcolonial other” (p. 93). It is the sign separating “them” and “us”, reminding “us” that the land within the fence is the only haven surrounded by lurking dangers. The man-made demarcation is another version of the colonial “divide-and-rule policy” which reflects the power imbalance between the colonisers and the colonised. The rich man’s oppressive power is also seen through his possessiveness. When Grandmother is a servant girl in the mansion, he demands Grandmother’s “body and soul” (Yahp, 1992, p. 51) to be his. He plucks the lover out from the sea and locks her up in the mansion. However, his possessiveness is especially seen through his possession of cultural artefacts both local and from all over the world. He builds “a funicular railway to the top of the hill, an ornate toy with open-air cars carved and gilded with creatures from foreign mythologies: mermaids and men, a Gorgon, Winged Gods and Sirens, the Faerie Queen” (p. 5). In this sense, the mansion is built based on the natives’ “drops of sweat mixed in with the foundations, their blood and crushed limbs marking the beams that held the ceilings up” (pp. 4–5). Their blood and flesh have been intangibly and invisibly oppressed by and integrated with the mansion. The rich man is “never satisfied” with its decorations and sees it as “an incomplete palace” so that when he is at home, “builders and carpenters forever plagued the place, adding Grecian columns, an attic garden, constructing curved staircases to rooms he later decided he did not want” (p. 5). The rich man’s possessiveness turns the sacred place of the locals into a site of continual change. Thus, the original order of the land is constantly altered and rewritten by new elements brought into the land. This echoes the historical fact mentioned in the introduction that Malaya has been colonised by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British who brought their own cultures into Malaya and kept rewriting its history. The convent developed on the site of the mansion and the nuns in the convent inherit the legacy of the colonial power which now masquerades as Christianity. A Christian institution on the hill is a strong indication that the original spiritual power of the land has been replaced by the Christian supernatural as a colonial power. The Christian message is disseminated in the form of colonial education and indoctrination which are understood to enlighten the natives. Young girls who are “too noisy or boisterous or too bossy or unladylike or too disobedient or worldly,

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or merely too hard to look at, or feed” are sent to the convent to receive “civilised” education and to be “turned into young ladies who are honest, obedient and humble” as well as “to bob when they see the nuns and the priest, and to know Jesus, to love Jesus and to serve him in this world and the next” (pp. 1–2). In line with the Christian worldview, the convent is believed to pass “civilised” and “modern knowledge” “with its deeply embedded Western values” (Wong, 2014, p. 202) to the “unenlightened”. In order to establish the Christian worldview as the orthodox order, the nuns inculcate a Western view of civilisation: Convent girls must learn to do it properly. A story starts at the beginning, with a description of the people and the place of the story … Convent girls must speak plainly and clearly until they get to the end … They must remember that the last word is not the true end (Yahp 1992, p.40). [C]onvent girls must learn civilisation. … They must spread it to their parents and friends and later their children … Manners must be learnt from the civilized books … Civilisation is the convent girls’ duty … Convent girls must read from the holy book what is good and right … To speak the truth they must learn to speak like ladies. (p. 111)

The fact that these demands bear the imperative forms “must” and “have to” foregrounds the oppressive nature of the Christian power. They are forced to follow the Christian order, the linear way of telling stories which eulogises Western and Christian heroes and vilifies the colonised. The girls are forced to believe that the convent is a haven surrounded by jungle enemies and that the Christian holy book is the only path to civilisation. Christian power stands for civilisation and order, whereas the local culture symbolises disorder, or even chaos. This coercive singlemindedness is strengthened through the strategy of praise and punishment: the girls “who tell the best story, with the best action and without stumbling, get an A for expression” and “get gold stars to paste next to their names” (p. 39), while those who fail to do so are scolded. In this sense, colonial power as a grading and ranking system underpins Christian education. The convent as a symbol of colonial power in the disguise of a Christian haven occupies the hill peak deemed sacred by the local people and attempts to impose spiritual influence over the city below. The city as the materialisation of colonial spiritual control is a replica of a Western city. As a projection of colonial control, the city echoes the rich man’s claim that he wants to possess everything’s “body and soul” (p. 51). When the city is not expanded and does not encroach into the jungle, the animals and spirits lurking in the jungle cannot scare Grandmother and the city can give her a sense of homeliness. When she was a child, she walked the street of this city fearlessly … the city was where she lived … the city was not yet a city but to her it seemed enormous, its rooftops seemed to stretch forever, only the ragged jungle around it signalled its end. In the city’s centre a child could imagine that no

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jungle surrounded her, no wild animals were waiting to gobble her up if she did anything wrong” (p. 70)

Before the arrival of colonial powers, the city is not developed to the edge of the jungle so that the spirits are not disturbed. “[P]ale men and dark men” (p. 22) from afar come ashore and the coastal city gradually expands and encroaches on the space where the hill and jungle spirits used to dwell. Foreign cultural forces are gradually usurping the space by hacking a wound in the landscape and gradually expanding with mushrooming “city skyscrapers”, creeping suburbs, and city smog (p. 7). As time goes by, residents come to see the city as their home and the hill and the jungle shrink to a dark corner of their memory as they are squeezed into the southeast corner12 of the city. The hill and the jungle in which the spirits dwell are on the edge of the city as “the complete antithesis of Western towns and cities” (p. 14). Native spirits are repressed and marginalised as the Other by “civilised urban space” (Daly 2018, p. 19). It is worth noting that the colonial powers are not homogeneous: the city sees “increasing numbers of different-coloured peoples” and hears “different-coloured voices” (Yahp 1992, p. 70). The city is forever changing with constant migration which unsettles the binary opposition of old/native and new/foreign. Constant migration dilutes absolute homogeneity under a dominant power, complicating the relationships between different cultural forces. The city features various cultural forces vying for prominence. The contact and confrontation between the city and the hill/jungle thus consist of a myriad of small-scale contacts and confrontations between specific spirits and cultural elements, further challenging the claim that the hill/jungle and the city form a binary opposition of civilised order and primitive chaos. When Mother walks in the city, she finds that it is no longer the city Grandmother walked in. It features disconnections and faces which are “fractured into features never amounting to a whole” (Yahp, 1992, p. 54), suggesting that the invasive cultures make the city fractured and fails to provide its residents with a sense of homeliness.

The (Re)emergence of the Malay Supernatural Under the oppression of colonial powers, the Malay supernatural (re)emerges as a mode of resistance, causing conflation of “the factual and the fabulous”. O’Riley (2007) understands postcolonial haunting as “a visual recognition of injustice positioned in the situated encounter with colonial history” (p. 5). “[A] visual recognition of injustice” refers to the (re)emergence of the repressed in the colonial past. The Malay supernatural is the visual manifestation of the fabulous as a product of colonial oppression. However, its subaltern status makes it barely visible, hiding in the dark. Its (re)emergence signals the repressed anxieties of the colonial past and the resistance to the colonial oppression. 12

Indicating that the foreigners came from the West.

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The lover and her ghost are the symbols of Malay female resistance against the oppression of colonial power. The lover is a creature or spirit from the deep of the sea, with cold skin (Yahp, 1992, p. 139), hair like “a sheet of night”, and face “as smooth as stone under water” (p. 7). The rich man plucks the lover from the sea (pp. 143–144) and locks her up in the mansion. He trains and tames her through orders such as “sit”, “stand”, and “turn” (p. 253). Enslaved by the rich man and as weak as “a flower in a glass jar” (p. 143), she never says a word, hardly smiles, and often sighs. She is a feminised sea creature or spirit troubled by a sense of melancholia and always faces east, “towards the sea” (p. 254). Addressing water and the feminine body, EdmondsDobrijevich (2010) argues that the “female body in the ocean … seeks to subvert the established canons in which figuration of the female is polarised as passive victim or alluring and dangerous other” (p. 120). Though the lover as the embodiment of the sea is marginalised as the disempowered Other, the rich man’s pride and his oppression of the lover lead to the latter’s revenge. He loses his heart to his lover and they both later disappear from the mansion, with the rich man found in the jungle kneeling, frightened, and soaked in salty water as if he was almost drowned in the sea. Furthermore, he is “covered with rows of stab marks, teethmarks: the slashing and chewing of beasts” (p. 286), suggesting that the lover is a beast in the disguise of a beautiful woman. If the rich man’s abusive power disrupts the normal “cultural dialogue” (Edmonds-Dobrijevich, 2010, p. 120) between the West and Malaya, the revenge of the lover transgresses the boundaries between “siren and madwoman” (ibid.) and between human and beast. The lover’s revenge is not finished. Many years later, the lover’s ghost returns in an unfamiliar and frightening form: “convent afternoons spied an occasional sad woman in shimmering white, pausing for an instant at the top of the stairs” (Yahp, 1992, p. 32). She returns to remind those who are currently living in the convent that the house and the land used to be her home. She “stands in moonlight even in the middle of the day…whitened, even her black hair whitened…draped in a plain white gown that fountains round her feet.” (p. 47), suggesting that she returns as a pontianak, “a monstrous female figure”, which is “the ghost of a woman who died during childbirth” (Maulod, 2009, p. 1). Her return represents the marginalised and feminised jungle which symbolises the womb of a mother whose child is dead. The harmony of the jungle has been impaired by colonial oppression. Thus, her return marks a lament over the loss of the land in the way that a mother loses her child. The ghost of the lover is not fixed in a single apparition by appearing in different forms: the whispers never agree on what they see. Some say they see the saddest and most beautiful face, the face of the virgin, the face of a queen. Others see a burned hag’s face, fire-licked to leather, with its lips stretched wide as it leaps from the moonlight with a deafening howl. Others say they see in moonlight only the billowing hair and skin like the underbelly of fish: there is no face. (Yahp, 1992, p. 48)

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She has become a hybrid of a monstrous witch Pontianak as well as Christian virgin or queen who are all nurtured by the convent. She is the queen because she was the lover of the lord (the rich man) of the mansion; she is the Christian virgin because she is the purely white spirit of the convent; she also represents a Chinese ghost because the whispers have never seen her feet and “[h]er step is as light as breathing” (p. 47). Her feet hang in the air and are covered by “a plain white gown that fountains round her feet” (ibid.). Addressing The Hungry Ghost Month in Chinese culture, Clifton D. Bryant (2003) asserts that when ghosts “appear as humans”, they “resemble the living in every way save one—their feet do not touch the ground” and “[a]s they walk about, they hover a fraction of an inch above the ground” (p. 84). It is said that Yang Qi (roughly translated as positive power) is aggregated in the earth, while ghosts consist of Yin Qi (roughly translated as negative power) which will be absorbed by the earth once ghosts touch the ground. As a summary of the analysis above, the ghost of the lover is, in some sense, a palimpsest through which elements of local Malay, Christian (Western), and Chinese cultures are alternatively visible. As a response to the lover as an embodiment of female resistance to the imposed colonial power, the King crocodile represents male resistance. He is embodied by “The Lizard Boy”, the only male character except for the rich man, the old priest at the convent and “the human-shaped terroriser” (p. 18) in the jungle who causes havoc in the city. The Lizard Boy’s predicament is described as follows: It happened before he was born: when his pregnant mother accidentally smashed a nest of geckoes, crumpling brittle eggs with one swipe. The tiny crushed bodies stuck to her cloth by their own jelly, their too-large eyes gleamed like jewels. … When the Lizard Boy was born everyone came to look, even the oldest Priest and the nuns … the Lizard Boy lay kicking his feet. His eyes blinked round and jewel-like amidst the folds of skin already lifting, flaking. His lips parted to show tiny serrated teeth … He breathed the moist jungle air; gurgled joyfully (p. 86).

The brittle eggs of geckoes are left by the land crocodile who uses his supernatural power to creep into the convent through the house where the Lizard Boy’s family lives (p. 83). The boy’s mother seems to be possessed by this power through her contact with those tiny geckoes so that her son is possessed by the spirit of the land crocodile. Specifically, she believes that she has “done something wrong to offend some spirit, or god, or nature” (p. 86). Her son’s abnormality is said to be caused either by the revenge of the land crocodile or by some disease. The Lizard Boy becomes homeless as his mother who is scared by his appearance and abandons him. The convent adopts him, but the nuns and the girls constantly taunt him due to his scary appearance: This fury seethed for years beneath the surface, beneath the lidded eyes and tightened lips of the Lizard Boy as he was prodded this way and that, and his skin scraped at, his photo taken, his trousers peeked into to see if he was growing a tale. The fury was at first, dormant,

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shuddering to life as his mother shuddered when asked to hold him, pushing forward as she pushed him away, growing as he grew, as he glanced up from his books and papers to see convent girls pointing him out to visitors, and nuns shushing, and parents craning to see (p. 125)

To the nuns and the convent girls, the boy is an abnormal and homeless alien. He becomes the Other, a creature to be taunted. Living between the magical and the real as well as between the spirit of the jungle and the Christian power, the Lizard Boy is haunted by the question of truth: He was always sorting proof: balancing this tale against that, these stories against those, this article and that, staring for long moments into space as he tried to figure out which was true. The Lizard Boy wasn’t choosy. One day he’d be reading a history book, the next a five-cent novel, then a book of rhymes … He read anything, everything … He muttered to himself as he read. “This one’s printed overseas, must be true story. This one local, aiya, can’t even spell properly, so many mistakes! Can’t be true.” (p. 84).

Western/Christian and local narratives represent different truth claims, but the Lizard Boy is guided to believe that books “printed overseas” must be true and that the locally printed is full of mistakes. He believes that what he sees in reality is not true whereas something from afar that he cannot see must be true. His memory of the past constructed in his own language has been nullified by colonial knowledge. With “[n]o memory”, “[n]o past”, and “[n]o future” (p. 275), the Lizard Boy always practised forgetting (p. 244). While the Lizard Boy is troubled by this sense of absence and his disadvantaged position at the convent, he becomes unsettled and his behaviour erratic so that he has to be “chained up in the laundry for causing a convent riot” (p. 84). The stories of the King crocodile drifts into the convent and possesses the traumatised boy. His personal trauma and the magical saying are conflated and the crocodile fury seethes “for years beneath surface” (p. 125). However, “[w]hen the crocodile fury finally burst … [t]hat was the day the Lizard Boy ran amok” (p. 126). He jumps out from the corner of the laundry where he has been barely visible and manifests himself in the form of the King crocodile in the main part of the convent: “‘Call me lizard!’” and the girls hear the Lizard Boy shouting “[t]here is no lizard here, see—only—a Crocodile!” (pp. 126–7). Chin (2009) argues that this transformation and fury designate “the end of one life cycle and the beginning of another” (p. 111), indicating the crocodile or the boy’s split, unfixed, and ambiguous identities. While the ghost of the lover returns as a feminised creature of the jungle and unsettles the convent with her womanly quiet step, sigh, and weeping, the Lizard Boy represents the masculinised aspect of the jungle and unsettles the convent through shouting, jumping, and causing chaos. The King crocodile causes havoc not only at the convent but also in the city which grows, expands, and witnesses the vicissitudes of the mansion and the convent. This “human-shaped terroriser” “lives on the edges of the jungle and gets the best of both

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worlds” so that “he fades into the safety of the trees” “when things get too hot” and “out he jumps at” “young girls” and “old women” “when the urge takes him” (p. 18). The King crocodile has been dislocated and his habitat/home has been usurped by colonial powers. Thus, he is “the barely visible” living between the hill/jungle and the city. He not only occasionally manifests himself in the city but also harms its residents: deflowering a young girl, causing a man to seduce someone else’s wife, causing a daughter to be stolen, and causing a faithful assistant to be led astray (ibid.). As a result, the jungle gradually becomes “a nest of trouble and defiance” (p. 102). The partial disappearance–presence of the “human-shaped terroriser” keeps the city residents on alert against the lurking danger in the jungle. The occasional presence of the terroriser keeps reminding the city residents of the question of whose habitat/home the city is. The King crocodile or “the human-shaped terroriser” is also a representation of the mad male sailor who “was stranded there” and “ran from civilisation to live forever on the jungle-covered hill” (p. 101). The legend has it that he “creeps down the hill to spirit naughty children to the jungle to tear their limbs and crunch their bones” (ibid.). He is believed to bring bad luck: “the deaths of loved ones, business folding, great houses falling to ruin” by only “one glimpse of him” (ibid.). He is said to be “possessed by a demon” and “he’d bargained his soul for knowledge, his afterlife for an immortality as tormented as it was long” (ibid.). This can be seen as an allusion to Doctor Faustus who sells his body and soul to Lucifer for “vain pleasure” and the latter’s assistance in knowledge (Marlow, 1993, p. 193). It may be the cultural confrontation and dislocation that drive him mad. His madness can be caused by human pride in the form of (colonial) urbanisation which attempts to conquer the jungle by cutting it back and oppressing its spirits which become angry and haunt the city in return with their repetitive visits to the convent and the city as well as with their “barely visible” presence in the liminal space between them. The “human-shaped terroriser” may also be “a gang of bandits” “who made the narrow paths and clearings of the jungle-covered hill their home” (p. 102). They are called bandits because they “assassinated landowners” “without hired soldiers”, “cut the cables of the rich man’s abandoned pleasure railway”, and “cut jeweled fingers off party-goers, sliced the lips from those who talked back” (p. 103). However, their role can also be linked to political insurgency as they print and distribute the following: propaganda leaflets and newsletters for distribution in the city by bandits in disguise. Freedom! Self-determination! Independence! Say no to slavery! Local riches for locals. Act Now! … They left [the villagers] money taken from bandit raids on rich houses, bandit ambushes on prosperous plantations … They cleared the city’s oldest landmark … of its foreign Pearl, its Boil — they razed its hilltop pavilion (ibid.).

The brigands are vigilantes who seize wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. Given their deeds and their propaganda, they may be communists who hide in the jungle. This claim is supported by the historical fact that “the Communist insurgency in Malaysia” lasted from 1948 to 1990 (Cheah, 2009, p. 132). Oppressed by the colonial British administration and then the Malay-controlled government, the

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communists escaped to the jungles and murdered “European planters and managers” (Yahp, 1992, p. 135). Similarly, the “gang of bandits” aim to free the (poor) locals from the oppression by foreign colonisation, rich people in the city, as well as landowners and plantation owners, but their violent revenge on non-specified targets causes fear among all city residents, making themselves into another manifestation of “the human-shaped terroriser”. These changeable appearances of “the humanshaped terroriser” indicate that it is, like the ghost of the lover and the Lizard Boy, also a product in the postcolonial context which has been fragmented by the colonial power. The bully as an orphan and an outcast at the convent is another resistance to the colonial oppression. Her resistance is manifested in her physical and mental confusion: she is older and bigger than other girls and her big body shape, muscles, and ungraceful manner reflect her difference which isolates her from the other girls. It is registered as strange that “[s]he grew until she was fourteen…the end of her second life cycle” (p. 25). Grandmother’s explanation for this is that she does not “know which way to grow” (ibid.). Chin (2009) describes her interrupted growth as “the tragedy of getting stuck in this ‘in-between’ time” (p. 101). Colonial power attempts to rewrite the colony’s history, causing “a time out of joint” (Eze, 2008, p. 26) which is not incongruent with the original sense of time in the colony. There are three ways to understand this “in-between time” and the process of “deconstruction, transformation and renewal” (ibid.): firstly, the bully is at the age (fourteen years old) of transformation from girlhood to womanhood; secondly, one way of telling stories is being replaced by another; thirdly, it is the landscape’s transition from colonial era to postcolonial era. All these changes entail the deconstruction of the past, a transformation in the present, and “an acute sense of the contingency of history” (ibid.) which points to the future. When the past on which people rely their existence is destroyed, people’s sense of time is destroyed and people may not know whether they live in the present or in the past or future. Accordingly, the bully stops growing to resist such a disorder of time. The bully’s mental resistance is also seen through her disobedience and immunity to the nuns’ Christian teachings. Like the Lizard Boy, the bully is perplexed by the differences between Western/Christian and local narratives. The nuns teach the girls to tell stories in order from the beginning to the end, but the bully does not follow: “[s]he mixes story up, starts in the middle, then goes to the beginning, then diverts, starts again, forgets how to end” and “tries her hardest to tell her stories the way the nuns say, but she never gets them right” (pp. 39–40). She refuses to accept the imposed colonial narrative and reinvents stories based on materials local and colonial. It seems that it is an invisible power that possesses her mind and prevents it from obeying the Christian order rather than the bully herself who resists the imposed Christian and colonial order. Narratives from afar cannot be assimilated into the local context so that the bully’s mind is pulled by multiple narratives and gets lost in the way that the novel’s narrator never finishes telling a story. The bully’s confusion is the colony’s confusion: everything in the jungle and everyone in the city are unsettled and do not know which way to grow. Different narratives compete to tell the colony’s past and its past and present are fragmented.

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Due to the fragmentation of the colony’s history, the bully suffers from a “lack of memory” (p. 62) so that she always carries the camera that the Old Priest left to her and she always searches for evidence of the convent’s past. Her favourite place is the darkroom where she is the king (p. 26 and p. 28) and has complete freedom. It is “tucked into a seldom-used corner of the library, behind a shelf of dusty books” (p. 27), suggesting that it is a place which has not been affected by the colonial/ Christian powers. In the darkroom, the bully “examines each photo an inch at a time” in “an album pasted with yellowing photos on pages shiny with age” and “[e]very time she looks she thinks there’s more to see” (ibid.) as she is eager to know more about the past. Addressing the objectivity of photographs, Roland Barthes (1981) claims that “the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” (p. 4) and “[a] specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)” (p. 5). A photograph, in this sense, represents “life frozen a moment at a time” (Yahp, 1992, p. 14) in the past. However, photograph can represent only part of the reality in the past while screens the majority, making the photo less objective and real. Furthermore, as time goes by, the photo gradually turns yellow and blurry in the way that memories gradually fade away like fugitives, further lessening its objectivity. Addressing the relations between photography and memory, Mary Bergstein (2010) asserts that “in the unfolding of time, photographs are ghostly, in that they are images made of light” and are “like fugitive memories” (p. 24). In this sense, when the bully sees “life frozen a moment at a time”, she is more likely possessed by the ghosts which emerge from the photos rather than seeing a real and panoramic view of the past. The darkroom seems to be the Pandora’s box in which the ghosts from the past lurk and may erupt into the present to frighten the convent. The darkroom and the photos symbolise the resistance to being changed and rewritten by the imposed colonial and Christian order. It is worth noting that the dark room is in fact the former room of punishment for Grandmother and the lover when they “reject the rich man” (Chin, 2009, p. 115). The memories of the torture they have had in the punishment room are still drifting in and haunting this dark room. The colonial power that oppresses Grandmother and the lover has never gone and can still be felt through the Christian order. The bully is not only the king of the darkroom but an expert on the jungle as she “knows the many paths of this jungle and the places where people can rest” and she “has walked it so often she knows where to look.” (p. 38). As a result, the bully “considers the jungle her own” (p. 37). Then, the reason why the nuns see the bully as an enemy emerges: the bully who enjoys and represents the darkness is part of the jungle, and thus, her resistance to growing reflects the jungle and the colony’s resistance to (Western) colonisation and urbanisation. This is possibly why the nuns teach the girls that “the bully is the friend of the crocodile” (p. 218). They see everything outside the convent as enemies, and thus, the bully who is not in line with the nuns’ Christian teachings must be an enemy.

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A Haunted Family In the family of Grandmother, Mother, and the girl protagonist as “three generations of female storytellers” (Chin, 2009, p. 96), Grandmother, the matriarch and “keeper of an ancient knowledge” (Yahp, 1992, p. 55), designs life patterns for the girl protagonist and her mother, wishing to train them to be her assistants in ghost chasing. However, the girl protagonist’s mother becomes a Christian and does not believe what Grandmother says while the protagonist finds that there can be other possibilities than ghost chasing for her life. They all tell stories about the convent, the jungle, and the King crocodile from different perspectives, but the only narrator is the girl protagonist. Grandmother believes that she gained her ghost-chasing supernatural power in the rich man’s mansion. As a bonded servant in the mansion, she felt the overwhelming presence of the rich man who desired to possess his servants “body and soul”. She felt “the weight of his body in the whole house” “whenever the rich man was in the house” (p. 134). Though he was fond of Grandmother (ibid.), she was still maltreated by the other bonded servants not only because she was “the youngest” and “the most inferior” (p. 9) but also because she exhibited unnatural powers: Grandmother slept so deeply her breath was a rumble that heaved out of her body, that slithered along the bedclothes to slip into the other servants’ dreams. The other bonded servants woke in fright, feeling Grandmother’s breath in their dreams … Other nights she rose to walk the kitchen in wavering circles, trampling everyone underfoot. Some nights the other servants woke to see what looked like a cloud of fireflies winking around her head. One servant or another woke to sit bolt upright at midnight, staring at Grandmother in irritation, in freight … At night Grandmother was otherworldly. She walked with her sleeping breath rattling the kitchen windows, her voice a hoarse whisper coming from lips that did not move. (pp. 9–10).

Grandmother’s strange behaviour during sleep unleashed mistreatment during the day: the abuse from the other servants and the overwhelming power of the rich man. The power hidden within her body manifested at night when Yang qi (ch’i) receded and Yin qi (ch’i) rose. It was during sleep that her conscious mind turned dormant, while her unconscious mind became active so that all the angers caused by oppression and mistreatment were released into various paranormal behaviours to frighten and take revenge on those who had done harm to her. The other servants try various means to appease her otherworldliness at night: they ringed their beds with lucky talismans and reflected eight-sided mirrors in her eyes to confuse her. They slept clutching their newly blessed crosses, their wooden beads. They tied Grandmother to her pallet, yet woke at midnight to find her arms and legs unbound, her body stumbling this way and that. Her hair flying, though there was

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no wind. (p. 10)

To the other servants, Grandmother was a “beast” or something evil possessed by ghosts or spirits. They were frightened and tried all possible means to pacify her. The “eight-sided mirrors” may be the Taoist Bagua (eight symbols) mirrors used to detect and catch ghosts. The “newly blessed crosses” and “wooden beads” indicate that they were newly Christianised. The failure of these means implies that Grandmother possessed or was possessed by something that could not be appeased by a single religious power or a foreign cultural force. When all fail to work, they dragged her to the basement as well as the “punishment room” where she “blinked and rubbed at the dark with her fingers” (p. 10). In the “punishment room” which later becomes the dark room of the convent, Grandmother’s vision became sharp. Furthermore, the extra eye or “the yin yang eye” as mentioned above, the key source of her supernatural power, is caused by a strike to her head (p. 12) and Grandmother lost her vision of colour. Chin (2009) regards this transformation as “a traumatic experience” (p. 99), but Grandmother’s trauma was compensated for by her gaining ghost-seeing supernatural powers. At this time, she was “almost fourteen years at the count of the calendar, no longer a child, not yet a young woman…at the in-between time” (Yahp, 1992, p. 11). Under the rich man’s oppression and with the other servants’ mistreatment, Grandmother went through transformation not only in age but also in gaining supernatural power. She believes that the harsh treatment imposed on her shapes her tiger-like character. The tiger is one of the twelve Zodiac signs in the Chinese culture and also a figure among the Malay Hantu. In an older history book of Malay culture, Frank Athelstane Swettenham (1904) describes the way the Malay tiger is viewed as the spirit of the land: “[t]he tiger is the scourge of the land, the crocodile of the water” (p. 199). The tiger and the crocodile, as the symbols of Malaya, supplement each other. Though Grandmother is a woman, she shows her tiger-like fierceness and her favourite saying (story) in the city is “the land crocodile” (p. 18) which lives in the jungle rather than in the water. Her only wish is to chase and catch the land crocodile. With her supernatural power, her extra eye, her tiger-like fierceness, and her haunted experiences in the mansion, Grandmother becomes “an expert on ghostly sightings, on the habits and hungers of spirits and demons, on ghostly vengeance or favour reaching to spook humans from the other side” (Yahp, 1992, p. 28). Grandmother “used to be a famous ghostchaser” and “[i]n her heyday her door was always crowded with prospective clients: red-eye men and women, haggard from the disturbances of ghosts” (p. 12). The booming of Grandmother’s ghost-chasing business suggests, as Chin (2009) claims, that the power of “the older forms of authority that preceded colonial rule … is derived from prescribed rituals of prohibition and taboo, the enduring power of memory, and the oral tradition” (p. 96). Before the import and rise of Christianity, Grandmother’s power based on ancient Chinese and Malay cultures gained popularity in the city. However, Grandmother’s business wanes because city residents, turning to Christianity, “stand in the street with their golden-edged books and leaflets driving

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customers away” (p. 56). Grandmother’s supernatural power has shown incompetence as the land Crocodile—her “oldest enemy”—never goes away, always lurking in the jungle. Her reputation for ghost chasing is impaired, so she wants revenge on the convent, a symbol of Christianity that has marginalised her supernatural power as well as the cultures she represents. Challenging Christian power makes her a woman warrior who rebels against dual oppressions, colonial and gendered. Her plan includes chasing ghosts and turning the protagonist into her assistant and recorder. Grandmother preaches her view of order and the supernatural based on Taoist teachings and tries to impart her worldview to the protagonist: This is how the story first started. First of all was the number One, which is the number of completion and loneliness. When the Big One first moved, its breath produced the male principle yang and when it rested it produced the female yin. The energy that gives life to these two principles is chi or the breath of nature. (p. 55)

Her belief in the binary opposition of Yin and Yang and the life-giving qi(chi) are quite different from the nuns’ belief in a life-giving God. Unlike the Christian worldview based on an omnipotent God who is above all creatures and incarnated in a man’s image, the Taoist worldview is closer to nature: Dao(Tao) originated in nature and is the mother of all creatures. Taoism, though somewhat similar to animism, views the world as based on the Yin and Yang binary opposition where ghosts mainly dwell in the Yin realm or the underworld. However, Grandmother argues that [t]he world is full of gods, humans, and ghosts. Some ghosts are hard to recognise, they are masters of disguise who mingle freely with humans. Others are easily discovered … Some ghosts have no bodies, only a weight that presses against you or a voice that bangs inside your head. People with yin eyes, eyes of darkness, can easily see ghosts … A way to spot a pontianak ghost is to scrutinise the back of her neck. (p. 76)

Here, her view is not consistent with the Taoist binary opposition of Yin and Yang and goes against Confucianism which advocates worldly success. This shift from either orthodox Confucianism or Taoist binaries suggests that Grandmother’s worldview has incorporated animistic Malay cultural elements. Her belief system is a hybrid mixture nurtured in both Chinese and Malay cultures: on the one hand, she is in the business of ghost chasing; on the other, she herself manifests otherworldly features. Addressing a world full of ghosts, Grandmother points out the ghosts’ hiding places: “[g]hosts live in dark places like deep in the jungle, or a basement, or school and public toilets” and “[n]ever go into the jungle or the basement, or a school, or public toilet alone” (p. 12). She sees the jungle and a school as dark places, the shelters of local spirits which have been oppressed by colonial and Christian supernatural powers. The strategy is to claim the ongoing existence of spirits in order to accuse Christianity of causing the unsettlement of the natural and traditional order.

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Among all the jungle creatures, Grandmother’s favourite is the land crocodile “who can’t be controlled” (p. 18). When she speaks of this creature, she “becomes pensive, her eyes cloud over, her hands lie still” and sometimes she is “so awed she has nothing to say” (ibid.). She seems to be possessed by the land crocodile’s spirit. However, she is “terrific at descriptions but that is as far as she will go” (ibid.). Though she tells many stories about her ghost chasing, this text does not give details about how she catches ghosts or spirits. The only description of catching a ghost appears towards the end of the novel. However, it turns out to be “Sung Ting Po Catches a Ghost” from Gan Bao’s In Search of the Supernatural, an ancient Chinese ghost-chasing story told by Grandmother to her prospective clients in the city. It is very possible that Grandmother’s stories of ghost chasing are the mixture of retold and invented Chinese and Malay folklores. These stories represent the resistance to the Christian order which views all other cultural elements as enemies. Grandmother as the matriarch of the family wants to chart the life of Mother and the protagonist in line with her own design. Her attempt to control them stands in opposition to colonial and Christian power and she would like to see Mother and the girl protagonist follow her order. Grandmother rescues Mother from a brothel, later attempting to train her to be a ghost-chasing assistant. She then snatches the girl protagonist from Mother’s womb before the girl protagonist can be naturally born (p. 161), manually stopping Mother from turning to a woman and thus making her always stuck in the transition period. Grandmother sends both to the convent to see “where these doors and rooms and twisting corridors led to” (p. 4) as she wants to pass on her ghost-chasing power to Mother and the girl protagonist. Mother is troubled by an enlarged neck, and she is convinced that “her luck was bad” (p. 167). Before she becomes a Christian, she believes in “the value of walking crooked”, “the value of beating, of shoving harder if someone shoved her, raising her voice louder, and pushing her arms, her elbows, her body to the front of the crowd, the head of the queue”, and “the value of fooling both humans and ghosts” (p. 77). Grandmother trains her to be tough and ferocious (ibid.) as the ghost-chasing business is prosperous so she needs a tough assistant. However, Mother becomes a Christian at the convent and the bad luck around her neck “shriveled to a lump on her shoulder that she could hardly feel…at the first touch of holy water” (pp. 129–130). Other changes take place after she becomes a Christian: she no long believes in “shouting” or “fighting”; she emerges “clean and wholeskinned”; [h]er voice becomes “soft and gentle” and her look becomes “a limpid query, never a glare” (ibid.). According to colonial Christian ideology, she is saved from superstition and an uncivilised way of life. This is why she does not believe what Grandmother says anymore and she also says that Grandmother’s crocodile is “neither original nor true” (p. 83) and the crocodile saying is “nonsense: made up in a flash of madness the day the Lizard Boy went amok” (p. 167). On the surface, Mother as a Christian is challenging what Grandmother has told her; in fact, the Christian power is challenging the Chinese and Malay cultural forces. With the defection of her adopted daughter, Grandmother has to change her plan and places all her hope on the girl protagonist who believes what Grandmother tells her and follows her orders such as to be “[b]eware the land crocodile” (p. 18) and to

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follow the bully around (p. 27) at the convent. All the stories about the hill, the jungle, the rich man, the mansion, the nuns, the convent, the lover, the land crocodile, the bully, etc. are told by the girl protagonist, but most are the retellings of Grandmother, Mother, and the bully’s stories. Though Grandmother is the matriarch of the family and the main source of the stories, the girl protagonist as the narrator of the novel links the different story fragments. The intergenerational communication and interaction between Grandmother and the girl protagonist form key thematic elements of this novel. From the moment Grandmother snatches the narrator from Mother’s womb, this family is haunted by a weird sense of incompletion. Grandmother represents an overwhelming power intercepting the girl protagonist at birth. In other words, she intercepts the natural flow of time for Mother to finish the process of becoming a real mother and for the protagonist to fulfil her journey out of Mother’s womb. The mother–daughter link between Mother and the protagonist is not properly established, making it possible for Grandmother to take the place of Mother. Grandmother has already taught the protagonist to see before she “could be born naturally” by pouring “eye-strengthening soups” down Mother’s throat (p. 311). Grandmother believes in a seven-year life cycle. When the girl protagonist was about to reach seven years old, she became seriously ill and almost died as if she “burned with a fire that separated the skin” “in layers, like a snake” (p. 87). This is a strong indication that the girl protagonist may be endowed with a supernatural power so that she can cast off one layer of her skin to be reborn and to begin another life cycle. It also suggests that the girl protagonist as a fruit born on the land whose history has been rewritten by various cultural forces is a natural multilayered palimpsest. Around that time, Grandmother fought with a sea spirit in the disguise of a beautiful woman without feet who came to visit the girl protagonist in hospital and “[t]he next day the children the woman had touched all died”, but the girl protagonist survived (ibid.), further revealing her and Grandmother’s supernatural power. It is the sea spirit’s revenge for what it had lost. The end of one life cycle marks the beginning of a new stage and the girl protagonist is reborn once she manages to survive the transition between two cycles. The girl protagonist’s life pattern is pre-determined by Grandmother, the matriarch, who attempts to control her in the way similar to that in which the rich man attempted to possess Grandmother “body and soul”. Grandmother has a plan to train the girl protagonist to be her ghost-chasing assistant before the latter was born. She is later sent to the convent to be Grandmother’s eyes and ears there. The girl protagonist feels Grandmother’s overwhelming power: “I only know what I’m told, what I see. I see only what I’m told. This is what my grandmother has taught me: to narrow my eyes and look sideways, and see what she has told. To see what Grandmother sees” (p. 241). The protagonist views herself as a mimic of Grandmother: “my face a copy of Grandmother’s tiger face”, “[m]y mouth shapes itself to the shape of her mouth” (pp. 299–300, 309). Grandmother’s authoritative teaching is also similar to the nuns’ teaching that girls at the convent must follow the Christian order. Thus, a

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competition arises between the Chinese supernatural power represented by Grandmother’s teachings and the colonial power represented by the nuns’ Christian teachings. Grandmother’s control over the girl protagonist is also represented through her demands that the girl protagonist writes down her ghost-chasing plan: First: going to the convent. Second: following the bully. Third: getting back Grandmother’s ghost slashing knife. Fourth: searching the jungle for her other unfinished business. Fifth: burning it up. Sixth. Seventh. Eighth … The steps that fill her notebooks are almost as many as her years. (p. 311)

Grandmother hopes that her “tremendous memory” can be slowly passed on to the girl protagonist (p. 193). Grandmother requires the girl protagonist to note exactly what she says by asking “[h]aven’t you been listening?” and “[h]aven’t you heard what Grandmother said?” (ibid.) Sometimes when the pen in the girl protagonist’s hand flies out and rock between Grandmother and her, the girl protagonist feels that she is controlled by Grandmother’s will (ibid.). However, the girl protagonist’s unnatural birth foreshadows a future that will always be “in-between”, ambivalent, indicating her resistance to authoritative teaching and foreshadowing her transformation. At the time of the narration, the girl protagonist is nearing fourteen years old, the end of her second life cycle. She is an “in-between girl, no longer a child, not yet a young woman” (p. 196) and she is also going through a transformation towards gaining supernatural power in the way that Grandmother did when she was turning fourteen. However, this rupture and ambivalence bring about defiance against both Grandmother and the nuns’ authoritative and exclusive teachings. Both Grandmother and the nuns believe that their respective teaching is superior and want to impose their teachings on the girl protagonist. However, the relationship between Grandmother and the girl protagonist is always haunted by innumerable ambivalences between similarities and differences. The girl protagonist’s defiance is also represented through her fragmented narration: it “begins with one story, stops abruptly in the middle and jumps into another story, another description, and another character, before doubling back to the stories already told” (Chin, 1992, p. 100). The protagonist girl retells Grandmother’s stories in which many characters and settings are entangled with each other: the hill, the jungle, the rich man, the mansion, the nuns, the convent, the lover, the King crocodile, etc., Mother, the bully, the nuns, and the protagonist girl. These different perspectives and narrations complicate the text and turn it into a polyphony which blurs the land’s history as if all the characters lived in the absence of multiple pasts. Melancholia over this absence causes the “compulsive repetition” (LaCapra, 2001, p. 66) of these elements because one narrative is always interrupted by another so that each element is either repressed or represses another. Chin (1999) comments on the fragmentation of these stories: In a way, the narrative is deliberately made into a huge jigsaw puzzle whereby fragmented pieces of the stories must be fitted together. But

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unlike an actual puzzle, the novel will not yield a unified whole. There are still many unresolved voids left gaping in the novel; these loose ends are left open to questions, and thus frustrate [the reader’s] attempts at exegesis.

The “many unresolved voids” are the reason for those unfinished stories and Grandmother’s unfinished ghost-chasing business. The fragmentation of the stories is a representation of the fragmentation of the colony and of the storytellers’ subjectivity. The girl protagonist’s defiance is further represented through her experiences in the dark room and the jungle, both of which Grandmother fears. The dark room used to be the punishment room where Grandmother and the lover were locked up by the rich man, and thus, it is associated with the past trauma. The dark room is also a space which connects the past and the present through the stored photos, and thus, it can be seen as “an ambivalent ‘in-between place’ where both absence and presence are powerfully felt in the ghostly presences of ‘spirits’ hovering between limbo and reincarnation” (Chin, 2009, pp. 104–105). The girl protagonist and the bully’s entry into the dark room activates the ghosts hidden in the past and dwelling in the photos. An ambivalent in-betweenness inhabits the images of persons in the photos who can be seen and felt but who are in lack of substance. Invisible memories of Grandmother and the lover’s traumatic past and the visible memories represented by the photos turn the dark room into a haunting site where the past and the present encounter. No one other than the girl protagonist and the bully has entered the dark room and it is not inhabited by the Christian power represented by the nuns. In the girl protagonist’s view, the dark room is where she can feel infinite freedom and can experience transformation: “[t]he minutes swell and stretch” until she loses “sense of everything except their swell and stretch” and the bully became “alternately large then small, large then small: enormous, then the head of a pin” (Yahp, 1992, p. 60). Similarly, the girl protagonist, unlike Grandmother, does not view the jungle as a space where “the cursed thing” [the lover’s ghost] (p. 303) is lurking. She does not view the crocodile as evil as Grandmother tells her (p. 324). As in the darkroom, the girl protagonist “re-discovers the freedom” (p. 323), a freedom not constrained by either the Chinese culture or the Christian power. In both the darkroom and the jungle, no spiritual yoke is imposed onto her. Though the girl protagonist has been going through her “in-between time”, the ultimate transformation comes after she finds the lover’s gown in the jungle. She says all her life’s “walking and listening and waiting bubbles up” her throat and all her years of “treading the path of Grandmother’s plan… [t]he trembles turn into giggles and small shards of laughter” (p. 304). In a manner reminiscent of the way the Lizard Boy turns into the King crocodile, the girl protagonist turns into the lover while holding her sides with laughter, “brushing the tears that sprout from” her eyes (p. 326). In this sense, she “rewrites the gaps and spaces” (Chin, 2009, p. 109) of Grandmother’s notebook not only with a pen but with her corporeal transformation. Chin (1999) views the transformation as the birth of a new life and claims that both the girl protagonist and the lover have to travel the path of forgetfulness to be truly

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liberated from the chains of the past (web). However, the past is not completely buried as the girl protagonist gains rebirth into the lover’s body. Accordingly, Chin (2009) comments on the dialectical binary of new/old and present/past as that “erasure entails re-inscription, while loss involves gain, and vice-versa” (p. 114). The girl protagonist attempts to shake off through transformation the shackles imposed on her by the nuns and Grandmother, but she does not turn into something completely new after her second life cycle comes to end. Instead, she blends herself with the lover’s ghost. The lover is a product of Malaya’s tropical landscape and returning to the lover means returning to nature and tropical vitality. However, the landscape has been encroached and oppressed by urbanisation driven by colonial power and the lover has gone and left only her gown, indicating that the spirit of the land has gone under the colonial oppression. Thus, the girl protagonist’s transformation is also a deep lament over the loss of the spirit of the tropical landscape and the loss is irrecoverable.

Oppression Under the Chairman’s Rule Though Playing Madame Mao focuses primarily on the mirror creatures which haunt the city, it is necessary to understand the oppression which causes their (re)emergence. The Chairman rules the city in an oppressive manner and seeks to wipe out its diverse past in order to shore up his own rule. Early in the novel, Ching describes the city’s unique positioning: at a fork for incoming ships from Europe and India in the West; China, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand in the north; Borneo and Moluccas in the east; and from Java and Australasia to the south. Its face is traversed with tourists and peregrines. Here is a meeting place. In more than one sense (p. 23).

Different peoples and cultures have come to this small (is)land for trade, colonisation, or migration, making it culturally diverse. However, this kind of diversity has made the city’s history fragmented and seemingly inconsistent. Thus, the Chairman fights for “the city’s independence from foreign powers” and aims at “creating a new world” (p. 154). He views himself as the founder of the city and wants time to begin with his rule, in reminiscence of uprooting time and turning the year in Gregorian calendar into Year Zero by the Khmer Rouge as analysed in Chapter One. Though the city often appears unnamed in the novel, it is directly mentioned as Singapore for several times. In response to the Chairman’s ambition, there was “a popular and proud slogan” after Singapore’s independence: “SINGAPORE HAS NO HISTORY. SINGAPORE’S HISTORY BEGINS NOW” (Turnbull 2009, p. 1). The city certainly had a history featuring diversity before the Chairman’s rule, but he attempts to deny its existence by wiping it out. In this way, he could claim he is the creator of the city. In order to wipe out the city’s past, the Chairman resorts to tight social control to pursue absolute conformity. He proclaims:

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I am not a democrat in that I do not believe we are all born equal. Some of us are born to rule, most are born to follow. There are few minds able enough to decide for the good of the rest. If one were to listen to everyone, nothing would get done. In one small city like ours, there must not be too many rulers. There must only be one thought, one mind. When the people speak, it is with one voice. (pp. 209–210).

By claiming that “some of us are born to rule, most are born to follow”, he suggests that he is predestined to rule the city; by claiming that “there must not be many rulers” and “there must only be one thought”, he demands absolute conformity in the city under his rule as if he was God of the city in the way that Christian God demands “thou shalt have no other gods before me” (The Holy Bible, 2011, p. 39) in the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament. Absolute conformity is achieved through the persecution of the Chairman’s enemies who are mainly (claimed to be) Communists and Catholics. The Chairman says “[l]et them destroy who amongst themselves is not in line” (p. 208), and thus, his government detains twenty-two persons accused of being Communists and “involving in a conspiracy to subvert the government” (p. 69). Ching’s husband Tang Na is among them. In the Catholic journal he helps to found, he describes the tight control as experienced by the city residents: We are living in a chicken coop society…Even if the door of the coop were to open, we would remain because here we are given food and shelter, we have grown fat. We have traded in our freedom for bread. We are kept people. We let the government do our thinking for us (p. 20).

The city residents are only allowed to fulfil their basic physiological needs and make money (p. 208). The Chairman suggests that they would not survive or prosper without him as he establishes the city in which his residents can get access to abundant material gains. He also wishes that 99% of his people were fools (p. 22) as, in this way, he can be the only one with mind in the city while his residents, deprived of the right to thinking, become the prey of high capitalism and wander soullessly in the city. Tang Na is not in line with the Chairman’s idea, and thus, he is taken away from home one night by government agents and later tortured by the Red Guards who are under the Chairman’s command. The President is also apprehended and his wife is tortured. Though the President is not explicitly identified, he may be President of the city, in reminiscence of President Liu Shaoqi of the People’s Republic of China during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Both Ching’s husband and the President are made to confess their guilt on TV. This crackdown targets Communists and Catholics and is indicative of the Chairman’s fear of foreign interferences from both Mainland China and the West. Absolute conformity is also manifested by the city’s glistening cleanness and high urbanisation. Its buildings are as clean as if “they have been polished” and “[s]omeone has come with a scrubbing brush and taken away all the grime” (p. 83). A spotless city looks impressive. However, in some sense, the extreme cleanliness is unsettling

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as it causes fear: citizens are required not to sully its image and those who do so will be fined. The clean city whose high rises are wrapped in glass is like a giant mirror under the Chairman’s rule. The river’s banks on which the city grows are decorated with fancy restaurants with exotic flavours such as “New England Seafood Bar and Restaurant” and “Thai Paradise” (p. 37), suggesting that some cultural elements are brought in in the form of gentrification and high fashion to fill the vacuum of the past that has been wiped out. Ching compares the gentrification and urbanisation of the city to male invasion of the land figured as a female body. She sees coconuts with “thick tangled skeins like a woman’s pubic hair” and the seafarers lift them with “muscular brown arms” and hack them open with “large knives” (p. 144). The masculine seafarer seems to refer to the oppressive male power represented by the Chairman whose great size and predominant forehead exhibit his strong masculinity (p. 208). Developing in line with the Chairman’s strong masculine will, the city as a symbol of urbanisation invades the tropical landscape with sword-like high rises made of concrete, steel, and glass. Living in fear, some city residents view the Chairman as an immortal god (p. 208) with supreme power. The city seems to be in absolute conformity underlying his deep unsettlement about the city’s past and his own power. However, what he has oppressed is never completely gone. It lurks beneath the surface of the river, the glass, and the residents’ skin and will soon re-emerge. The creation of a new world based on absolute conformity as depicted in this novel echoes the ideas of male rulers in Chinese mythology and history: the Yellow Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, and Chairman Mao. They appear in the novel not only because they demanded absolute conformity but also because each of them offered an illustration of oppressive patriarchal power. It needs to be noted that the Yellow Emperor and Qin Shi Huang are represented, rather than through historical references, through Ching’s reading of Borges’s rewriting of the two rulers in The Book of Imaginary Beings (2002) and “The Wall and the Books”13 (1973). Based on her reading of The Book of Imaginary Beings, Ching states that the Yellow Emperor originated in and mainly resided in the region “within the bend of the Yellow River” which “corresponds to the original confines of the birthplace of China” (p. 17). The Yellow Emperor is believed to have founded the Chinese (Cathay) nation by defeating other tribes, and this is similar to the Chairman who founds the city and keeps it stable by destroying all his enemies. The Yellow Emperor’s wife is also believed to have invented mirrors, based on which Borges (2002) invents the part that the Yellow Emperor imprisoned the mirror people in a mirror and all they knew was imitating human (p. 68). Ching believes that the mirror people were sealed in a watery and dream-like mirror and death world. The mythology of the Yellow Emperor as a half-mythic Chinese ruler is reinvented by Borges to depict him as an oppressive ruler. The rule of the Yellow Emperor also foreshadows the emergences of other male rulers in Chinese history. Ching also reads Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Wall and the Books” and states that Chin Shih Huang Ti (Qin Shi Huang) demanded conformity by burning “books of earlier ages” (Lau 2000, 13

“La Murralla y Los Libros”.

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p. 17) and burying scholars of various schools of thoughts. This is one of the main reasons that he is depicted as a “despotic emperor” (ibid.) who attempted to erase the past because the scholars of the previous states he conquered always thought of and referred to the past and became “dissatisfied with the present” (Chan, 1972, p. 105). Apart from oppressing his enemies, Qin Shi Huang ordered thousands of labourers to build the Great Wall which was used to defend against the invasion of northern neighbouring tribes. The Great Wall, in Qin Shi Huang’s view, stood as a demarcation between the civilised and the barbaric and between the powerful and the disempowered. Ching seems to suggest that the Great Wall is a symbol of Qing Shi Huang’s power under which his enemies on both sides of the Wall are oppressed in the way that the mirror creatures were sealed by the Yellow Emperor. By ordering the Wall to be built, he articulated his wish to be remembered as a god and the founding father of China and so “appropriated to himself a name that has its roots in Shang Ti, the High Lord of the Heavens” (Lau, 2000, p. 17). In this sense, his creation of a new world was based on the destruction of the past. Ching believes that Chairman Mao inherited and is haunted by the oppressive power. Chairman Mao also viewed himself as a ruler who unified China from chaos, in the way that the Yellow Emperor and Qin Shi Huang did. Ching says his army was once located in the same region where the Yellow Emperor and Qin Shi Huang arose and ruled, suggesting that “this region almost corresponds to the original confines of the birthplace of China” (ibid.). After Chairman Mao founded new China, he also demanded conformity through launching a series of political movements including the Cultural Revolution so as to wipe out the past and destroy his enemies. As Ching notes, Chairman Mao said Well, what was so extraordinary about Ching Shih Huang? He only executed 460 scholars; we’ve executed 46,000! I said that once to some democrats: you think you are insulting us by calling us Chin Shih Huangs, I said, but you’re wrong, we’ve done a hundred times better than Chin Shih Huang. (pp. 17–18).

Chairman Mao did say this in a certain historical context and he compared himself to Qin Shi Huang. Thus, the Yellow Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, and Chairman Mao can be understood as the creators of particular incarnations of China at different times and they also wanted to have time to start from their rules by erasing the past. After the past is erased, each of them would become the only unparalleled ruler in history so that each was able to ascend to the apex of power. The oppressive power has been wandering and waiting for a new life cycle resurrected and embodied by a male ruler. The reference to these oppressive rulers in the past also suggests that the oppressive power is functioning again in the city. The Chairman of the city becomes another inheritor of the power and demands absolute conformity by persecuting his opponents who are also mainly scholars and ordering a new city to be built. The city to him is in the way that the Great Wall was to Qin Shi Huang as the Wall was and the city is believed to be able to ward off foreign invasions. The Chairman also wants to have time to begin with him as he is possessed

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by the will of becoming the only supreme ruler in the city’s history. In the meantime, the enemies who have been destroyed and oppressed by those male rulers in the past are lurking beneath the surface of mirrors, glass, rivers, and any reflective objects, waiting for re-emergence, for another life cycle. In this sense, under the oppressive rule in the new city, the mirror creatures are destined to rise again to “recover their true selves…when the world of men will suffer for their arrogance” (p. 16).

The Return of the Mirror Creatures This novel shows that the mirror creatures (re)emerge as a challenge to the world of men in the way that the repressed return from the past. As a result of the mirror creature’s resistance, the city under the Chairman’s rule becomes unsettled. Ching as an actress playing Madame Mao notices that the mirror creatures are about to emerge on her stage after her husband is taken away as she is obsessed with the story of the mirror creatures who challenged the Yellow Emperor and were finally imprisoned in mirrors. The mirror creatures were reinvented by Borges based on the story that the Yellow Emperor defeated the mirror creatures who attempted to revolt against his rule and then he sealed them in a mirror. Borges’s book also draws on The Water Essays—a mythological book on the observations of the mirror creatures (Lau, 2000, p. 151). The book tells that the mirror creatures’ written language, opposite to alphabetical language, “goes from back to front, which you read from right to left, and up, down, up, down, instead of across; in every respect, the opposite of alphabetical language” (ibid.). This is a strong indication that the mirror creatures’ language is the ancient Chinese language based on characters including pictographs, different from all European languages based on alphabet. The mirror creatures, in this sense, stand for ancient Chinese culture which is different from European cultures. Furthermore, the trope of “water” in the book’s title foreshadows the mirror creatures’ reflectiveness as they are forced “to take on the identities of those who looked into the mirror, repeating their actions, as if in a dream” (p. 15). The mirror creatures, imprisoned in mirrors, have been deprived of their subjectivity and can only imitate human beings. Ching also believes that the other side of the mirror is the watery death realm (p. 15). Thus, the mirror creatures are in fact ghosts or somehow associated with death. Ching draws on Borges’s description of the Fish and argues that the Fish was the first to stir the mirror world and cause cracks between the mirror and human worlds. She says that the mirror is destined to break “when the world of men will suffer for their arrogance” (p. 16). When the Chairman, the current embodiment of oppressive rule and men’s arrogance, demands that time begins with his rule as if he was a god, the mirror will break and the mirror creatures will (re)emerge. The Chairman’s power is also felt in and outside the theatre in the city. In the world of the theatre, Madame Mao who used to be an actress has a deep understanding with the mirror creatures and the ghost of Madame Mao haunts Ching who tries to represent the best version of Madame Mao. Ching’s performance competes with other actresses’ performances of Madame Mao and different versions of Madame

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Mao enter the theatre. Marvin Carlson (2003) compares acting to ghosting by arguing that “the operation of repetition, memory, and ghosting are deeply involved in the nature of the theatrical experience itself” (p. 11). When imitating a real person, an actor or actress tries his or her best to match the person’s image in the audience’s memories by repeating the person’s words and deeds. The actor or actress also needs to compete with the images in the audience’s memories created by other actors or actresses who have played the same role. However, the repetitions of represented roles cannot be identical with the real person so that possible nuances and differences between acting and reality trigger the haunting of a multitude of images of the same person in the audience’s memories. Ching is possessed by the concept of acting as ghosting while trying her best to become the perfect version of Madame Mao on stage. She relates the theatre to the death realm and argues that I think, We in the theatre are like beings in the death realm. We are mirror creatures scattering light, catching now and again a nuance, a word that sounds like life. In Chinese mythology, death is a watery realm. When I die my soul will travel to the Yellow Springs that runs from the foot of the fu-sang tree in the east to the ruo tree in the west. When I die, I shall be as one of the creatures in a mirror world (Lau 2000, p. 15).

She makes it clear that the theatre/stage is a like a death realm and actresses like her are mirror creatures who, based on memory, imitate the real lives of human beings. The quotation above suggests that acting is a form of imitation, of mirroring and, indeed, of haunting. Acting as ghosting can be understood in two ways. Firstly, as Madame Mao has different names and identities and has played different roles on stage, her different identities and roles as other mirror creatures haunt Ching when she tries her best to imitate Madame Mao. Ching believes that “Madame Mao knew the mirror creatures were akin to herself” (p. 16), not only because Madame Mao who used to be a famous actress was good at imitating others but also because she had been oppressed in a watery mirror world by the male autocratic power. Given Madame Mao’s watery nature, it is not easy for Ching to truly represent Madame Mao on stage. Ching paints her face “a ghastly white” and stretches her eyes with “black grease till they touch the uttermost limits” of her face (p. 13). This exaggerated makeup turns the image of Madame Mao into a frightening ghost. In other words, playing the best version of Madame Mao, to Ching, is representing her ghostliness. Secondly, Ching is obsessed with the idea of becoming the best version of Madame Mao in the way that Madame Mao was obsessed with the idea of becoming the best actress. During the Cultural Revolution, Madame Mao turned China’s political world into one big stage on which she played both the director and the leading role. She attempted to “monopolise the world of literature and art” (Yan and Dao, 1996, p. 401). Madame Mao’s fear was that “she was not the greatest actress” and this fear drove her insane (Lau, 2000, p. 14). Ching similarly claims that she is “the greatest Madame Mao the stage has produced” (ibid.), indicating that she is obsessed with this idea and tries her best to imitate Madame Mao and represent the latter’s boldness and deadly ruthlessness on

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stage. Carlson (2014) explains ghosting in the theatre by arguing that “the process by which audiences’ memories from earlier performances inevitably and involuntarily inform their reception of the present one” (p. 48). Each of Ching’s performances of Madame Mao during the Cultural Revolution represents a miniature part of Madame Mao’s life. The end of a play is signalled, as Carlson (2003) argues, by the curtain call which “may be grafted a higher level of ghosting, as any curtain call itself is ghosted by memories of previous curtain calls and their repertoire of expectations” (p. 91). Acting as ghosting in this sense refers to the haunting of the ghosts of all the past roles or life cycles played by other actresses. Thus, Madame Mao played by Ching is drowned by the previous roles of Madame Mao played by other actresses and now living in the audience’s memories. This is possibly why Ching sees that “[t]he water rises…ripples stir, breaking the levels of air” between her and her audience (Lau, 2000, p. 27). The audience who rise and clap are compared to the rising and seething water. Madame Mao played by Ching descends into the watery mirror and death world. Outside the theatre, the mirror creatures also invade civil life through the river that runs through the city and the glass which wraps around the high rises and possesses the city residents by turning them into shiny walking bodies without souls. Accordingly, Ching views the city as an “I”-land in which each resident is another’s shiny mirror and only concerned with wealth to make themselves increasingly shiny. Ching argues that “the mirror is used to define identity, to define ‘I’” (p. 151). Without a solid past to rely on, the city along with its residents has come adrift not only because of the city’s material obsession but also because the residents have become indifferent to each other, building “ego walls around the soul” (p. 71). Soulless and hopeless, the city residents decorate themselves with shiny luxuries and become as glistening and commercialised as the city is: they wear gold watches, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, and “hair that shines and glistens like black sheets” (p. 161). Ching is also adorned by luxury brands such as Armani (p. 11), Gucci (p. 35), Estée Lauder, and Chanel No. 5 (p. 43). In a city whose past is being wiped out, the city residents rely on material possession for the meaning of their existence and their motto which, according to the narrator, is “[t]his is mine, it belongs to me” (p. 153). The fact that these luxuries originated in Western countries such as France, Italy, and the U.S. suggests that these former colonial nations still control the world through global capitalism and consumerism. Featherstone (2007) summarises Fredric Jameson’s view on “commodity-signs” and “the consumption of signs”: “consumer culture and television have produced a surfeit of images and signs which have given rise to a simulation world which has effaced the distinction between the real and the imaginary: a depthless aestheticised hallucination of reality” (p. 53). The city’s residents live in a space filled with a multitude of shiny commodities as “images and signs” which create a hallucinatory space beyond reality. The more the city residents desire, the more hollow and unsettled their inner world becomes and the more “images and signs” are created. In this oppressive “I”-land, Ching sees the entanglement of the real, the imaginary, and the supernatural. The Fish appears and disrupts not only the distinction between the watery mirror world and the theatre but also the surface between the watery mirror

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world and the city. On the bank of the river on which the city grows, Ching sees an old mirror woman “standing like a lost soul” (Lau, 2000, p. 35). The old mirror woman is “revered as a dragon mother” who emerges from the dark and retells a story of the past in a Foochow (Fuzhou, a city close to the southeastern coast of Mainland China) dialect (p. 40). Ching sees the river surface stirred up when the fish which comes close to the shore “twirl and bow” upon their tails (ibid.) to the old mirror woman. If the world beneath the river surface lies the city’s past which has been repressed, the emergence of the fish marks the breaking of the demarcation between the past and present and foreshadows the return of the mirror creatures. Ching understands the story and identifies herself with the old mirror woman’s dialect and culture, indicating that Ching is also a Chinese descendant. The old woman returns from the past which has been banished beneath the river surface to remind the city residents who gathers in a semi-circle around her and are hungry for the past. The city is seething and Ching sees “a long line of high-rise apartments lit like dynamite that is ready to go” (ibid.), suggesting that the city is deeply troubled. A group of mirror people led by a mirror woman whose bearing “denotes a dignity above the ordinary” (Lau, 2000, p. 128) wander around the city, causing fear. Ching remembers that the mirror woman once appeared in her dream, blurring the demarcation between reality and dream. The mirror people kill and disembowel the Red Guards.14 More people are killed after the death of the Captain of the Red Guards and the city becomes increasingly unsettled: Each day brings more and more reports of the dead. Who is dying? Who is killing whom? It is hard to say. More than one battle is fought in the city. Buildings are burned to the ground. The MRT is jammed at many stations. Bus drivers curse at passengers, fist fights follow insults. Many do not turn up for work, many are fired from their jobs. People wander in a daze, not knowing where they are going. (p. 133).

Killings and fear are the mirror people’s revenge, not only against the Red Guards’ ruthless persecution, but also against the soulless city residents who scuttle “at the feet of buildings” and pay homage to “the great god, urbanisation” (ibid.). One of the city residents even says: “I want to destroy this city, I want to tear down the walls, I want to escape.” (p. 226). This sense of suffocation is a strong manifestation of the resistance to the Chairman’s oppressive rule. Destruction is what the mirror people wish for. The death of the Captain of the Red Guards can be viewed as a turning point in the process of the blurring of the demarcation between the human world and the mirror world as well as in the change of power hierarchy. The death indicates the beginning of the mirror people’s revenge which ultimately targets the power that has wiped out the past. Haunted by “the real and the imaginary”, the city residents are, as Lyn Jacobs (2004) claims, “ghost-like, hungry for truth, love, fame, recognition, 14

During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were Chairman Mao’s zealot followers and they destroyed many artefacts made in and inherited from the past. In this novel, the Red Guards appear on the stage, in the city and in the recount of the Cultural Revolution.

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or just something beyond its evidently slick surfaces” (p. 114). These city residents become the soulless walking dead wrapped in shiny clothes and accessories in the same way as the city is filled with high rises wrapped in glass. In the city possessed by mirror creatures and caught between reality and hallucination, every resident seems to become a shiny actor or actress playing different roles on stage and the other residents are their audience. Addressing the relationship between theatre and social reality, Carlson (2003) reiterates Bentley’s view that the theatre is the space where “a group of audience members assembles to watch a group of actors impersonate a group of stage characters” (p. 53). Audience, actors/ actresses, and characters form social relations so that “the theatre is normally a social occasion on both sides of the curtain” (ibid.). The social attribute of performance sets up a link between the theatre and real life. When social life as “a highly, detailed realistic setting” (Strecher, 1999, p. 267) is also invaded by the mirror people, the city becomes a stage on which city residents are played and embodied by mirror people. Ching believes that the possession of the residents by the mirror creatures is caused by “the collected karma … the hunger to assert an identity, the unreasonable that only builds ego walls around the soul” (Lau, 2000, p. 71). Karma refers to the future effect of a person’s deeds, building a link between the past, present, and future. “The hunger to assert an identity” suggests that the city residents including Ching as mirror people reflect or play different roles at the intersection of the past, present, and future. Ching wanders aimlessly in the city as in a dream and looks for “a connection somewhere in the recesses” of her soul (pp. 83–84). She has to resort to the ghosts of certain heroines in Chinese mythology and history to gain courage in order to challenge the oppression imposed upon her. After the mirror creatures (re)emerge in the city, Ching plays the roles of a series of legendary heroines in Chinese history and mythology. She compares herself to the Chinese moon-goddess, “the Empress Chang-Er, who drinks the potion of immortality, flies to the moon, saving her people from the everlasting reign of a tyrant” (p. 145), suggesting that she, like the Empress, will save the city residents from the rule of the tyrannical Chairman. She also compares herself to Hua Mu Lan, the “legendary woman who had to ride into battle disguised as man” and “the Empress Wu Tse-tien…who actually ascended the male-dominated throne” (p. 140). Ching, as a woman, longs for the courage and power which are said to belong to men only. This comparison, however, also indicates Ching’s predicament—she can get access to power only by imitating men. She also becomes “the river woman, the dragon-mother commanding the little fish to surface” (p. 156), suggesting that she has become a mirror woman who dominates the watery mirror world or probably the old mirror woman is a projected reincarnation of herself. She turns from the Indian Monk Kapila15 to Chinese mythology (p. 144) to awaken the oppressed souls of woman warriors in order to bring life to the city. Madame Mao’s ghost also haunts Ching not only on stage but also in her daily life: Ching whispers Madame Mao’s name Chiang Ching which is also her own 15

“The name of the Brahman monk who in the course of his life uttered one hundred foolish words” (Lau, 2000, p. 36).

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and she studies her face in the mirror, wondering whether it is Ching’s or Madame Mao’s (p. 71). In the city as stage, Ching’s audience are the other residents including her friend Roxanne and her husband Tang Na who also become mirror creatures. The significance of their life becomes the reflections in other people as mirrors. Roxanne and Tang discover some of Ching’s characteristics which present a multitude of Ching’s images. Roxanne observes Ching and plans to write a book about her, in a gesture reminiscent of the American historical figure Roxane Witke who interviewed and wrote a biography about the historical Madame Mao. Roxanne says about her relationship with Ching that they are not “entwined souls, but mutually reflective selves” (p. 46). Ching uses Roxanne as “a mirror for her ego’s expression” (p. 42) as Ching’s personality is revealed through Roxanne’s observation: bold, independent, aloof and that she cares about only the theatre and the stage as an unreal world and “carries a lot of anger” (p. 43 and p. 45). Ching’s anger, aimed at the Chairman who embodies political oppression and patriarchy (p. 45), erupts after her husband Tang Na is taken away by government agents. Roxanne also views Ching as a mirror from which the former gains “a sense of entering another world” (p. 42). This can be understood in two ways. Firstly, Roxanne is freed from “her tiring daily work” and provided with “an escape from home” (p. 41), a home with an uncaring husband. Thus, Ching presents a totally different way of life to Roxanne. Secondly, Roxanne is fascinated by Ching’s otherworldliness as Ching is haunted by the mirror creatures and Madame Mao’s ghost. Though Roxanne and Ching are each other’s mirrors, they are not identical. Ching is bold, while Roxanne is a “Plain Jane” (p. 42), an ordinary girl. Ching’s complex personality is also reflected through her husband Tang Na whose name is also the name of one of Madame Mao’s husbands. Similar to the relationship between Madame Mao and Tang Na, Ching and Tang differ from each other in many aspects: upbringing, values, thought, and occupation. Tang as an academic who excels in logic is obsessed with Ching’s passion and irrationality (p. 80). Tang not only presents a contrast to Ching but also represents the frailty of men. Ching states that her husband is one of the people who “find it hard to live” (p. 73) and “caught in a labyrinth and unable to see his way through” (ibid.). This contradicts the fact that Tang excels in logic. The reason may be that Tang is demasculinised by Ching’s power as Ching shouts on the stage that her husband Tang, a weak man, fears her hostility (p. 86). When Ching seeks to imitate men and grab power, her masculinised actions disempower Tang and reveal his frailty, a quality said to belong to women. As a result, in a mutually mirrored relationship, Ching and Tang’s positions are reversed. However, in Tang’s absence, Ching also exhibits her and Madame Mao’s weakness and dependence on a man, for instance, she exclaims on stage: “[w]ithout Tang, who am I? [h]ow can I withstand their threats?” (p. 86). These queries expose Ching and Madame Mao’s dilemma: on the one hand, they display their overwhelming power; on the other, they still need to rely on men as their spiritual dependence. Roxanne and Tang have been observing and reflecting Ching until Tang’s suicide and Roxanne’s fleeing to Australia. Through them as Ching’s audience, Ching’s images accumulate and form a kaleidoscope which blurs the demarcations between historical facts, reality, performance, and dream.

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The mirror creatures (re)emerge and cause fear in every corner of the city so as to remind the city residents of the autocratic power which has been passed down from thousands of years ago. The city is turned into a mirror world under the Chairman’s rule and its residents are dragged into the watery realm where reality, performance, dreams, life, death, and the present and past cannot be separated. In challenging the autocratic power that belongs to men, women rise as mirror people who have been oppressed. Ching as Madame Mao or/and Madame Mao as Ching become the “dragon-mother” dominating the watery mirror world, a challenge to the Chairman’ power.

Agency and Victimhood: Haunted by Power The previous section has argued that Ching’s version of Madame Mao contends to be the greatest in theatre and Ching also becomes the dragon mother who commands the mirror world. However, the power Ching enjoys is endowed by the Chairman, implying Ching’s status as a puppet. This section will focus on how power haunts Ching and how she mobilises an agential response to its exertion. Agency can be defined as “the degree to which a subject is able to determine the course of their own actions” (Buchanan 2010, p. 10). Agency can be understood as the freedom to exert one’s power. Ching longs for power in a world filled with men’s arrogance. Ascending onto the stage of performance and revolution, respectively, manipulated by a male director and a male ruler is ascending to the apex of male power, for instance, Ching assumes that the Chairman has become old and impotent and “[h]is power is ebbing” (Lau, 2000, p. 270). She then attempts to seize power from the Chairman by “demanding back all letters and photographs” from those who knew her in the past and having her foes tried and imprisoned as communists (p. 239) in the way that the historical Madame Mao did to her foes, only except for the fact that Madame Mao tried and imprisoned her foes in the name of counterrevolution. As the empress of the mirror world, Ching persecutes her foes with the autocratic power which has been passed down through Chinese patriarchal history. Ching is, to a large degree, an instrument of the Chairman’s power. When the Chairman praises her beauty, she declares that beauty is ephemeral and “power is everything” (p. 190), suggesting that she slights her beauty as a feminine feature while longing for the power she lacks, centred as it is in male hands. Her agency is determined by the social context in which women’s agency is determined by men. While Ching is enjoying the power afforded to Madame Mao, nonetheless, “the Chairman is behind the revolution” (p. 270). Chairman Mao once said of the historical Madame Mao that “[s]he was only a paper tiger” (p. 289). It is possible that the two Chairmen are in fear of ageing and losing their power, but they will not or are not able to personally fight against their foes. Their wife and lover are thus respectively pushed to the front of the stage of performance and revolution. The two Chairmen attempt to have time recommence with their rule by oppressing and erasing the past and rewriting history. The two Mesdames Mao become the

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Chairmen’s helpers and agents in rewriting history (p. 239). Ching as Madame Mao and as a victim of autocratic power is tamed and possessed by it and becomes part of it in the process of resisting and challenging it. In this way, she, as a victim, is turned into a perpetrator. However, once the Chairman’s enemies are eliminated, he returns to the centre of power and Ching is taken down by his followers in the way that the historical Madame Mao was taken down by Chairman Mao’s followers. When the agent’s power is taken back, she returns to her status as a victim. Her pursuit of power in a male-dominated world is nothing but a dream and approaching it is in fact approaching the watery mirror world. In Ching’s final performance on stage, she thus laments: I am spent. My hair loose and wild. They have come for me. They haul me to my feet. They bind my arms in chains and lead me before the crowd. I whisper through misted eyes. I close my lids and let death come to me. I watch my soul enter the mirror realm (p. 28).

Multiple meanings are revealed here: on the stage, Madame Mao played by Ching collapses as the play comes to an end; in the city, Ching is deprived of the power granted to her by the Chairman; in Beijing, Madame Mao was removed from the leadership of the Communist Party of China and committed suicide after more than ten years of imprisonment. Performative experiences of falling, then, come to represent the fall from grace and power experienced by Ching as Madame Mao. In this sense, the two Mesdames Mao are hauled into the watery death realm and they become the victims of the autocratic power. The two Mesdames Mao’s longing for power and their failure to challenge the autocratic male power are fully shown in their trials. Their status is downgraded from that of agents to that of puppets. Madame Mao was tried in November 1980 in Beijing and the trial was televised nationwide (Yan and Gao, 1996, p. 529). Similarly, in the novel, Ching is “taken to the court room”, facing trial judges “like wax figures in a mausoleum” and “six hundred invited faces” with “hostile eyes” (Lau, 2000, p. 291). It is not clear from the novel whether we are reading a description of the trial imposed on Ching in the city, that of Madame Mao’s trial represented by Ching on stage, or that of the trial imposed on the historical Madame Mao in Beijing. It also seems that she is taken to the palace of the King of Diyu (Hell) where ghosts dwell. A sense of ambivalence arises from these multiple possibilities. Whichever it is, Ching as Madame Mao is standing at the centre of the stage or the court to defend herself against “a list of sins” (p. 292) attributed to her by the court or the mirror world: The city demands too much. I have always had to give account of my very existence … Everything I do is an outrage. Every step I take is out of bounds. You have spent years attempting to stifle me. I will not stand trial. (ibid.)

This shows the restrictions placed on Ching and Madame Mao as women, restrictions which eventually suffocate them. They have been, in the judges’ views, driven

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hysterical. However, the claim “I will not stand trial” reveals their resistance to oppression. They condemn the oppression of women at the hands of men: Why do you blame me and not the Chairman?…It is because I am a woman who has transgressed the limits of your definition of a woman. For that you cannot excuse me. You turn upon me like tigers. I see the claws in your serious folded hands. I catch the glint of green eyes…You accuse me but you envy me too, my freedom despite your laws. (p. 293)

It is the Chairman in the city and Chairman Mao in Beijing who launched the revolutions, but it is the two Mesdames Mao who are condemned for transgressing the limits of their agency in a patriarchal context. The Chairman, the ruler of the mirror city, says: “[i]t is not for a woman to make history” (p. 144). This is the reason that everything Ching and Madame Mao do is “an outrage” for which they seek revenge. They find this world to be fake and the only thing that is real is their anger. Their statement is an outburst of long-repressed anger against autocratic male power. Ching’s mirror world is despised by the judges as “a dream world” which goes beyond “the boundaries of what should be” (p. 295). The judges, siding with the Chairman, condemn women’s attempt to overthrow the current order and “the mandate of heaven” and believe that women should not hold power as women “will not keep it well in hand” (p. 296), implying that women who are controlled by lust lack in logic and reason and they live in “a dream world” created by themselves. Ching refutes all these allegations by exclaiming “[w]ho is to say what is real and what is not” and “[w]ho are you to judge that my world is any less real than yours, my set of laws any worse?” (ibid.), suggesting that the power to decide on what is real or unreal should not belong to men only and that there can be multiple worlds. In and between these worlds, there should be no authoritative standard to draw demarcations between women and men and between the real and unreal. She also suggests that power is no longer exclusively in the hands of men and that women are no longer men’s puppets. Rather, she also suggests, women have the power to determine their own way of life. In this way, autocratic power is decentralised, making it possible for various centres of power to intersect with and challenge each other. Ching, haunted by the power which have haunted the warrior women in Chinese history and mythology, enjoys the power of persecuting others as a release of her resentment. However, the power endowed with by the Chairman is as “ephemeral” as is Ching’s beauty. The power allows Ching to emerge from the oppressed mirror world to enjoy it for a short time in the way that the warrior women did. Once the power is taken back by the Chairman, Ching falls from the apex of power into the mirror world. As a result, she, as a woman longing for power, is forever a victim doomed to drift in the watery mirror world.

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Permanent Exile The two Mesdames Mao as the empresses of the mirror world attempt to challenge autocratic male power, but it ends with Madame Mao’s imprisonment and later suicide in Beijing and with Ching’s fleeing the city. Ching assumes that she can find a home and begin a new cycle of life in Australia. However, the power which has oppressed her accompanies her to Australia and keeps haunting her. She finds that Australian cities such as Brisbane are as commercialised as the city she comes from: “[f]ancy department shops”, “McDonald’s”, “K-mart” and etc. (p. 308). Brisbane, in this sense, is also a replica of “a uniform or homogeneous outgrowth from Europe and America” (Bishop et al., 2003, p. 2). In this land with homogeneous cities, she is not sure “when the new landscape will begin to make sense” (Lau, 2000, p. 309). The new landscape, familiar and unfamiliar with the city where she comes from, also imposes an experience of the uncanny on her. Her sense of unhomeliness in the new land also comes from Ching’s contact with people who are from the same city as she is. She easily recognises them from their “walking, talking, gesture or inflection of voice” and they “acknowledge silently a hidden bond” because “they have not been treated well in their past” (ibid.). The mutual recognition has to be a silent one, suggesting that their fear of oppression still haunts them in this new land. Ching finds hunger in their eyes and these people “have glimpsed home” in Ching (ibid.). They are caught between a sense of unhomeliness in Australia and the fear of returning to where they come from. Ching and her fellow countrymen live like ghosts in the new city due to their permanent senses of powerlessness and homelessness. Autocratic power has turned Ching into an “outcast, exile, immigrant” (p. 314), suggesting that she is always a soulless mirror creature drifting on the margins of power, from one place to another, from one stage to another as well as from one role to another. She stands alone among strangers in the new city as she did before her interrogators, denouncers, and those who try her and punish her (p. 315). The strangers in the new city standing opposite Ching also impose an experience of the uncanny onto her in the way that those in the court of the city where she comes from did to her. She also stands alone before strangers in the new city as if the “I”land (island) city where she comes from stood alone before possible surrounding enemies (ibid.). This link implies that Ching assumes that the people in the new city who are different from her can be her enemies in the way that the “I”-land city is surrounded by peoples who have different cultures and religions. The “I”-land city is deeply unsettled by its past and by the eagerness to erase the past to establish a brand new city. Similarly, Ching and her fellow residents flee the city in order to leave the political oppression behind. However, the autocratic power is still haunting them in the new land which fails to provide them with a sense of homeliness. Everyone from the “I”-land city is marked by a deep sense of unsettlement and by the paranoid quest for power and wealth. Everyone in and from the “I”-land city, including Ching and the Chairman, is a victim of the autocratic power.

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Conclusion The two novels examined in this chapter represent the coexistence of and the interaction between supernatural beings and human beings. Different ways of telling stories of the past merge with each other, creating a sense of haunting based on a palimpsest of narrations. In The Crocodile Fury, Grandmother tells the stories of the colonial oppression and the ensuing (re)emergence of Malay supernatural beings. Grandmother also tells Chinese ghost-chasing stories. However, it is the girl protagonist who retells Grandmother’s stories of the Malay and Chinese supernatural. Grandmother as a keeper of ancient stories and traditions tries to pass them on to the girl protagonist. Western, Chinese, and Malay narrative voices are each refracted through the girl protagonist’s uncertain and changing identity. In Playing Madame Mao, the autocratic power represented by the Chairman leads to the re-emergence of the mirror creatures through Ching’s narration. The protagonist Ching as an actress in both the theatre and a destined exile retells stories of brave women challenging patriarchy in Chinese history and mythology. In both novels, the representatives of colonial power and autocratic power assume that they can conquer everything and wipe out history. Supernatural beings are the manifestations of the resistance to the obliteration of the past. Their (re)emergence blurs the demarcations between the past and present as well as between dreams and reality. The two novels bring supernatural beings into the real world through narrations as a challenge to colonial and autocratic powers. The supernatural beings represent the palimpsest of a history fragmented by different powers and narratives. Christopher Warnes (2009) claims that the supernatural is used as a tool for “the defamiliarisation of discourse” (p. 16). Grandmother and the girl protagonist in The Crocodile Fury and Ching in Playing Madame Mao connect their daily surroundings to the supernatural in their cultural memories and turn the reality into an unfamiliar space resided by both human and supernatural beings. The supernatural beings in magical realist texts are socially and culturally produced based on everyday human life. Warnes also argues that a text which “displays fidelity to a set of cultural modalities…may, metonymically, use magical realism to generate an effect of granting access to the modes of perception that characterise that culture’s worldview” (p. 15). The conflicts between supernatural beings and powers nurtured in different cultures represented in The Crocodile Fury manifest the ontological differences between the worldviews of Western, Chinese, and Malay cultures. The conflicts between supernatural and human beings represented in Playing Madame Mao manifest the conflicts between the autocratic male power nurtured in Chinese culture, urbanisation as Western colonial power, and finally, the feminine agency that challenges male oppression.

Conclusion

Haunting has been the perspective and methodology of this book as the condition of diaspora cannot resolve crises in identity by an appeal to hybridity. Haunting can be a means to address many of the complications of the postcolonial world. This book has asserted from the outset the fact that “life is complicated” (Gordon, 2008, p. 3) is caused by “repressed or unresolved social violence” (p. 8). Haunting is thus about the return of the repressed or unresolved which appears to be unfamiliar or even frightening. The textual analysis in the chapters has explored the ways Chinese Australian writing can be examined through the perspective of haunting. The 19th century and the first half of the twentieth century saw the decline of Imperial China as it came under attack by various Western powers. One of Ouyang Yu’s (2012) poems reads that “[t]he 5000 yr structure collapses overnight” (p. 197). The texts analysed in this book are more or less related to this sense of decline: Lo Yun Shan in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage leaves China in the mid-19th century as it was tortured by poverty, famine, and wars with Western powers. Alice Pung’s grandparents in Her Father’s Daughter left China at the end of the 1940s when the war between the Chinese Community Party and the Nationalist Party has reached its apex. Jing in Ouyang Yu’s The English Class left China around 1990 right after the political incident took place in Beijing in the summer of 1989 and when Mainland China was still economically disadvantaged. Grandmother and her family in Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury and Ching and many residents of the city in Playing Madame Mao are of Chinese ancestry as their ancestors migrated to Malaya1 due to poverty, famine, and the wars with Western powers in China. However, Chinese people, especially Chinese intellectuals, are always obsessed with cultural memories or cultural capital accumulated through a long history. Chinese intellectuals always believe that they are the carriers and disseminators of “five thousand years of culture” (Lovell, 2006, p. 3). The decline of Imperial China imposed serious cultural trauma onto Chinese people home and overseas. Thus, Lovell also claims that 1

Going to the Southern Ocean or xia nanyang (下南洋).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 X. Xiong, Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3064-7

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at various points during China’s troubled twentieth century, intellectuals (both literary and non-literary) have combined resentment of China the nation-state with patriotism for the motherland: modernising iconoclasm has coexisted with affection for and pride in aspects of traditional, premodern Chinese culture (p. 6).

The mixture of resentment against and patriotism for China has been a significant part of the Chinese diasporic experience, having been haunting Chinese diasporic communities in the past two centuries, which is represented in Birds of Passage and The English Class. In the former, Shan’s fellow countrymen smile when the ship which carries them leaves China, while Shan keeps a diary with Chinese calligraphy and returns to China at the end of his journey to Australia; in the latter, Jing claims that he hates China and defects to Australia, while he nonetheless finds that he does not have a sense of homeliness in Australia. In the view of many Chinese intellectuals, the continuance of Chinese civilisation was broken by Western powers, and they were caught between the weak, disadvantaged, and fragmentary remains of China’s cultural capital and the powerful, advantaged, and modern Western cache of cultural capital. They are caught between the criticism over Chinese cultural capital and the pride in China’s splendid past. Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century have been troubled by the “imbibed imperialist views of Chinese racial inferiority” (Lovell, 2006, p. 4). They are the most sensitive to change as they are “an educated elite occupying the forefront of social and political reform efforts” (ibid). This kind of traumatised national character has greatly affected Chinese intellectuals inside and outside China. Thus, they have to resort to ancient Chinese culture as the legitimate support of their cultural identity when facing the invasion of or/and the oppression by Western powers. Shan in Birds of Passage keeps records in Chinese calligraphy of his experiences in Australia; Jing in The English Class always compares the Chinese and English languages and believes that the former is superior to the latter; grandmother in The Crocodile Fury employs ancient Chinese ghost stories and ghost-chasing techniques as a form of resistance against colonial oppression; the old woman on the river bank as the Dragon Mother in Playing Madame Mao tells a story of ancient China in Fuchow (Fuzhou) dialect as a form of resistance against the political oppression in the city. The claimed 5000 years of cultural capital still haunts Chinese Australian writers and the characters in the selected texts. On the one hand, these Chinese Australian writers and characters from or living in Malaysia, Singapore, or Australia are constantly exposed to the influence by Western powers; on the other, they are constantly reminded that their ancestors or they are entitled to the 5000-year cultural capital. The cultural confrontations in the mind and on the body make these hyphenated migrants always wonder which realm they are living in and are scared by the seemingly unfamiliar. Though haunting has been brought into literary studies, it may still remind the readers of the experiences of the uncanny or cause frightening feelings. Even though Maxine Hong Kingston’s (2015) The Woman Warrior is about “memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts”, much published research on the novel draws from a perspective that privileges feminist and gender perspectives. Many researchers on Chinese Australian

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writing take this, and similar perspectives such as a focus on identity wherein Chinese migrants stand for the Other in Australia. In fact, haunting has already been encoded in the repressed, the marginalised, and such unequal power relations vis a vis gender, race, or alterity. This book has taken a further step from the existing scholarship on identity issues and explored something ghostly lurking beneath these issues. It has examined how “the return of the repressed” (Gordon, 2008, p. xvi) haunts the characters in the selected texts by challenging “the traditional distinctions between fact and fiction, between truthfulness and falsity, between reality and fantasy, and between presentation and representation” (p. 32). It is through these challenges that we become unsettled about what we have long believed in and held dear and that we become able to see apparitions beneath something we have believed to be stable. It is through these challenges that trauma, languaging, and the supernatural can be brought together under the name of haunting. This book has examined haunting as the coexistence of and the competition between different realms through trauma, languaging, and the supernatural. The focus here has been on the way the past invades the present or people in the present relive the past through trauma, one language erupting in another, and the supernatural (re)emerging in the human world. These modalities of haunting manifest different ways of repression and corresponding resistance, forming different types of palimpsest through which the old is forever being partially erased or replaced by the arrival of the new. It also needs to be noted that the interaction between repression and corresponding resistance is an ongoing process, so the relations between the past and present, between languages, and between human and the supernatural beings become increasingly entangled. Trauma, languaging, and the supernatural are part of the change, suggesting “a transformative recognition” (ibid.). In this sense, the abusive systems of power which have caused haunting in the selected texts can be viewed as part of historical change. This echoes my statement in the Introduction that palimpsest, multidimensional, trans-spatial, and trans-temporal, sees “partial erasure and writing-upon-writing” as a fundamental human experience. Realising that “partial erasure and writing-uponwriting” is permanent is the best way to reconcile ourselves to the unresolved and repressed in this complex world. All of the texts examined in this book have represented the identity crisis and the experiences of the uncanny in the postcolonial world in which the sense of time and space is disrupted by transnational and transcultural migration. A sense of unsettlement always accompanies migration caused by language and cultural differences, and its effects can last for generations. The foremost contribution of this book is that it has found an alternative to lamenting over the identity crisis and the experiences of the uncanny represented in Chinese Australian writing in the postcolonial world which has been fragmented by various powers and narrations. In addition to the book’s contributions above, there are also limitations. Chinese Australians are constantly experiencing Chinese culture and language being affected by Anglophone Australian culture as they are always living between their home countries (China, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Singapore) and Australia and between Chinese and Australian cultures. Thus, as a Chinese academic having stayed in

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Australia for some years, I have selected trauma and languaging as representations of haunting. I have also selected the supernatural or ghosts as another representation of haunting as haunting is originally about ghosts frequenting a person or place. This book has examined haunting as trauma in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter, haunting as languaging in Ouyang Yu’s The English Class, “The English Empire”, “Translating Myself”, and “The Doubleman”, and haunting as the supernatural Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury and Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madame Mao. However, I am aware that there are more works by the selected writers and by other Chinese Australian writers who may have addressed haunting and further representations of haunting. Not only for reasons of length and time have I not examined all texts of this kind but also in order to adequately and fully focus on those texts surveyed. In future, I may examine, in other works of Chinese Australian writing, food, architecture, or city space as other representations of haunting. Similar to language, food is also an important carrier of culture. In the postcolonial context, different foods and culinary forms migrate with people, and dinner table and kitchen become other sites where different ingredients, spices, recipes, and cooking styles encounter and interact with each other, similar to the ways in which different language elements encounter and interact with each other. Schwegler-Castañer (2018) addresses culinary racism in Alice Pung’s Laurinda and explores “foodways enables the illustration of how a lack of interaction between distinct social classes and ethnic groups is conducive to an absence of cross-group understanding” (p. 255). We can also see here unequal power relations and the marginalisation of some ethnic groups’ foods. Chow (2014) similarly argues that. Even in the most vivid, concrete descriptions of ingredients, colours, smells, and tastes, food is…a manner in exploring the secret dimensions and possibilities concealed in what appear to be ordinary, banal contact among people and things (p. 83).

The contacts between “ingredients, colours, smells, and tastes” refer to, in fact, the contacts between peoples from different cultural backgrounds. We may assume that the dishes on our dinner table are homemade and locally produced. However, the ingredients may have been brought to the place where we live from afar and long time ago. A dish on the surface appears to be a whole, while the histories of different ingredients with the “secret dimensions and possibilities” are lurking beneath the whole, reminding us that each ingredient becomes localised and comes to our dinner table at different times due to different migrations. Thus, a dish as a whole is, like language, a palimpsest in which the old keeps being erased and replaced by the new, arousing the experience of the uncanny. Daughtry (2003) also addresses architecture while discussing palimpsest. He summarises Andreas Huyssen’s argument on the architectural palimpsest as asserting that “the visible residue of buildings that have since been razed—provide a theoretical model for reading urban spaces intertextually and recovering ‘present pasts’ from the abyss of cultural amnesia” (p. 5). Buildings also become the sites of haunting which

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accommodate the coexistence of the partially erased past and the partially altered present. You Bok Mun, the protagnoist in Brian Castro’s After China, is an architect who designs a hotel by the sea. Brun (2011) examines After China and claims that You’s own architectural practice, since the principle of impermanence is at the centre of his fascination with metabolist architecture, a movement that worked to produce flexible buildings that were impermanent and constantly subject to evolution. The story of Zhuangzi thus ties the impermanence of sex and life with the impermanence of architecture. (web)

This claim shows After China’s reference to Taoism established by Zhuangzi, highlighting a sense of change in nature and human experience. Like language and food, architecture as a representation of human history has also undergone metabolic changes with old elements being replaced by new ones. The hotel designed by You is situated on a cliff between land and the sea, suggesting its marginal position and its impermanence of being changed by the elements from both the land and the sea. Architecture is, in this sense, a palimpsest in which the remnants of old elements are always being erased and replaced by new ones. Based on the preliminary examinations on other representations of haunting, I will examine in future haunting as food in Alice Pung’s Laurinda and haunting as architecture in Brian Castro’s After China and other relevant works to further my research on haunting in Chinese Australian writing.

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