by : Carolyn van Langenberg

(Carolyn van Langenberg is the author of the fish lips trilogy — fish lips, the teetotaller’s wake and blue moon, Indra Publishing).

Susan Wyndham’s Region’s Tales Should Be Brought To Book (Opinion, SMH 11/01/05) about the Australian literary perspectives on Asia concluded with ‘Perhaps, perversely, the tsunami will help drag our attention to another neglected region.’ The region to which she drew particular attention includes Indonesia and Malaysia, lacking, she found, as settings in novels published by ‘big-name’ Australian writers. At the end of the article, Elizabeth Weiss of Allen & Unwin confirmed that it ‘has been harder to publish on Asian issues,’ citing a shift in interest to the Middle EastThe questions which ‘Asia’ and what ‘Asian issues’ were not raised.

As the continent of Asia contains within it the voluble people of South Asia, the over-anxious Chinese and precise Japanese as well as the apparently easy-going Malay people, why are these questions ignored?  Is it too complicating because the ‘Asia’ word necessarily connects with another discussion, the one about setting novels in the globalised urban-scape or in the region’s villages and towns?
Think global, live village. Sometimes village prejudices has global impact.  The bombing of the nightclub in Bali is one example. Language expertise in Indonesian language suddenly became desirable. But experts, as a direct result of the government’s failure to sustain programs for the teaching of languages, were found to be too few.

The effect of the Federal government’s fiscal policy that so erodes education is felt by publishing houses. At a time when for security reasons it is of national importance to have experts trained in Indonesian language to read errant text messages, to discuss rescue operations, to assist in police investigations, and to assist in court proceedings, publishers are rejecting Indonesian language textbooks written by linguists. The publishers claim that there is no market for text books on Indonesian language.

Without a clear vision of the future that includes our closest neighbour, Indonesia, the Federal government resides on ignorance, failing to encourage students to study Indonesian language or know anything about that fascinating string of islands.

Economic rationalists demand that everything must be instantly marketable. Coupled with the myopia of the Federal government, the demands of the marketing department diminish the intellectual quality of the publishing environment.

So where is the place for the writer/thinker who roams through ‘Asia’, that richly vibrant continent that has been categorised as a borderland?

The easiest way to deal with writing in settings that inform cultural difference is to write a love story. The politically chaotic period of the 1965 coup in Indonesia when Sukarno’s generals were murdered, disguised as the successful military squashing of an attempted communist coup, was backgrounded with a love story in Christopher Koch’s The Year Of Living Dangerously (1978).
Blanche D’Alpuget in The Monkey In The Dark (1980) wove through a love story insights on life as an ex-pat in Jakarta, threading the layers to show historical and cultural textures.
The Red Queen (2004) is British writer Margaret Drabble’s most recent accomplishment in writing across the historical time-line and also across the cultural border. The historical period of eighteenth century Korean court-life is engrossing, even though the Crown Princess seems to be somewhat prim, rather like a mid-Victorian upper class British lady. By comparison, Miss Porntip in Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory (1991) is more successful, the character’s practicality, sensuality, materialism and good-heartedness credibly Thai.

However, a more successful writing across both cultural and historical borders is The Rose Crossing by Nicholas Jose (1994). Seventeenth century Northern England and Imperial China meet in a novel that is funny, erudite and wicked, in equal proportion. Informing both characters and plot is a sinuous delight in discovery.

Contemporary Australian novels about the migrant’s experience — about finding oneself marooned in suburbs so boring you can hear the grass growing — concentrate on alienation, not discovery. Australia, said to be an iconoclastic nation, notwithstanding the consistent worship of holy cows, is undeniably an odd country to understand in the sense of coming to grips with its tempo, climate and bureaucratic obsessiveness.

In The Australian Finance (2000), Simone Lazaroo captures the sandy limits isolating Broome from the hinterland where there is no grass to hear either growing or rustling in the breeze, the most alienating of experiences for her principal character, a Singaporean, a young woman used to night markets and the constant noise of communal life.

Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro (2003) and The Eastern Slope Chronicle by Ouyang Yu (2002) push beyond the boundary delineating disillusion with Australian oddities. Although egocentric, these two stylish autobiographical novels offer a satisfying, unsafe reading experience. In Shanghai Dancing Castro brings to the reader the strangeness of being a blend of red barbarian (European) with the Inner Kingdom (Imperial China). Castro’s work resonates with cultural conflicts that reside in the skin of the persona, who is a product of European colonialism. As I read, I thought about all those other Others, blends of Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Dayak, Gujerati (when should I stop this list?) born before European colonialism in Southeast Asia.

The Eastern Slope Chronicle is a funny post-modern novel about cross-cultural interaction. From China to Australia and back again, from teaching and translating Chinese from English and English from Chinese, this novel offers an insight into the pain of the migrant’s identity crises (plural). At no time is the novel precious.

Both Shanghai Dancing and The Eastern Slope Chronicle are published by small presses — Giramondo and Brandl & Schelsinger respectively.

Publisher’s resistance to writing set in the Malay Archipelago is not new. The late G. M. Glaskin wrote A Lion In The Sun (1960) set in the Crown Colony of Singapore and The Beach Of Passionate Love (1961) set in the Federated States of Malaya. In correspondence with Glaskin, his London editors complained that readers regarded the archipelago as a war zone. His agent for a short time, Paul Scott, later to publish The Raj Quartet (1976),  was equivocal about them. Both agent and publisher preferred Glaskin’s earlier novels that were set in Australia. Barrie Books, his publishers, advised Glaskin that the Southeast Asian region (Far East) was unexciting.

Both of Glaskin’s novels were about being a working Australian in the Malay archipelago of the 1950s, a tricky state of affairs, requiring the personas to negotiate British colonial snobbery as a fellow colonial, but one looked down upon as either a colonial drongo or white trash. Singaporeans and Malays also regarded with some suspicion people who came from a land with the iniquitous immigration policy that discriminated against them, The White Australia Policy. Australians may have forgotten that our government enacted an Immigration Act that discriminated against people of races other than European, and was cautious about those who were not British. But Southeast Asians continue to remember the indignity of The White Australia Policy. That policy was, and still is, a cross to bear.
A Lion In The Sun and The Beach Of Passionate Love are not cross-cultural. They are experiential, drawing directly from autobiography, in which the author displays his awareness that political and economic imperatives were about to alter the future of British Imperial history.

British publishers believed that British reading taste was for light-heartedness. The famous The Long Day Wanes : A Malayan Trilogy by Anthony Burgess, released as one book in 1964, consists of Time for a Tiger (1956); The Enemy In The Blanket (1958) and Beds in the East (1959). These novels set in the Federated States of Malaya, regarded by the British as the second-rate Raj, relished in the absurd experiences underwriting the archetypes of British colonial shenanigans. Burgess is quite sharp about all the people living on the Straits of Malacca.
As a writer, Glaskin is not as comic as Burgess, his novels not as well-shaped. Nevertheless, readers wrote to Glaskin, thanking him for the two novels. One letter thanked Glaskin for The Beach Of Passionate Love because the detailed descriptions prepared the reader better than a travel book for life in Malaysia where for business reasons he was relocated.

I haven’t yet read Peter Carey’s novel,  My Life As A Fake, which I must do not only because I like Carey’s novels, but also because I have researched the Malaysia of the period Carey has used as a setting —  and more — for my own the fish lips trilogy   (fish lips (2001), the teetotaller’s wake (2003) and blue moon (2004)). Where Carey concentrated his efforts on Kuala Lumpur, Penang inspired me.

When I first visited Penang in the early 1970s, it reminded me of the slumbering New South Wales fishing town of Ballina. The road to Batu Ferringhi was unsealed, as were many of the roads between Lismore and the coast in the 1950s. And the vegetation was the same.

Every afternoon, 1950s slowness lulled Georgetown to sleep. The portions of spiced oily noodles were so big one bowl kept me going for a whole day. I safely walked across Penang Road from coffee shop to market to hotel room.

Over the years, I watched the demolition of the stately homes along Gurney Drive as they made way for condominiums. The E & O has been gutted by fire and restored as an imitation Raffles. In 2002, the streets were even more hazardously one-way than they were in 1998. But the portions of spiced oily noodles are still ample.

Since the early years of the twentieth century, sports like horse racing, fishing and yachting have brought Australians to Penang. Australians, especially Western Australians, go there for their honeymoons. Some stay on to live with culturally blended families, evidence of love affairs that join our nations. The contemporary Malaysian government offers relaxed visa conditions to Australians choosing to retire to Penang. Youthful romances and the expectations of the twilight years have created links that are both real and consistent, the stuff of stories.

And yet, like Glaskin before me, I have been advised by agents and publishers that no one is interested in Malaysia/Singapore, an attitude I don’t understand.

When I wander through Cheong Fatt Tze mansion in Penang and observe where Catherine Deneuve rested her elegant presence in the film Indo-Chine, evoked are the love stories, the financial manipulations, the rough-house towkays, race track scandals and crazy gossip that make Penang tick. It is as robust as Swedish towns are bland and English villages are predictable.  Penang isn’t explicable in a straightforward sort of way.

Like Brian Castro and Ouyang Yu, I have been published by a small press. Indra Publishing has a special focus on writing with Southeast Asian settings.

Poets Stephen Kelen and Adam Aitken have gone beyond the shoreline into Southeast Asia. Judy Johnson is writing poetry set in the northern islands between Australia and Indonesia, as did Gail Jones in prose in The House Of Breathing (1992), her very first book.  The Polemo Tree, poetry by Margaret Bradstock, is an intelligent investigation of Chinese immigration and settlement in Australia, her mood contemplative, her focus historical.

At a writers’ conference several years ago, I listened to poet Sam Wagan Watson advise writers to hear the words of his uncle who advised him to listen to the wind for the music of language,  the sound of stories and poems. Sam’s uncle may have had Indigenous communities on his mind, but in the contemporary world, his advice holds true for all writers. Heightening perception to hear the sounds of people, hearing the music of the multitude as rapid travel and instant news diminish the size of the world, inspires writing set in both village and city. But translating the sounds of the borderless world into cross-cultural stories is not as easy as swiping the credit card in whichever country one is shopping.

Most writers don’t cross cultural borders, don’t even attempt to do so, and with good reason. There are those things one learns at one’s grandmother’s knee that mark us culturally for what we are.
Others of us love to take the risk.

Whether propelled by a tsunami or fascinated by archives that show the white presence in this region is a recent layer of light dust, we’ll bring to book poems and stories heard on an old wind whistling with new music.