by Hiromi Goto
Lest this depiction of the time seem all too idyllic, I should also add that it was a time of tremendous cruelty, backbiting, backstabbing, self-aggrandizement, clique-ishness, competition, bullying and self-righteousness. That these actions, moods and energies came from the recognition and speaking of historical pain and oppression made them all the more awful and frightening. Right beside the freedom we felt we were coming into lay an active volatility that threatened to destroy the possibility of that freedom from within. The fact that there is no such thing as a perfect subject of oppression, tended to produce an unwinnable race to the bottom—what Diana Fuss identifies as an “essentialist” impulse or Rey Chow identifies as “the fascist longing in our midst”—that ultimately did no one any good. All that was needed was a neoliberal or a right wing match and the fragile empowerments that these loose and fractious communities of marginalized people were building together could go up in flames. And ultimately, they did go up in flames as the millennium closed, and the new henchmen of oligarchy found the tools to shut off funding and media access, and to re-narrate the important but fragile work of progressive racialized people in Canada, through labels like “politically correct” and “reverse racism.” The problem at its most obvious is that corporate, patriarchal and racist interests were doing their best to kill liberatory anti-racist activism and culture. But if I were to lay some responsibility on the progressive side of the fence, I’d suggest, in fact, that it was a particularly activist mood and its language that engaged too tightly (critics would say “dialectically”) with the polemics of its conservative counterpart, and that this dialectic engagement made the collapse of the movement possible. But what some writers and artists were doing was writing in a way that was more nuanced—narratively or poetically—in ways that broke the power of binary opposition and made space for racialized communities to live and to go on living. These locations—”activist,” “artist” or “writer”—are, of course, malleable. At different moments, the same individual might take on any of these mantles and so do its labour. And certainly, Hiromi Goto was and is one of those individuals—an important one.
As the 1990s came to a close, much of the possibility that period held dried up. The freedom that Goto writes for Grandma Naoe, to break all the racialized and gendered strictures of our lives, seems less imaginable now. With the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 and the unconscionable government, media and financial exploitation of racist narratives about the Muslim world that gripped Europe and North America in no uncertain terms, many if not all of the hopeful aspects of the anti-racist cultures of the 1990s seemed to melt away. Its practitioners had to find other ways to live—in menial labour, in more commercial forms of creativity, or in the academy. The liberal democracy that our parents came here to find, and that we were educated to believe in, vanished overnight and was replaced by a system that reproduces the old oppressions, using the language of freedom and democracy to do so, and in the process evacuating that language of its previously held liberatory possibility. “Freedom fries” and “free trade” mark the subjugation of our minds and imaginations to the power of corporations and sold out governments. Critics and writers have become more important than ever to help citizens and noncitizens, migrants and Indigenous people see the co-optation of language itself. The end of the millennium marked a shutting up and shutting down of many of those voices by getting us out of the public arena in the ways I have described above. That shut down continues in the contemporary moment with the massive marginalization of the humanities in the academy.
Racialized critics and writers have a special role in the neoliberal economy, not because we have won any of the battles pitched in the dying days of the old liberalism, but because the new liberalism requires the surface appearance of the old liberalism in order to work. Hence the spate of state apologies that have occurred in Canada over the last couple of decades. Because neoliberalism needs optics, apologies, and credentials, those of us racialized subjects who have worked for and received some of these things are newly empowered, but in strange ways that are limited by the forms of economics and governmentality under the new system.
What Chorus of Mushrooms can do for the present moment is show us the relationship between the old liberalism and the new liberalism, while retaining hold on a powerful anti-racist politics and showing us the relationship between racism under the old liberalism and racism under the new. If students—both those swept here from East and South Asia under neoliberal economic conditions and local students of Asian, European and South Asian descent—can read this novel and tie the conditions it depicts to the conditions of the present, then Chorus becomes a newly powerful text able to show us as much about the 1990s as the 2020s.
What remains unaddressed as a burning issue of the present is the relationship of racialized subjects to questions of Indigeneity, something Goto takes up in her subsequent novel, The Kappa Child. Chorus, however, works well beside Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories, and is perhaps best taught together with it and/or other Indigenous texts, to make Indigenous voices present. The Truth About Stories is a particularly useful kinship text because it shares with Chorus a recognition of the relational nature of stories and a celebration of multiple, embodied truths.
What remains hopeful in the monstrous times in which we live is that Chorus of Mushrooms has remained an important text inside the academy, where it is taught all over the world through a range of different kinds of courses: including Introduction to Literary Study, Western Canadian Literature, Comparative Canadian Literature, Food and Multiculturalism, Women in Literature and Asian Canadian Literature. The danger, I should point out, is that it becomes merely content, and that in this shift, it loses its live power to build communities and change lives. But Chorus of Mushrooms still does important social labour in the contemporary contexts in which it circulates.
For the last seven years, I have been teaching this novel as a required text in a large, first-year lecture course at the University of British Columbia. This context is utterly different from the context in which the novel was first published, at least as I experienced it. And yet, it teaches well, and works for both me and my students. Until recently, the context in which I taught Chorus was one section of a course that was a university-wide requirement. It is now one of several options for a humanities credit that most UBC undergraduate students must fulfill one way or the other. What this means is that it is a general course that includes people with a wide variety of interests, abilities, and goals. They are headed for disciplines as disparate as Business, Music, Physics, History, and Kinesiology. The demographics of the class, largely as a consequence of the shifting economic conditions I described above, is such that tends to include students from the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. It still includes as well many students of European, South Asian and East Asian extraction whose families have lived in Canada for several generations, whom the administration understands as "local." Occasionally, there are Indigenous students, though the moment of this afterword is still very much a moment in which Indigenous students are segregated (in practice if not by requirement) from non-Indigenous students, meaning that they are conspicuously absent from the class in which I teach Chorus of Mushrooms. While the economic conditions that have increased the presence of so-called "foreign" students is connected to the recent neoliberal turn, the economic conditions that make Indigenous students largely absent from my classroom belongs to an older but ongoing colonialism that is entangled with the conditions of neoliberalism in complicated ways. The hyper-presence of "foreign" students is a consequence of economic conditions that also produces a hyper-absence of Indigenous students.
The economics of the academy means that students designated as “foreign” pay significantly higher fees. Their financial contributions are becoming increasingly necessary to fund the presence of local students and the running of the university as a whole. Pragmatically, what this means is that foreign students are o
ften also wealthy students. In addition, UBC prides itself as an elite school. The lived politics of race and class at UBC are thus quite intense, as the “Too Asian” scandal of 2010 illustrated all too clearly. In this context, Chorus is as live a text as ever, in the sense that it still speaks very much to the conditions of the present. It can spark passions that flare with the same intensity that they did in 1994. On average, the students in this class are eighteen years old.
If these conditions are attached to the economic rise of Asia, which, of course they are, I think it is important to recognize that this economic rise emerges in a complicated response to European colonialisms in the 19th century, and much very material suffering in Asia through the Cold War period in the 20th century (for further analysis see Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method). Those “foreign” students who come from wealthy families and attend my classes may or may not have personally earned the wealth they bring, but they are nonetheless subjects of unjust and brutal histories. They are just now coming into very complicated forms of privilege. And many—wealthy and not— still come for the old reason: hope for a better life. With that hope comes a willingness to work hard, and perhaps also some expectation of mistreatment.
There is no escape from the temporal and the material conditions of the present. If I learned anything from the wonders and horrors of the 1990s, it’s that the material conditions of the present, in all their embodied and historically sedimented glory matter more than anything else. In the present context, this translates into making my best efforts to teach my students from the location in which they live. Misrecognition and heterogeneity are givens, so the task is not exactly Herculean but perhaps Psychic, in the sense of the Greek myth about the mortal girl in love with the god Eros, whom Venus forces to complete three impossible tasks before she can be reunited with her true love. The first of these tasks is the tackling of a giant heap of mixed grains, to separate the different varieties from one another. In my non-mythic daily life, the job is to figure out the social, cultural and affective location of each of my students and to try to show them something new, empowering and possibly shocking or at least unsettling from that location. This task is impossible because, most years, I teach at least 200 students, sometimes 250.
The closest thing to a universal question about literature that I can imagine is the question of the relationship between life and text, truth and representation, signifier and signified. The Greeks asked it, so do the Buddhists. Modernists asked it, so do Postmodernists. It has also been a useful question in postcolonialism and critical race theory. I feel my job in this class is to open the door to more nuanced kinds of thinking than students are used to. It is a cuspy kind of labour, this work of guiding young folk into what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm shift, the hardest kind of teaching that there is. It draws up all kinds of affect—confusion, boredom, irritation, disaffection, and rage. Combined with all the old affect still alive in Chorus, these affects can often occlude the important critical content of the novel.
I frame this class around the concept of repetition, doubles, and mimicry. It has the express purpose to teach students to see text as text. Other elements in the course include placing Charles Perrault’s collected version of “Little Red Riding Hood” beside Angela Carter’s “Company of Wolves.” Lately, I’ve been teaching a poem by Elizabeth Bachinsky called “Wolf Lake,” a poem about the abduction and murder of a young woman by an old school friend somewhere in rural British Columbia written from the point of view of the woman. I teach it beside another poem of the same title on the same subject by Matt Rader, this one from the point of view of two young men who witness the killer with the body in the woods. This year, I’ll add Michael V. Smith’s version of the same incident, which gives us the murderer’s point of view. By the time students get to Chorus of Mushrooms, if they have been paying any attention at all, they are thinking about versions of stories and points of view. If they are really bright, they are questioning the possibility that any apparently original text is indeed what it claims— implicitly or explicitly— to be. And further, they are able to read and articulate the ideological investments of any particular text.
Immediately prior to Chorus of Mushrooms, I teach Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both for all the postcolonial critique that it makes possible and for the more traditional reading of the play, which queries the relationship between the stage and the world, that is, between art and life. My first lecture on Chorus argues that as Prospero uses the island as a stage to change the material conditions of his daughter Miranda’s life, so Goto’s protagonist Muriel/Murasaki uses storytelling as a creative venue to change the conditions of her grandmother’s life. And extra-diegetically, Goto sets the nation up as a stage in which all of our lives might be made better and more just.
First of all, Murasaki calls us, the audience, into being through the figure of the lover, and a pact is made between the lover and the storyteller. The lover’s question on the first page, ”Will you tell me a true story?” is important (11). I suggest that when Murasaki answers “Yes,” she is promising the lover even more than he has asked. She is not just going to recount the truth of the world; she is going to make the world anew for him. There is a birthing going on in this novel—not of a child but of a grandmother. But in order for the new world to be made, there has to be an agreement between the storyteller and the listener, and the storyteller must make sure of it: “It’s like people want to hear a story and then, after they’re done with it, they can stick the story back to where it came from. You know? ..... Can you listen before you hear?” (11). To really listen and to take in the story is, in a sense, to agree to make the world with the storyteller. It is also to put aside judgements and frustrations and attend to the storyteller’s logic—not an easy thing for people raised in the mainstream Canadian school system. In its first pages, the novel is about to reclaim racial and cultural identities, to criticize the politics of assimilation as whitewashing, and to show us the sexuality of old women. Murasaki wants us—her lovers—to listen very carefully so that we don’t misunderstand her. It is the only way the world we are making together can be a better world.
She makes no mistake either when she interpellates the audience as the lover. We say different things to different people depending upon our relationship with them. If the audience is a room full of bigots who have already made up their minds about who she and her grandmother are, then there is no story to tell. But since the lover is a Japanese man, and someone who cares for her enough to share her bed, she can tell the story differently. She can assume a little intimacy, and the understanding that comes with liking one’s interlocutor. In this way, Chorus has something in common with Yasmin Ladha’s short story “Beena,” in which the protaganist, a honey-voiced Muslim woman, is trying to convince her white male lover of the value of non-Western forms of knowledge. In bringing her audience close, like a lover, Murasaki is more generous and kind than she might be with an audience that mistrusts and dislikes her. It is possible to say more and go deeper with someone you love. But she also expects this exchange to be mutual. Further, in specifying her audience as lover, and shocking us a little in doing so, Murasaki shows us how all texts call their readers into being, and not usually as immigrant Japanese men. So even in its loving gentleness, this critique offers a pointed critique of mainstream literature and criticism.
Grandma Naoe is also a figure attempting to call the world into being. Through the first half of the novel, however, she is unable to do so because no one listens to her. Her daughter, Keiko, determined to assimilate to white Canadian norms, pays no attention to her, but rather, chastises her for her “muttering.” At the start of the novel, Grandma Naoe is so silenced and so oppressed, that even Nature tries to shut her up. She battles with the wind: “Ahh this unrelenting, dust-driven, crack your fingers dry wind has withered my wits, I’m certain. Endless as thought as breath—ha! Not much breath left in these bellows, but this wind. Just blows and blows and blows. Soo
n be blowing dust all over my mummy carcass and beetles won’t find the tiniest soft bit of flesh to gnaw on, serves them right. Dust in joints dry as rust and I creak” (15).
But strangely, in her battle with the wind, Grandma Naoe becomes like the wind: a force of Nature. If the wind is like breath, then breath is also like the wind. It can blow, and so have an effect upon the landscape. And indeed, as Grandma Naoe speaks back to the wind, she becomes in a sense “naturalized.” As people born elsewhere can be naturalized as citizens through government process, so Grandma Naoe is naturalized through her conversation with the prairie wind in such a way that her Japanese comes out sounding like a poetic, magical English. This, I think, is one of the great feats and great acts of generosity in Goto’s writing. She has figured out how to share a sense and feel of Japanese language with readers who read only English. Rather than being naturalized through government ritual, Grandma Naoe is naturalized through speech—a magical, materializing speech that produces Grandma Naoe as a more empowered figure than we might usually expect. Certainly she is a more empowered figure that government ritual can make her.
The power of language to magically remake the world deepens in the second half of the novel. The magic language is not just any kind of language—it is magic storytelling from the bed that Murasaki shares with the carefully listening lover. Up until the middle of the novel, that bed has been a Western-style box-spring. But as the story and the love between Murasaki and her lover grows deeper, another more magical kind of bed is required. They abjure their Western-style box-spring in favour of a Shōgun-sized purple futon from a local futon shop. We have been told already that “Murasaki” means “purple.” So from the bed whose colour bears her name or, better, from the bed that is an extension of herself, Murasaki narrates an even more fantastical adventure for her grandmother. Naoe departs the loneliness of her rocking chair for a life of freedom; a love affair with a Japanese-speaking, truck-driving cowboy; and a delicious meal of shrimp, squid, scallops, and lobster in Calgary’s Chinatown.