by Alex Miller
After I’d been working on the book for a year I realised I would have to go to China to experience at first-hand the people and the place of Lang’s origins, to breathe the air of West Lake in Hangzhou on a winter evening and to smell the smells of life in Shanghai. I knew by then that much of the book was to be set in Shanghai and Hangzhou. I travelled to China over the Christmas/New Year period of 1987–1988. It was my first visit. Through Ruth Blatt in Melbourne, and with the help of Nicholas Jose, I’d made contact with Chinese people in Shanghai and was able to travel as a Chinese for the brief period of my visit, which lasted ten days.
It was in Hangzhou, while walking among the evening crowds on the shores of West Lake, that I began to feel for the first time a confidence in my ability to write of Lang’s life and his Chinese family background. I didn’t take photographs or make notes. It was to be my impressions that would be important to me. I knew that.
Alex with his son, Ross, West Lake, Hangzhou, 1987
When I returned to Australia I discarded the draft of the book I’d been working on before I went to China and began again. I felt an assurance about writing of the Chinese that I could not have felt if I hadn’t visited China. My visit had dispelled for me the myth of difference and given me the assurance that in writing about Chinese Australians, providing I got the facts of their history right, I would be no more limited than I would be in writing about any other Australians.
I didn’t go to China expecting to become an expert on Chinese life and culture. I went to experience a little of China and the Chinese for myself, so that I would have private memories and impressions to draw on for my book. Whenever we visit a foreign country for the first time we enjoy for a brief period a kind of honeymoon, during which the depth of our ignorance seems to insulate us from danger and to imbue our surroundings with a kind of glow of infinite goodwill. It is a bit like being in love. If we stay too long, we soon begin to be worn down by the frustrations and difficulties of daily life that the locals are nearly overwhelmed by. After a few weeks or months the struggle to get a place on the overcrowded bus has ceased to be a challenge to our determination to behave just like a local and has become a daily burden. The inability of the authorities to provide adequate public transport is no longer part of the exotic spectacle but has become a source of anger and resentment and a cause for frustration and criticism. The unvarying menu in the Mongolian restaurant in Hangzhou, after we have eaten there every day for a month, has ceased to intrigue us and has begun to disgust us.
With increasing familiarity we soon lose our tolerance of difference. I don’t mean fundamental difference, if there is such a thing, but petty differences. The sharpness of our curiosity has been blunted against the repeated minor frustrations of ordinary daily life. The longer we stay, the harder it is for us to experience anything outside our own immediate area of endeavour. We begin to manipulate the status quo so that arrangements will suit us better. We cease to be uncritical. We begin to limit ourselves. We define our little area of interest. We become a political being, a struggling member of the local community, a foreigner suffering all the frustrations of foreignness and determined to overcome them.
Some foreigners who stay on respond to the problem by insulating themselves from the foreignness of the place, drawing over themselves a protective carapace composed of the customs and beliefs they brought with them from the country of their origin. They live in a ghetto, whether of the mind or an actual physical community which, with the passing of time, comes less and less to reflect the cultural reality of their homeland. In some ways, of course, it’s easier for migrants and long-term foreigners to live in ghettos and ethnic enclaves. In this way the problems are postponed and are bequeathed to the next generation. The ghetto people are a people lost to history, their lives are lived outside history, they are castaways on an island that has become disconnected from their own culture and from the dynamic of change and conflict within their host culture. I encountered a little ghetto of such European foreigners in Shanghai. The Chinese referred to them as Foreign Experts with just enough irony to make me immediately want to translate this as Foreign Devils. With the Foreign Experts I ate the worst Christmas dinner I’ve ever eaten anywhere. The ritual of Christmas with them was more funereal than celebratory, and I couldn’t wait to make a polite excuse to escape from them back into the living world of China, on which they’d turned their backs. Another writer might have stayed and written a novel about them. There was certainly a fictional offer in the peculiar melancholy of their lives—a kind of communal folie, in which they had each agreed to keep silent about the death of reality. Would I notice that they were ghosts? This was their fear. They watched me closely. They knew they had ventured a long way into the labyrinth and had no hope of ever finding their way back. They could scarcely remember the brief days of the honeymoon. After a few glasses of wine their resentment at the way I was able to take my pleasure in the country they had grown to hate began to find its voice. The ghetto, wherever it is, breeds hatred. Despite legislation prohibiting their permanent residence in Australia, Lang Tzu and his forebears had never been ghetto Chinese. They had married with the Irish and the Scots and the English and had lived in the general Australian community since 1848. And so had thousands of other Australian Chinese.
It wasn’t the hazardous business of staying on and becoming a long-term resident of China that interested me. What interested me was the honeymoon experience, the precious period of being insulated by my ignorance and my lack of accountability, a period during which I might hope to be a detached observer of life, a kind of carefree visiting parasite, collecting my impressions and enjoying the uncritical blindness of a lover, not the hard-boiled attitude of a spouse. It was a peculiar privilege, this period of disengagement within a culture that I knew would never require from me an atonement if I failed. And art always fails. I already knew that. We never succeed in making the sublime incandescent object of our imaginations that beguiles us into undertaking the journey in the first place. For the novelist, the next novel may even be, in a very private way, an attempt to atone for this kind of spiritual failure of the previous novel.
The day before I was to leave China and return to Australia, a Chinese professor from the Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute where I was staying took me for a walk in Lu Shun Park. He said to me, ‘Where you see only friendliness and a kind of harmless neutrality, I see deep hatreds and conflict.’ He stopped and took my arm and pointed to people who were strolling about and enjoying the winter sunshine. ‘Hatred and distrust are all around us,’ he said. ‘You can’t see it in our faces. We are holding it in for the sake of peace and quiet. But make no mistake, this is a society that is deeply divided by long-standing hatreds and by the desire to avenge past wrongs. Watch us for long enough and you will see what I mean. We are just waiting for our chance. If you take home with you these honeymoon impressions of yours, this idea of a peaceful and contented people who are eager to assist each other, you will have been fooled by superficial appearances. China,’ he said—and he was a man who loved his country and who had suffered much—‘China cannot be at peace with herself for long.’ That was in January 1988. Tiananmen Square came a year later.
This man’s words entered into my work in The Ancestor Game, and gave to it a sense of a more vengeful side of Chinese history than the word ‘honeymoon’ could ever generate. It was an impression all the more insidious and intriguing for having been given to me on a sunny day among the quiet walks where lovers felt free to stroll in a park named after a poet.
It wasn’t history but impressions that remained my source. When he read the book, Professor Huang Yuanshen, who was born in Hangzhou and who heads the Australian Studies Centre at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, asked me, ‘How did you manage to get the smell of duck droppings in Hangzhou in 1937 exactly right? I was in Hangzhou as a child,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you, the smell of duck droppings was then exactly as it is in your novel.’
Impressions that hadn’t seemed important at the time, and which I thought I’d forgotten, surfaced again once I was back at my desk writing the book. I wasn’t proposing an historical argument. A novel, I believe, deals in the currency of the universality of human nature. Isn’t that why we can still read novels about nineteenth-century Russians and French or eighteenth-century Chinese and feel able to identify our own destinies today with the destinies of the characters in those novels?
When I began writing The Ancestor Game I didn’t start out with the idea of celebrating a rich Chinese contribution to our immigrant culture in Australia. I couldn’t possibly have started out with that idea because when I began work on the book, like almost every other Australian I’d ever met, I didn’t know there had been a rich and complex Chinese contribution to our immigrant culture as we know it today. Such a contribution had not been noted. It hadn’t been celebrated in the literature. When I began the book I was writing about friendship. And in the end for me, whatever else it might be for others, I think The Ancestor Game will always be a book about my old friend Lang Tzu and my new friend Ouyang Yu. A book about friendship and home, and how those two things go together.
Alex with the poet Ouyang Yu, in Shanghai, 1988
1995
EXCERPT FROM
The Ancestor Game
You’re Australian, Lang said, as if he were reminding me that I’d had myself tattooed while I was drunk. He blew out a cloud of smoke. He was gleeful. You told me you were an Australian. Remember? Remember that, Steven? He laughed and waved his cigarette at me. He didn’t require an answer. His spiky hair shivered and sent out gleams in the firelight. His ankles were bone-white above his socks, brittle plaster-of-Paris casts. He sat cross-legged on the rug and rocked himself backwards and forwards, the wine slopping about in his glass and spilling on his old blue trousers, his left eye watering and blinking with the optimistic, greedy innocence of a child, his right eye swivelling about independently, the elder, the remote sensing organ of the lookout in the gazebo, on the alert for the approaching enemy. It steadied on me fleetingly. Would you like to see the lotus cup my grandfather gave Speiss?
It really exists then?
Of course it exists! Of course it exists! The eagerness of my interest gratified him. The lotus cup, he said. There’s plenty of time. Let’s have a drink first. You do want to see it?
I’d love to see it.
Good. Good. I remember everything. He drank deeply, abandoning caution, becoming master of his past again, empowered to reclaim it breath for breath and to deliver it to me, intact, its smells, its texts and textures, the precise weights and measures of things and of circumstances, the gravity and the levity of events. And to prove it, he would produce for me the celadon teacup from the Sung kilns of Fenghuang Hill, the fragile antique heirloom saved miraculously from the ruins, which Gertrude’s father had held honourably in trust for him. To prove his capacity, his friendship and his largesse, to prove that it all still belonged to him, he would disclose Huang’s lotus, his lien. He would produce for me not merely his mother’s gold this time, but his mother herself. He would produce whatever I might desire for my concoction. Nothing was too sacred. Nothing was too precious. He was protected from his fear of saying too much, of revealing too many of his secrets, by the confessional veil of alcohol. He aspired to demonstrate abundance. Completeness. An unflawed trust that would never have permitted him to react suspiciously, as I had done earlier, to his absence from the house. He intended to prove himself to me and to rebuke me in the process for my lack of generosity of spirit. His estate was invulnerable to my incursions. It was too large and too grand to be noticeably depleted by my appetite. He would account to me for his past in its entirety. He would present me with the problem, not of what to put in but of what to leave out. He would dazzle and disorient me. He would leave me confused and uncertain.
He refilled our glasses with the heavy red cask-wine and we clinked them together. I remember everything about my childhood, he boasted. You only need the first ten years. That’s all you need. The Nanking decade: 1927 to 1937. The entire period of my life in China. The worst years, the hardest years for my father and for all the Shanghai capitalists. After ten years it’s too late. After a child reaches the age of ten nothing can be changed. His bleary gaze struggled to locate me in the fug of smoke and radiant heat from the fire. He reached out and clutched my sleeve. He swayed. Did he see me? You’re my only friend, Steven, he said hopelessly and let go of my sleeve, half regretting the excess immediately.
I saw that his bravado would be easily disabled; I saw in him a kind of sorrow and a kind of love and a deep inconsolable regret, a kind of horror of what lay before him, each emotion discrete, like colours in an oily puddle, circling slowly, trapped within his eyes.
I said, And you are my only friend.
He grinned sheepishly, breaking the surface, for a split second the boy experimenting with being grown up. What do you really think of me? He laughed, abashed, unsteady, unable to hold to one direction.
1992
Chasing My Tale
Apart from chasing my tale I don’t know what I’m doing. And I mean this in a very general way indeed. I’ve never been at all clear about what I’m doing. I can’t be highly articulate about my writing. Andrew Riemer, the Sydney academic and critic, who is also a personal friend, told me that as a result of the publication of The Ancestor Game I’m now considered to be a revisionist historian by certain of his colleagues at Sydney University. When I read history at Melbourne University in the sixties with Marion Gibbs I learned, or thought I learned then, from that very great teacher that all history is revision.
So I’m not sure what being a revisionist historian means, but I do know it doesn’t follow from a conscious intention of mine. My life, though I’ve always tried to disguise this fact, has been rather aimless. I’ve clung to the suggestion of a thread of sense that writing sometimes seems to offer me, perhaps the way some people cling to a religion they have never really learned to trust. Beyond this uncertain thread of sense, I don’t know why I write or why I do anything else. I have, I’m afraid, a very strong affiliation with futility. Even now I feel a bit ashamed of admitting this. I look at the books I’ve written and, instead of drawing a satisfying theoretical position out of them, I wonder how I ever came to write them.
When I do write, however, when I’m working on a book and have reached the stage where it has fully engaged me, I feel that I don’t need to worry about the problem of meaning. I feel I’ve left that awkward social demand behind. The business of writing fictions seems to me to be setting up barriers to intelligibility in the external sense, in the sense in which present reality is conducted, that is, and in which empires are understood to crumble and peoples to become post- or neo-colonial or some other thing.
Who has not heard writers say—who, if they are honest, has not themselves said at some time—such things as, ‘We have written about the migrant experience. Now we have moved on from that. We have left that behind.’ Or, ‘The realist novel is dead. The Dickensian novel can no longer be written. The novel has become the playground of ideas.’ And so on. Pronouncements about the future that are proven false the instant someone produces a book that does freshly again those very things that one has claimed have been done-with forever. When this annulment of some portentous pronunciamento occurs, those of us who care about the novel rejoice that once again it proves its resilience as the means for telling any kind of story about humankind we care to tax it with in any kind of voice we care to tax it with. As novelists we celebrate our liberty. We celebrate the fact that the novel keeps on surviving in all its elaborated forms, Dickensian and realist as well as magic-realist and post-modern. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, which is the only Latin novel that has come down to us intact, is magic-realist. Which seems to some people a very modern thing. Apuleius’s novel was written in the middle of the second century of the Christian era. Reading it we are reminded that nothing is n
ew. We keep learning the same lesson over and over and forgetting it over and over: the lesson that we are a language species and that language will do and redo anything we ask of it. The lesson that language underwrites our realities. That language is the first step in the process of making the things of our imagination tangible. Nothing is finished with. Not the migrant novel or the realist novel. It has all been done before and it will all be done again, and again, so long as we go on. The human species is also a migrant species. We have always travelled. In our wanderings we are forever coming across our old tracks and speculating on the perplexing nature of the creature who must have made them. In the strange place we are stilled by the presentiment of familiarity and we know that we have been there before. Home, indeed, may be for many of us no more than this fleeting intuition. A singular truth (which we do not often acknowledge because to do so kindles in us feelings of overwhelming futility) is that there is no place left that has not been visited by us and that there is nothing to be done that has not already been done by us. Round and round the mulberry bush, that’s where the novelist is going. Chasing his or her tale … as ever.