Chinese in Australian Fiction - Ouyang Yu

Published 2008

"Ouyang Yu's book Chinese in Australian Fiction 1888-1988 is a substantial critical survey of how the Chinese in Australia were represented in fiction. It begins with 1888, the year the Second Intercolonial conference decided to exclude the Chinese from Australia, and a very low point for depiction of Chinese is Australian fiction. Yu asks what has happened since then to Australian attitudes and as far as fictional representations of Chinese, what has changed? Although this study stops at 1988, the centenary year of white settlement in Australia, it provides a solid foundation for studies of more recent Asian-Australian literature that has "written back" to colonial discourses which have consistently treated the non-Anglo Australian Asian subject as the eternal Other, against which Australia's own identity as a racially and culturally superior white nation could be contrasted.Yu's Mainland Chinese heritage gives him an advantage of being able to test depictions of the Chinese against his own experience, and from this position he quite mercilessly critiques the way Australian fiction has fulfilled it ideological functions by demonisation the "heathen Chinee" and idealising the domesticated version, the "chinese with white hearts'. While documentation of Australia's anti-Chinese history is thorough (and quite relentless), Yu's own perspectives gives this study an enduring originality, and as Susan Lever points out in her forward, Yu takes on Australian literature with his 'usual courage'.

By "Chinese", Yu is wary of his own admitted tendency to be Sinocentric and steers away from taking sides with nationalistic discourses which tend to ignore the hybrid and diasporic conditions of Chinese-Australian migrants. Thus Yu's study ends on an optimistic note, highlighting the more sensitive depictions of the Chinese in the work of Australian fiction writers like Brian Castro, Nicholas Jose, and Alex Miller.Yu builds his analysis on a conceptual approach familiar to scholars of Edward Said. Orientalism in Australian fiction is a system of knowledge production that operates negatively to relegate the Chinese to a cultural status lower than that of the Anglo-Australian. Othering the Chinese who had migrated and worked in Australia in the 19th century served the ideological project of building a White Australia. But positive Orientalisation also produces a literary commodity that celebrates difference and thus gives pleasure. While Chinoiserie was popular in the late 19th Century, between 1902 and 1949 Orientalist representations of Chinese were 'basically racist' (Yu, p. 7), but from then on until 1972 Australian literature was polarised into pro-Communist and anti-Communist camps. From 1973 to 1988, according to Yu, multicultural writing in Australia challenged and subverted the old stereotypes. Now, we are in a period in which China is again feted as the useful ally, though Yu points out that the old fears of Chinese invasion are always under the surface.

Despite the unrelenting evidence Yu provides to prove the basic ethnocentrism of Australian literature, he pays careful attention to writers who created more favourable depictions of the Chinese, for example, Aeneas Gunn, Mary Bruce Grant, and Hume Nisbet. These writers were however limited by what Yu calls their tendency for "positive Orientalism". Thus Chinese cooks, gardeners and other characters became the symbols of hard work, patience, honesty, and above all, loyalty to their Australian employers. Such idealisations serve the writer's own need to moralise in Eurocentric ways, and often to use the image of the loyal Chinese servant as a lesson in Christian values. In other cases, writers used Chinese to critique the shortcomings of the West; the uncomplaining 'simple' Chinese - migrants from pre-industrial rural heartlands - were displayed as examples of the West's own loss of a Romantic ideal. Chapter 5 reveals how after 1901 Australian writers were able to publish novels which praised 'the better' Chinese when they could emulate the white gentleman's virtues of Christian integrity and honour. These so-called "Chinese with white hearts" were of a higher class and breeding and were often distinguished from those 'few illiterate market-gardeners of laundrymen they happen to meet during the course of their daily life' (Charles Cooper, Hong Kong Mystery, 1938). Despite the back-handed nature of Cooper's compliment, Yu argues that Cooper's white hearted Chinese were conceived in opposition to Kipling's racist formula that East and West will never meet. What Yu is suggesting is that a few Australian writers were open to the idea of the assimilated Chinese-Australian, but more importantly such an ideal could serve as a critique of Communism. "

Review by Adam Aitken

http://adamaitken.blogspot.com/2009/06/chinese-in-australian-literature.html

As noted by the tiger's mouth " The Cambria Press website lists it at $139.95 / £82.95. Ouch"