Special issue: Women writing the Asian diaspora

In the last thirty years, the worldwide movement of populations from the third world to the first, the South to the North, has accelerated dramatically. In a striking change from previous patterns, women as well as men are migrating to new homes. Increasingly, they and their daughters are putting the experience of diaspora into words. For this month’s special section, we went to established and emerging writers of Asian origin, living in the US, Canada and Europe—from Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn and Meena Alexander to Bhanu Kapil Rider, Caroline Hwang and Mông-Lan—in search of their latest work. And we asked a number of them, in interviews and through their own comments, to reflect on the place of their latest work in their writing careers.

In the pages that follow, we present a gallery of new and forthcoming work by writers hailing from Singapore and San Francisco, Manila and Vancouver, Brooklyn and Saigon, and points between and beyond—first- and second-generation women, famous and yet to be famous, grappling with perennial questions of language, identity, loyalty and authenticity. In fiction, poetry, essays, interviews and reviews, our contributors demonstrate the exploding variety of styles and themes that characterizes the writing of the Asian diaspora.

From Winnifred Eaton, who may be said to have invented the position of Asian American woman writer a hundred years ago, through the now-canonical figures of Maxine Hong Kingston and Bharati Mukherjee, to emerging writers like Cathy Park Hong, Hiromi Goto and Barbara Tran, who are determined to escape the limiting expectations of the term “Asian American,” women of the Asian diaspora have generated a constantly evolving, often self-questioning, body of literature. We offer in this issue some of the latest expressions of this increasingly complex tradition of writing.

I choose the Poet's life
Maxine Hong Kingston invites the muse

Maxine Hong Kingston © AP/World Wide Photos

I HAVE ALMOST FINISHED my longbook. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem. Poets are always happy. I want to be always happy. No plotting any more plots. For the longbook (about the long wars in Viet Nam and in the Middle East), I sacrificed time with my child, grown and gone, and my husband and family and friends, who should have been loved more. The longbook has got to be done soon, and I'll be free to live. I won't be a workhorse anymore; I'll be a skylark. Free of obligations. I am sixty years old; I have enough reputation and fame and money. Poets don't care too much for money. I declare to you: I'm making a try for poetry. If one becomes Poet by grace... beauty and truth hap upon the Poet... all gift, no labor... the Muse flies over, and drops jewels upon the Poet's head and into open hands... I will go about lifting an empty basket to the air.

I want poetry to be the way it used to come when I was a child. The Muse flew; I flew. Let me return to that child being and rest from prose. My mother used to hold me by the waist, and boosted me out the upstairs front window. "Sing to your grandfathers," she said. "Tease them." My mother's hands at my waist squeezed poems out of me....

Excerpted from To Be the Poet by Maxine Hong Kingston, to be published in September 2002 by Harvard University Press. Copyright (c) 2002 by Maxine Hong Kingston. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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From warrior to poet
Maxine Hong Kingston talks to Lori Tsang about her latest book.

Lori Tsang writes:
The works of Maxine Hong Kingston have been critically acclaimed and reviled, and have ended up on many a college syllabus. From The Woman Warrior, written in the voice of a female protagonist, to China Men, written in the voices of several male protagonists, to Tripmaster Monkey, a story about a male protagonist written in the voice of a female narrator, Kingston has explored the human psyche from both male and female perspectives. These books crossed borders, not only between fiction and non-fiction, but also between China and "America" in claiming the likes of William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman as literary ancestors in addition to the talk story tradition of the author's Chinese heritage. With its postmodern playfulness and vivid characters who speak with strong, loud voices, her work has had an impact on the Asian American community as well as on American literature. It was a pleasure and an honor to have had the opportunity to interview her by phone in anticipation of her latest book, To Be the Poet.

LT: Can you tell us about the origin of To Be the Poet?

MHK: I wrote it for delight and relaxation, because I am writing a longbook, The Fifth Book of Peace, that has taken me twelve years, and in order to have some freedom during that time I wrote poetry. Prose is tremendously hard work. It’s like creating the world, creating the universe. Just once in a while I want the happy life of a poet.

I was having dinner one evening with Gary Snyder and Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman, and I said, boy I envy you, you poets, you’re always happy, and I want to be a poet because poets are happy and poetry is easy--there’s nothing to it, you just write whatever you want in a state of delight.

LT: What did they say?

MHK: Oh, they said that I was wrong! They don’t know any happy poets, poets are suffering!

LT: So you think it’s not true that poets starve and suffer?

MHK: I think poets make that up. They invent that life, that tragic life. Poetry is free. It comes to you out of nowhere, out of nothing. It’s a gift. I have a feeling if you have to struggle for it and suffer and force it then it probably isn’t any good. As a child, the first thing I ever wrote was poetry. I wanted to go back to that free state of poetry that I had when I was a child.

LT: So you see this book as a poetic work rather than a prose work.

MHK: I begin the book in a state of prose, because I have been working on prose for ten years. But I’m trying to find a way into a poetic state, and as my consciousness and my soul find ways to fly, then I cross the boundary between prose and poetry.

LT: Did you have a preconceived process or did you just start working on it and let the form find itself?

MHK: For this book, I made up my mind to use a different process. In prose writing it’s a matter of just going after it, day after day, just like any job--you just show up at your desk and you stay there and work hard.

LT: But you didn’t do that for this project?

MHK: For this book I said that I’m going to be free of that process, that I will let the muse find me and give me a gift. Maybe nothing will come, but I’ll take that risk. I’ll just start having this attitude on the first day of spring and see what happens. I decided I was not going to do flashbacks and flash-forwards and deal with history the way I do with my other books, where I think about the past, or I invent situations or characters in prose. For this one I decided the muse will give me feelings, events, stories, states of mind and emotions.

LT: So it’s more like a journal?

MHK: Partly, but a journal is written for oneself and not for the public. Here I’m very aware that I am also carrying on a conversation with a reader. Also I think of a journal as writing any old thing, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like, you don’t have to revise, and you don’t have to make it understandable to other people. To Be the Poet is honed and shaped, and I find a form for what I’m saying. I find the rhythms and rhymes and line-lengths.

LT: You mentioned the Oakland-Berkeley fire in the book, but I wasn’t sure when that had happened in relation to writing the longbook.

MHK: The Oakland-Berkeley hills fire burned the longbook, The Fifth Book of Peace. I had been working on it for about two years, and then the fire happened in 1991, so I started all over again and worked for another ten years to try to pull the novel back out. It’s a huge book--at one point it was 1200 pages--so writing poetry was a relief for me.

LT: Do you think that the fire and the destruction of your work had something to do with your impulse to make the shift towards poetry?

Probably, probably so. But I began as a poet, you know, I spoke and invented poetry as a baby, before I could write I would sing and make up poems and say them to people. Then I kept on doing that, but some of the poems got longer and longer and longer and they turned into books. The Woman Warrior began as a poem. All my prose works began as poems. In a way I’m just wanting to go back to a short form.

LT: You don’t think that when you start to write poetry, the prose will take over?

MHK: I hope not! You know, I look around me and people my age are retiring from jobs and I think, I should do that too. Other people going into their sixties, they put down the hard work, they take up volunteer work, work that they’ve always wanted to do.

LT: Do you see yourself constructing a voice in this book, maybe the way you invent the voices of the narrators of your novels? Are you inventing a self?

MHK: I think a young writer is substantially creating a self as well as a work, but at this point I feel that I have created myself, and in writing this book I feel that I’m just playing. I’m playing with ideas and attitudes, and playing with inspiration, and experimenting to see whether there really is such a thing as grace and beauty that will come for free.

LT: It’s as if writing it is revealing a certain process.

MHK: It’s revealing of the world, of reality. What is reality? Is the world a horrible mean place, or is it a place where I can just walk about being myself and beautiful things come to me? I come to the longbook, The Fifth Book of Peace, with heavy responsibility. I am coming to terms with history, asking why do we go to war? Why do we organize ourselves into nations and then try to annihilate other nations? Why do we torture one another? I feel that it’s my responsibility as a citizen, as a teacher, as a parent, to stop war, and I took on that responsibility as I wrote that book. For To Be the Poet I’m saying, I’m not going to take on those responsibilities, just for the springtime. I will take a rest and just let the beauty and grace of the world come to me.

LT: I remember as a young Asian American woman when The Woman Warrior first came out, that for many of us of my generation, especially Asian Americans, you became such an icon. You have a public persona, and now you’ve written a book that’s in your own voice. Do you think your perception of yourself is different from the public personas that people have constructed in response to your previous works?

MHK: I think that in all writing there is the writer, and there is a protagonist, and there is a narrator. Sometimes the three are closer together and sometimes one or another of them takes center stage. Sometimes the protagonist takes over the whole chapter or the whole sensibility of a scene. Sometimes the narrator, who is also a construction, takes over. Sometimes, and I think for me rarely, the actual writer reveals herself. In this book I put all three together, so that I am the heroine and the narrator and the writer. I hope that that directness, that integration comes through. It’s straight from myself. It’s as direct as I can possibly make it.

LT: That’s what I think gives it the feeling of being a journal. People are always analyzing your previous work to see what it means in terms of how Asian Americans, or Chinese, are perceived, or in terms of how women are perceived. This work simply has to do with being a writer. And while it’s very clear that you’re an Asian American and a woman, it comes out in a very unself-conscious way.

MHK: I wonder whether it just takes a lifetime or two to be an integrated person, so that you don’t have to think, at what point do I have to announce that I am a minority person or a woman or what? When I think back on when I was a young writer, I would wonder, okay now, when do I let everybody know that I’m Chinese American? Do I have to announce that? That would be coming from the writer and the narrator, so what do you do? Do you just interrupt the narration to let everybody know, do you subtly let them know, do you have to let them know? It seems to be a problem that I thought about when I was very young, but it seems that now I just write and if readers don’t get it, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.

There is some Chinese stuff in the book which I think is pretty funny. There’s a section where I write about how I’ve discovered the four-word poem. I like it because it’s so easy, you know, anybody can do it. And that’s part of what I’m showing here, that art is not for the elite, art is not for geniuses; everybody should have the happy creative life. I’ve always known about four-word poems, they are a Chinese tradition, but I’ve never known any scholar who wrote about them or gave them a place in a literary canon. At that same dinner, I said to Gary Snyder, who is a wonderful Chinese scholar, "What do you think? Do you think that four-word poems can be done in English?" This was after I already gave him some of my examples. And he said, "Oh, of course not." So I said, "Well, I guess this book is going to come out and all the poets are going to hate it."

LT: So who do you see as the audience for this book?

MHK: Oh, I feel the same way about all my books, it’s everybody. I feel democratic about poetry, I guess in the Walt Whitman sense; he’s always writing about He and She, the Democracy.

LT: Can you say what impact the process of writing this book has had on you? Is there a shift in your life or how you feel as a person or as a writer?

MHK: Writing as a poet has made the culmination of the longbook easier, bearable. It’s incredibly hard to take a big book into its final stages, the labor of it, the taking of editorial criticism, their telling you what’s wrong, my fear that I can’t fix it. Now the longbook is almost finished, do I no longer have a purpose for my life? I’ve been a writer all my life, you know, from the moment I was born I was making up stories. So now what do I do? At the end of the longbook, I decided that I was going to give myself all of spring to see whether the muse would bless me, and she did. I came up with quite a few poems. So then I thought, okay, that’s my spring harvest, and all I have to do for the rest of my life is to stay in that same state of mind, and go right into summer, and from there right into autumn, and then right into winter. I already have my next three books planned--summer harvest, autumn harvest and winter harvest. I’ll start with the coming summer, and see what happens, and get it down into the right words, and there will be the next book.

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Growing up confused
For a Bengali Muslim girl, life is full of contradictions

By Taslima Nasrin

Taslima Nasrin

I WAS BORN AT DAWN on the twelfth day of Rabi-ul-awal. Such a girl ought to have said La ilaha ilallaha Muhammadur Rasulullaha (Allah is one, and Muhammad is His Prophet). Apparently, saints and those dear to Allah said these words as soon as they were born. Aunt Fajli had told Ma, "Look how bright her face is. And why shouldn't it be? After all, she was born on such a holy day!"

Soon, however, the sun burned the brightness of my face to a coppery brown, for I spent most of my time outdoors, running after Uncle Sharaf, Uncle Felu, and Uncle Tutu. The games started in the afternoon with something called chor-chor. One of us was selected to be the chor, the thief. When this chor ran and touched someone else, that other person had to take his place, stand facing the banyan tree, and count loudly to five. Then he would turn around and chase all the others in the hope of grabbing the slowest runner so that a new chor could replace him. My uncles, being older, could run much faster. I ended up being the chor most of the time. Uncle Tutu ran in a zigzag manner; I could not keep up with him. Uncle Felu ran as fast as a hare. Even if I spent all day trying to catch him, he would still elude my grasp....

Excerpted from Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood, translated by Gopa Majumdar, to be published by Steerforth Press in September 2002. Copyright (c) 2002 by Taslima Nasrin. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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The plates of wrath
At a Korean dinner-party, food becomes a lethal weapon

By Caroline Hwang

Caroline Hwang

WE TOOK A CAB to Koreatown, a rundown patch of mostly wholesale stores anchored, surprisingly, by the Empire State Building. When I first saw the American landmark, I took it for an imposter like all the fake Gucci and Fendi bags in the crowded shop windows. Now I thought of it as a hostage. The restaurant, Secret Garden, was in the heart of the area, in the middle, actually, of a daunting block of shuttered storefronts and indecipherable signs. The street lamps, which seemed unnecessary under the glare of neon, had just come on

"We might be overdressed," I said, holding the glass door open for my mother. I wiped my hand on my shift.

The place wasn't shabby but it was definitely broken in. Korean barbeque was thick in the air and on surfaces. My stomach rumbled, happy for all the shoulder-to-shoulder people jabbering Korean-testament to the authenticity and quality of the food. My mother pushed to the front; I followed in her wake and caught the spray of dirty looks....

Excerpted from In Full Bloom, a novel, to be published by Dutton, Spring 2003. Copyright (c) 2002 by Caroline Hwang. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Growing up in a broken English home
By Caroline Hwang

DURING A RECENT VISIT HOME, I looked over my mother's shoulder at the notes she was taking as she talked on the phone to my oldest brother. She was getting his lawyerly advice for a friend of hers who was going through an ugly divorce. Like many children of immigrants, I'm used to having to correct my parents' speech and correspondence, and I reached for my mother's pen. She'd written "alimony" as "allmoney."

As a teenager I would have turned the second "l" into an over-inked "i" and blotted out the "e." Instead, I wrote out the desired word and labeled it as a more common, and less antagonistic, spelling. I chalk up the more patient and amused response to maturity--not so much of a daughter who is no longer rankled by her parents' imperfect English and foreign ways, as of a scribe who appreciates how the differentness of her upbringing contributed to who she is.

Simply put, I probably wouldn't be the writer I am if I hadn't grown up in a broken-English home.

Before I'm taken for a wannabe Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, I should clarify that I was born and schooled in the US. My Korean is limited to food; I am fluent only in English. And aside from occasionally mispronouncing words that are more frequently encountered on the page than in everyday conversation, GRE-type words, I speak as well as any American.

Yet having parents who don't have full command of English affected my relationship to the language. Though it is my only means of expression, I have never taken it for granted. Seeing as a child how the lack of enough words, or the right words, hampered my parents in big and small ways impressed upon me the importance and value of language. It was the gateway to assimilation and upward mobility, and great attention was paid to it. In my family, it was not unusual for a conversation to digress into a discussion of a word that had just been used, or to be halted while someone went to the dictionary to find out what the difference was between, say, "brave" and "gallant," or "ravel" and "unravel."

Of course, my parents' regular requests for translation and simplification hardly assisted the flow of dialogue. To my frustration, especially as a teen, the more serious a conversation was, the more often it was interrupted. "Forget it," is a phrase my folks know well. Yet the language barrier did more than lead me to pick up a dictionary habit. It also trained me to be clear and concise.

That's not to say that exchanges with my mother and father were dry and bare like telegrams. On the contrary, conversation was colorful, lively and often downright poetic. My parents' need to communicate with their children outpaced their vocabulary and they covered this gap in a number of ways. Sometimes they used words unconventionally, such as describing overcooked rice as wet (a regular complaint of my father's) or an idling car as sleeping. Other times, they altered words, such as "probabably," which means something between probably and certainly, or collided them, such as "sicktired," which means mental fatigue tinged with sadness. And when all words failed them, they simply made up new ones, such as "yaggeldy," which means talk that's tiresome and irritating, and is usually accompanied with a dismissive wave of the hand. Their inventiveness was the child of necessity, but I do not doubt that it opened my eyes to the pliability of language, as well as to its potential for play.

Riding roughshod over the English language, they were bound to run into incoherence here and there. Many of their unintentional malapropisms, such as the above "allmoney," weren't so apt or comprehensible. Likewise, their use of colloquialisms was sometimes off the mark, and could lead to misunderstandings, if not hurt feelings, especially said over the phone when I couldn't see my mother's or father's facial expression. You would think after a lifetime of being their daughter, I would have learned by now to make allowances for them. But in the heat of the moment, sensitivity can give way to emotion.

What's more, I don't want to give the impression that I'm glad my folks' English is flawed. My knowing the language of the land better than them turned the parent-child relationship upside down in some respects. It also meant, as earlier mentioned, that I was left hanging when it came to the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. For my parents, each new word or saying was another outpost in the wilderness of unexpressed thoughts. Their joy of discovery was contagious, but each discovery also underscored for me my lack of a speech role model at home. One incident that still makes me cringe when I think of it, though it happened almost two decades ago, is the time I said "awe-ree" for "awry," and the entire class burst into laughter. That particular humiliation had been the last straw, and I subsequently spent hours listening to my father's advanced vocabulary practice tapes. But I have never been able to shake my self-consciousness completely when speaking in front of groups--which, I suppose, may be why I turned to the written word.

English being my parents' second language, it could be called my adopted mother tongue. Were I with my biological one, would I still be a writer? Probably. Or probabably. An affinity for language is, after all, partly genetic. Would I have a different voice or style? It's an interesting question to ponder, especially when I'm experiencing writer's block. But the matter is moot. English is all I know and love.

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Fairytale princesses
Desirable Daughters by Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Hyperion/Theia, 2002, 310 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Suzanne Ruta

Bharati Mukherjee

TARA BHATTACHARJEE, the heroine/narrator of Desirable Daughters, is a bit of an Indian princess. When a strange young man shows up at her San Francisco house claiming to be a long-lost nephew, she's suspicious of the way he carries his cigarettes, loose in his pockets, like the "uppity servants" in her Calcutta neighborhood "who liked to smoke the same brand as their employers." Visiting her sister in New Jersey, she averts her eyes self-protectively from "the hideous mall scarred landscape." She dismisses the street crowds of Jackson Heights, thriving commercial center of Indian life in New York City, as "the hungering classes. They look to her like a bunch of documented felons."

But give her a break. She's 36, divorced, a single mom, and drop by drop, to paraphrase Chekhov, she's wringing the snob out of herself. This novel hyperalertly charts the making of a consciousness, the ebbs and eddies of the elusive mental processes by which a daughter of privilege learns to observe without flinching the world she lives in and the world she came from.

Desirable Daughters reads like Mukherjee's sly response to the doctrinaire multiculturalists who demand that she (and everyone else) write about their own kind. She's done just that, with precision and mockery and strong reminders of the dangers inherent in narrow cultural self-definition. A nice rebuttal.

Tara is the youngest of three beautiful sisters in an affluent family of Bengali Hindu Brahmins, raised in 1960s Calcutta. Like fairy-tale princesses, all three girls share the same birthday. At nineteen Tara dutifully entered an arranged marriage, wholly innocent of the facts of sexual anatomy. Within a few years her brilliant husband, Bishwapriya Chatterjee, PhD from Stanford, has parlayed his inventions (something to do with broadband) into a global telecommunications empire. Tara becomes a billionaire's wife, living in a gated community in Silicon Valley (gates and gate-crashers are a leitmotif of the novel).

Bish (his American nickname means poison in Bengali, another cross-cultural misunderstanding) is so busy expanding his Mughal-like empire that his humanity suffers. Working fifteen-hour days, at home he relapses into the role of a traditionally demanding Indian husband, hectoring and threatening his dreamy, artistic son Rabi. To save her son from his father's crushing contempt, Tara flees the gated community and moves to San Francisco, where she takes a volunteer job at a local public school and a live-in lover, ex-member of a biker gang turned peaceful Zen adept. He's a nice enough guy but she likes him for the wrong reasons: the thought of his violent past gives her a little thrill.

BUT WHEN THE PUTATIVE NEPHEW turns up, his claims terrify her. She can scarcely believe her older sister, proper censorious Didi, had a child out of wedlock. And Didi isn't talking. At 42, this beauty, who once hoped to be a serious actress, stars in soap operas on a US Indian home-shopping network, and sells gold jewelry and saris to affluent professionals eager to buy the trappings of tradition. Emotionally frozen since her parents brutally intervened in her romantic life in her mid-teens, Didi remains, Tara eventually concludes, "an off leash adolescent." Padma, the middle sister, had the gumption to make a love match, but now lives in Bombay in thrall to her overworked corporate-executive husband, lavishing her unclaimed affection on a pair of pariah dogs rescued from the streets. Tara's older sisters--drawn with wit and sympathy--are tragic figures, trapped in unexamined lives.

Mukherjee's plots tend to be overdetermined. This one is a mix-and-match morality play, with borrowings from Hindu myths and legends, from nineteenth-century Brit lit (Dickens' orphans, Charlotte Brontë's scorched husbands) and global high-tech thrillers. The disparate elements don't always meld. Thrillers have to take evil seriously, revel in claustrophobic frissons. Mukherjee is too much a daughter of the Enlightenment to write a truly creepy book and in fact she could care less about the mysterious "nephew." He's just the agent of karma. The real villains here are caste-ridden Bengali-Brahmin snootiness and Indian Americans' mindless pursuit of wealth and status. These linked forms of madness deliver the family to a terrible comeuppance.

In the midst of her ordeal, Tara begins to suffer from "Calcutta hot flashes," a sudden midlife longing for the tastes and smells of home. Why are the final chapters, set in India, so immediately appealing? Is it the lure of the exotic? Nostalgia for someone else's past? I wanted to know more about the Tree Bride of Mishtigunj, wed at the age of five in 1879, who lived to be a heroine of the Independence movement in the 1940s. And the swami who appeared to Daddy in a cloud, and Mummy's favorite books and the faithful old servant who dusts them for her... Inside this strenuously imagined and very moral novel is a relaxed and rueful memoir waiting to be written.

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Decoding the language
Bharati Mukherjee tells Suzanne Ruta some of the stories behind Desirable Daughters

SR: Desirable Daughters is a novel about three sisters. The two older sisters are remarkable women, beautiful and courageous each in their way, but they lead largely unexamined lives. Tara, the third of them, is examining her life as she lives it, and she's planning to write a book which is going to be about the making of a consciousness. The book is very fluid because Tara's never quite in one position; she's always going back and forth, and paradoxes are left completely unresolved. There's a moment of revelation in the very last paragraph, but there's an ambiguity there too.

BM: I wanted to go back to the beginning of the story from a very different perspective in that last paragraph of the book, back to the crowds, to the vendors and the children in 1879. The scene hasn't changed, the people, the sounds haven't changed, but the narrator suddenly realizes, "This is my heritage in ways that I never understood, never cared about, and I have to make sense of it and put it down in writing."

SR: The book is really a portrait of a particular class of Indian society in Calcutta, the Bengali Brahmins, who live in a very gated, guarded vigilant society. And yet, there are gatecrashers.

BM: There have always been gatecrashers. Young Tara is, to her disadvantage, protected from the knowledge of these breaches. I have always felt that the very nature of the protectiveness with which I was brought up ironically brought home to us, maybe too late, the vulnerability of that class. If you put up barriers you become terribly conscious of something out there that is about to harm you. So that protectiveness is false to begin with. The tragedy for this group, for the family in the novel, is that continual and aggressive refusal to acknowledge that anything is wrong, that any transgression was committed, and that there are material consequences to that transgression. At the very last moment Tara acknowledges it, but the older sister never does.

SR: The novel I compared this to as I was reading--other things being equal--is Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, where you find in the old country, in the religion, in the Holocaust survivor, a moral standard to apply to all the crazy goings-on in the United States. Here too, you have characters who are minting money right and left, and they've lost sight of anything else; it keeps them so busy that they don't have to examine their lives or the harm that they might have done to anyone on the side.

BM: They can be minting money guiltlessly and at the same time they can trot out all the religious proverbs as necessary, without any of it creating conflict or self-divisiveness--it's a religious duty, a caste duty, to make money. I watched my father in India as he founded a pharmaceutical company from scratch, and since then I've watched especially the Silicon Valley types in Northern California, people I'm surrounded with, whose kids I have in my classroom. The people who have come from India as a result of the relaxation of immigration laws in the 1960s are the urban professional middle classes, not the upper-upper classes. Because life, making money, was so hard in India, there is now a kind of virtue in consumerism. You measure your success in terms of your bank balance and the cars you drive.

What I've tried to show in some of my short stories is that we immigrants don't always know the code in the new country. Some of what we do might be interpreted as "My god, what vulgar overgenerosity," you know, showing off, giving of gifts and so on. The rawness and messiness of that cultural transaction is maybe melodramatic by mainstream American standards, but it's part of the learning process, learning to disguise oneself.

Many women of my generation--I've written about this in Days and Nights in Calcutta--were trained vehemently, virulently, violently, to be docile, pliant, never to talk back to elders, never show impatience. I had to force myself, after I came to the States, to get over that pathological kind of politeness. I hated myself for being constantly polite. Other Indians take great pride in consumerism, I take great pride in snarling back. That aggression is a way of deleting, neutralizing, triumphing over my training, but then it becomes another example of the codes getting confused. That what to me is, "I'm jolly well going to tell you how wrong you are" as brashly as possible, becomes a kind of nasty aggressiveness in the eyes of the mainstream. How do you, to what extent do you learn the adopted community's codes?

SR: There's a lot of violence in your books, particularly against men. Where does that come from?

BM: I was born in 1940, which means that I was witness to colonial brutality. We lived on a large street along which there were regular funeral processions of teenage martyrs. They were carried in rope cots, all strewn with flowers, everyone shouting "Quit India!" We would all rush, women, children, everyone, including my widowed grandmother, to the front gate, and shout the nationalist slogans. An uncle of mine was arrested for taking part in demonstrations. It touched everyone's life. And I also remember--in flashes of images--famine victims, which must have been during the 1943 famine. My father organized food lines. We were constantly being told, even as children, that the famine was manipulated by the Raj, that they were siphoning off food for the British Army. This is the kind of violence by osmosis I ingested.

Then there was constant domestic brutality all around me--extreme verbal abuse, physical abuse, of women, including my mother, which I witnessed, and a lot of it was ritualized. Then as I got a little bit older, as a teenager, I could see how the lower classes were exploited. Not just servants in households--a cop, if he didn't like a cart-puller, would slap him on the street. There was absolutely no concept of the rights of individuals, or that people who were not born into privilege were individuals at all. Then there were the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people living for generations on sidewalks. I watched all this through the windows of the Rover with one or two bodyguards, the driver and my mother as chaperones. That's protection, but you know that if the glass is broken, you are going to be ensnared in that violence. Being on the oppressor's side and realizing you could easily be the oppressed puts you in a very confused, complicated position. It's a slippery situation.

SR: Tara says she gets tired of explaining India to Americans; does that ever happen to you? Do you feel that your ideal reader doesn't exist?

BM: I think I would die if I reminded myself that the ideal reader doesn't exist. I've always told myself that book by book, body by body I'm creating an audience. I've been at it for so long, but I've always been ahead of my time and edgier than others in the diasporic Indian community, who are far more successful because they're offering a more familiar version.

SR: I felt that there was a memoir trying to get out of this novel, and that you had to trash your background, in a sense, you had to show everything that was wrong with it so that nobody could accuse you of being sentimental and nostalgic for the good old days when the rich were rich and the poor were poor and everybody knew their place.

BM: I realized as I was writing it that what I had really wanted to do was write a memoir, an autobiography. But I couldn't do it. I'm still not ready to let go of story as cover. But I wanted to talk about the very different decisions as adults that we three sisters have made. My younger sister is the ideal of modern Indian womanhood, with all the perks that come with it, but she's also paid heavily for that position, and my older sister is into amnesia and constant self-transformation.

SR: How do they like being in your novel?

BM: My youngest sister loves it; in fact she had wanted in the beginning for it to be a memoir, and said "let me provide all the details!" But my older sister, fortunately, is not a reader. She's a merry widow in Detroit, a retired child psychologist, and we're happy to keep it that way.

SR: Let me ask you about your mother. What can you tell us about her that you haven't written yet?

BM: She was a feminist hero without ever having known the word feminist, or hero. And she quite literally put her body on the line so that we three sisters would be educated. She was physically beaten up, I still remember those occasions, by my father's family--not my father, but my father's family--for wanting these things for her daughters. The refrain that you should kill yourself because you are the mother of daughters, who have only brought ill luck and drain the financial resources of the family--it was constant. Her come-back, as she became a little more confident, was "my daughters will prove better than your sons." That's why it was important for her and important for us that we all get education and make something of our lives. She was also a very religious woman, but in a practical, ironic way, not into ritual.

SR: I'm thinking that just as having daughters to fight for changed your mother's life, having sons to fight for must have changed yours.

BM: When my first child was born the first thing that my mother and father said, separately, was "Thank god you have a son." Even though my mother had gone through all that trauma, she was still traditional enough to feel relieved that they were sons. My husband Clark and I were graduate students and so busy just surviving when the kids were young that I certainly didn't make any effort to insist that they learn Bengali or Indian traditions, but they came with us to India quite often, and they were sent during Christmas breaks to stay with my parents. There was never any attempt at systematic Indianization. They were very North American children.

I would be a very different writer and person, I think, if I had married a Bengali engineer and lived out my life in New Jersey. My opening out to the new landscape, popular culture, taking an interest in American politics and sports is because of Clark and the children. I learned American history as the kids were going through their classes, and I am an expert on barbed wire because my kids had to do a project on barbed wire.

There's a whole thing about the anxiety of authenticity in Indian diasporic literature. But when I say I am an American writer of Bengali Hindu origin, I mean it. I'm different from other diasporic Indian writers in that I'm not concentrating exclusively on nostalgia, but I'm writing about people who are in between and who are deforming their pasts and reforming their identities.

SR: When you go back to India, do you see big changes in the next generation of women?

BM: Yes, enormous changes, especially in the swelling of the middle class. People who were domestic staff, household servants, before, are now working in factories, which means that they are union members and they have rules about how many hours they work and so on, and therefore a wholly new sense of themselves. They want all the material goods that come with belonging to the middle class, and that's a kind of consumerism I'm willing to embrace. They also want to send their children to the best schools, which are usually still run by Jesuits for boys and nuns for girls. They want facility in the English language. There's a blurring of class lines and history, which is very heartening. But that's only happening in the city. And you have still in the upper class and in the urban centers like Delhi, horrendous stories of wife-abuse, bride-abuse. Quite a lot of arranged weddings are really for green cards or the bridal dowry money which the husband needs to go abroad.

SR: And the wife stays behind?

BM: The wife takes a long time to be sent because of the visa regulations. The traditional arranged marriages are still going strong, not through a matchmaker in the old way anymore, but over the Internet. The photos are downloaded, and little histories, and you e-mail, talk by e-mail, and both parties feel modern, but you don't get together too often before you're having to make up your mind. The women brought up here, Hindu American women--Muslims are a slightly different story, because they're not allowed quite as much freedom--are the ones worst off for arranged marriage, because the parents of the boys and the boys themselves want to go back to India and get a certified virgin. Those women are articulate, educated and angry. I just met a lot of brilliant young women in the research and development division of Pfizer in Groton, Connecticut, where I read from Desirable Daughters. All these women who are senior research chemists came up to me afterwards and said, "You're telling my story."

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Butterflies and cherry blossoms
In search of the first Asian American woman writer

By Jean Lee Cole

YUKI, THE "AUGUSTLY DESPICABLE half-caste" heroine of Winnifred Eaton's second novel, enchanted hundreds of thousands of readers. The book went into multiple editions and was translated into at least four different languages, made into a Broadway play (1903), and eventually adapted for the screen (1918). This novel also established Eaton's career. For several years Eaton, writing under the pseudonym of Onoto Watanna, had been placing stories and articles in magazines such as Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly and Ladies' Home Journal. Her first novel, Miss Numè of Japan, had been published in 1899 to largely favorable reviews.

But it was in A Japanese Nightingale that Eaton found a formula that enabled her to develop a marketable voice. In telling the story of a half-Japanese, half-American girl who becomes the love object of an American man, Eaton was able to connect her own experience to her writing in a way that appealed to a mainstream audience. Through heroines like Yuki, Eaton could address issues such as interracial romance, biraciality, and ethnic difference; at the same time, by setting the novel in faraway Japan and taking on the quaint, charming voice of the geisha, Eaton capitalized on an audience that seemingly could not get enough of "things Japanese."...

From The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity by Jean Lee Cole. (c) 2002 by Jean Lee Cole. Excerpted by permission of Rutgers University Press. Copies are available for purchase in local bookstores, by phone (800-446-9323) and through the publisher's online bookstore, http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu.

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Reviewed by Jan Clausen

 

Cathy Park Hong © Caroline Lee

IT’S DIFFICULT TO KNOW where to start the discussion of Cathy Park Hong's prickly, dazzling first collection. Should one say what the poems are "about"? Well, the body and language, especially as these figure in the experience of a dark-skinned girl or woman who must face down the hostile Euro-American gaze, the perception of her "immigrant's tongue/as shrill or guttural." Yet to name these themes may misleadingly suggest that the poems function more as statements about experience than as aesthetic experiences in their own right. Worse, it may make them sound static, more like adjectives and nouns ("Korean American," for instance) than like the gerunds and infinitives they both abound in and resemble: spanning, crossing, splitting, scavenging, raving; to collage, to desire, to listen; "to forsake/to hide/to cleanse/to transcend."

Perhaps, then, one ought to begin with the poems' language--a happy task, for it entails describing Hong's thrillingly tactile sense of her materials, her penchant for rolling in sound and syntax like a cat in catnip. Behold the riot of assonance and consonance in the lines "Palpitation, cyst, polyp: skin licked,/tongue pioneers along topographic pulp"; the seductive off-rhyme and quasi-metrical cadence in "the scent of cunt and lemon verbena." Yet to emphasize form over content in this way--as Garrett Hongo's cover blurb does in an apparent effort to head off the reductive readings that plague "ethnic" writers ("the politics of identity are not a central theme but an assuredly subordinate and ironic one.... Translating Mo'um accomplishes the kind of intelligent and abstract pleasure celebrated by Stevens")--is to downplay the far from abstract sucker-punches some of these poems deliver. "Rite of Passage" begins demurely enough by evoking the speaker's childhood in "open dressing rooms where/white women pulled chenille over their breasts," but ends with an outrageous, outraged list: "Fragments of freaks: the Hottentot's ass,/the Siamese twins' toupee, the indecisive chink/who said, I do. Later, no forget it, I do not."

To get around this familiar dilemma of form and content I would rather focus on the processes of estrangement that Hong's poems both address and trigger in the reader. One of her favorite strategies is the use of the trope of translation. When I first read the book's title, I unconsciously assumed that "Mo'um" would turn out to be some classic text or author, the activity in question a complex but finite negotiation between two stable linguistic worlds. Instead, interpreting "translating" as an occasion for constructing sophisticated riddles, Hong deftly dismantles the romance of language as homeland, with results especially unnerving for the non-Korean-speaking reader. "Translating Pagaji'" cleverly adopts the format of a language class exercise, instructing the reader to fill in the appropriate blanks with the undefined word "pagaji," then providing a sieve-like narrative of immigrant experience: "She felt a bloated sense of cultural ______/so she took some antacids./She did not ______, she strode." "Wing," on the other hand, offers plenty of literal translation while withholding context. Facing pages in English and Romanized Korean, both headed "(Secret Language of Home Exposed)," inform us that the words "udi ru ga moyok" equal "hills piss barley tea" without cluing us in on how to read them in relation to each other or to "home." These poems are serious jokes that speak to the linguistic dislocation of transnational experience while twitting the monolingual reader on her expectation of easy access to "home-bound vernaculars."

The book's title poem continues the riddling process by offering an overwhelming amount of context for the "translation" of a single word, thereby confirming what we suspected all along: that the deep strangeness of language, its engulfing tendencies, its maddening reticence, are inherent characteristics and not simply functions of limited fluency:

the utterance is an alm, the deep palaver of monk,
the demure lips--the struggle to speak with a mouth full
of water without spilling, the mmm
the hurried um, an afterthought, ghost, as if
embarrassed to say--

mo'um is:
fur
food
heart
lust
or changing my mind, it is none of this: (p. 69)

This passage calls our attention to the many levels on which language operates, from the feel of pronunciation (especially crucial in light of Hong's preoccupation with the gap between Korean and English vowel sounds) to its deep emotional associations. And just when we think we're getting somewhere, there comes the retraction: "it is none of this." The speaker in the prose poem "Splitting" similarly experiences translation as an infinite regress, complaining, "I don't know the Korean word for sex," then learning that even a friend in Seoul "doesn't know. 'There are many words that refer to it. Just not one definite one.'"

IN HER INTRODUCTION to the poetry in the anthology Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (Rutgers University Press, 2001), Eileen Tabios cautions that the work of contemporary Asian American poets can't be adequately addressed within the framework of the US poetry scene's pet controversy over "the idea of language as material [versus] the idea that the poem is rooted in the ego." That comment suggests another useful approach to defining Hong's poetics of estrangement: complementing her play with "translation," she habitually combines fragments that sound like personal narrative with fragments that treat subjectivity as a function of language and syntax. In "Splitting," for example, the anecdote about searching for the Korean word for "sex" can easily be read as autobiography, but the poem includes other lines ("I grew a petri dish of princes, all replicating and jostling each other for my hand," "I am here to lick your shoes, your hairy shins, your eventual cock") that seem to propose language as the instructor of experience rather than the other way around.

In a variant of this technique, Hong juxtaposes a fragmented first-person narrative with a series of surreal vignettes that exploit to the hilt her fascination with sound: "A girl jerks off in a mouse hole and a serf/naps on a scrap heap of dirty fingernails." In the wonderful "Body Builder," we follow the adventures of a sky-scraping female figure as narrated by a folksy rabble ("Oh/ she'll topple. She's making for the welkin.... I/ be damned where she gits all that nylon, the size of wedding tents!"), while a first-person voice interjects statements about blushing. The bumpy splice of narrative perspectives interacts intriguingly with Hong's characteristically adventurous mix of diction (I had to look up "welkin": it means "the vault of heaven").

Elsewhere, Hong slip-slides among pronouns: that possibly autobiographical "I"; a "we" that may point to familial or ethnic identification ("Our illuminated manuscript is the kneel"); a third-person singular or plural whose link to the other actors in the poem it is up to the reader to supply. The collection fairly bustles with a sense of partly elided narratives and barely hinted connections--a layering that is richly, relentlessly political. Call it, if not an identity politics, at any rate a fiercely instructive politics of dislocation.

Lest that formulation sound entirely pessimistic, let me close by calling attention to the motif of a residual (or nascent?) affinity between seemingly isolated female figures. This motif structures "The Shameful Show of Tono Maria" and "Hottentot Venus," each of which connects an Asian American immigrant speaker to a dark-skinned woman (the first, a Brazilian Indian, the second, an African) forced to star as a grotesque exhibit in the Western narrative of racial otherness and "native" inferiority. Although I appreciate the thematic importance of these poems, I have to say I find them a bit too redolent of familiar cultural studies texts (and too structurally tidy) to compare with Hong's strongest, strangest work. I'm more moved by the ambiguous resonance of the mother-daughter relationship in "Not Henry Miller But Mother" and the title poem. And I love the mythic, mysterious "Gatherer" who echoes the strangely vulnerable image of epic femininity introduced in "Body Builder," and with whose unknown consciousness the subjectivity of the poem's speaker becomes touchingly (troublingly?) fused: "She is mine, and I her object,/searching for our imagined core."

"Assimilation of Sitting" ends with the speaker's rejection of the notion of cultural authenticity as represented by traditional matting:

I would rather sit on the ground,
it is safer, less slippery

or give it to an ancestor who needs a rest--

she is out of breath
from spanning our labor of crossing. (p. 29)

Yes, there's irony in this appeal to the apocryphal ancestor for whom "tradition" wasn't always already a can of worms. Yet there's tenderness, too, as there is in Hong's austere acknowledgment of an excluded female figure at the end of "Translating Michin'yun": "Sallow, raving, she returned to the village after four years/of work (what she did or where she worked, no one knew)."

Translating Mo'um is an astringent, ravishing read whose emotional acuity fully matches its sensual and cerebral appeal. Cathy Park Hong is well on her way to the welkin.

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Cathy Park Hong talks to the Women's Review about the politics of language.

WROB: The relation between English and Korean is a thread or tension running through your writing. Can you say a bit about your linguistic history--were you born in Korea? did you grow up speaking Korean or English or both? did you as a child or later have particular emotional associations with either language?

CPH: I grew up speaking both but Korean was the language I learned first. I didn't start speaking English until seven or so only because my parents first lived in a predominantly Korean community in Los Angeles. My parents always insisted I speak Korean at home which I resented at the time. I guess I associated Korean sometimes with shame since speaking it at home was a sign of not being assimilated and a language that was private, that was unfit for public use. But more so, Korean had associations of home, whereas English was more the official language, the language I didn't learn until I started attending school.

My parents were the first of my extended family to come to America in the 1970s. Although my father was university-educated, times were hard and there weren't many opportunities in a country that was still struggling to regain itself after the war, so my father with my mother decided to immigrate to America. After that, it was a hardscrabble life (my father of course loves talking about this). They moved to Erie, Pennsylvania, where my father was an assistant mechanic and my mother worked the assembly line at a doll factory. Eventually they scraped enough money together to get on the Greyhound and move to LA where I was born.

WROB: You often use Korean words and phrases in your work, but without the help of a standard glossary or literal translation: can you say what kind of message--aesthetic, political, whatever--you mean to convey through this use of a language your readers mostly won't know? In several cases the "language barrier" situation is also one involving conflict between women and men--is that deliberate, and can you say more about how those intersect?

CPH: I wanted to emphasize the slippages in translation--not just translations from Korean words to English, but also how to translate memories of family or history that I associate with a Korean language into a poem written in English. I wanted to open up these schisms, to emphasize that memory, the filtering of human experience into poetry, is often fractured and not transparent, especially experiences which have always been bisected and undercut by two languages. As far as not providing enough information or a glossary, I think poetry is often layered with references and intertextual allusions (which often deters people from poetry). I mean, look at Ezra Pound's Cantos. But it seems that we are expected to get or at least look up certain canonical Western references, while if we are faced with anything non-Western, we expect notes, a neat little synopsis. I had a teacher who said that if a poem had a lot of "foreign" allusions, it was not worth his time. But at the same time, he expected all of us to understand an allusion to Wallace Stevens' Florida poems in someone's work. I think this is privileging a certain kind of reader, which I don't want to do.

My interest in the conflicts of language does intersect with sexuality although not necessarily to point out the oppositions between men and women. I was more interested in alternative ways of writing the body, different from older feminist works that insisted on the seamless personal narrative, the confessional poem. By writing about the subaltern female (whether it was my own life or the historical Carnival figures), I was more into puncturing the first-person narrative, not only by using Korean language, but using puns, syntactical fragments, layering of different stories.

WROB: Translation itself as a theme shows up explicitly in the title of the book and of several poems in it. The implication of those poems seems to be that translation is impossible: do you think that's so?

CPH: I definitely think that translation is possible and that cross/cultural understanding is also possible. Otherwise I wouldn't write. I think that I want to debunk the idea of easy translation--whether it be the idea of literal translation or, as I said before, the translating of one's experience into poetry. I've been dismayed by some ethnic poetry where the poets were into conveying difference through the content of their poems but the language itself was pat, New-Yorker-style free verse. This seems false to me. I'm more interested in the collisions, kinks and complications through that cross/cultural conduit, and that makes the act of translation richer.

With the poem "Translating Mo'um"--"Mo'um" actually means body--I wanted to begin with my earlier associations with the word. Because I learned Korean at home and not at school, I was unfamiliar with the exact definition and knew the word by association--which interestingly enough was sickness. So I wanted to follow that associative strand into this Korean obsession with martyrdom, Korean Christian spirituality that is interested in self-erasure. Overall, though, I think that being bilingual affords a richer opportunity for writers, especially for poets because I from early on you learn that there is more than one linguistic system for every thought. You learn that there is more than one word that could describe an object and that gives resiliency to the way you look at language. My favorite writers are Rushdie, Nabokov, Theresa Cha and Paul Celan who use their cultural rift to become so much more adventurous with writing.

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Cross-cultural creatures
Hiromi Goto brings magic into everyday life

Hiromi Goto

JAPANESE CANADIAN HIROMI GOTO's novel The Kappa Child was chosen to receive the 2001 James Tiptree Jr. Award this past April. Announcing the award, jury members wrote: The Kappa Child is a delightful, wholly original book, a multi-layered story of dysfunctional family life, unexpected pregnancy, true friendship, alien abduction, budding romance and intimate encounters with mythical creatures. The prose glides from the narrator's real-time life (shopping cart collections, poor self-image, cucumber binges, halting if not downright painful interactions with family and friends), to her childhood recollections (presented in hilarious, heartbreaking contrast to Little House on the Prairie), to her recent encounters with the Stranger/Kappa, to brief meditations about water, birth, growth, identity (as told by the Kappa? the magically conceived fetus? the narrator's nascent self? all of the above?) There's so much vivid imagery here: lots of water, lots of green; and many oppositional references to American television and Japanese mythology. This is definitely a trickster's tale; things are not what they seem. The narrator's subservient, long-suffering mother is revealed as an alien abductee quite capable of self-actualization and self-defense. The narrator finds that she herself is not as isolated as she'd believed and that her sisters are not as shallow, spacey or damaged. The kappa itself is a genderless entity, no nipples or navel, for all that it first appears as a woman in a red silk wedding dress. This trickster is a loving one; by the book's conclusion, there's reconciliation, friendship, romance and rain.

The Women's Review invited Tiptree Motherboard member Debbie Notkin to talk with Hiromi Goto about her work.

DN: Can you start by telling us about the figure of the kappa, which appears not only in The Kappa Child but also in your children's book, The Water of Possibility?

HG: I first heard about the kappa from my father, who grew up in the countryside in Japan. The figure is very popular in folk legend and very much part of the cultural vocabulary today. I was fascinated, hearing about it as a child, because by then we were living in British Columbia. In a North American context, it is a fantastic creature. A lot of Japanese folk creatures can be seen as malevolent or mischievous, but they also have the capacity to help humans--this ambiguity is rife with possibilities for a writer and placing a kappa into "foreign" North American terrain causes two distinct narratives to explode into wild possibilities.

The kappa is like an imp, the height of a five- or six-year-old child. It's often depicted as green, although in different areas of Japan they manifest in different colors. It has a bowl-shaped head, and in the bowl is water, which is the source of its supernatural power. They like to initiate wrestling matches, sumo matches, with people, and the only way you can beat the kappa is to trick it into spilling the water from its bowl. It has a tortoise's shell on its back, webbed hands and feet, it walks upright, and it has a beak-like mouth. It drags livestock into the water and pulls out their entrails through their anus. It drowns unwary children. The kappa was also the one who taught humans how to set broken bones. The kappa is a complex creature that seems to inhabit shifting spaces between human, amphibian and demigod. It is a fascinating creature in itself.

DN: Is the kappa's affinity for cucumbers in the legend, or something you added to The Kappa Child?

HG: It's a reference to the original myth. People who are fond of sushi might remember that there's a roll called "kappa maki."

DN: What do you think that using Japanese myths and legends in your fiction adds to the otherwise very contemporary human stories that you tell?

HG: I suppose it adds a different way of thinking, or of visualizing or interacting with the world. Mythologies have been birthed in different cultures and geographies and are reflections of belief systems and philosophies. There are some parallels in archetypes as well as profound differences. Bringing Japanese myths into contemporary human stories layers the reading of a story so that it moves beyond the limitations of contemporary realism into unpredictable terrain. I don't want to have complacent and relaxed-almost-falling-asleep readers. I want my readers to feel unsettled.

DN: Do you think of yourself as a fantasy writer?

HG: I don't think I ever had that identity in mind although I have actively defined myself as a feminist writer and a Japanese Canadian writer. But the writing speaks for itself, I suppose. I recently had a review that said, among other things, "Goto tries to bring too much magic into our lives." I feel like we ought to grab what magic we can find. Sometimes it seems to be the only way to make sense of the madness in our "real" lives.

DN: Your children's book, The Water of Possibility, is almost a classic Western-format fantasy novel, in which two children step into a place in their house that leads them suddenly into a magical land. It's a very well-known trope in young adult fantasy fiction, but it is differentiated from all those books because the fantasy elements they encounter are very Japanese, rather than the Western ones that we expect. I wonder if you had any reaction from non-Japanese readers: do they like the exotic elements of the Japanese fantasy or does it confuse them?

HG: My older sister, who I identify as conservative/mainstream--she's an anomaly in our family--said "Don't you think it will be hard for people who don't have the background to understand the creatures?" I said, "Well, of course, if they never see them, they'll never know them." The reason they're not known is that there aren't many Japanese Canadian writers writing about them. Part of my aim is to introduce another world of creatures and mythologies. Especially in countries like Canada and the US, where we have so many people from different backgrounds and cultures, we should be working toward a time when all of our mythologies are converging. My desire is to bring my particular background into the mainstream, to make a kappa just as recognizable as a unicorn. And I think people are wanting different stories and new creatures. Tales of sorcerers, dragons, vampires, etc. are familiar ground. Of course I still find them entertaining but they rarely take me to places I haven't been to before. As well as reading for entertainment value, I also want to learn new things. Nalo Hopkinson is a great example of someone bringing Caribbean mythologies into SF with her novels like Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber, and it's a blessed relief to read stories from all genres where characters of color are central to the text. Especially when the characters bring with them aspects of their culture and it is embedded within the narrative as a given. What is "exotic" for one reader is home ground for another. I think fiction that includes cultural identities bridges the gap between this divide.

DN: One of your characters in Chorus of Mushrooms asks a question that struck me very strongly: If you come from a culture where there is no turmoil and you're very comfortable there, why leave? And the question that goes with that is: If you get where you're going and you don't like how you're treated and what is expected of you, why stay? Can you say something about how this applied to your own family history?

HG: My family emigrated to Canada around 1969, when I was three. We were in the privileged position of choosing to leave, choosing to go somewhere else. There's a lot of privilege in being able to leave: I never realized that when I was younger, but it's something I consider more and more when there's so much conflict in the world and borders are closed except for the wealthy. Why leave? is a question that's not meant to be answered but more to be thought about. Why stay? when a lot of things point to your not being welcome, I think is a daily question for many people. And I think it's something many people of color think of in North America.

The more frightening extension to this question is that it can be posed by the dominant culture in racist ways. The ideology behind "Go back to where you came from," is still alive and thriving today. It was challenging for my family to settle in southern Alberta in the late seventies. We moved to a small town and we were the only Japanese Canadians living there. When my sisters and I were children and we didn't have the language to begin decoding racism, all we could do was feel the effects in our body. Racism is internalized and there was a time when I didn't want to call myself Japanese Canadian. Canada is our home. There is no going "back" although the question is still posed that way. People of color may ask themselves why they stay but this is just the immediate reaction to oppressive forces. The more important extension of this question is: what is causing them to question our desire to stay? And we all have the responsibility to examine our sense of entitlement of living on First Nations land. How are we complicit in the ongoing oppression of the people of the First Nations? What are we doing about it?

DN: One theme that is in all three of your books is moving, not just to a new country but within a country, from the city to the prairie to the small town, and also moving toward an image of oneself as a farmer, or toward an image of oneself as a self-sustaining person. The fathers in both Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child not only move to the prairie, they then engage in very Japanese types of farming, in the very Canadian landscape. Do you want to comment on any of that?

HG: In Chorus of Mushrooms, I was utilizing a setting or background that I was very familiar with--my father does have a mushroom farm. What is very interesting about mushroom farming in Alberta is that you have to create such an alien environment on the prairies. The space is enclosed and the temperature has to be maintained as well as the humidity--which is ludicrous, especially in a prairie winter--so it was interesting for me as a writer to explore the implications of that sort of enclosed, "safe" environment, within a broader, larger geography that could be perceived as hostile, which fed into a lot of the themes I was working with. In The Kappa Child, the father leaves British Columbia and wants to start rice farming on the prairie, which is obviously an impossible endeavor in that environment. I was re-working the "pioneer" experience in a contemporary setting, using Little House on the Prairie as an existing model. I was hoping to deconstruct the colonial mentality that we might have swallowed unnoticed when we read the Little House books as children.

DN: The Tiptree Award is an award for exploring or expanding gender in science fiction or fantasy writing. Does that suit your vision of The Kappa Child? Was that one of the things you were trying to do?

HG: Oh yes, absolutely. Whenever I finish writing a book, I look back and say "Oh, you were greedy again. You wanted to write about too many things in one book again." Gender was one of several areas I wanted to explore, particularly gender and pregnancy. I was trying to work that in a way that wasn't necessarily overt.

The social construction of gender was never so blatant to me as when I had my first child. I received second-hand clothing from friends and I dressed my child in these clothes. Depending on the color of the clothes, people spoke to my baby in radically different ways. Certain colors would elicit, "Ohhhh, she's so beautiful," while other colors would trigger, "Hey, there, buddy! Are ya gonna be a fighter?!" It was an eye-opening social experiment. I wanted to explore a character whose gender wasn't limited to the socially constructed. I was hoping to explore an identity that placed no qualitative values on physical and social cues. This doesn't mean that the character didn't want to be a woman. I wanted to explore a character who was learning to become instead of the gendered baggage we're laden with since birth.

DN: The lead character is pregnant with The Kappa Child in the course of the book.

HG: Yes, though the central character is never referred to in the third person, and remains unnamed. The only things which point to an identity would be references to menstruation or her breasts. In my mind, she was a woman, but I was also wanting to explore that notion of gender and sexual identity and the body. How is sexuality interconnected with gender? If gender isn't apparent, how is sexuality defined? And how does pregnancy gender the body? How do we imagine the pregnant body? I don't exactly have answers. I suppose these are questions I want the readers to explore.

DN: I'm trying to decide why I was so sure that the main character was female, and I think it's in part because her older sister always wants her to go for a hairdo and a makeover. It's hard to imagine that conventional older sister making that offer to a brother on a regular basis. But the gender exploration is very interesting, and the atypical pregnancy, which confounds the doctors and the family.

HG: That was another theme that I wanted to explore. Usually you get two camps on pregnancy: the "I hate the alien creature in my body, I can't stand it" camp, or "I'm Mother Earth Goddess, and I love this pregnancy and I love my baby." I wanted to explore something other than that--the idea of the changing body, and also what we bring to what we think pregnancy is, what's invested in it, an idea of the unborn child itself, especially given the whole abortion/anti-abortion issue. Maybe even to depict the unborn child as more neutral ground, if that makes sense. Although I was worried for a little while after I gave the unborn child a voice in the narrative. I didn't want the anti-abortion camp to imagine that this was meant to be taken literally and that all unborn children are whole people with souls and a consciousness. But after a few nights of anxiety I let it go. The Kappa Child demanded a voice in my novel. There's also a long tradition of atypical pregnancies in mythology. Momotaro being birthed out of a peach, Athena birthed from Zeus' head, Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary, to name a few. Pregnancy is a wonderful metaphor in fiction as well as a physical process that verges on the magical.

DN: One thing that crops up in all of your books is family relationships, relationships between siblings and between mother and daughter. Do you have things to say about Japanese views of family versus Western ones?

HG: As a writer, I've chosen to depict Japanese Canadian characters, instead of other identities. I do know that the depiction of the family and the domestic space in these books reverberates for many Asian Canadian readers, or so they've told me. Ideas of family vary between families as well as between cultures. I wouldn't want to generalize in sociological terms. I can say that the family unit becomes particularly important to immigrants who find themselves isolated in a mainstream culture not of their own. And when this "safe haven" becomes dangerous terrain the sense of isolation increases exponentially. Personally, family ties are extremely important to me, and my own insane family (and I include myself within this insanity!) is a Pandora's box of story ideas. I've been blessed!

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Birthing the kappa child
Of sisters, shopping carts and cucumbers

By Hiromi Goto

DAD HAD NO IDEA how to grow Japanese rice. He had no idea how to grow anything at all. We had lived in a poor area of Osaka, where the eternal roar of subway trains lulled Slither and me to sleep and where Dad was a nighttime parking attendant for a department store. When the store closed, he delivered flyers for noodle shops. He never went drinking with his colleagues on the weekends, never went to topless hostess bars to toss back shots of overpriced scotch, hooting and pinching, singing enka songs off- tune to the raucous laughter of other patrons. He couldn't drink a drop of alcohol without turning blue, then vomiting for three days in a row. And Okasan's few neighborhood friends would always say how lucky she was for not having a husband who drank. Yes, she would softly smile, still pretty with her cat-eye glasses, so lucky. The nasal spray didn't happen until the dry, dry prairies for some strange reason filled my father's head so mucus-full he couldn't breathe without it. Nasal spray. His cavities filled with memories lost, or maybe the unattainable future....

Excerpted from The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto. (c) 2001, 2002 by Hiromi Goto. Published by Red Deer Press, 813 McKimmie Library Tower, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, www.reddeerpress.com. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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In the city of lionesses
This Place Called Absence by Lydia Kwa. New York: Kensington Books, 2002, 218 pp., $23.00 hardcover.
Shadow Theatre by Fiona Cheong. New York: Soho Press, 2002, 240 pp., $24.00 hardcover.
Joss and Gold by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. New York: The Feminist Press, 2001, 276 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Indira Karamcheti

WESTERNERS KNOW SINGAPORE as one of Southeast Asia's "tiger" nations, an economic marvel that gracefully blends Asian tradition with Western technology. Beyond this, we may not know much about it--its history, present-day politics, racial narratives, the social tensions thrashed out in its cultural expressions, the roles and issues confronted by its women, even its location. There may be a vague familiarity with the name of Raffles--perhaps a British topi-clad official? perhaps a hotel? The Singapore Sling may ring a bell. Singaporean women, in the Western imagination, may be represented solely by the willowy Oriental--and Orientalist--beauties of Singapore Airlines.

It is all the more welcome that these three novels allow Western readers a chance to educate our imaginations about Singapore's women and, through them, about this region of the world. Singapore, the "city of lions," has a different symbolic and emotional resonance in each of the novels and for each of the main characters. The central figure in Lydia Kwa's This Place Called Absence is Wu Lan Lim, a psychologist born and raised in Singapore, now a twenty-year resident of Canada. For her, Singapore is the past: a place to leave which can never be left behind. For Shakila Nair, the central character of Fiona Cheong's Shadow Theatre, Singapore is the place to which one returns, not necessarily the present, but the place of births and deaths, of beginnings and endings. In Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Joss and Gold, Singapore is the city of the future: both sanctuary and promised land, the place of opportunity and independence in which the past can be reconciled with the present.

In all three of these novels, the city itself is a third presence, a place with its own history, its vivid and active present, in which individuals live deeply and long passionately, attempt to build lives and happiness--a city where lionesses walk. The women within these stories walk in the thickets of the non-Western past, in which women have clear-cut roles as mothers and wives. They tread the paths of the westernized present, in which women are also expected to be contributing members of the economy, in full control of the lives they themselves construct. All stalk the prey of identity and of emotional and financial independence.

A small island state south of Malaysia, originally populated by Malays, Singapore was early seen to be a desirable geopolitical location by the Europeans. By 1819 the British had established a trading post; quickly becoming a highly profitable site, it was formally claimed by the British in 1824. Its prosperity attracted high numbers of Malay, Chinese and Indian immigrants. After independence in 1959, Singapore briefly merged into the larger confederation of Malaysia; in 1965, it separated from Malaysia and became an independent nation. It is now undeniably prosperous, firmly knit into the global economy, with a multicultural, multiracial and multilingual society.

The management of diversity has, in fact, been Singapore's challenge: how to create a Singaporean out of a motley gang of Chinese, Malays, Indians and others, including Eurasians and Europeans, all of whom originally came to Singapore in search of economic prosperity. There are four official languages: Malay, the national language; Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and English, the language of administration. While the national anthem is in Malay, all citizens are taught English and are encouraged to learn the language of their own ethnicity. Singaporeans profess many religions: Islam, Buddhism and Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism and others. The state propounds what are called "The Five Shared Values": nation, family, community, consensus and harmony. The Five Shared Values stress group unity, respect for individual autonomy and distrust of the individualism of the West.

ECONOMICS AND TRADITION, modernization and cultural integrity have been from the beginning the central elements of Singaporean identity. They are also the central questions of these three novels. In all of them, we enter a world of women, particularly women in their roles as culture bearers and culture teachers. Mothers and daughters become the insignia of the traditional past with all its sins and safety, of the modernizing present, attempting to reconcile the past with the present, experimenting with ways to construct happy lives. More, these are often women involved in the everyday work of the global economy: psychologists, professors, businesswomen. They are, in short, modern women, seeking how they might define independence, how they might best become themselves, financially, emotionally, culturally and sexually. Although the individual stories meditate over these questions in their individual ways, all the novels also share an obsession with the method of telling and with the role of the book.

Dr. Wu Lan Lim, the central character of Lydia Kwa's This Place Called Absence, resident in Canada for the past twenty years, finds herself in crisis following the suicide of her father. Although a practicing clinical psychologist, she is unable to work, haunted by the ghost of her father, brooding over her parents' relationship with each other, the reasons for her father's suicide, her mother's desire for grandchildren, her own lesbianism, which her mother refers to as "her horrible secret," or "the Big Shock," and what it means for her to be a Singaporean woman. She finds refuge from her turmoil in two things: casual sex with women and the printed word. She becomes absorbed in scholarship on Chinese and Japanese women prostitutes in Singapore at the turn of the twentieth century.

The stories of two such prostitutes, Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui, appear as first-person narratives within the story. Unlike Wu Lan, they are enslaved by economics, their sex no pleasure but only the means to making a living. Yet gradually the novel begins to draw a parallel between one of them, Chow Chat Mui, and Wu Lan herself. Both seek pleasure and a kind of liberation in their sexual desire for women. Most importantly, both find a scholar who frees them. Wu Lan is drawn to the Buddhist temple in Chinatown, where an ambiguously gendered woman teaches her the meaning of her own name, "exorcist of hidden demons." Chat Mui is drawn to a male scholar who teaches her how to write a single word: Contemplation. Later, this same scholar marries her.

Wu Lan and Chat Mui are both liberated by the word. By the end of the novel, the word becomes the means whereby we can all free ourselves from the turmoil of our lives and discover who we are in our stories. Wu Lan likens it to the talk therapy of psychoanalysis: "I'm returning to this place called absence, where in front of me, a stranger talks. Stringing words together. Two strangers who sit across from each other in a small, soundproofed room. Face to face. Truth or lies?" Ironically, the reader gradually realizes that Chat Mui is Wu Lan's grandmother: Wu Lan has unearthed her own ancestry. In doing so, she has realized her likeness in the faces of the past and simultaneously her own individuality.

Fiona Cheong © Shalini Puri

Ancestry, stories and words are equally the material of Fiona Cheong's Shadow Theatre. Here, Shakilah Nair, a Eurasian lesbian who left Singapore some years earlier, has become a successful writer and university professor in the United States. She returns in August 1994 to await the birth of her child. The novel is written entirely in the voices of numerous narrators, servants, best friends, mothers, children, as they tell and retell what happened, why, and how this one connects to that one. The story itself is a mystery, which is gradually but not completely unraveled through the various versions of the tales. Here, too, the present is haunted by the past: ghosts materialize and dematerialize, and the sins of the fathers are visited upon the daughters. We learn that Shakilah's father was a child molester poisoned by his wife. Shakilah, who is mistakenly convinced that her mother has molested her, leaves her child to her first lover, Eva Thumboo. By the end of the novel, that child, Maria, discovers who her grandmother is and makes contact with her. As in This Place Called Absence, the individual is made through long history, through ancestry.

LI AN, THE CENTRAL CHARACTER of Joss and Gold, personifies the attempt to leave the demands of the past behind, and the desire to invent oneself. A tutor of English literature in Malaysia, she marries an eminently eligible bachelor, Henry Yeh. She falls in love with Chester Brookfield, a white American Peace Corps worker, and becomes pregnant by him. After Chester returns to the United States, Li An gives birth to a daughter, Suyin; her husband, seeing that the child is not his, leaves her. Li An moves to Singapore, where she becomes a successful businesswoman. But the past does not rest: when Suyin is eleven years old, both Henry and Chester reappear, wanting to claim the role of father. The novel ends with Li An's realization that all of this, including her own role as mother, is part of Suyin's history. Suyin is made equally of her mother's past--Chinese Malaysian-Singaporean--and her two fathers'--Euro-American and Chinese Malaysian. They are her ancestry, and what she will make of herself is a future mystery.

But it is Li An, the heroine of the novel, who most clearly exemplifies the object of meditation of all three books. Ghosts, sex and babies are catalysts in all three. Ghosts are the restless past, offering themselves as explanation, solution and necessity for the puzzling present. Babies are central to each of the stories, the babies and traditional heterosexual identity that Wu Lan does not want, the baby that Shakilah Nair bears, Li An's Singaporean mixed-race baby. Children, daughters, not only present the enigmas of ancestry and identity, but also suggest the mystery of the future, of what this society will become as it juggles the competing needs of community and individuality, of consensus and personal desire, of tradition and modernization. Sex functions as solace, but also as the severing act that cuts the central characters out of the herd, that drives Wu Lan away from Singapore, Shakilah Nair away from her mother and Li An away from Malaysia, away from home and husband, to Singapore. Sexuality becomes the space for individuality, which necessarily conflicts with community, consensus and tradition.

For Li An, this struggle begins in Malaysia, as riven as Singapore with racial, religious and linguistic divisions. But in Malaysia the various groups cannot mix, as the native Malays demand a dominant role in culture and government. Unlike Malaysia, Singapore refuses a single, monolithic culture and racial identity. That the nation officially recognizes diversity means that she and her daughter can claim a place to live and work. Li An does not "feel at home," but the anonymity of a nation created for economic reasons allows her to reconcile the demands of tradition and the needs of the individual self.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim © The Straits Times

Perhaps the most telling illustration of the unity of past and present as the necessary prologue for the future occurs on the very last pages of the book. Li An, in her youth, is a lover and teacher of literature. In Malaysia, as in much of the formerly colonized world, literature means, most often, English literature and even more narrowly the British canon. Li An is a lover of Keats, of D.H. Lawrence, of Donne, of Housman, Yeats and Hopkins. She responds to the sounds and textures of the English language, "relishing the overflow of sibilants like spiced chickpeas in her mouth." She has been formed by the ethics of the British children's books that shaped her childhood, and believes that literature can "connect things, even the most unlikely things." But her life has been a living contradiction of that belief. British literature is a vestige of a shameful colonial past, which, like a vengeful ghost, otherwise named cultural imperialism, extends its dead hands to distort the present.

Li An has put aside her love of language and literature and used her linguistic abilities in the service of the global marketplace. But as she comes to accept that her daughter's future is out of her control, and will be a hybrid of West and East, Li An also comes to accept that her own past includes that colonial history, that it can be claimed and accepted as her own. The novel ends with her acceptance of herself, with all that has made her:

Wryly, she read aloud Hopkins's "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo." If she could recall the rhythm of Hopkins's crooked lines, sprung from who knows what hidden sources of his language, she would know she had not lost the past entirely....

She settled down to read the poems again, pulled in by a music of feelings that had remained set in print... A muse of feelings she thought she had forgotten, more than words, more than poetry, returning to the spaces inside her body its silent and eloquent touch. (p. 265)

The sexuality of this language suggests that in this acceptance of her past, Li An has effectively regained her wholeness, as represented in the sexuality she has denied herself since Suyin's birth.

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE and literature remains one of the most important aspects of these three novels. All are written by women of Chinese ancestry: Kwa and Cheong are Singaporean, while Lim is Malaysian. The three novels are written in diaspora: Lim lives in California, Cheong in Pennsylvania, and Kwa in British Columbia. Kwa's and Cheong's novels connect Singapore with the United States and Canada, while Lim's triangulates Malaysia, Singapore and the United States. But all concern the Southeast Asian Chinese community, and all three are written in English. This could of course be explained by their provenance in diaspora and their publication by Western presses, that is, as part of the economic globalization that all nations are undergoing. But it may also be why all three books so emphasize the importance of narration and of language. Who tells the tale and how it is told are as much an object of meditation as are the themes of tradition and modernization, economics and cultural integrity, community and individuality. The methods of narration themselves mimic the content.

This is more perhaps more true of Kwa's and Cheong's novels than it is of Lim's. Joss and Gold's narration is a fairly straightforward, chronological one, told through a third-person narrator. It is written throughout in a standard English, although dialogue often captures the inflection and vocabulary of the spoken form. But the privileged positions of beginning and ending are given to a discussion about the place of English literature and language.

This Place Called Absence and Shadow Theatre have a more complex narrative form. Both are told through multiple voices which worry the same events, tell and retell the same stories. Mahmee, the mother in Kwa's novel, speaks in a Singaporean English, while the two prostitutes and Wu Lan often use standard and even bookish-sounding English. But Cheong's story is told completely through a transcription of oral speech, of characters talking to each other in their own forms of English, some standard and some not. Shadow Theatre even includes a glossary and a definition of "Singlish": "the English vernacular of Singaporeans... a hybrid language formed from the blending of King's English, Hokkien, and Malay."

The multiplicity of voices and the range of different kinds of English accomplish several ends. First, they remind us of the multilinguality of Singapore itself, of its hybrid nature. Second, the importance of the spoken, of the oral and the vernacular--but transcribed onto the printed page--mimetically presents the reader with the theme of the reconciliation of the traditional and the modern, of the local experience and the global community. The heteroglossia of these novels allows the Westerner to get a taste, through literary eruptions of Singlish, of Singapore, of the omnipresence of the foreign in our global dominance.

All three novels also stress the importance of Literature, of the book and the printed word. For Kwa's Wu Lan, the library is, in an incorrect etymological pun, "liber": both the repository of books which educate her about herself, and the place where, picking up her young lover Stephanie, she enacts her own sexual liberation. In Cheong's novel, the interweaving voices become the shadow theatre of the title, enacting the drama of Shakilah's ending and Maria's beginning: Maria is told that she ought to find the incomplete manuscript that her mother was writing at the time of her death. All three stress the importance of the imagination and of the written word, of what Maxine Hong Kingston has called "talk story," a way of interpreting history, transmitting culture, of making sense of our lives.

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Singapore on my mind
Fiona Cheong, Lydia Kwa and Shirley Geok-lin Lim compare notes

The Women’s Review recently convened a discussion between the three novelists whose work is reviewed here by Indira Karamcheti.

WROB: Can you each start by describing your recent novels?

Fiona: Shadow Theatre is about a Eurasian woman in her thirties, who returns to Singapore in 1994, after having been away for fifteen years, and who's being followed around by a child ghost. Because she's single and pregnant, this woman, Shakilah, becomes the focus of gossip in the neighborhood to which she returns, which is the neighborhood in which she grew up and where her mother still lives. What I was trying to work in was the way gossip can function as a method of investigation, and the capacity of human beings to love in spite of our own attempts to legislate who should love whom. And I don't mean just sexual love; I also mean parental love. I also wanted to write a Singaporean ghost story. I've wanted to do this for a long time.

Lydia: At first I didn't realize or admit to myself that I was writing a novel. When I started out, it looked like poetry. It evolved as four voices of women: two of them are sex-trade workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Singapore. The third voice is that of a woman in Vancouver in 1994, a psychologist, Lim Wu Lan. I see her as the matrix of the novel because she is prompted to take a leave of absence from work because of her father's suicide in Singapore. She searches for clues to the suicide, and her search leads her to speculate about the lives of these sex-trade workers in Singapore whom she learns about in a social sciences article. The fourth voice is that of Wu Lan's mother, who's in Singapore feeling haunted by her dead husband's memory or presence, whichever way you want to interpret ghosting or being haunted. The novel slowly evolved in a musical way, as a chorus of four women's voices.

Shirley: The kernel for Joss and Gold began as early as 1978. My first impulse was to rewrite the story of Madame Butterfly, but to write it from the point of view of the white male who "abandons" the Asian woman. When I began writing the novel it was based in the United States, written from the point of view of Chester, the American who leaves this Asian woman with a child. But because it took such a long time to write, the novel went through a number of layers, of processes, and it became a very transnational novel. It is set in Kuala Lumpur, in Westchester County in New York, and in Singapore. In some ways I was rewriting the Madame Butterfly story with a sympathetic male and trying to understand the kinds of racial/cultural issues that would permit what seemed like a good liberal character to act the way he did. But in the process of writing between 1978 and 2001, when the novel finally appeared, I went through a feminist transformation, and the women characters emerged much more strongly in the final version, with a stronger exploration of what it is to be an Asian woman in Singapore or Malaysia, where women are much more strong, much more successful, much more confident than they ever were before.

WROB: Can you say who you thought of as the audience as you were writing? Did thinking about a particular audience shape the books?

Shirley: My first audience is always myself, the story I'm exploring, characters I'm interested in that mystify me. But of course there's always an audience other than the audience of the authorial self. I had an audience that was clearly Western, because I was writing in English and wanted to publish in the United States, but as I got drawn into the Asian women characters it became clear that I was writing for my own home audience, which was split between Malaysia and Singapore. The problem with audience for me is that I'm using a lot of materials that are unfamiliar to each of these different audiences. I'm using Asian materials that American readers have no idea about, but then I'm also using a lot of American concepts, values and cultural attitudes that Asian readers find not only mystifying but boring. That's a real problem of writing transnationally. Then there's the problem of language. I use not only Singlish, which is Singapore English; I also use Manglish, Malaysian English, because I have a couple of Malay characters, and they speak English slightly differently from Chinese Singaporean characters.

Lydia: I am also aware of myself as the audience at the beginning of the writing process. Later on in the process I start to wonder who else I'm talking to, who I want to address. I'm writing for people who might be more interested in psychological experiences. How the external world affects the internal, and how the internal world of the psyche is enacted and replicated in the external. The novel I wrote was very interior, dark in certain ways, yet hopeful in essence. So my audience might be those people interested in grappling with internal, psychological realities, or people interested in reading about the impact of colonization, or readers who have a broader world view and want to learn about other cultures and other realities, or even people who are fascinated by Singlish...

Fiona: When I wrote my first book, I thought my audience was clearly Western. Like Shirley, I was writing in English and I wanted to publish in the United States, but of course that gets complicated because everybody I know in Singapore speaks English too. Many of them often slip into more standard English than many Americans I know. So I've had to re-think what I really mean by a Western audience. And after I published my first book I was invited to read in several places that I wouldn't have expected to be invited to. Many of these were small Southern towns where there were women's reading groups, and the women I met were all white, and mostly upper-class. It revealed to me my own stereotypes of North and South, and my assumptions about who would actually read my book. I realized that those women liked my book, even though I never thought of them as my primary audience, and that their appreciation of the book mattered to me. Now with this second novel, I was really trying to move away from thinking of my audience as either Western or Eastern, and I wanted the novel to challenge that concept and the reader's reliance on it. When I think about audience now, I try to imagine an audience of readers who are interested in language, and who are interested in the ability of language to transform the physical space that you happen to be in as a reader.

Shirley: My memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, came out in Singapore and in the US at the same time. I got a whole lot of publicity in Kuala Lumpur, all through Malaysia and Singapore, so I had an immediate sense that my writing spoke to these two audiences, as well as to the United States. The novel also appeared simultaneously in Singapore and New York. As soon as it appeared in Singapore it was set for a couple of university courses; I went to do a reading in Kuala Lumpur, with a Malay audience, and there were over a hundred students there who had all read the novel. So I'm constantly aware that I have these audiences, people who follow my writing. When I was younger my sense of audience was much more tentative, more abstract and vague.

Lydia: I launched my novel first here in Canada in 2000, and it had a very positive response from a wide range of people. I got quite a few positive reviews. It was nominated for the amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Re-Lit Award. Even so, I suspect there were a few things I was trying to do in the novel which may have eluded some people. Since the novel inhabited me and I inhabited it for five years, I know it so intimately, and I would love for other people to understand it to the same degree of complexity and knowledge that I do--of course I say that tongue-in-cheek because I know it can't happen.

Shirley: I have a question for Lydia: have you thought about reading in Singapore?

Lydia: I've thought about it, but that's like fantasyland for me.

Shirley: You don't go back?

Lydia: I don't go back very often. I left in 1980, and I don't have the literary connections in Singapore, I'm out of the scene completely.

Shirley: But thinking of it as a scene in which you don't belong is to see it as more rigid than it is. I left in 1969; I was just a graduate student, part of no scene. I doubt there was even a literary scene then, yet I manage to get invited to read, you know?

Fiona: I'm terrified at the thought of reading in Singapore. I would love to, but I'm nervous about it.

Shirley: You've never read in Singapore?

Fiona: No, I haven't. Like Lydia, I don't go back much. I left in December of 1979, and while I was in college, I went back every year, but once I started graduate school and then teaching, I didn't go back for about eleven years.

Shirley: I left years before you both did, yet I feel this very continued strong connection. I wonder why your break, rupture, has been so much more complete.

Lydia: One of the factors for me definitely is that I only came out to myself as a lesbian in Canada. That's a very big issue. It's still considered illegal in Singapore, although I think the climate is shifting.

Shirley: In my novel, I have a character--the kind of best friend who never marries and becomes your child's godmother. I was asked by my editors at the Feminist Press, is this a lesbian character? Why don't I just out her in the novel? And I said, at that period, in the 1980s, people didn't even out themselves! You were the good wonderful loving supportive best friend and spinster godmother, and you wouldn't even admit your lesbianism to yourself. To be faithful to that historical period you wouldn't have an out lesbian.

WROB: Have you all found your publishers suggesting changes like this? Can you talk about how the process of publishing in North America has affected your work as you originally conceived it?

Fiona: In this novel I took out a narrator, the narrator I had the most fun with, who spoke practically all Malay, with very few English words thrown in. My family often speaks Malay, but I thought I had forgotten much of it. I haven't spoken Malay in years, and I was actually shocked that I was able to write in Malay. But that chapter was deadly for editors. Somebody said "the plethora of non-English words" was just too much.

Shirley: I think what your publisher was also responding to is something that all publishers in the United States are aware of, that is, American readers want to read about America. It might be multicultural America, but still there's this strong interest in its own identity. The Feminist Press has never made me drop anything--what it's always made me do is to write more, and always to write more about America. When my memoir was done I gave it to Florence Howe at the press and said, "I'm finished," but she said, "I'm not going to publish it until you write the American part." The draft stopped after my first year in the United States. So I had to sit down and write another forty percent of the memoir. At first I was really resentful, but now I'm grateful that she made me do it, because it compelled me to deal with material that I was avoiding, which was my American self. I had been in this country since 1969, longer than many of my students have been alive, and for a long time I avoided dealing with what it is to be living in America as an American citizen, with an American child and an American husband. I constantly wanted to go back to where I was, to the origin, the pain of the rupture, the loss of origin. And with my novel, the Feminist Press came back to me to say, you're not writing enough about these American characters. I resisted that too, and I think my struggle both with the memoir and with the novel is in trying to inject fully into my imagination this other national territory and society and people and history and politics. It's a very difficult thing for someone who comes to the United States when she's 24, as I did.

Lydia: I was fortunate because my Canadian publisher, being a small independent press, found a great editor who had worked with quite a number of women writers of color. There was no requirement for me to cut words out because of language. There were reasonable solutions found to make things sufficiently comprehensible. I made a request that all my "non-English" words not be italicized because I wanted to send a message about not "othering" that language. But I also didn't have the challenge of writing a novel predominantly in Singlish; I'm sure that's also a factor.

Fiona: I had a similar concern about the "non-English" words. In fact, one of the reasons I went with Soho Press was that I had said to myself, "I'm going to go with the publisher that, one, allows me to not italicize the 'non-English' words, and, two, doesn't ask me to drop any more narrators." Everybody else asked for the number of narrators to be reduced. And I went back and forth on the glossary that's at the back of the book. But again this brings up how easy it is to think that "American" means "white," or "mainstream." Who's going to be reading this and why is it difficult for them? One tends to think that if Shadow Theatre's difficult for American readers, it's because they're not patient enough or they don't want to work hard enough with the text. But if one thinks about African Americans reading the book, or Latina or Native Americans reading the book, or other Asian Americans reading the book, the language can be difficult for genuine reasons of cultural difference. And I do want to reach those audiences. So I wanted a glossary, but I had to find a form for it that wouldn't feel anthropological.

I agree with Shirley that Americans in general do like to read about Americans, which I don't think is that unusual--many of us like to read about ourselves. I have thought, however, that if I want to write something that really sells, if I want a shot at something that really sells, I should try to set it in the United States. But so far, it's been hard for me to do that, for several reasons, one of which is that I haven't been able to get enough distance, whereas I do have that distance with Singapore. I'm not sure if my writing would be at risk, or if I might lose a certain clarity of vision, if my "rupture," as Shirley put it earlier, were less "complete." For instance, it was when I first went back to Singapore after I'd been away for a long time that I found it poignant that the Borders Bookstore in Singapore had a ghost story section. That was when I started thinking of the ghost story as an actual literary tradition, and what it could reveal about the culture, about what people value, and how they see the world and how they construct the world.

Shirley: It's the equivalent of American horror films.

Fiona: But not exactly--the horror genre is a teen genre here. In Singapore the people who tell ghost stories cut across age, across race and levels of education; the most unlikely people will have a ghost story somewhere.

Lydia: I also suspect that most of us who grew up with ghost stories actually do believe that ghosts exist. I don't know about you, but I do, and that's the difference between that ghost story genre and the horror genre.

WROB: That comes back to our initial question about audience. How is it different for a Singaporean reader who also believes in ghosts to read something like Shadow Theatre versus, let's say, an American reader for whom this is exotic local color that's all made up? Can you work on both those levels? Can you write for both those audiences?

Fiona: I wasn't thinking about audience really when I was writing, though I thought about it a little at the start. I thought, first of all, that I'm going to be criticized by Singaporeans, because strictly speaking, I wouldn't call the vernacular used by some of the novel's characters Singlish; it's a written form of Singlish, and in fact it's an invented written form of Singlish. Because what I wanted to get at was a certain rhythm, the way people talk, which I missed hearing. The way my relatives talk, the sound of their voices. I wanted to get at that. I wanted to get a certain kind of music onto the page, and that meant that I had to work with literary sound, with the way sound functions on the page, not necessarily with the "authentic" syntax of spoken Singlish. So I worried about that a little, about what people might say. I didn't worry about authenticity with respect to the ghosts. I was drawing on ghost stories that I've heard, and I tried to be true to what I remembered, and I'm trusting, even though I've lived here for so long, that there's a way in which narrative form lives in the body and it doesn't really leave you. But to return to your question: Can one write for both audiences? I find that I can if I accept that different audiences will probably read a somewhat different book, and if writing for one audience or the other doesn't necessarily mean writing to please that audience. On the other hand, it's why I'm nervous about reading in Singapore. I'm afraid people will be really critical, because Shadow Theatre isn't necessarily the book they want to read, or the book they would like to be written, or the book they feel is important. And yet, it's very much a book I wrote out of a deep love for them.

Shirley: That might explain why my readings in Singapore and Malaysia work so much better in some ways--I must still at some deep, unconscious level be writing for that audience. I find in the United States that the readers don't get the musical sound of Singlish or Manglish; they think of it as broken English or bad English. When I do a reading I read this English the way it sounds, and then the audience gets it and says, oh, that was really interesting. If you were to read it with your eye, without your ear engaged, because you have no familiarity with the sound of Manglish or Singlish, it just looks like not very good English. Singaporean and Malaysian readers can hear it, but American readers lose it completely. When I write about American characters, I worry that Malaysian and Singaporean readers lose them completely too. I have this character, Meryl, whom I really admire, a very strong female character: she's driven by her career, she doesn't want a child, and she's a very sympathetic character for me. But of course to Malaysians and Singaporeans, a strong professional woman who's married and doesn't want a child is just horrible! It's very difficult to write cross-culturally and cross-nationally and have all those audiences follow you all the way.

WROB: Would any of you define yourselves as diasporic writers?

Shirley: I think that there's a real distinction between diasporic and transnational. "Diaspora" was appropriate at a time in human history when if populations left a location of origin, it was difficult for them to return. With the original notion of diaspora--the Jews leaving the temple--every Passover you say "Next year in Jerusalem." But of course now it seems almost facetious to say that because you can just hop on the plane and be in Jerusalem. I think some of us prefer the notion of transnationality as opposed to diaspora, a sense of continuing relationships with the location of origin. The shift suggests an interesting evolution that has to do with space and time travel--faxes, jet planes, frequent flyer miles...

But we need to rethink, as we always have through the centuries but more urgently now, our sense of nationalism. What does it mean to be a national? And what does it mean to be a patriot? Can one be a patriot to only one country? Can one not be a patriot to many countries, if not to the planet? The word "diaspora," to me, is sort of problematic. As a writer I'm constantly stewing over these issues. In fact I find these materials "explosive" and I write out of that kind of explosiveness.

Fiona: I actually don't mind the term "diaspora." I may even prefer it to "transnational," because the focus is not on the nation. I'm not keen on national identities right now, because they're being used to justify committing atrocious crimes.

Shirley: But it also means a one-way street, you know? There's no going back and forth.

Lydia: Having to choose between the two isn't appealing to me. I don't like either for those reasons that you both stated. The national thing especially sends off red flashing lights in my head. Here when some people see me they assume I'm not Canadian since I'm not white, exposing their racist conditioning and their beliefs about what national identity can or cannot include.

Shirley: But you can always debate that.

Lydia: Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on the nature of my relationship with that person. I'm not always eager to put myself out that way. The issue is that the visual misrecognition automatically happens. Or someone will say, "You don't have an accent"--"You mean I have a Canadian accent," I say. The terms people use automatically can go unquestioned, with such problematic attitudes deeply entrenched in those terms.

Shirley: But this misrecognition happens and will continue to happen in North America. The good thing, the positive thing, is that you can stand up and debate it, you can contest it and talk right back to them. The US has a culture of dissent and struggle. I am not so much against the term "national," because I think that as citizens we are asking for the protection of the nation state and for the entitlement of being a member of that nation state. Maybe it's because I'm older and more conservative as I age, but I believe there is a form of reciprocity: if I benefit from certain institutions and structures, I need to see these structures also as working in some ways positively. Otherwise I'm just a leech; I benefit from these structures but I give nothing back.

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