From: xu@hydra.maths.unsw.oz.au ()
Subject: fwd: CND Books and Journals Review
Organization: school of Mathematics UNSW
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1992 12:49:39 GMT


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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
                            
                            November 15, 1992

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1. Beyond the Gold Rush --
   "Sojourners - The Epic Story of China's Centuries-old
    Relationship with Australia"  by Eric Rolls  ....................... 82

2. "The Crocodile Fury"  by Beth Yahp  ................................. 88

3. Where the East is Read --
   "The Kitchen God's Wife"  by Amy Tan
   "China Boy"  by Gus Lee
   "Typical American"  by Gish Jen  ................................... 160
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If 
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in  
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Beyond the Gold Rush --
   "Sojourners - The Epic Story of China's Centuries-old
    Relationship with Australia"  by Eric Rolls  ....................... 82
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: XU Ming Yang
Source: The Spectrum, SMH 10/3/92
Review written by: John Douglas Pringle

"Sojourners - The Epic Story of China's
Centuries-old Relationship with Australia"
By Eric Rolls. UQP, 580pp, AUS$49.95 ISBN 0 7022 2478 2

The most ardent nationalist can hardly deny that Australia has a racist
history. Between 1788 and 1970 Australians had to deal with three
substantial coloured minorities: the Aborigines, who were here thousands of
years before the Europeans arrived; the Kanakas or South Sea Islanders who
were recruited - or kidnapped - to work on the sugar and cotton plantations
in Queensland between 1863 and 1895; and the Chinese, who came here in
considerable numbers between 1847 and 1885.

All three were badly treated, often with callous brutality.

Up till now, the Chinese have been rather neglected by historians. No
longer. In this massive book Eric Rolls has told their story with an
admirable blend of scholarship and sympathetic understanding. He does not
conceal his admiration for the Chinese and their culture, but everything he
writes is backed by over 20 years of research, both in China and Australia,
and by arduous journeys to almost every site of importance in this story.

No-one knows exactly how many Chinese visited these shores. When further
immigration was stopped in 1885 by the rising demands for a White Australia,
there were only 54,550 or 1.54 per cent of the total population. But many
thousands had left before that. For with very few exceptions the Chinese who
came here did not intend to settle. They came under contracts to stay two or
three years in the hope of earning enough money in that time to buy a plot
of land in China and to marry a wife. One of the few consolations in
this melancholy story is that, at least in the early years of the Gold Rush,
most of them succeeded in this modest aim. They were excellent and
hard-working miners, who often did better than the more slap-dash Europeans,
who tended to abandon a field if they had not "struck it rich".

The Chinese despised Europeans as barbarians and hated the British, who at
that time were engaged in the Opium Wars, which Gladstone rightly described
as the most discreditable episode in British imperial history. It is perhaps
natural that the European miners resented the Chinese arriving in thousands,
but they showed their hostility and prejudice with shameful brutality. The
Chinese, who are not a submissive people, often fought back. The result was
a disgraceful series of riots and battles on several gold fields, though the
loss of life has been exaggerated. Eric Rolls points out that Mary Gilmore's
famous story of seeing 14 dead Chinese hanging from trees as she drove past
with her parents after the "battle" of Lambing Flat in 1861 cannot be true
since she was not born until 1865!

Australia's colonial governments tended to back the miners and did their
best to restrict Chinese immigration. When Victoria did this, the Chinese
simply moved to South Australia. When South Australia followed suit, they
went to New South Wales, and so on to every State in turn where gold was
discovered. When restrictions failed legally, the colonies blamed the
Chinese for introducing smallpox and leprosy. As Eric Rolls writes, this
"allowed injustice to be disguised as justice."

All this is narrated in exhaustive detail. But this book is far more than an
account of the gold fields. There are chapters on the diseases which the
Chinese are alleged to have brought, on their habit of gambling (another
cause for complaint, as if the Australians did not gamble), on opium and, of
course Chinese cooking.

Eric Rolls is nothing if not thorough. His erudition is alarming. When he
writes about smallpox he has to tell us the whole history of vaccination.
When he writes about opium he tells us where to grow poppies, how to harvest
the seed and extract the juice in extreme detail. But it is also his love of
detail which makes his social histories so fascinating to read. My favourite
passage is his description of Chinese singing and fighting crickets and the
exquisite cages made to carry them. This reads like a prose poem in praise of
Chinese craftsmanship.

Sometimes Eric Rolls takes things too far. Admittedly I have never acquired
a taste for Chinese food, but I found his chapter on it excessive. I hurried
through it, shuddering occasionally at some of the dishes he describes with
such relish and the methods used to prepare them.

As a farmer, Eric Rolls is not at all squeamish about killing animals, but
he seems ready to excuse even the Chinese habit of eating their rapidly
disappearing wildlife. He tells an amusing story of Australian
conservationists going to China to see a scheme for saving the last wild
lynxes in that country. They were greeted by a feast of roast lynx.
Characteristically, Eric Rolls expresses more anger at the Australians'
rudeness in refusing to eat it than at this bizarre example of Chinese
conservation.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. "The Crocodile Fury"  by Beth Yahp  ................................. 88
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: XU Ming Yang
Source: The Spectrum, SMH 9/26/92
Review written by: Alison Broinowski

"The Crocodile Fury"  by Beth Yahp
A & R, 329pp, $16.95  ISBN 0 207 17055 X

The 1990s China phenomenon in Australian fiction can no longer go unnoticed.
Nicholas Jose's Tiananmen novel, "The Avenue of Eternal Peace", and Barbara
Hanrahan's "Flawless Jade" were the first novels on a wave that swelled and
broke this year with Brian Castro's prize-winning "Double Wolf" and then
"After China". Alex Miller's brilliant "The Ancestor Game" was followed by
the evocative collaboration by Trevor Hay and Fang Xiangshu, "East Wind,
West Wind."

Together, these books are evidence of a two-way consciousness between
Australians and Chinese which is unprecedented in our fiction. It has no
current rival in English writing anywhere.

The newest, youngest Malaysian-Chinese-Australian writer to ride this new
wave is Beth Yahp. Her first novel will be compared with "The Joy Luck Club"
and "The Kitchen God's Wife" by the American novelist, Amy Tan, but not, I
hope, for long, because the comparison is inappropriate.

Yahp exults while Tan maunders; Yahp overrides nationality while Tan
excavates identity; Yahp reinterprets history while Tan is tethered to time;
Yahp's girl-hero shrugs off pain while Tan's suffers.

The dimensions of Australia's proximity to Asia are being exploited by
writers like Beth Yahp, Ee Tiang Hong, San Ye and Mang Ke. Australia
provides them, Malaysian or "Chinese" Chinese, with space in which to expand,
a free press and a relatively tolerant audience. All Australians are their
beneficiaries.

We are being required, now, to attune our ears to different cadences, to
words lacking final consonants, to verbless exhortations, to the sound of
overseas Chinese English. The last writer I can recall catching this sound
in English was Paul Theroux in "Saint Jack."

Yahp uses almost no adjectives. Her sentences take off like motorbikes. She
whizzes at speed and at considerable risk among the crawling traffic, leaving
me wondering can she sustain it without disaster. Will she be there ahead of
us? She will, and will still be only 28. Her prose is, more than anything,
young.

It's no accident that I am reading Yahp during the Melbourne Festival and my
mind is full of Philip Glass, Einstein, significant repetitions and subtle
adjustments. Yahp, like Glass, writes fugally, executing knowing variations
in the early chapters on the theme of "this is the place to begin", and,
towards the end, several more on "this is the place to finish".

Without a hint of a nod to political correctness, she makes women the
central characters - Grandmother, mother, nuns, convent girls, the girls'
school bully, the rich man's lover - and men the outsiders, circling,
dangerous predators, barely seen through the encircling jungle. Even the Old
Priest, dead at the time of the story, is a peripheral pretender in the
fraught world of women, where ancient knowledge of magic and malevolent
spirits is pitted against ignorant, modern chalk-statue Catholicism, and
where their own sexuality is the battlefield.

Without a single explicit reference to "The Tempest, Yahp has these female
Prosperos and Calibans wrestle, and nowhere more passionately than in the
library, among the books.

The young girl sent to the convent epitomises the generational, ethnic,
millennial debate. Her deserted mother clings for comfort to the Church.
Grandmother teaches her resistance to pain by knotting her hair too tightly.

     The braid she has knotted is so tight it pulls my eyes up at the
     corners, it gives me slanty vision so I walk crooked. All the way to
     the convent my mother pulls me straight ... Slowly, patiently, she
     loosens Grandmother's knots until my scalp itches from the blood
     rushing back.She rubs my temples until the glittering black behind my
     eyelids goes away, until I can see.

Boundaries between the dream world and the real world are not distinct.
Ghostchasers like Grandmother cross them, convent girls cross them, monkeys,
soldiers and crocodiles cross them at will. Everyone wants to see
"evidence", but of different things.

"Tell us, show us", the girls ask mother, or Grandmother. The Old Priest
seeks evidence of the divine, the girls' school bully compulsively
photographs evidence of amazing scenes, the soldiers hunt, torture and kill
"communists", with or without evidence.

Depending upon where they're coming from, all the women have evidence of
their own particular crocodile, the male principle, desired and feared. How
the girl-hero will handle her own croc is the question, kept to the end,
towards which this mesmeric novel rushes, to screech, and only just, to an
enthralling resolution.

[Alison Broinowski is the author of "The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions
of Asia (OUP, Aus$27.95)]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Where the East is Read --
   "The Kitchen God's Wife"  by Amy Tan
   "China Boy"  by Gus Lee
   "Typical American"  by Gish Jen  ................................... 160
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: XU Ming Yang
Source: Far Eastern Economic Review 11/14/91
Review written by: Eleanor N. Schwartz

"The Kitchen God's Wife"  by Amy Tan
HarperCollins, London   US$22.95

"China Boy"  by Gus Lee
Dutton, New York.  US$19.95

"Typical American"  by Gish Jen
Houghton Mifflin, Boston.  US$19.95

It has taken a long time for Americans to acknowledge the presence of the
Chinese in their midst. Arriving with the California gold-rush in 1849,
hired to lay railroad track in the Rocky Mountains, the Chinese were
overworked, underpaid and the easy victims of persecution, both legal and
illegal. Barred by the 1882 Exclusion Act from further immigration, they
fanned out gradually from the West to other parts of the country, clustering
within their own tightly structured and largely self-sufficient communities.
Despite the growth of a merchant class and a scattering of scholars in the
universities, the Chinese came to be viewed in 20th-century America chiefly
as laundrymen, purveyors of chop suey and as a movie detective named Charlie
Chan.

Only now, as the 21st century looms, have their fellow Americans become
aware that there are some prodigiously bright and productive people in the
nation's Chinatowns, and only now have the Chinese-Americans themselves
produced the writers who can interpret their unique experience and culture
to the rest of the world.

The first of these writers to emerge was Maxine Hong Kingston, whose
astonishing first novel, "The Woman Warrior", published in 1976, won her the
National Book Critics' Circle Award. The most prominent of the newer writers
is Amy Tan, whose 1989 bestseller, "The Joy Luck Club" was followed straight
to the top of the lists by this year's "The Kitchen God's Wife". Among those
making promising debuts in 1991 were Gus Lee, whose "China Boy" is a
fictionalised account of his own early years, and Gish Jen, author of
"Typical American", the only Easterner in this group of Californians.

Much has already been made in the American press of US publishers' new
enthusiasm for novels by Chinese-American authors ("Publishers Weekly"
called it "fictional encounters of the Chinese American kind"), but not all
interested observers are enthusiastic about the attention. For instance,
when Elaine Kim of the University of California at Berkeley's department of
Asian American studies was asked about this publishing development, she
replied: "This is the first time that books by chinese-Americans are being
published by mainstream publishers. A lot of people have been doing a lot of
good writing before this."

Be that as it may, recognition is now coming from other sources as well. For
a three-day symposium, "The Asian American Experience: Looking Ahead,"
recently held in Los Angeles, the Asian Society devoted two sessions to the
"burgeoning presence of Asian Americans in the arts,"inviting such
participants as playwright David Henry Hwang, actor B.D. Wong, Amy Tan, and
Prof. Kim herself.

In New York City, the China Institute is planning a conference for next fall
that will deal only with Chinese-American writers, exploring among other
things the diversity of their heritage, their experiences as Chinese and as
Americans, and the wide range of perceptions about China and the Chinese
that have taken hold in the minds of other Americans.

What has happened? Why, all of a sudden, did this interest in
Chinese-American writing spring forth? Diane Wong of the Asian American
Journalists Association in San Francisco believes it to be a "market-driven"
phenomenon. Echoing Elaine Kim, she says: "Publishers and editors now
realise that the population growth has produced a cultural mass, a pool of
people who are writing stories of Asian-and Chinese-American interest and
that the stories are good enough for others to want to read them.J"

In "The Woman Warrior" Maxine Hong Kinston explained the emergence of a
Chinese-American identity in yet another way: "Those in the emigrant
generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from
home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out
how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in
solid America."

The need to recognise and come to terms with this world certainly appears
critical to the world of Kingston, Tan and Lee, though less so to Jen. In
Kingston's case, according to one interviewer, "She was determined to make
a living as a scientist or mathematician or writer. She was not going to be
a slave or a wife." Tan has said that she set out to write her stories for
her immigrant mother, to explain all the disagreements and turbulent moments
of their lives together, while Gus Lee began "China Boy" as a memoir for his
children for whom, he once said, "We must provide safe harbour,
communication and disclosure."

Jen's difference may be that she was born and raised in the suburbs of New
York City, was educated in New England and still lives in the Boston area.
Seeing herself as an American rather than as a Chinese-American writer, Jen
points out that J"Typical American" is not only about the immigrant
experience but about business and the way people function in American
society, no matter what their country of origin."

Where the others have drawn from the fount of ancestral myth and tradition,
Jen has been influenced by the Jewish-American writers, notably Bernard
Malamud and the early Philip Roth. A product of the University of Iowa's
Writers' Workshop, Jen says, "I've been writing for 10 years and if you
could see my earlier work, which has not been collected, you would see that
it does not have Chinese themes at all. What I hoped to establish in
"Typical American" was to show that if you write a book about business, the
characters don't necessarily have to be 'white'."

But Jen is not alone when it comes to maintaining a distance between herself
and the recent events in China. Although she shared the universal dismay
over Tiananmen Square, "It was not a racial reaction, but simply the
reaction of any American with ties to or an interest in China. "Similarly,
Tan has spoken publicly of China only with reluctance, when persuaded that
her celebrity could help to keep awareness of the situation there alive.

While Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife" and Lee's "China Boy" share a great
deal, including their San Francisco setting, the cultural patterns they
represent are quite different. "The Kitchen God's Wife" tells the story of a
woman who suffers at the hands of an abusive, psychotic husband. In "China
Boy," it is a woman who holds the upper hand: a stepmother so evil as to
make Cinderella's look positively kindhearted. Of the two, Tan's is the more
satisfying book. This may be because it never loses sight of its Chinese
frame of reference. Lee's, while goo-humoured, is at once Chinese and
American, and when Lee follows trails that have no particular bearing on
Chinese life, the book sags in interest.

In the first 73 pages of "The Kitchen God's Wife," Amy Tan introduces us to
Pearl Brandt, a first-generation Chinese woman, married to an American and
maintaining an uneasy peace with her elderly widowed mother, the China-born
Winnie Louie. Each woman is keeping a secret from the other and Pearl's is
revealed to us early on. Not until Tan begins to unravel Winnie's secret,
recounting her years as a docile Chinese wife, does the book take on
momentum. But when it does, the reader is quickly drawn into a compelling
and splendidly written narrative.

Lee's "China Boy" is told through the eyes of a youngster named Kai Ting,
whose early years were dominated by three misfortunes: the bullies that
populated his neighbourhood, the death of his mother when he was six years
old, and his father's choice of a second wife, a blond American who came
into the Ting household determined to eradicate from it every vestige of
things Chinese, food included.

Kai's salvation is the YMCA, where he enrols in boxing lessons that enable
him to develop the muscles and confidence not only to demolish the meanest
of the bullies, but to stand up to the evil stepmother as well. For all its
good spirits and upbeat ending, "China Boy" contains too much detail about
boxing lessons and the life stories of occidental bullies and boxing
instructors. One wishes for more episodes like the one in which Kai goes
into a Chinese restaurant for a barbecued pork dumpling and cannot make
himself understood to the hostess because he is speaking a Chinese language
she does not know.

Travelling across the continent, and back to the late 1940s, we meet Jen's
"Typical American", a young man named Yifeng Chang, newly arrived from China
to obtain his doctorate in engineering from a university in New York City
and soon to change his first name to Ralph. Ralph's behaviour is to bizarre
one wonders how he managed to learn English and get himself into an American
doctoral program in the first place. Disdaining the opportunity to give up
his Chinese passport and become a US citizen, he is forced to leave the
university and is down to his last $3.16 when he is miraculously rescued by
his sister, who has just escaped from Shanghai.

Achieving his PhD at last, and even obtaining a tenured professorship, Ralph
blows it all away again when he falls prey to a conman named Grover Ding,
who alienates Ralph's sister, seduces his wife, and talks Ralph into giving
up his professorship and investing in a fast-food restaurant. This venture,
of course, ends in disaster but Ralph bounces back into another teaching job
and once more the American Dream is his to grasp.

Except for the slow patches in "China Boy," all three books are written
by master story-tellers and move at the speed of light. That they do not have
the weight and power of "The Woman Warrior," and Kingston's second book,
"China Men," is of no consequence. What does matter is that while
Chinese-American high-school students are walking away with a
disproportionate share of academic honours, and while the Pacific Rim seeps
into America's consciousness, a new generation of writers is finally
bringing Chinese-Americans into the mainstream of American literature where
they belong.

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