‘This story does not begin on a boat’: What is Australian about Asian Australian writing?

Abstract

With reference to recent debates about the politics of representation, this paper argues that a profound ambivalence about identity, and particularly about Asian Australian identity, is a common characteristic of much recent Asian Australian literary writing. It also asks whether this is the characteristic that marks this writing as specifically Australian. Tracing cultural contexts from the ‘pathologies’ of Australian multicultural debates to other transnational literary traditions, the paper uses examples from the writing of Brian Castro, Alice Pung, Ouyang Yu, Nam Le, Shaun Tan, and Tom Cho to speculate on the emergence of a new and distinct phase of transnational writing in Australia.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this paper is based was supported by the Australian Research Council and the University of Wollongong. I want to acknowledge my co-researchers Alison Broinowski, Paul Sharrad, Ouyang Yu, and Michael Jacklin. My discussion of Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem is a version of my 2010 discussion of this text in ‘Writing as cultural negotiation: Suneeta Peres da Costa and Alice Pung’, in The unsocial sociability of women's life writing, ed. Anne Collett and Louise d'Arcens, 187–203. London: Palgrave.

Notes

1. The specific references are to the bestsellers Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang and Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves, which spawned a large number of publications detailing the oppression of women under both pre-Communist and Communist regimes in China.

2. AustLit, the online bibliographical resource for Australian literature (www.austlit.edu.au), has recently been upgraded to enable diacritics, which means that it can record references to texts in Chinese and other non-Roman character languages. The project of recording information about non-Anglophone Australian writing is currently under way.

3. For a theoretical introduction to Australian multicultural writing see Gunew 1994.

4. Helen Demindenko, prize-winning author of The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994), who in promoting her novel had paraded her Ukrainian ethnicity in public, was revealed as Helen Darville, the daughter of English migrants.