Ouyang Yu has released a short story collection! Although he has previously published poetry, fiction, NF, literary translation and criticism since coming to Australia in 1991, this is his first collection of short stories in English. And the book itself is exquisite: the hardback boards are a classy black, the jacket cover design is by Peter Lo and features artwork by Ohara Koson, and there are beautiful endpapers featuring Australian native plants such as banksia. It's a lovely book to have on the coffee table to dip into every now and again.

The blurb for the book begins with a brief excerpt from the first and titular story, 'The White Cockatoo Flowers', which encapsulates the sense of cultural disorientation that permeates the collection.

‘He looked down at his watch and saw that the long hand was overlapping the short, pointing towards twelve. The old year had passed and the new year had begun. He was swept by a feeling of loss and attachment to a past that was no longer there: If I were in China now, I would be …’

[This excerpt made me wonder about his watch. Google tells me that Chinese watches can have Chinese characters instead of Hindu-Arabic numerals, i.e. 1,2,3 &c. For migrants used to other scripts, it's one more thing to have to adapt to. See here, for images of watches with Thai, Cyrillic, Armenian, Arabic, Japanese, Turkish, and Hebrew numerals.]
The story that intrigued me most was 'Wolves from the North.' Luo Wenfu is alone in the suburbs on Christmas Eve in Melbourne. He has surfed the TV channels in search of something like the celebrations for Spring Festival Night in Shanghai, but found nothing.

He wanted to call someone. The telephone was close at hand. But he gave up the idea. In this new city, he did not have anyone to call. His neighbour, Tom, an Englishman, had gone to Kathmandu with his wife for a holiday a week before. This three-bedroom house with its front and back gardens and two cars in the garage was left entirely in his care.

In Shanghai, he thought to himself, there would be no better place to throw a party than there was right here. There was a stereo CD player, a video machine and an air-conditioner in the sitting room where folk could dance. There was a big lawn outside where one could have a barbecue. But this was Melbourne, not Shanghai. Here, Christmas meant holidays. People went overseas or down to the beach, as far away from home as possible, leaving behind them a deserted city. It would be no exaggeration to say that in Melbourne at this season nine out of ten houses were unoccupied. Patience with the home one had found sanctuary in for twelve months ran out when Christmas came round. Nobody wanted to stay home one minute longer.

[Notice that word 'sanctuary'.]

Horrible, he thought. It's as if I've become a maximum security guard for the entire city. (pp.51-2)

Well, not quite. It is a bit of an exaggeration, a generalisation formed from limited experience. But, walking the dog in the summer school holidays, I have occasionally felt the same sense of living in a deserted city. The neighbourhood dogs are not there to bark at us, the playground park is silent, and by mid-January, the grass, normally so dutifully mown, is tall. We prefer the comfort of our own home in the hot summer months so we take in our neighbours' mail, collect their eBay deliveries, and put out their rubbish bins — but we draw the line at mowing their lawns!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/02/11/the-white-cockatoo-flowers-2024-by-ouyang-yu...… (más)

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anzlitlovers | Feb 10, 2024 |

Billy Sing : a novel por Yu Ouyang

Billy Sing is a novella from Ouyang Yu, a multi-award-winning Chinese Australian author and poet whose work I have read and (mostly) enjoyed before. Ostensibly the story is based on the real-life story of the famed Gallipoli sniper, William Edward Sing who received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for ‘conspicuous gallantry’ and the Belgian Croix de Guerre for his service on the Western Front.

As in much of his other fiction and poetry, Ouyang Yu in this first-person narrative focusses on bi-racial identity in this fictionalised version of Sing’s life. Born in the late 19th century to a Chinese father drawn by the gold rush to Australia from Shanghai, the fictional Sing has a complex identity forged by two cultures. His mother was English, proud of the fact that she was born ‘near’ Shakespeare’s home town, as if that conferred some kind of prestige on her own birthplace. His father’s stories – and his frequently cited advice – derive from his ancestry, and are passed on orally. His mother’s stories come from the rich tradition of English literature, but Sing is not interested in reading. Bookended between the accounts of racist incidents in his lonely childhood and adolescence, and a brief account of his post-war life and a troubled marriage, is Sing’s account of his war service.

Appropriately for a story that is focussed so much on the death and destruction of WW1, Sing lives between a world of ghosts and of nightmare.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/04/billy-sing-by-ouyang-yu/… (más)

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anzlitlovers | Apr 4, 2017 |

Diary of a naked official por Yu Ouyang

Confronting, complex, clever, this erotic novel looks at the impact of an over-focus on sensuality and pleasure in modern China, but with some universal relevance to the western world's fascination with sexuality over substance. It presents a disturbing picture of a sex-focused, market-driven world. For my full review, please see Whispering Gums: http://whisperinggums.com/2014/08/09/ouyang-yu-diary-of-a-naked-official-review/… (más)

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minerva2607 | otra reseña | Aug 25, 2014 |