Lunar Inheritance

by Lachlan Brown

Giramondo, 2017

ISBN 978-1-9253363-8-2

Reviewed by NICHOLAS JOSE

One of the titles in Lachlan Brown’s new book is ‘(sorites and another traveller’s song)’. The parenthesis is a sign of casual deflection. The title of the poem is an add-on. It could be something else. But actually it provides a good description of the whole, which is a lyrical reflection of a journey and a heap of other things. ‘Sorites’ means ‘heap’, referring here to hoarding—the poet’s grandmother’s literal obsessive hoarding, as well as the metaphorical hoarding of memories, stories, observations and associations that make up (this) poetry—and conceptually to the paradox of a heap. Does a heap stay the same as things are added to it or taken away? When is a heap not a heap but just detritus, nothing? For a certain kind of contemporary Australian poetry, of which Brown’s is an appealing example, this is a problem of situatedness, of inheritance.

Poetry is hard to talk about. The usual way to do so is to add a heap of words, in appreciative response. Hence this review. That’s harder to do with the particular poetry I’m talking about here which is already adding its own loose, dense, fast, fluid language to a referential conversation going on with other voices that share the space. Perhaps with John Tranter at their back, Ken Bolton and Pam Brown comes to mind, Jill Jones, Adam Aitken, John Mateer, Greg McLaren, Fiona Wright, ‘Sydney’ poets, sort of.  Lachlan Brown’s first book, Limited Cities (2012) links the 2005 riots in Macquarie Fields, the Western Sydney suburb where he grew up, with riots encountered in Paris, similarly fuelled by disadvantage and disenfranchisement. The poet re-visions the world through techniques of substitution, or ‘replacement’, what a hoarder imagines for the things at their disposal. The manner of the concern is what Brown shares with his cohort. It is exemplified by the epigraph from Borges that introduces Brown’s poem ‘Petrol Stations, or Nine Vouchers Without the Optimism’:

It is as if a novelist of our day were to sketch a satirical caricature of, say, service stations, treating them in a ludicrous way. Borges, ‘Partial Enchantments of the Quixote’

But for the poet of the Australian banlieues in the 21^st century, this is no longer satire but revaluing with redemptive intent.

The new book, Lunar Inheritance (2017), makes that underlying purpose and power more apparent:

              You rethink your motivations
for writing. You catch yourself frowning.

It is there, first of all, in the foregrounding of form and the ordering of things. The book is organised around travel between Sydney and China’s major cities, but with the notable addition of Kaiping in the Pearl River Delta. That’s where the poet’s grandmother left from in 1939, eventually for Australia. Three generations later she has farewelled her grandson on his ‘return’. The poet tells Fiona Wright in an interview (29 August 2017, Sydney Review of Books podcast) that he was ‘going back to China for the first time’. Yet his ‘first time’ carries the China that has been handed down to him, making this a family ‘going back’, even if to a place that the maternal line broke away from and no longer knows. What return can there be? The question prompts poetry in which the moving through of layers of place, time and identification are fashioned to communicate a questioning, multiple selfhood.

The poems in Lunar Inheritance appear as eight line blocks (with parenthetical titles) arranged in sets of eight. Each set is prefaced by a bold title and an abstracted ideogram and every second set is followed by a poem in sonnet form (14 lines) with its own title in bold. The second set ends with a poem called ‘Chinese Container’, for example, while the third set is called ‘Self-storage’, both indicators that the containment is thematic as well as formal. The pattern continues strictly throughout until the last set, which has only seven poem blocks, the last (eighth) being left void, in keeping with the openness of the last title, ‘Almost there’, suggesting that any arrival can only be provisional. There is cultural play in the arrangement—8, the auspicious number in Chinese—and an embrace of Chinese aesthetic features—the rectangle, the regular sequence—combined with cross-cultural play via the interpolation of the (Western) sonnet, in poems that often critique Australian anxiety about cultural crossing. Flowing through and over the formal constraints, however, there is a great flexibility of line, varied and divided up in all sorts of ways, allowing experiment and openness.

The lunar inheritance is the yin line of female legacies from China, the far side of the moon, through the poet’s great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, all present in these poems, but it is also the pressure of that experience in himself, for an English-language poet whose name is Lachlan (unpronounceable in China) Brown. There is an undercurrent here, and a determination to defend a family’s experience and the power of the culture it draws on. Brown appreciates what he finds in China. It inspires some marvellous similes—‘scaffolding like bamboo / hashtags camped around a high-rise’—and forces reflection from a double perspective: in a Beijing hutong, for example, you glance
sideways for touristic reasons and find your gaze
pattern caught by a workshop that is filled with clothes
and striped bags, and for less than a second this is
your grandmother’s brimming house in Ashfield….

This is not a China limited by national boundaries or history as the future unfolds: ‘Around the world ((y)our) people begin to wake….’ The poet welcomes such transformation with what he calls his ‘(absorption method)’, the title of a poem written on reaching Shanghai, where ‘the river [is] the colour of a bad espresso’. The blocks of these poems image the building blocks by which China has moved forward—producing, transporting, systematising, multiplying: economic activity with a cultural base that extends even to his grandmother’s hoarding: ‘buildings … become Mahjong tiles’, a ‘container’ heads to the coast, ‘my un-heritage stacked five / stories high’, ‘in a shelf-stacked reality’, ‘the promise of a perfect supply chain’, all modular:

So you now know the reticulated
of a Zili village like those gridbooks where your
friends all practised their Mandarin Saturday characters
while you pressed space bar to jump through traffic.

Brown is a fine phrase-maker, at his best when there’s something at stake. His method is to make a connection that glances to something else, recoining the familiar, converting a perception into a  metaphor. He worries that he writes from a position of ‘deracinated privilege’, that his poems are selfies. His consciousness of that puts him properly at the centre of what he writes about:

(non-sober judgement)
You’re anxious that each new insight is just
self-surveillance missing/hitting its mark,
the sky-like mirror in a nightclub bathroom
in Chaoyang district.

In an empire of near-universal surveillance whether language hits or misses makes little difference. The presence of China in our world has become the uneasy sign of that: a condition in which we are all complicit. Lachlan Brown registers it with a tentative intensity, his language ‘already straining this experience … like a half-hearted net in a swiftly flowing river’. Lunar Inheritance is especially valuable for the uncomfortable awareness it shares.

NICHOLAS JOSE has published seven novels, including Paper Nautilus (1987), The Red Thread (2000) and Original Face (2005), three collections of short stories, Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (a memoir), and essays, mostly on Australian and Asian culture. He was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy Beijing, 1987-90 and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2009-10. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide, where he is a member of the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.

Middle of the Night

by HC Hsu

Deerbrook Editions, 2015.

ISBN 978-0-9904287-4-9

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

HC Hsu’s essay work, Middle of the Night, is part of what might be called Asian American experimental literature, that combines elements pertaining to the migrant experience with avant-garde forms and styles of writing, such as prose poetry, without subsuming the one under the other. As Dorothy Wang argues in her book Thinking its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2014), the error would be to “read the experimental as experiential” (164) and hence fall back into the content-oriented approach that consecrated canonical Asian (American) diasporic literary fiction such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior or Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. To start with, Middle of the Night employs the essay form, a “minor” literary genre working at the crossroads between fiction and non-fiction, the anecdotic/personal and metaphysical/universal. The book’s plasticity — its hybridity — seems to befit Hsu’s overall purpose, viz. to narrate one’s individual musings from sunset (18:03) till sunrise (05:25). So the book is not divided into chapters but into slices of time, rather, reflecting Hsu’s concern with the minutiae of existence. Hsu’s attempt at jotting down those little epiphanies, fleeting moments, small joys and silent pains that fill up our lives, is like a photographer’s effort to capture a pose’s pause. The vanity of such an endeavour is, paradoxically, what makes the reading of Middle of the Night a deeply moving experience. It reminded of a movie scene from the American drama The Hours (2002), partly based on Virginia Woolf’s life, in which Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) has to listen to her former lover and dying friend Richard (Ed Harris): “I wanted to write it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers look when you carry them in your arms. This towel – how it smells, how it feels … its thread. All our feelings – yours and mine. The history of it. Who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything mixed up. Like it’s all mixed up now. And I failed.”

Failure at embracing an all-encompassing truth, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida intimates in his work, is in fact constitutive of the deconstructive process. Things move slowly in Hsu’s book, if they move at all, just as thought sometimes works, running in circles, or the way memory functions, through fragments that do not always match up; yet at the same time, everything vibrates in it with the shrill of intent. Hsu’s highly dense, (in)tense prose aggregates clauses or word clusters that, to paraphrase the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha in his seminal text The Location of Culture, “add to” but “need not add up” (1994, 155). Hsu’s descriptive insight and eye for details seen from a multiplicity of takes, through close-ups or low-angle shots, confers on his writing a cinematic quality that appears suited to his Romantic task of reviewing the world from a fresh perspective. As he states: “To find the miraculous in the ordinary, in the spectrum of the in-between, I think, is my ‘homework’” (108). For Hsu, the object of writing itself stands for this in-between miracle (miraculous in being precarious) whereby reader and author meet across space and time. To paraphrase Bhabha again, writing then consists in the task of measuring “how newness enters the world” out of this three-dimensional (con)fusion of souls between reader, author, and text. Three images in particular from Hsu’s story fragments have retained my retinae’s attention here.

The first image is from a TV documentary aired in the middle of the night, when insomnia makes you watch anything, like soap operas, reality shows or animal documentaries. Here, Nature’s little wonders take the form of a one-thousand-pound man being airlifted in his bed to the nearest hospital for gastric surgery. Reminiscent of an angel, is the surreal vision of this anonymous man’s ascent into the sky, as if touched by grace, bed sheets flying around his naked body, and with the transfixed crowd cheering down below. Seeing him on TV, his former girlfriend, having left him because of his obesity, decides to nurse the man back to life, “because, she said, she sensed in him ‘so much pain and suffering’” (84). Through this unusual mismatch that reminded me of a Carson McCullers love relationship in her short story collection The Ballad of the Sad Café, the two of them do not so much complement (add up) as second (add to) each other, finding a supplément d’âme (solace to the soul) to their human predicament and deep sense of loneliness. The second image functions along a vertical axis, too, but deals with falling instead, bringing to mind Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man on the aftermaths of 9/11. A female office worker accidentally raises her head from her desk towards the window of her office tower for a fraction of a second and sees the V shape of a woman silently falling down outside, her black hair floating around. These two parallel individual, self-centred lives briefly intersect, yet cannot feel more removed from each other at the same time. Insulated within the illusory safety of the air-conditioned, soundproof building, the office worker “couldn’t hear anything, or make out what was happening. Just point and trajectories” (96). Falling here entails the dissolution of matter into form, and vice-versa, like the raindrops that come falling onto Hsu’s window in the middle of the night in Central Texas, making time liquid.

The third image is from a movie scene in Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, in which a man spies upon a woman from across his apartment unit. The woman is standing by the “open, large rectangular window” (100) of her own apartment, pretending to be having a romantic dinner with her lover, kept hidden from view by a wall, “when, in fact, she’s alone” (101). The man and woman’s eyes never meet, wrapped as they are in their respective solipsistic, Hopperesque solitude. There is often a tension in Hopper’s paintings between the interior and the outside, as there is here, for although exposed to the man’s binoculars and to the film viewer’s gaze, the woman remains oblivious to her surroundings, as if “putting on a show, just for herself” (101). Hsu is a cinephile, and quite a number of his anecdotes are movie reviews of films he remembered watching. Is this because cinema, as a visual art, offers the kind of rear view window and perspectival insight that Hsu, as a diasporic writer, is particularly fond of? Hsu grew up in Yonghe in the northern part of Taiwan before moving to America with his family in the early 90s. Both of his parents have connections through relatives with Mainland China. Hsu recollects his first trip, flying from America, to his father’s home in Pingdu, situated in the northeastern province of Shandong, aged eight. There he learns about the unfathomableness of “ancestral”, family, communal times, meeting with unknown relatives and “generic” (78) Asian old ladies whom he would probably never meet again, yet who are at the same time implacably, absurdly, connected to him by blood. The arbitrariness of diasporic belonging to the transcendental signifier of China is for Hsu further compounded by his father’s complicated relationship with the “Middle Kingdom”, which the latter fled as a child, crossing the Formosa (Taiwan) Strait partly by swimming. For Hsu, China remains, like the middle of the night or the disjointed nature of human relationships, a foreign haunt to which he however keeps returning. His childhood memories of China are in particular associated with his grandmother’s funerals and with the event of having to witness his father’s near-death seizure: “My father later said, that night, he had a dream that my grandmother came to our hotel room, and asked him if he wanted to go on a trip abroad, with her” (80).

To conclude this review, I must admit Hsu’s meta-fictional comments on literary reviews made me rethink the role and function of this “minor” genre. According to Hsu, book reviews often amount to highly subjective and personal scribbling in the margin that is more indicative of the reviewer’s own worldview than it says something about the author, the book being reviewed, or its potential readers. Isn’t it, however, what writing, all writing that is, is about, and what Hsu’s adoption of the essay work form hints at in particular? Hsu argues that writing is altruistic (having in mind the absent reader), while reaffirming the primacy of life over art, which will appeal to carpe diem amateurs and art dilettantes alike. In effect, readers of Middle of the Night should not expect an underlying or overarching theme running through the book, as Hsu does not write for anyone or about anything specifically, his Asian American-ness (and homosexuality) being ultimately of “marginal” concern to him. Hsu is a process artist, that is to say that his primary concern, like the German dance choreographer Pina Bausch or the American photographer David Armstrong, to both of whom he devotes a “time slice”, is “neither of this world, nor of another, neither in the moment that’s past, nor in the one to come, but, in the space and time that is lost, between them” (73). Another scene-image from Hsu’s essay work resonates with me here, that illustrates the supplementary, intra-subjective and partial (ad)equation of re-views (“yourself plus the world minus me” as Hsu puts it), and the way re-views can also, by definition, provide new ways of seeing. An undefined, non-gendered, first person narrator sits in the public transports of a non-situated city, unbeknownst to his/her lover, who coincidently sits two rows in front. Instead of joining him/her, the narrator remains in his/her seat, preferring to watch his/her lover’s back. In doing so, the narrator realises how in their respective, self-immersed anonymity, s/he has never felt so close to connecting with his/her lover: “It occurs to me I had never up until then, seen you. In your completeness. In your solitude. I wonder what you are like without me. Yourself plus the world minus me. It’s a strange feeling, but I feel a lightness and clarity. A bright whiteness shines through me. I can see an outline of myself” (113-4).

Genre of The Poison of Polygamy by Qiuping Lu

The Poison of Polygamy 
Wong Shee Ping and translated by Ely Finch
Sydney University Press 
ISBN: 9781743326022
 
Editors’ note: This research essay references Ely Finch’s recently published translation of The Poison of Polygamy (2019). While not a review of the book, the essay offers a point of resonance.
 

The Poison of Polygamy (Chinese title Duo qi du, shortened as PoP in the following) is a novel published in serial form in the Chinese newspaper The Chinese Times from 5th June 1909 to 10th December 1910. Kuo states that its publication date is between 8 June 1909 and 16 December 1910 (222), but my research indicates the first episode was published on 18 April 1909, and the last on 9 November 1910 (Chinese lunar year). Their corresponding Gregorian calendar dates are 5th June and 10th December. And instead of being published in 52 instalments as mentioned in previous studies (Ommundsen 4), there were actually 53 instalments. There are two episodes with the same number, 25, dated 6 November and 2 December 1909 in the Chinese lunar calendar; the corresponding dates in the Gregorian calendar are 18 December 1909 and 12 January 1910. The author uses an alias, Jiangxia Erlang.

Considered the first novel about Chinese-Australians to be published in a Chinese language newspaper (Huang and Ommundsen 533-544), Duo qi du has gained the attention of critics and translators. Huang and Ommundsen first translated its title from Chinese into English as PoP, and have analysed it from the postcolonial perspective. Kuo has noted the novel’s emphasis on the value of kinship and brotherhood for Chinese immigrants, as well as its criticism of traditional Chinese values and manners. PoP is now being translated by Ely Finch, and the English version will be published by Sydney University Press next year.

The novel is set in China and Australia, beginning between 1850 and 1860, during the Taiping Rebellion, an internal revolt that ran from 1850–64, and which posed a major threat to the Qing dynasty (Dillon 663), and ending between 1880 and 1890. The story is told by an omniscient narrator who interrupts the narrative from time to time, commenting on an event, criticizing a social problem, or initiating a dialogue with the reader. As the title suggests, the novel’s focus is on the harmfulness of polygamy. The central character, Shangkang, is described as having a pointed head like a falcon, indicating his crafty, treacherous character, and foreshadowing the evil he’ll engage in.

At the start of the novel, Shangkang lives in a village of Guangdong and is addicted to opium. He and his wife Ma have been married for three years and are childless. They’re very poor, and when his mother falls ill they’ve no money for a doctor. Ma pawns her clothes and personal possessions to pay for witches and wizards to perform rituals to cure the old lady. When these have no effect, she asks Shangkang to pawn her new padded cotton coat and send for a doctor. However, after taking the formula concocted by the doctor, Shangkang’s mother worsens and dies.

After the burial, life becomes harder for husband and wife. Despite the threat of starvation, Shangkang pawns everything he can get for opium, while Ma forages for wild plants to use as food. One day she stops him from trying to pawn a broken pot; she tells him her cousin has just come back from Australia with a lot of money. Her cousin, she explains, is kind and generous, and she asks Shangkang to seek his help. Shangkang goes and sure enough the cousin, Mr. Ma, gives him money; however Shangkang spends it on opium, leaving little to buy food. He lies to Ma, telling her the money was given him by an old friend. The next day, when Mr. Ma visits, Shangkang’s lie is revealed. Ma tells her cousin it’s difficult for Shangkang to make a living in the village as everybody knows he is dishonest and untrustworthy. Mr. Ma agrees to pay for Shangkang to go to Australia, on the condition he give up smoking opium, and becomes diligent and thrifty. Shangkang agrees, and receives enough money to prepare for his trip and buy food; he asks for, and is given, additional funds to buy medicine to quit smoking. But predictably, Shangkang immediately goes to the opium den.

Mr. Ma arranges Shangkang’s departure, and when the time arrives, Shangkang is ready. Ma is reluctant to let him go, afraid he’ll spend the money on concubines. Shangkang promises he won’t forget her hard work and the hardships they’ve endured. They bid a tearful farewell.

On the voyage, Shangkang experiences seasickness. Fortunately, his co-passenger — whose formal name is Huang Peng, though is better known in the text for his style name, Chengnan — is very kind and nurses Shangkang carefully. Another passenger named Binnan is from the same town as Chengnan. The three men bear the family name Huang, so are referred to as clansmen.

There are over seventy Chinese workers on the ship; it takes seventy six days to reach Australia. When they finally dock, one of them offers to be their guide as he knows the rough direction of the mine where they’ll seek work. They climb mountains and wade across fords, trekking through vast wilderness. They quickly run out of food, and suffer from hunger and thirst. Many die. Some are bitten by venomous insects; and they have to contend with wild animals, heavy rains, lack of shelter, and homesickness.

Resting one day in a wood, they’re attacked by four Aboriginal people. A white hunter named George appears and defends them, though one man is captured and taken away by the ‘savages’ (referred to as Heiman in the text). The men learn they’ve taken the wrong way to the mine, and are now very far from their destination. George leads them to a Chinese farmer nearby who owns a vegetable garden. The gardener, Chen Liang, provides them with sumptuous meals and a place to rest. He helps the men find jobs and settle into the community.

Chen Liang invites the three Huangs to participate in a mining venture. Initially, he is reluctant to cooperate with Shangkang as he finds him wicked and unreliable; but Chengnan refuses to abandon Shangkang due to the bond that’s grown between them. For a time, their venture is prosperous; however a collapse in the mine results in the loss of their profit. They move to another mine and are prosperous again. Once they’ve earned a considerable amount of money, they plan to return home.

During Shangkang’s absence, Ma lives a miserable life of poverty and loneliness. Her mother attempts to persuade her to remarry as there’s been no message from Shangkang who might have died. Ma refuses, saying she would rather die if Shangkang has died, rather than marry another man.

When Shangkang returns to his wife after a separation of six years and sees how her youth and beauty has faded, he despises her. He considers buying a young and beautiful concubine; his indifference to Ma causes her deep pain. Shangkang resumes his opium habit and squanders his earnings, leaving no money for a concubine. They adopt a one year old baby son and name him Jinniu. Chengnan attends the celebration feast in Shangkang’s home and talks with Shangkang about going back to Australia. Shangkang immediately consents.

In Australia, Chengnan’s business prospers and he establishes several stores. He lets Shangkang manage one of his successful furniture manufacturing businesses, and Shangkang thinks again of getting a concubine. He learns that an eighteen year old slave girl named Qiaoxi has come to Australia for an arranged marriage, but refused to marry the man who she thinks is too old and ugly for her. Shangkang comes for a visit and is infatuated at the sight of Qiaoxi. He proposes through her chaperone Ma’am Lian. Qiaoxi agrees, not for his money, but because she believes she can take advantage of his seeming obtuseness and honesty.

After they are married, Qiaoxi meets often with her lover Shuangde while Shangkang works. One day, when the two are having a tryst at home, Ma’am Lian drops by and the two lovers’ adultery is exposed. Shangkang is furious at being cuckolded, but uxorious and entirely under Qiaoxi’s sway, does nothing. Qiaoxi gives birth to two daughters and the four live extravagantly. Chengliang’s business is almost entirely ruined by Shangkang’s neglect. Shangkang and Chengliang return to China. Before they leave, Shangkang asks another clansman Rongguang to run the business, and instructs him to abscond afterwards with the remaining profits.

In China, Qiaoxi asks Shangkang to build a villa away from the neighbours and relatives with the embezzled money. Though Ma is heartbroken to see Shangkang break his promise and dote on Qiaoxi, she succumbs to her fate and to the feudal rules. She is tolerant of Qiaoxi. The latter is jealous, nevertheless, when Ma becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son. Out of malice, she poisons Ma and smothers the baby. When Shangkang learns of the deaths, he grieves and is sorry for Ma and the baby. When he questions Qiaoxi, she grabs him by the throat, strangling him. He dies soon after.

After Shangkang’s death, Qiaoxi becomes more unscrupulous and lives a lecherous life in the villa. One of her lovers is Jing. Jinniu is now twenty and married to a young woman, Li. Jing nearly rapes Li when Jinniu is out one night. Li tells Jinniu, and he avows to avenge her. Qiaoxi overhears this and plots with Jing to kill Jinniu. Their plan fails when Jinniu’s cries for help are heard by nearby villagers; and the townsfolk, as well as people in Jinniu’s old village, decide to aid him by getting rid of Qiaoxi. They finally decide the best way is by lynching, and throwing her into muddy water. They believe the officials who are only interested in accumulating wealth and amenable to bribes, are incapable of carrying out justice. In the end, Qiaoxi is cornered and jumps into a deep pool and is drowned, while Jing and his gangsters are at large.

The novel is eloquently written in classical Chinese. The language is beautiful; the descriptions of the natural world embody and enact the inner life of the characters. The historical and literary allusions are pregnant with meaning. The plot is well-constructed; its social criticism is obvious — and this is related to its genre.

For Western readers and readers unfamiliar with Chinese literary history, PoP might be read as a picaresque novel, but its genre is ‘new fiction’, which has its origins in the magazine New Fiction, established by Liang Qichao in Yokohama of Japan in 1902 (Zhang 86). This genre was made known to the Chinese-Australian literary circle after Liang’s visit to Australia in October 1900 and April 1901 (Kuo 96), followed by the circulation of his New Fiction. During Liang’s visit, the Tung Wah News (former name of the Tung Wah Times) published Liang’s collection of speeches and thoughts, and circulated it widely in the Chinese-Australian community (99). The Tung Wah Times was an agent for Liang’s literary journal New Fiction and shared his opinion of the social value of the novel, and argued that the novel and other new forms of literature had the power to reform society (157). The Chinese Times carried on the reformist ideas of the Tung Wah Times. It sympathized with Chinese revolutionaries and shared their anti-Manchu notions, which is reflected in the novel PoP, consistent with Liang’s ideas.

A prototypal novel of new fiction is Liang’s The Future of New China (1902). Liang was the founder and initiator of this genre; he aimed to improve the old genres, which he felt had failed to help ameliorate social problems. New fiction was to undertake the important task of enlightening the people and promulgating new knowledge and learning (Wang 14). However, what Liang and the other innovators of this genre in Chinese literary history stress, is that new fiction is not the outward form of fiction, but involves a specific method of narration, and specific subject matter. It still preserves the serial or chapter form of traditional novels, and many novels of the new genre still adopt an omniscient narrator, but the narrative pivots around the revelation of social darkness, emphasising social reformation and praising innovation (Xia 11). As PoP does, it venerates the rationality of monogamy, and embodies the progressive ideas of the time. Here ‘chapter’ and ‘serial’ do not mean the same as our understanding of them today. The genre ‘chapter/serial novel’ comes from the story-telling script of the Song and Yuan dynasties. In Chinese serial/chapter novels, the chapter/serial is marked by a number, just as PoP is. ‘Serial’ or ‘chapter’ means ‘scene’, or ‘time’. In Song and Yuan, the stories were told by a story-teller instead of being read, as many common Chinese people were illiterate at that time. The script of a story was too long for the story-tellers to finish in one sitting, so they often ended one fragment with ‘if you want to know what happens afterwards, please listen to me next time’ to attract the attention of the engrossed audience (‘Serial/Chapter’ 10). The length of each scene is nearly the same. Many chapter or serial novels have a title beside each number to summarize the main idea of a chapter, or rather, fragment. According to the contents, new fiction is divided into political fiction, social fiction, and historical fiction. PoP belongs to social fiction, that is, it criticises many social problems prevalent at the time.

Apart from its attack on the evil of polygamy (Serial 1 and Serial 37, the actual serial number of the latter should be 38), Pop is punctuated by the narrator’s criticism of superstition and opium-taking (Serial 1), of charlatanism (unqualified doctors) (Serial 3), the misogynous practice of foot binding (Serial 20) and lack of women’s right to an education (Serial 21). It follows the lead-in of Liang’s The Future of New China on the destructive force of polygamy, in which the narrator tells the tragic story of a man who practices polygamy, is bereaved of his wife and son, and then deprived of his own life — the concubine, in the end, receiving her due punishment. Ommundsen writes that ‘Horrible Poison’, a short story published in the Tung Wah Times, reflects the agenda of the Chinese Empire Reform Association, a movement dedicated to reforming the outdated and corrupt practices of China under Qing Dynasty (Ommundsen 4). In this respect PoP resonates with ‘Horrible Poison’. The editor of the Chinese Times, Chang Luke was a former editor of the Tung Wah Times, and embraced the idea of the newspaper promoting social reform. Early issues covered the reform of education, feminism, and the anti-opium movement (Kuo 84). The Chinese Times shared the Tung Wah Times’s purpose to increase revolutionary and anti-Manchu attitudes (118) The latter shifted from revolutionism to moderate constitutionalism after 1903 (149). The novel bristles with feminist ideas, and criticism of misogynous ideas and practices. At the same time, it is studded with the belittlement of women, the preference for submissive wives, and descriptions of female characters in pejorative terms, which warrants further study.
 
Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my supervisor and associate supervisor, Professor Wenche Ommundsen and Anne Collett, who have been very helpful in the proofreading of this paper. Professor Ommundsen has offered advice on its revision. I also appreciate my Chinese supervisor Binzhong Zhu and Zhong Huang, my academic brother, as is called in China, for their help. I also want to express my heartfelt thanks to the librarian staff of UOW for obtaining the microfilm of The Chinese Times for me. and to the editor of this journal, Michelle Cahill, for her patient and careful editing.
 
Notes

Chinese Times, The. 1909–1910. Melbourne: State Library of Victoria (microfilm).
Dillon, Michael. Encyclopedia of Chinese History. New York, NY: Routledge. 2016.
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QIUPING LU is a Joint PhD candidate of Wuhan University, China, and University of Wollongong, Australia, Associate professor of Wuhan University of Science and Technology