Plastic Budgie
by Olivia de Zilva
ISBN: 9781763554146
Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM
Olivia de Zilva’s debut is a memoir told in three strikingly different parts. First, de Zilva takes the reader through her memories of a Chinese Australian childhood, where impressionistic description is juxtaposed with nuggets of heavy-handed familial wisdom, as she navigates the milestones of childhood and adolescence. She then shares her struggle, as a writer, for the correct organizing principle for her story; and finally, reflects on symbols and how they are interpreted. Plastic Budgie does not play to reader expectations for a story about coming of age as a Chinese Australian, though it does delve into many aspects of that experience. It does not deliver a narrative that is safe, predictable or neatly structured, nor does it wrangle together a conventionally satisfying resolution; rather, it puts all the elements of second-generation immigrant memoir on the table and confronts readers with the instability of meaning and with their own expectations of the story.
In the first part, with humour, irony and cynicism, de Zilva recalls a childhood as the daughter of Chinese parents from Hong Kong. Her grandparents’ rules provide a framework for her existence even before she is born, with her mother told not to leave the house for a month after giving birth and not to think about sex while pregnant or the baby will be infertile. She attends an Adelaide school with Anglo Australian kids who bully her, prompting a period of mutism, during which her parents shrug their shoulders when asked if anything traumatic has happened to her. The family is agonisingly aware of the white gaze, with her parents refusing to watch Cantonese dramas ‘as if someone would find out and tell Pauline Hanson’, and her mother embarking on a mission ‘to make me more Australian’ (p 33). References to cultural markers such as Harry Potter and Delta Goodrem locate the reader in Australia in the early 2000s, but de Zilva does not probe this cultural moment, instead segueing fluidly between past and present. She ponders her family’s affliction with ‘purple’ – her mother’s word for her father’s temper – which the author also recognises in herself and interprets as linked to loneliness and bitterness. She refers several times to a curse, before her mother clarifies, ‘the women in our family are cursed with ghosts’ (p. 108), but it is not until later that this trope is deeply explored.
In the second part of Plastic Budgie, de Zilva reflects on what it means to write an ending. Suddenly she is all self-awareness. The reader can orientate herself and see that the genres gestured at in the previous section are now to be unpicked. The sense that we were being given a summary, rather than immersed in a world, crystalises into an interrogation of the sort of narrative the author should write, an acknowledgement of the weight of conflicting expectations, and the struggle to reconcile warring versions of herself. She recalls different drafts with different foci:
First this started out as a series of random events, like when I poured noodles on a family from a balcony in Darwin. At one point, it was a verbatim recount of obsession with horses and the lead singer of The Killers.’ (p. 123)
She then interrogates her preoccupation with doubling, tracing the presence of twinning all through her life from her Western horoscope (Gemini) to her Chinese one (the equally duplicitous rat) and evokes a struggle with ‘the part of me I couldn’t avoid’ (p.130). She asks her grandmother in Hong Kong if there is any way to end a haunting, to which the woman replies simply, ‘No.’ de Zilva juxtaposes Western medical explanations of hereditary illness with her family beliefs about family curses and explores the legacy of being raised with cultural notions that can’t be reconciled with her Western existence. She explores how she has been shaped by her family’s beliefs and muses that her culture does not really acknowledge trauma, unless you count the opera where the swan princess escapes the ugly frog. So, she goes to the one place everything is acknowledged: Reddit.
At this point, I should out myself as an Anglo Australian reader. Despite being half Chinese, I was raised by my Anglo parent, and when I read, I read with Anglo Australian eyes. I was very conscious of this as I was reading Plastic Budgie, particularly as it was pitched to me as a memoir ‘with themes that resonate for many readers’. I wondered if I was positioned wrong to read and respond to the text as intended. While de Zilva’s mother tries to make her more Australian, as a young person my own discomfort was often prompted by the keenness of others (of adults) to engage with me as a Chinese person when I had no sense of myself as any such thing. The further I read, though, the more it seemed that these were exactly the questions the memoir was dragging to the surface. What is an Asian Australian narrative? Who is it written for and who is it read by? Should a writer be defined by her mother or by her father? Is one more of an outsider when viewed as Chinese in Australia, or when viewed as Australian in Hong Kong? How much weight should we give to medical explanations, and does this mean giving correspondingly less weight to more marginal epistemologies? All of this leads to perhaps the biggest question of our times: what counts as truth?
The doubling that de Zilva writes of hints at a discomfort – or split – between the two halves of her identity: Asian and Australian, mother and father, the observer and the observed, the child and the adult, the inheritor of a curse and the recipient of a diagnosis. Such doubling of identity has been a feature of other recent works. I’m thinking of Pip Adam’s Nothing To See, in which each character has dual selves who live parallel lives in two separate bodies. I’m thinking too of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which interrogates the phenomenon of doubling in online, political and cultural life, and what this says about polarised culture. After posting a question on Reddit about her haunting, de Zilva learns that many users feel that it is common for people to be frightened of themselves. She then admits to deleting her search history of mentions of ghosts and hauntings, signalling the shadowing between covert online activity and the curated online self of social media. Again, shades of Klein. Deconstructionist and performative approaches to being Chinese have also been features of other recent Australian works – such as Siang Lu’s Miles Franklin-winning novel, Ghost Cities, in which the protagonist achieves a level of celebrity when #badchinese starts trending, a reference to his failure to perform his Asianness in a way that is acceptable to others.
de Zilva’s bio tells us that she wrote her master’s thesis on representation of Asian-diasporic identity in contemporary Australian publishing, and this interest is explicit throughout the text. It may be that in this post-truth era where information is curated for the individual internet user, and where beliefs are chosen to suit one’s identity or agenda, the unified and linear Asian-Australian narratives of writers like Alice Pung and Li Cunxin are giving way to more meta and internet-based approaches to bicultural identity. Some readers of Plastic Budgie may miss the cohesion of earlier waves of creative non-fiction; others may be heartened that Asian-diasporic experience has moved sufficiently towards the centre that attention can now be focussed on questions of self-representation and the implications of how we tell a story.
FERNANDA DAHLSTROM was born in Melbourne and has made homes in Darwin and Brisbane. She practised law for eight years, in the Northern Territory and Queensland.