Road to East
Asia
Road to East
Asia
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York University
Vol.3, 1998-1999
Castro began publishing short stories while at Sydney University in 1970. He was joint winner of the Australian/Vogel literary award for his first novel Bird of Passage (1983), which has been translated into French and Chinese. This was followed by Pomeroy (1990), Double-Wolf (1991), winner of the Age Fiction Prize, the Victorian Premier's Innovatory and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, and subsequently After China (1992), which won another Vance Palmer award. His fifth novel, Drift, was published in July 1994. In an interview with Road to East Asia, Castro expresses his views on exilic and hybrid cultures. Highlights:
Wai: Where
is
your permanent home?
Castro:I was born in Hong Kong in 1950 of Portuguese, Chinese and English parents. At 11, I was sent to a boarding school in Australia. I have lived in Paris, in Hong Kong and for many years, in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, but like my familial and fictional forbears, I lead an increasingly nomadic life. Currently, I reside in Melbourne.
Wai: In his
book
Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers (Duke University Press, 1996),
author
Gregory Lee questions the validity of the "mythic monolithic China invented by
the West
and the Chinese obsession with ideas of
authenticity and purity of nationhood." In your opinion, is post-Tiananmen
Chinese exile
literature an offshoot or the cream of the crop of China's literary output
today?
Castro:I agree with Greg Lee that it is hybrid cultures that are really at the cutting edge of Chinese literary output. The post-Tiananmen writers have yet to prove themselves by and large, but they do form the necessary quantity of energetic and different writing from which quality material will surely emerge. They will need, however, to come to terms with being slotted into the box of exilic literature. Like Jewish disaporic writing in the early part of the century, the world is reluctant to recognize such literatures because they form the "background Other." The primary focus, the foreground, is the European Other.
Wai: Are Bei
Dao, Yang Lian, Duoduo, and other Chinese exiles producing
hybrid culture? Aren't their instinctive responses to the daily rituals
and phenomena in Western society quite different from authors of other
national origins? (One professor argues convincingly that Henry James is
an American rather than a British author because only an American would
react as he did to the British-European lifestyle.)
Castro: I think the culture these writers (Bei Dao etc.) are producing is different. And this is the overriding factor. This is the sine qua non of all writing.
Wai: Is
Kenzaburo
Oe's work derivative because the author is exposed to Western culture, has
studied in the
West, and admires some of the authors it has produced? Have foreign influences
made
Oe's work less Japanese and less worthwhile? By the same token, has the abode of
the
Chinese exiles diminished their Chineseness and the worth of their work?
Castro: I think Oe's own words should suffice to answer this one. He said that we often assume the myths of a culture as being the culture. It is important to remove, deconstruct, these myths before a culture can be said to have advanced. I don't think anything has diminished through foreign influences. Literature is enhanced instead.
Language is the world, and any richness encompassed therein is a boon and an advantage. The mono-lingual have never written well, and the best (Joyce, Beckett, Berryman, Rushdie) have always heard the rhythms of another language, another world, another time.
Wai:
American
poet laureate Richard Wilbur believes that art is prompted by art and that
writers (past
and
present) belong to the timeless Republic of Letters. After all, the Imagist
Movement,
which
was influenced by Taoism and the Japanese haiku, has affected the consciousness
of most
major American writers. Have the Chinese exiles in turn contributed
significantly to the culture of their host countries?
Castro: Most definitely so. I think, however, that the results will be slow and long-term in Australia. Unlike the U.S.A. and Canada, the population is small and the reading population is minute... I mean those who actually read novels and poems. Secondly, the self-confidence of these other nations, particularly the U.S., can quite readily cope with difference, since it was and is a nation of immigrants. Australia, on the other hand, has its own problems of identity. It is still not yet a republic, let alone a republic of letters. It is frighteningly Anglo and white and still views Chinese writing--any foreign writing for that matter--as alien and exotic. It upsets me to see some Chinese writers falling into these expectations, namely, giving the orientalists what they thought they knew all along.
Wai: In
Troubadours, Gregory Lee notes that Duoduo resembles Russian poet Marina
Tsvetaeva in her rejection of media-inspired patriotism to construct
romantically a beloved homeland. What is your artistic vision of China?
Castro: Tsvetaeva went against the grain. She sang of Germany when she should have sung for Russia. I admire this rejection of nationalism. You don't become a writer in order to become a nationality. I think poets have a particularly hard time of it because people, countries, tend to make them into national propaganda (poets laureate are necessarily oxymoronic, Wilbur aside). I believe Lee's point about economic zones is a more important one than that of artistic visions of a country. Popularity is not in the end a measure of intellectual and cultural appreciation. Poets are shot, writers are unread. It's an old story. But the endeavor is all important in the end.
Timeless and boundary-less. I have no romantic visions. I just don't think writers and artists have that much importance in the world of politics and economics. What is important is that timeless relevance of being human.
Wai: Of the
Chinese exiles, whose works do you value most? What are the
comparative merits of these poets/writers? Do you think Bei Dao is going
to win the Nobel Literature Prize soon?
Castro: This is a difficult one to answer as I claim no specialist knowledge of Chinese exile-writers. I suppose from my limited knowledge of Bei Dao, that I would count his poetry as some of the best contemporary poetry I've read, but I cannot find any of his publications in Australian bookshops, and have had to consult academic libraries. I think it is the anti-traditionalism I find so refreshing and attractive. Also Bei Dao traverses the Modernistic canvas without compromising his honesty. This kind of honesty is probably more available to poets than to novelists or playwrights, who have to deal more dissimulatingly with other " selves" and characters. I hope he'll win the Nobel. I have no idea.
Wai: As a
writer,
have you helped in any way discover and mold "the national character" of the
Chinese?
Castro: No. I would find attempting to mold national characters most unpalatable. Many Australian writers are attempting to do just that, and I cringe before their embarrassing efforts, because I can see straight through their enterprise. . . to create exotica for the rest of the world, to establish national pride, to become their nation's spokesmen.
Wai: Liu
Binyan,
in A Higher Kind of Loyalty, writes: " . . . it is only on the mainland
that I am in
my element." Could the writers in exile be in their element outside China?
Castro: To be in one's element is self-delusion for a writer. When I returned to live in Hong Kong in 1994-5 I immediately wrote a novel set in Japan. A writer should always be in exile. Hong Kong was in a way, the perfect place of exile because it was in a state of turmoil over the forthcoming takeover. Back in Australia, I am only now using some of that experience.
Wai: Do you
think the exiles have helped to secure a future for Chinese writing?
Castro: I think they have helped open the eyes of others to the "closed Oriental mind," something which Europeans have been fascinated with for so long. They have freshened the air, provided new directions for literature in general. I think it will become increasingly obvious that exile, hybridity, immigration, will be the preeminent forms of cultural experience and expression in the next century. Stay-at-home nationalists will be pretty much outmoded.
Wai:
According
to
Sinologist William Tay, "We should look at Chinese writing from mainland China,
Hongkong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities as an extended family of
Chinese literature." Tay feels that the identity of a writer should not be
decided by where he lives. Do you agree with him?
Castro: I think the problem with William Tay's definition and with others like his is the need to become inclusive in order to render something exclusive. I think there are many Chinese "literatures," and national adjectives are sometimes more obstructive than useful. I feel that we need to broaden the scope of origins and identities so that their very exclusiveness is the fact that they cross borders and they bring into effect a new phenomenon more suitable to the new millennium.
Wai: In a
big-
budget festival, Maxine Hong Kingston was placed in the same group with U.S.-
based
Taiwan writers Pai Hsien-yung and Chen Jo-hsi, who were billed as Chinesische
Autoren
aus Ubersee in German and Asian-American Writers in English. Kingston could not
come,
and was replaced by a Japanese American. Should Kingston have been invited to a
festival
that was Europe's window on the Third World? Is Kingston an American or a
"hybrid"
author? Who is she? Who is Amy Tan? Who are you?
Castro: These conferences are more beneficial to those who organize them. . . viz: they provoke new definitions and papers and underwrite the industry of European manufactories in maintaining constructions of the East. The real question is always who is claiming whom. Given that good writing is always something of an irritant to national consciences (Patrick White, for example), I think it is terribly unfair to force identity upon writers. The result of this is often a schizoid mentality since a writer in Australia obviously wants to be published in Australia and elsewhere, and that very materialist support must coexist somewhat delicately with critique. I think this is the very definition of an "open" society... one in which writing is a necessary counterpoint to national "feel-good" notions, and the more we celebrate hybridity, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, the better the writing will become.
I see Hong Kingston as a very good writer who happens to have some unique locations within her consciousness. I would be less enthusiastic about some others who have used their very "flavor-of-the-month" Chineseness to sell exotica... As for me, I am many selves, some of whom return consistently to where I was born, my Chinese-English mother etc. I think language is the key to all this identity anxiety. A writer works in a language and it is a dialogue between that language and a culture. My skin has nothing to do with it, though how others view me will be a constant factor in adjusting my dissatisfaction with stereotypes.
Wai: What is
your
attitude towards hybridity?
Castro:Hybridity is a plus; not a minus, though host-nations often want hybrids to feel that way. Hybridity is a flowering of multiple consciousnesses and it is often that ambivalence, that struggle within oneself that is the subject of the best literature. Unfortunately, this interiority becomes an inferiority when it cannot work itself out artistically. While hybridity adds a dimension of sensibility, the term itself is somewhat disquieting. In Australia it is too often read in agricultural terms. I was once cheered for being a hybrid because, the woman later explained, all her quarter-horses were the strongest, whereas the thoroughbreds succumbed to various illnesses.
Wai: What is
your
opinion of Jiantian (Today magazine), which was co-founded by Bei
Dao?
Castro: I don't know this magazine, but it is good to see this occurring. I think it is also good to see male Chinese writers coming to the fore, since the predominantly female writers have given the West some false impressions of exile and hybridity. This is a question we haven't touched upon. . . A male Chinese writer in Australia, and one would presume the U.S., has different problems of identity, since he is constantly seen as threatening the (silent) patriarchy of national character and homogeneity. He is also seen as culturally violating the maternal tongue.
I think the Amy Tans have unwittingly played into the hands of host-nation chauvinists because although the woman's position in China, particularly in the past, has been one of servitude and degradation, modern realistic depictions of this reinforces the tableau of "victimhood," and underlines the continuing female subject as sensual, oriental and compliant. I think writers like Shawn Wong have a lot more to offer, in that their male selves are constantly under construction in a desperate and terrorized way. It is a lot more difficult to be anti-traditional, non-assimilationist, non-sympathetic, when national identity is used as a weapon in the cultural wars.
Wai: Do you
consider yourself an exile?
Castro: Oh yes. Even if I were not an exile in terms of state I would be an exile. It is both the writer's condition and his/her instrument.
Wai: Are the
Chinese exiles well received in Australia?
Castro: Chinese writers in Australia form a very small group. . . I mean writers that are actually published here and have permanent residence.
Since the election of the Liberal (Conservative) government in 1996 the policy of Multiculturalism exists only in memory and whatever national or political identity writers of non-Australian background had, has been extinguished. Few, if any, are being published since the emphasis now is on the "free-market" and publishers are not about to risk publishing material they feel will not be popular or sell well. Also, given that most publishers in Australia are now multi-nationals and that smaller, independent publishers are going bankrupt by the minute, the prognosis for any fiercely independent or "different" voices is bleak.
Australia's most important literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, one which would give prominence to an Australian Hong Kingston or Ishiguro, stubbornly refuses to change its conditions of entry: viz: the subject of the writing must be about, or set in, Australia, and it must promote Australia positively. To date, no person of non-English background has won the prize.
Wai: Fiction
aside, have you produced works of other genres?
Castro: I have written a play Secrets, which was performed at the 1994 Sydney Festival, a radio play Nightsafe Area for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and together with Jim Sharman, a screenplay of After China.
Wai: What is
your
current project?
Castro: I am writing a "fictional auto/biography" based on my family's life in Shanghai during the 1930s. It is a hybrid form, which I am using to question all autobiographies and to put pressure upon the concept of nationality, culture and the European tradition.