The Asian Century is an Australian document, and its ‘pathways’ to a bright future are intentionally laid out for Australians, not for people in Asian countries. It does not go into the historical idea of a renascent Asia, or introduce to Australians the literature about it, though it is unfamiliar to many. The ‘profound transformation’ Dr Henry calls for is hardly on the scale that Japan achieved in a mere three decades in the Meiji period (1868–1912), and again achieved between the 1950s and the 1980s, nor is it anything like the changes that were brought about in China after 1978. At the urging of late-nineteenth-century internationalists like Fukuzawa Yukichi, even Japanese who were deeply resistant to change nonetheless reversed centuries of isolation, modernised their country, and discarded all their familiar Chinese-based systems of governance, law, commerce, education, and society. Skilfully selecting what they wanted from the West, the Japanese preserved what was at Japan’s core: the emperor, their language, culture, and religion. After Deng Xiaoping, Chinese did the same, at least in technology and trade, though with recurrent debates about Confucius. Imagine Australia ‘Asianising’ itself so rapidly and on such a scale!

Japan’s rapid industrialisation and militarisation amazed the world. In 1903 the cultural historian Okakura Kakuzo’s rousing statement, ‘Asia is one’, inspired poets and writers from India, China, Turkey to  Egypt. After Japan defeated the Russian fleet in 1905, it became a beacon for those seeking to modernise and to reclaim ‘Asia for the Asiatics’. But nationalists like Rabindranath Tagore, Sun Yat-sen, and Aung San eventually fell out with the Japanese militarists, finding them as hierarchical as their colonial overlords. As early as 1931, writing from prison, J.N. Nehru claimed that India, not Japan, was responsible for first inspiring an ‘Asian sentiment’. He and Sukarno pushed ahead with the Asianisation process at gatherings in New Delhi in 1947 and 1949. At Bandung in 1955, Nehru declared ‘Asia reborn’. For them, the century of Asia had already begun.

Postwar Japan rebuilt what became the world’s second-largest economy, and fuelled growth in other Asian economies, particularly China. By 1988 Deng Xiaoping was ready to join Rajiv Gandhi in coining the term the ‘Asian Century’. Ishihara Shintaro’s The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals (1991) inspired a succession of similar ‘say no’ books in China, and the future of a more assertive Asia was discussed in Kuala Lumpur when Malaysian leaders convened a Committee for a New Asia in Kuala Lumpur in 1993. Although it never met again, Mahathir Mohamad went on to co-write with Ishara The Voice of Asia: Two Leaders Discuss the Coming Century (1995). In the following year, his then-colleague Anwar Ibrahim, in The Asian Renaissance (1996), issued a more moderate call for Asians to accept what was of value from the West, but also for the philosophies and religions of Asian societies to be understood and respected. After Japan’s bubble economy collapsed, triggering the East Asian financial crisis, Mahathir proposed A New Deal for Asia in 1999.

But the Asian vision had not been fully realised, and neo-conservatives in the United States still claimed the twentieth century as America’s. Since 2000, Singaporeans in particular have taken to proclaiming this the ‘century of Asia’, and some describe a ‘new Asian hemisphere’ led by China, in which Mandarin could become the language of the Internet. Its leading proponent, former diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, points to an ‘enormous Renaissance of Asian society’ and describes the ‘shift of global power to the East’ as irresistible. The ‘era of Western dominance has run its course’, he wrote in 2008. In the same year, some Indian writers were saying the same, and Shri Kamal Nath went further, claiming that this is ‘India’s century’ and that China’s moment has come and already gone. Yet writers who predict the end of Western dominance never include Australia in the resurgent ‘new Asia’, and when they mention Australia at all they rarely see it as relevant to Asian aspirations. A widespread perception in the region is that Australians are ignorant of Asia. Australia is usually categorised – as we usually identify ourselves – as a Western country. For some in Asian countries this is regarded as a positive attribute: for others, not.

We are what we read. Dr Henry recommends ‘deep knowledge’ of Asia for Australia in the Asian Century, and he is right to urge Australians to take a catch-up course. A good place to start is Pankaj Mishra’s recent From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012). Mishra argues that for the most of the world’s population the most significant event that took place in the last century (not this one) was the intellectual awakening and political emergence of Asia. Selecting those he regards as ‘the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East’ (all men) who took part in this hundred-year process, Mishra describes their perplexed responses to the West’s transformation of their societies, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and ending with the rise of China. Some who welcomed the West’s rationality and modernity resent Westerners who deny them acceptance, no matter how ‘Westernised’ they have become. Others struggle with the West for independence and self-esteem, hoping for support from an Asian solidarity that is sporadic, confused, and has not yet been achieved: hence the writings of those like Mahbubani (The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, 2008) in Singapore, and Shashi Tharoor (The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India, the Emerging 21st-century Power, 2007) about Asia’s expectations in the twenty-first century.

Another good way to start improving our ‘deep knowledge’ is by reading Asian accounts of Australia in biography and fiction. From the 1970s onwards, novels and short stories by both Asian Australians and Australians in Asia have been published in significant numbers, in English and Asian languages, both in Australia and in Asian countries. Written from inside Australia and Asian societies, they reveal unconventional views of both. Plays, poetry, film scripts, and children’s fiction have joined a list that now includes hundreds of works, and more of them appear every year.

‘A widespread perception in the region is that Australians are ignorant of Asia’

The earliest accounts are by Chinese miners and traders, whose warnings to each other about how to survive in a harsh Australia are much the same as those written much later by Chinese students who stayed on in Sydney and Melbourne after the Tiananmen massacre. In 1983 we find writer Xie Kang advising Chinese in Australia that they should keep a low profile and stay out of trouble while finding out all they need to know about ‘foreigners’ (Australians). A Hong Kong student tells Sang Ye (The Year the Dragon Came,1996) that arriving in Australia made her a foreigner, a yellow devil, overnight. In Ouyang Yu’s novel The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002), his protagonist, Dao, is infuriated by the uncouth people around him and the ennui of Melbourne, but on a return visit to China he is equally disillusioned. Others tell stories of spectacular success, like Li Cunxin, whose biography, Mao’s Last Dancer (2003), traces his rise from Chinese peasant, to ballet dancer in Houston and Sydney, to successful Australian businessman, and director of the Queensland Ballet.

As migration from Asian countries to Australia increased from the mid-1960s, Asian Australian fiction and biography began to appear, some of the early authors being Sri Lankan women Chitra Fernando and Yasmine Gooneratne and, later, Michelle de Kretser and Chandani Lokuge. Young women from several Asian countries wrote wittily of the Australia they observed, some adding mythical tales from their childhood, elements of magic realism, social comment, or political perceptions: Beth Yahp, Ang Chin Geok, Hsu-Ming Teo, Dewi Anggraeni, Merlinda Bobis, Arlene J. Chai, Simone Lazaroo, Lau Siew Mei, Lillian Ng, and Nam Phuong, for example. Men from South Asian countries like Adib Khan and Ernest Macintyre have explored the pain of displacement (the latter in drama), while Brian Castro and Nam Le prefer to escape national boundaries and write cosmopolitan fiction. Others find humour in the situation in which their family’s migration places them: Alice Pung, Hung Le, Benjamin Law, and Tom Cho among them.

The experience of migration, painful or pleasant, sad or funny, naturally preoccupies many first-time Asian writers in Australia. For some, their adopted country frees them from constraints and obligations, while others experience disconnection and a dearth of tradition. If Australia fails to meet the expectations of a new life for some, revisiting the country they left can also be disappointing. Young Asian Australians in this fiction painfully try to belong, but many wonder to what: to the culture of their parents’ country or ‘cultureless’ Australia? These are common themes in the English-language fiction of the Asian diaspora in the United States too, as well as in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. Some authors fall silent after their first book. Those who succeed as writers branch out to more eclectic topics. In Australia, some write of an Asian underworld or counterculture located in an almost imperceptible Australian city; some invoke the traditional stories of their first culture; others become global writers whose fictional people may be in Australia or anywhere, while others relish having their own take as Asian Australians on gay and transgender fiction.

Australian writing of Asian countries grew as more Australians visited and began living in the region, among them writers whose tastes had moved on from the fiction of Asia that was published in the early twentieth century. The novelists of the 1970s and 1980s included such familiar names as Blanche d’Alpuget, Robert Drewe, Margaret Jones, Christopher Koch, Ian Moffitt, and Roger Pulvers. Of these, only Pulvers still writes Asian fiction (Japan). From the mid-1980s to beyond 2000 the output fell rapidly, as novelists aged or died, or retreated from the field. Some may feel outclassed by the superior language capacities of today’s Asian Australians, with their intimate knowledge of their first cultures. But the longer writers of fiction continue to live in any second culture, the more the boundaries of identity become blurred. Some, like Brian Castro in Australia or Inez Baranay in India, become disinclined to acknowledge them, preferring duality, mobility, and universality.

Recently, two new trends have developed. The output of fiction by Asian Australians seems to have declined, while some new fiction about Asia by Australians of other backgrounds has emerged, though there is less of it in evidence than in the 1970s and 1980s. Of course, we cannot count the unpublished manuscripts in either group, or discover the reasons for their non-publication. Small publishers remain brave and active, but, as Australian publishers’ and booksellers’ profits decline, risk-averse gatekeepers tend to reject books by unknown writers with modest sales prospects. Fewer Asian Australian titles now appear in the annual prize lists, writers’ festival programs, and newspaper review pages – which are themselves shrinking – than they did in the 1980s and early 1990s. Is this because popular interest in reading about the tumultuous Middle East has displaced interest in relatively peaceful Asia? Is the market for diaspora fiction glutted? Has Asia become ‘normal’ for Australian readers? Is the whole genre disappearing?

Or were the seeds of this decline sown in the Howard era? From 1996, for more than ten years, conservative resistance to Australian engagement, enmeshment, or identification with Asia trickled down to poison much of the study of Asian languages, Asian Studies in schools, multiculturalism, and even, because of travel warnings, Australian travel to Asian countries. A leadership that did not welcome cultural difference took advantage of terrorism to cultivate xenophobia, knowing that ignorance crossed with fear would breed hostility. Succeeding governments have failed to fulfil the expectations of those who hoped for something better, and the ‘climate change’ towards Asia brought about in those years has still not been reversed. The Asian Century can be understood as the Gillard government’s attempt to do so, but it will need proper resources in order to succeed.

A few examples suggest the diverse directions that writers of Asian Australian fiction are taking since the decade in which the political climate changed so dramatically. Some are no longer writing, or are taking their time. The internationally acclaimed author Nam Le has not published a book since his multi-ethnic short story collection, The Boat (2008). In its opening story, the narrator is told by a colleague in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that Asian fiction is ‘hot’, yet in Australia, five years ago, that already seemed like an overstatement.

‘Young Asian Australians in this fiction painfully try to belong, but many wonder to what’

Tom Cho has yet to provide admirers of his quirky fiction with another book after Look Who’s Morphing (2009). Paddy O’Reilly, whose novel The Factory (2005) is the best recent fiction on Japan written by an Australian, now lives in rural Victoria and new interests inform her writing. David Foster has similarly moved on. Nicholas Jose based Avenue of Eternal Peace on events in China in 1989, and followed it with novels of China and about Chinese in Australia, but he now devotes much of his time to academia and other publishing projects. The same is apparently the case for Hsu-Ming Teo, who wrote two successful novels in 2000 and 2005, and who is now pursuing academic work in European history.

For others, teaching creative writing enables them to continue writing fiction. They include Merlinda Bobis, Chandani Lokuge, Simone Lazaroo, Patrick Allington, and Brian Castro, whose latest addition to his complex oeuvreabout Asia, Australia, and Europe, the novella Street to Street (2012), is reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Alice Pung and Benjamin Law successfully write both fiction and journalism. Important fiction about Vietnam appeared in 2012 from Emily Maguire (Fishing for Tigers), and Patrick Holland (The Darkest Little Room).

A few full-time writers survive. Fiction by Ouyang Yu, Linda Jaivin, Gail Jones, and Michelle de Kretser continues to attract admiring readers and publishers. Another loose group of novelists with past connections to Australia through residence or education publish elsewhere, like Don’o Kim (Korea) and Aravind Adiga (India).

Tennis star Li Na’s autobiography has sold a ‘mere’ 900,000 copies. Imagine how much better off Australian writers, translators, editors, publishers, designers, printers, and booksellers would be in the Asian century if they could establish a significant presence for Australian work in this populous region. Australian literature deserves to be better known and more widely studied in Asia, just as Australians should be more familiar with the literatures of Asian countries. Should not the outdated preconceptions about Australia in the region that the White Paper mentions be offset by a new ‘national narrative’, one that is more readily available in Asian countries, in translation and online? Why is there no book program on Australia Network designed for television viewers in Asia? Australia seems powerless to challenge the system by which London and New York predominantly decide which books of fiction in English are published in Asian capitals in significant quantities. In spite of globalisation, or perhaps because of it, much Australian writing, even fiction that is Asian Australian, is still categorised by these distant moguls as non-Asian. Communication technologies are decisively changing the way peopleconstrue the world and access its literature. Conventional book publishing suffers from this, even as creative writing graduates in growing numbers seek publishers, and pressure builds to increase demand for Australian literature. Urgent tasks facing the Australian industry include estimating the market for digital books, predicting changes in the supply chain, adapting to new technologies, and increasing Australian global participation.

Fiction by Nobel laureates and Booker prize-winners will always sell in large numbers. But fiction about Asia that wins awards and does well in Australia is not guaranteed a readership in Asian countries, nor vice versa. In India, Australian novels with Indigenous themes are the most sought after in English, but the translation of Australian fiction has scarcely begun. In China, decisions about what gets translated are unpredictable, and little-known books are sometimes chosen ahead of those by well-known Australians. Chinese fiction of Australia in Mandarin reveals surprising experiences, and includes some bizarre accounts of Australian society. Contemporary Japanese fiction of Australia visualises encounters in the outback that are seen as alluring, almost spiritual, and they also appear in books written for Japanese children. In manga, which reaches millions, Japanese react to Australian food, wine, and mores, but in recent years Japanese fiction about Australia has been scarce, and vice versa.

To aspire in the twenty-first century to make Australia the world’s most ‘Asia-capable’ country, and to seek to improve Australia’s standing as a regional neighbour, would not be out of place. Better late than never. The rewards might be surprising – even mutual.