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- Custom Article Title: Letters | August 2004
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- Article Title: Letters | August 2004
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Different attitudes
Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to John Biggs’s letter (ABR, June/July 2004) regarding my review of his novel, The Girl in the Golden House (ABR, April 2004). Reading Biggs’s comments on my discussion of his use of English names and idioms, I was reminded just how different our attitudes towards contemporary fiction are. We are obviously writing from different generational perspectives, with quite different expectations of what writing, especially that about ex-British colonies, should be able – or at least attempting – to do. Of course I am aware that Chinese people in Hong Kong have old-fashioned English names and have received aspects of an English education, but it was the way that Biggs wrote about and, simply, continued this colonial tradition that I felt compelled to critique. People in Hong Kong have Cantonese names and traditions as well, but Biggs’s characters lacked complexity and believability in this regard. As I suggested in my review, this was most probably not only a result of Biggs’s own cultural background but, more importantly, of his lack of awareness of some of the wider debates that currently surround the practice of Westerners writing about Asia.
Biggs’s concern that I neglected the political backdrop to his novel – that is, the transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule – may further indicate the divergence in our expectations of contemporary fiction. It is true that I did not explore this aspect of the book, primarily because it is a story I felt had been told already by journalists and others, one requiring at least some kind of innovation in the retelling to be worth mentioning in a literary review. Instead, my description of a 1920s literary hoax was given to establish an appreciation of the fact that, at any point in history, we can learn a lot about an author (and reading public) by consideration of what he or she writes about others. For example, a young Chinese woman in Biggs’s novel keeps a journal of her sexual fantasies, calling it her ‘Dragon Diary’, describing the way that ‘inside her tiny cave, behind its silky black doorway’, her dragon lies in wait: ‘Dearest, sweetest Dragon, how fierce you can be!’ Critiques of the colonial imagination and ‘Orientalist’ traditions are now commonly available for all who might be interested in reading them. My review of Biggs’s novel was in part a reflection on these conventions, their origins and consequences; something I found missing from the book.
Christen Cornell, Beijing, China
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