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The diversity of Ouyang’s readings suggest that the changing relationship between Occident and Orient has more complexity than Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism proposes.
From time to time in this book, Ouyang Yu asks whether anything has changed in Australia, but he gives us plenty of evidence that it has. His examination of Australian fiction traces the shift from populist denunciation of the Chinese to a conscious engagement in understanding the Chinese experience in the years since the 1970s. Brian Castro, an Australian of Portuguese-British-Chinese background, is a major contemporary novelist by any standards; he is a literary innovator and brilliant stylist no matter the subject of his work. Castro’s experience and writings invoke a more internationalist understanding of culture than can be found at any earlier period of Australian history.
The last fifty years have seen humanity’s greatest displacements of people through migration, so the isolationism and paranoia of the past cannot continue. We all need to know and understand each other. When I taught a course on the 1890s a few years ago, my class of Australian students was shocked on reading William Lane’s anti-Chinese diatribes and a range of writing from otherwise respectable writers; in fact, they could not read some of it because it was so far from their own understanding of acceptable attitudes. Though she gained some populist support for a time, Pauline Hanson’s opinions do not represent contemporary Australian attitudes; she is just one of the many different voices heard in a society where people feel free to draw mustaches on pictures of royalty.
Australians now have a prime minister who speaks Mandarin—a new era of Australian-Chinese relations may have begun. Ouyang Yu’s study is a timely contribution to the reexamination of Australia’s relationship to China.
Professor Susan Lever
University of New South Wales, Australia