Brian Castro's Fiction: The Seductive Play of Language By Bernade ...

While his plays, short stories, and novels appear at times to tell radically different stories, all are concerned primarily with the nature of language and the relationship between writing and reading. Castro investigates repeatedly the themes of public and private, writing and autobiography, and identity and hybridity.

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong on 16 January 1950, the second child of Portuguese, Chinese, and English parents. His father, Alberto José Castro (1905–1975), was descended from Spanish, Portuguese, and English merchants who settled in Shanghai at the turn of the century. His mother, Jessie Maria Castro (née Ewing), born in 1925 in Canton (Guangzhou), was the daughter of a Chinese farmer and an English missionary. This confluence of nationalities and cultures meant that Castro was raised in a household that used a mixture of English, Cantonese, and Portuguese languages. His mother spoke little English while his Liverpudlian grandmother was fluent in Cantonese, his father fluent in Japanese. He grew up speaking Chinese until his father insisted he learn only English and French. From an early age, therefore, Castro discovered that language was something that respected no borders. The celebration of language as a means of freedom, as a way of escaping the constraints of reality, informs all of Castro’s writing. As he notes in ‘Writing Asia’: ‘Language marks the spot where the self loses its prison bars—where the border crossing takes place…The polyglot is a freer person, a person capable of living in words and worlds other than the narrow and the confined one of unimagined reality’ (Looking 152–153). In a later essay, written after the opening chapter of After China was excised from the Chinese translation of that book, Castro emphasizes how movement between languages stimulates an individual’s artistic appreciation, allows us to ‘reinvent ourselves’ and frees up ‘the sclerotic restrictions of our language’ (‘Masked Balls’ 70). He continues: ‘it is only through curiosity about language, through willful misunderstanding and obliquity, that we are able to live within a multiplicity of selves and to encounter new worlds’ (71). It is because of this belief that Castro seeks—largely through play—to explore the maximal potential of language.