Wenche Ommundsen: Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet
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Wenche Ommundsen: Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet[PAGE 595]In the title poem of Ouyang Yu's first collection, Moon Over Melbourne, a homesick Chinese poet compares the Australian moon with the moon celebrated by countless poets in his homeland. The moon is the same, but at the same time it is different. Like the ancient Chinese moon, it inspires poetry—and madness. But in Australia, that poetry is born of frustration and loss, and of everything this foreign moon fails to be. The ‘bastard’ moon over suburban Melbourne even looks Australian. ‘Mooching’ along in an ‘air-conditioned’, ‘I-wouldn't-care-less’ kind of mood, it mimics the country's indifference towards the newcomer and towards everything else: ‘you hang on you all right you no worries mate’.1 Australia and China are both colonizers, but they colonize differently. While Australia is content to plant ‘the rag of a flag/among your rocks’, and then retreat into lazy indifference, China has colonized the moon itself, tamed it, sinicized it and so, it would seem, claimed as its own a symbolic territory. Lulled into a complacent sense of security, a ‘multicultural sleep’, Australia makes no effort to defend its imaginary space, which can be repossessed in the night by the lonely stranger: ‘Never mind their colonising instinct/For they lose you as soon as they touch you/Tonight you belong to me’. The image of the poet howling his frustration, anger and infinite loneliness at an indifferent moon in a sleeping or dead suburb [PAGE 596] perfectly encapsulates the tone of much of Ouyang's writing, as does the ambivalent attitude of the speaker—rejection of the alien land which rejects him and, at the same time, desire to possess it, to make it his own. His preoccupations echo those of a great number of migrant writers: a sense of exile, of living at the intersection of two cultures without belonging to either; an acute awareness of language and of the possibilities and limitations of translation; a complex and conflict-ridden identity accompanied by an over-developed self-consciousness. Ouyang is one of the small but growing number of writers who are writing in English about what it is like to be an Asian in Australia in the 1990s, viewing this would-be Asian country from the perspective of a dominant Asian culture. His purpose, it would seem, is to shake his adopted country out of its complacent ‘sleep’. Any reaction is better than none: rather anger than indifference. His poetry does not make for comfortable reading. When he writes about Australian racism, as he often does, his target is rarely the Pauline Hansons of this world but rather the insidious, unconscious racism of liberal-minded professionals. Writing about sex, he baits the prudish, at the same time leaving women ill at ease with depictions of aggressive male sexuality. Writing about the literary world, he attacks self-serving literary editors, critics and academics who use his work to further their own careers. The risk, as he is well aware, is that in the process he will alienate some of his most likely supporters. Ouyang Yu is not for the faint-hearted: anyone not wanting to see their own ideas and attitudes challenged and their prejudices exposed would be better advised to stay away. But for those who persist, there is verbal and intellectual energy in this poetry, with the power to delight as well as disturb. There is also a sophisticated play with poetic voice, not always apparent at first contact, a disarming self-irony and moments when prosy untidiness acquires the freshness, the surprise value, of poetry at its unexpected best. To read Ouyang's poetry is to follow his own experience of life in Australia, from the desperate loneliness of his first year, when the culture seemed as empty and unwelcoming as the deserted streets of a western suburb, to a complex engagement with a society that both welcomes and rejects him. It is also to observe him negotiate [PAGE 597] an evolving relationship to China—its people, its culture, its diasporic presence in the West. But autobiography is only part of his contract with the reader, and should not be allowed to overshadow the equally important emphasis on poetry as performance. Ouyang's speaker adopts a number of voices and attitudes, varying from anger and aggression to resignation, acceptance and wry humour. The degree of self-awareness fluctuates, even within the same poem. Reading his poems as artless self-expression, as the writer spilling his guts onto the page in fits of anger or despair, is as tempting as it is misleading. The stronger the passion, the more urgent the message, the more likely we are to confuse the personal and the performative and, thus, miss the playfulness. It is not, of course, that Ouyang himself should be dissociated from the powerful views expressed in his writing, but that his repertoire of voices and positions may go unrecognized. In Moon Over Melbourne he shows that racism is a two-way street, and after denouncing the hostile attitudes of white Australians, goes on to demonstrate a similar intolerance when ‘A Racist Chinese Father’ tells his son to pay the ‘fucking aussie bastard’ back with the same coin.2 In this respect, he echoes the performance pieces of another multicultural poet, Ania Walwicz, who, in prose poems like ‘Australia’ and ‘Wogs’, puts on display the prejudices of both old and new Australians, showing that they stem from identical sources: fear, distrust and above all else, ignorance.3 Ouyang grew up in a small town on the Yangtze river, and did a BA in American and English literature at Wuhan Institute of Hydraulic and Electrical Engineering, and later an MA (English and Australian literature) at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He became a student of Australian literature by default; no supervision was available in his preferred area of English literature. In an interview with D.J. Huppatz he says that at the time he had read only one book by Patrick White in translation, and what he chiefly remembered about it was the description of a couple who didn't communicate except that they could hear each other fart.4 For a young poet longing to break free from his country's ban on all matters controversial and indecorous, that proved a lasting first impression. He taught English at Wuhan University for a couple of years and was then offered [PAGE 598] a scholarship through La Trobe University and the Australia/China Council. In 1991 he came to Australia to do a PhD on representations of the Chinese in Australian fiction. Since completing his doctorate, he has mainly worked in interpreting and translation, but at the same time pursues a career as a writer and researcher. He has published two collections of poetry, Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems (1995) and Songs of the Last Chinese Poet(1998).5 A book of poetry in Chinese, The Summer of Melbourne, was also published in 1998. He has completed two other collections, Translating Myself and Foreign Matter, and has published widely in literary journals in Australia and overseas. He has recently finished a novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, extracts from which have been published in Southerly.6 He has translated numerous Australian books into Chinese, and some Chinese prose and poetry into English. Ouyang is one of the most prominent members of the growing community of Chinese writers in Australia, and the editor of its only literary journal, the Chinese-language publication Otherland. He became an Australian citizen in 1998. In a survey of Chinese writing in Australia, Nicholas Jose wonders what the future holds for Sino-Australian cultural encounters: ‘How might elements of Chinese culture become part of Australian culture, not merely as an enriching add-on but a lasting transformation of what exists already, contributing to the creation of something new?’7 Similar questions have been asked, and tentatively answered, in numerous publications over the last decade, from Eric Rolls' two-volume survey of the history of Chinese immigration to recent compilations of oral history in which the immigrant's own voice is heard. Sang Ye's The Year the Dragon Came and Diana Giese's Astronauts, Lost Souls & Dragons are both based on oral interviews that document the experiences and views of Chinese in Australia, but, as Margaret Jones has noted, the two books ‘could not be more startlingly different.’8 Giese's book tells the migrant success story; her informants are for the most part perfectly assimilated, economically secure members of a community that has made the adjustment to a new culture while retaining strong links with those aspects of the Chinese tradition that suit life in diaspora. Racial prejudice is mostly referred to in the past tense, confined to the bad old days of the [PAGE 599] White Australia policy and the rhetoric of ‘the yellow peril’. Sang Ye's anonymous interviewees tell a very different story of Chinese-Australian relations; mutual distrust and accusations of racism, immigrants struggling to make a living and retain a sense of identity in a culture they both envy and despise. Against the racist rhetoric of white Australians (current variants on ‘the yellow peril’) they pit their own yang guizi, or ‘foreign devils'. The stark difference between these two books may be explained by the fact that Giese's Chinese-Australians for the most part have been in the country for a long time; they are members of well-established communities, in some cases able to date their Australian connection back as far as the Gold Rush. Many of them are also prominent members of the community: a real-estate developer, a museum director, a university professor, a politician, a film-maker. Most of Sang Ye's informants belong to what is sometimes called the ‘Tiananmen Square generation’ of immigrants, students or ‘students' taking advantage of relaxed immigration regulations but without the language skills or financial backing necessary to smooth their passage into Australian society. Depending on which of these Chinese-Australian communities we listen to, Giese's or Sang Ye's, our answer to Nicholas Jose's question concerning the contribution of the Chinese to Australian culture could vary significantly. Ouyang Yu may be said to have a foot in each camp. Like Giese's Chinese-Australians, he has mastered the English language and is confident in his dealings with Australian society. He has also achieved a degree of success (a doctorate, publications, awards) in pursuits valued by both host and immigrant cultures. Like Sang Ye's recent immigrants, he has had to face the hurt of personal and cultural disruption, and the disappointment of realizing that his expectations of life in the new country are not being met. Ouyang uses his writing to negotiate the various stages of the migrant's transition from the rejected and angry outsider to someone sufficiently in control of both worlds to forge a contract with them on his own terms. The contract is always unstable, liable to break down and leave him stranded in a no-man's-land of double cultural isolation, but it is precisely in this precarious process that a ‘new’ culture, borrowing from both but resembling neither, can emerge. [PAGE 600]In China, Ouyang explains in the Huppatz interview, all literary magazines are controlled by the government, and it is not possible to publish on such topics as sex or politics, or to express ‘negative’ personal emotions. Much of his poetic output since arriving in Australia may be read as a reaction against this experience of censorship. The sudden lifting of restrictions produced a wish to push to the limits formerly dangerous preoccupations, perhaps testing the new freedom, daring Australia to reveal its own taboos and sense of poetic decorum. The absence of censorship, however, is a double-edged sword—it may signal tolerance, but also a lack of interest. The combined expressions of exhilaration, despair, anger and boredom that are present in many of Ouyang's poems may stem from the perceived climate of freedom and indifference in which they are produced. Anger is not only the predominant sentiment of Ouyang's poetry, it is the very source from which his poems spring. If there is no anger, there can be no poetry:
Alienation, discontent and anger are not simply the products of cultural displacement; they are the defining features of his poetic voice. Ouyang's ‘Chinese’ poems (originally written in Chinese and translated into English since his arrival in Australia) voice a similar feeling of not belonging, of having landed not only in the wrong country but on the wrong planet. Ironically, having felt like an outsider in China, Ouyang had to come to Australia to know that he was Chinese. In the eyes of the Australians, he was Chinese, and the experience of cultural stereotyping forced a reconsideration of what that might well mean, to him. His feelings about China are mixed. Together with nostalgia for the landscape, people and traditions of China, there is also rage. He writes with bitterness about Mao (‘the [PAGE 601] tyrant who rose above millions of millions of blind/idiots/and made a god of himself’10), of the Chinese obsession with money and sex, of its ‘suffocating culture’: ‘chinese is the skin I wanted to shed/ chinese is the blood I wanted to change/chinese is the rubbish I wanted to get rid of’.11 He writes cynically about the current ‘golden age’ of Chinese writing in diaspora, of writers who have been elevated to literary stardom for their tales of concubinage, foot-binding and political oppression. Against its will, China has become ‘the world's biggest exporter of excruciating suffering/and ludicrous lunacy’.12 Ouyang himself is careful not to buy into the tendency to exoticize the cultural history and political horrors of his home country; his own concerns are with the present. Besides, there is no shortage of targets for his poetic wrath in his new life in Australia. The physical and cultural landscapes of Australia are studded with absences: absence of people, of danger, of noise, of want—absence, finally, of life itself. Death is a recurring image for what, by contrast with China, seemed initially a country almost unmarked by human habitation and culture. During the first months of his stay in Australia, Ouyang tells, the only sign of human life in his suburban street was that one night every week rubbish bins lined the street, and the next morning they were gone.13 A giant machine seemed to run the country, and people were screws in the machine. The emptiness, as Ouyang recognizes, was internal as well as external; an image of the loneliness and cultural alienation that reduces the migrant to an inanimate piece of human machinery adrift in a mechanism where there is no place for them. As the outer void starts to populate, the inner emptiness is replaced by a more complicated set of feelings, the most dominant of which is anger at being excluded from normal social interaction. Stereotype is pitted against stereotype as the ‘inscrutable, cunning’ Asian in his turn accuses Australians of being unfriendly, boring, lazy and arrogant. Reactions to racial vilification vary from undisguised hurt (‘Alien’) and bitter irony (‘The White Australian’) to almost triumphal expressions of over-the-top rage and desire for revenge (‘Fuck you, Australia’, ‘Revolution for Australia’). Racism, as the poet shows, takes many shapes, from direct taunts in the street and persecution in the schoolyard to the polite, evasive discrimination practised by bureaucrats and cultural elites. [PAGE 602]It is the latter who are singled out for Ouyang's most bitter indictment. The rhetoric of multiculturalism and equal opportunity might work in areas of unskilled labour, but the migrant with higher skills and higher aspirations has little chance of breaking through glass ceilings of ingrained prejudice. In ‘A Job Advertisement in China’ he enumerates the jobs available to migrants (‘carving chickens washing dishes sweeping the floor/making socks shoes donuts dimsims and dildoes’14), but warns that anything more ambitious will be met by doubts and suspicions concerning standards of language and cultural literacy. In a number of poems, and most directly in ‘The Eastern Slope Chronicle’, he portrays the dilemmas facing the NESB (non-English-speaking background) migrant who has been educated to the highest level in the English language and Australian literature only to find himself barred from academic work in his area because of his ‘foreignness’ and accented English. His character Dao Zhuang, a thinly veiled self-portrait, relies on his factory-working wife and odd jobs while dreaming of teaching English literature. Many educated migrants in this situation prefer to return to China, where good jobs are available and the standard of living now is comparable with that in Australia, but Ouyang's character still hangs on to his precarious existence marked by wounded pride, unemployment and freedom. The Australian literary establishment in several poems disguise their xenophobia as a disinterested concern for artistic standards, arguing that the migrant impostor lacks the linguistic, poetic and even moral sensitivity to produce ‘fine writing’:
In a rare instance of a personal attack, Ouyang in a brief poem vents his anger at the Australian poet most closely associated with the protection of ‘White Australia’ in the literary arena: [PAGE 603]
A sequence in Ouyang's recently completed collection Foreign Matter is entitled ‘Writing Poetry: An Un-Australian Activity’. Anger against Australia indeed appears to be what fuels his poetic engine, but that means that he also faces the dilemma of where to go when he can no longer maintain the rage. When he has to admit, as he occasionally does, that he actually likes aspects of the country (‘i grew to like its maddening quiet’17), we catch a glimpse of a more ambivalent and self-conscious poet, someone who can stand back from the loud, insistent voices of his angry poems with a degree of detachment. We also discover a poetic imagination tuned to a wider range of experience and moods. A seemingly uncharacteristic lyricism creeps into his poetry in descriptions of Australian and Chinese landscapes, and poems about family life catch the intrusion of everyday events into the world of ideas and ideals. In a recent poem, ‘The Middle-Age Romance’, he reflects with irony on what happiness might do to his work: will it trivialize his poetry? will anyone bother to publish him if he is no longer the angry Chinese poet?
Ouyang Yu makes heavy demands on his reader in formal as well as conceptual terms. How does one assess poetry that dismisses current criteria for judgement and aims to set its own standards? How can one criticize poems that in advance answer the critics back by accusing critics of bad faith, inadequate poetic yardsticks and ignorance? When does a deliberately ‘bad’ poem become a good read? Ouyang makes it clear that he is not interested in producing beautiful or even ‘good’ poetry; what fascinates him is the nether limits of the genre. When is a poem so mad and bad that it ceases to be poetry? In a recent poem he writes:
‘Bad’ feelings require ‘bad’ writing requires ‘bad’ language. Ouyang teases his reader by staging outraged critics complaining about the poet's inadequate grasp of the English language and of the proper forms of poetry, only to assure us that any infelicity on his behalf is entirely deliberate, part of his willed ‘badness’ and so, it would seem, good. The ploy serves as a useful reminder that standards for correct English and ‘fine’ poetry are relative, constantly being rewritten. The fact that some Australian journals have opened their pages to Ouyang's work while others have consistently turned it down goes to show that there is considerable room to move, even within current Australian definitions of what constitutes good poetry. There is a danger, however, that deliberate ‘badness’ could silence any criticism; pointing to weaknesses in Ouyang's writing would simply mean failing to recognize the poet's ultimate design. To this critic, however, there are moments when Ouyang's characteristic untidiness and verbal excess are no longer effective, when [PAGE 605] his irregularities speak of lack of control rather than deliberation. Many of his poems are too long, others have throwaway endings that weaken the overall impression. The problem is that, in his less successful poems (or in parts of very good ones), his greatest strength, an untrammelled verbal energy matched with a cheerful disregard for rules, turns into a distracting, almost irritating wordiness. His is the kind of poetry that brings out the editor in the reader and an itch to pick up the red pen and cross out repetitions and redundancies. To this, as to so many other possible objections, Ouyang has a ready answer: his poems are not meant to be taken very seriously, they are too accidental to be dissected by the heavy-handed instruments of literary criticism. The critics are in a no-win situation: damned if they take his poems seriously, damned if they don't. Critics are also attacked for using obscure academic jargon, for exploiting poetry for the purpose of showing off their own cleverness, for feeling superior to the poor poets whose work they dissect and demolish. If one didn't suspect that baiting his critics was one of Ouyang's favourite pastimes, a sport designed to be enjoyed by both players, one would be a brave critic indeed to venture any views on his writing. The question most likely to disturb many readers of Ouyang's poetry is his particular use of the sex/text metaphor, literary creation as the spilling of seed during sexual intercourse or masturbation:
Here poetry is like sex, in that it is natural, a reaction to internal and external stimuli. Like love-making, it is voluntary, an act of communication based on mutual trust. Ouyang plays with a number of variations on this slightly cliched theme, many of them fresh, especially in the linking of impotence with the migrant's experience of a linguistic and cultural hiatus. Sometimes, through a literalization of [PAGE 606] ‘fuck’ as a term of abuse, the metaphor comes to stand very close to the idea of rape, both physical and verbal. As the f-word slides from invective to sex to poetic creation and back again, Australia (‘a country/flowing with gold and fuck-holes’21) and poetry are feminized and figured as potential victims of the poet's combined rage and sexual aggression. Ouyang himself seems aware of the hostile reaction his poetry may provoke, particularly from female readers, and counters it by accusing Western feminists of deliberate misrepresentation of male motivations. It is true that his metaphors are complex, and that the semantic slippage of his terms of abuse is characteristic of the idiom captured by some of his angriest voices; it is also true that the actual female figures who appear and speak in his poems are represented in a sympathetic manner. For all that, I am not sure that it will be possible to lay to rest a certain disquiet about his equation of poetry and aggressive male sexuality. A more fully justified allegation made in his poems against critics and readers in Australia is that their mono-lingual, mono-cultural background disqualifies them from making authoritative judgements about writing based on the language, poetic tradition and cultural knowledge of more than one country. Ouyang has a tendency to exaggerate the cultural isolationism of the Australian literary establishment (he is not, after all, the only ‘multicultural’ in the field), but he is undoubtedly right when he asserts that to most Australian readers of his work, the English frame of reference is the only thing that really ‘counts’. It is not that he writes for a bilingual audience only, but that he regrets the cultural arrogance implicit in the assumption that elements of a foreign culture are somehow irrelevant to the Australian reader. If one wants to read, and comment on, Ouyang's writing from the position of a non-Chinese speaker, one should at least have the honesty to acknowledge that one can only ever present a limited perspective on his work, and leave the rest to critics who share his dual cultural frame. Fortunately for the European critic, his work has clearly been nurtured through contact with European and American literature, as well as other Australian writers. There is enough that is familiar, both in terms of form and content, for us to discuss his poetry in relationship to Anglo-Australian traditions, even if that is only part of its context. [PAGE 607]In Songs of the Last Chinese Poet references to the apocalyptic modernism of Eliot's Waste Land, Pound and Yeats capture the despair of the alienated poet adrift in a country where his hopes have been vanquished and a postmodern world where all certainties have evaporated: ‘spring is the season of death’, ‘the dream of this morning/in which he went fishing again/with a hookless rod’, ‘broken lines written all over scrap paper’, ‘things have fallen apart’.22 The world-weary inhabitant of the contemporary wasteland is then joined by more assertive voices reminiscent of Australian performance poets Ania Walwicz and O as despair alternates with aggression, resigned withdrawal with thirst for revenge. The combination of poetic modes and traditions is disconcerting, but effective; it is precisely what makes Ouyang stand out as a poet who speaks for his time, his own cultural predicament, and that of Australia in the late twentieth century. When, in a sequence entitled ‘Diary of a Crazy Contemporary Convict’, he says of his poems that ‘they are seeds/and will impregnate/a sterile land eventually’,23he is not only expressing his personal aspirations for a poetic afterlife but suggesting that the Chinese immigrant might enrich, even redeem a presumably ailing Australian culture. To the modernisms of early-twentieth-century Europe and late-twentieth-century Australia will be added poetic traditions the nation today can only start to imagine. Ouyang Yu is a disturbing poet, not simply because of the rawness of his poetic voice and the provocative nature of his subject matter. He disturbs because he openly challenges Australia to come clean on issues that many would prefer to keep under tight cover, if only to preserve the illusion of social cohesion. What is Australia's commitment to multiculturalism at the present moment, and what can be the place of the Asian immigrant in the social and cultural fabrics of the nation? In a recent review article Ouyang addresses the contradictions in Australia's attitudes to Chinese immigration: The embrace of Chinese as economically beneficial and the rejection of them as culturally unassimilable and potentially subversive creates a tension. I began seriously questioning what it meant to me to be a Chinese trying to be English or Australian in an essentially European culture. Where is the way out for people such as me? Is our future [PAGE 608] predetermined to be Chinese no matter how long we reside overseas? Are we a people whose only merit is our ability to make money? When one's culture is only represented at its most superficial level-in the Chinese case, in lion and dragon dances, takeaway food, Peking Opera, acrobatics or simply as anything ancient-one is left with a sense of hopelessness that no one will ever go beyond this, not in 100 years.24 In the encounter between China and Australia some locking of horns seems inevitable, as there is cultural arrogance on each side. While many Australians prefer their ‘multiculturals’ to be humble, grateful to be allowed into the country, satisfied with a small cultural space next to the dominant mainstream, the Chinese often regard Australia as an immature, irrelevant and derivative offshoot of the Western world, infinitely inferior, in cultural terms, to their own ancient civilization. There is evidence of such attitudes in Sang Ye's The Year the Dragon Came, as well as in the most arrogant of Ouyang's poetic voices. Australia responds by erecting barriers around certain of its institutions, protecting them, as it were, from too much multiculturalism, or multiculturalism of the ‘wrong’ kind. Australian literature has been, and to a degree still is, such an institution. Universities, the places where literature is taught and canons negotiated, also stand accused of participating in cultural selectivity. The work of Ouyang, read in the context of current debates about what multiculturalism actually means in Australia, whether the m-word should be retained at all, shows the unfortunate consequences of two particular ways of reading the term. One is the ‘ethnic ghetto’ conception, whereby the ‘ethnics’ and their culture are confined (or confine themselves) to spaces outside the mainstream; the tendency is to exoticize and sentimentalize this minority, thus limiting their opportunity for cultural intervention. The other is the possibility that the rhetoric of multiculturalism masks a very different reality, one of indifference, or even resentment. The ‘multicultural sleep’ referred to in ‘moon over melbourne’ is not, to the lonely migrant, a benevolent sleep. It is sleep as absence of involvement, indifference disguised as tolerance, bliss born of ignorance. It is sleep from which Ouyang Yu is urging us to wake up. [PAGE 609]NOTES 1 Ouyang Yu, ‘moon over melbourne’, Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems (Papyrus Publishing, Melbourne, 1995), pp. 8–10. 2 ‘A Racist Chinese Father’, Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems, pp. 70–2. 3 Ania Walwicz, ‘Australia’ and ‘Wogs’, in Sneja Gunew, ed., Displacements 2 (Deakin University, Geelong, 1987), pp. 130, 133. 4 D.J. Huppatz, interview with Ouyang Yu, recorded 19 February 1998, forthcoming in Ulitarra. 5 Ouyang Yu, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (Wild Peony, Sydney, 1998). 6 Ouyang Yu, ‘The Eastern Slope Chronicle’, Southerly, Summer 1997–98, pp. 63–76. 7 Nicholas Jose, ‘Mixed Doubles: Chinese Writing Australia’, Australian Book Review, 183, August 1996, p. 37. 8 Eric Rolls, Sojourners and Citizens (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1992 and 1996); Sang Ye, The Year the Dragon Came (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1996); Diana Giese, Astronauts, Lost Souls & Dragons (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1997); Margaret Jones, ‘Chinese Diaspora’, Australian Book Review, 189, April 1997, p. 7. 9 Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, 5, p. 6. 10 Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, 7, p. 11. 11 ‘Sojourners?’, Tirra Lirra, 4.4, 1994, p. 31. 12 Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, 50, p. 54. 13 Interview with Wenche Ommundsen, recorded in August 1997 for the Deakin University unit ALL 729 Literature and Diaspora. 14 ‘A Job Advertisement in China’, forthcoming in Law/Text/Culture. 15 ‘Epilogue’, Translating Myself, unpublished. 16 ‘Hear, Hear’, unpublished. 17 ‘Sojourners?’, Tirra Lirra, 4.4, 1994, p. 31. 18 ‘The Middle-Age Romance’, unpublished. 19 ‘can you write a bad poem’, unpublished. 20 ‘Untitled’, Moon Over Melbourne, p. 105. 21 ‘Fuck You, Australia’, Moon Over Melbourne, p. 79. 22 Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, pp. 86, 86–7, 83, 78. 23 ‘Diary of a Crazy Contemporary Convict’, Antipodes, December 1996, p. 132. 24 Ouyang Yu, ‘Lost in the translation’, Australian's Review of Books, October 1997, p. 10. |
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