Alice Pung, One Hundred Days

 

- It took me a while to get hooked by this new novel from Alice Pung. A young teen coming of age. A harsh, miserable mother. A broken family. A private school/state school melodrama. It's hardly an original story. 

- But as it proceeds Pung turns this narrative into a gritty and utterly absorbing exploration. 

- This element - electric, pulsating prose - is original: 

Just when Nurse Chin least expected it, along came this demanding peasant yakking away about her daughter being duped, like this was a chickenshit village instead of a big world where smart Asian women could get opportunity and independence.

- Her mother steals the meagre wages her daughter makes at the hairdressing salon, and the generous amounts of money her father gives her. Her justification is that she's the one paying the rent and buying all the food.

- But only rarely does the daughter vocalise her thoughts and feelings to her controlling mother. She only thinks them, which is very frustrating for the reader. She should be railing at her, loudly expressing her anger. Thankfully in the end she does, and it pays off in spades.

- Only an Asian writer could bring Asian family dynamics so vividly to life. Pung has a full grasp of the traditional habits, prejudices, beliefs and superstitions of the older generation, their anti-Western bias setting them against modern science and medicine. This makes for some measure of comedy but it's well and truly overridden by the resulting ugliness and horror experienced by their children and grandchildren. Modernity is a harshly contested zone.

- But Pung also castigates this so-called modernity when needed. The incidental contacts with males dotted throughout, on buses and streets, depict ugly, low rent, feral racists. The mother's urge to protect her daughter and her new baby is not entirely unjustifiable. 

- A thoroughly satisfying read, magnificently written. 

David Brophy, China Panic.

 

- This new book by David Brophy, a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney, is such a refreshing read. It is highly intelligent and informed, and full of facts and insights that so urgently need to be circulated and debated in these hyper-charged times. 

- It would be a mistake to characterise it as 'balanced', a rather meaningless cliche. It aims high, not low, thoroughly destroying anti-China posturing from the usual suspects on the left as well as the right. It names names and doesn't hold back. Clive Hamilton, Peter Hartcher and Hugh White are frequent targets. As is the defence and national security establishment.   

- Brophy's principal contention is straightforward: I see as dangerous any efforts to uphold a flagging American hegemony in Asia, which is now of an almost exclusively military nature. I worry at the visible rise in anti-Chinese racism we see here. And I worry at the worsening levels of state repression in China.

- Heather Rose’s highly lauded fantasy novel Bruny (2019) about a Chinese takeover of Tasmania is judged ‘a deeply problematic narrative’, indulging as it does in tired racial stereotypes. I read this book when it first came out and considered it dreadful. Thankfully Brophy destroys it. 

- The Conclusion addresses an important question of today: what should Australia do if China attacks Taiwan? We should oppose it in the same way we oppose America's wars: with demonstrations, strikes and coordinated international action, but not by calling for war on China ourselves. 

- These reviews on the preliminary page of the book are spot on:

Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

 

- This little novel is so unbelievably powerful. It’s a must read.

- It’s the 1990’s. He is 14 and bullied by Ninomiya and his friends at a Middle School in Japan. A girl classmate, Kojima, who is also bullied, asks to be his friend. Kawakami describes the  bullying in graphic detail and it's horrific.  

- The unnamed boy, the narrator, has a lazy eye, hence his nickname ‘Eyes’. Kojima struggles to be ‘normal’. They write letters to each other and talk freely. Both are from broken homes and unhappy marriages. 

- They are thoughtful, inquisitive and caring, despite suffering immense pain and sadness. 'Why do you think they do it? Why do you think they treat us like they do?’ 

- Kawakami allows her characters to indulge in Nietzschean philosophical musings on these fundamental moral issues. What is 'the right way to act’ here? Kojima is of the firm belief that fighting back with courage is a negative. I know there's so much pain in this, but we have to keep going...A time will come when everything will be clear. The reader can't but be unimpressed. It's a heavy handed moral imperative which is so unrealistic it's virtually other worldly. Nietzsche explored this in his tract Thus Spake Zarathustra, where he castigated the commitment to poverty, humility, chastity and asceticism as 'moralistic mendaciousness'. 

- Kojima also celebrates poverty and isolation. She conspicuously avoids being social, even to the point of rarely washing her hair or bathing. Unsurprisingly she's vehemently opposed to Eye’s consideration of undergoing surgery to fix his eye. She loves his eyes as they are. She refuses in the end to see him again or answer his letters, and begins to starve herself. She's become a victim of a moralistic cult.

- A counter perspective comes from one of the bullies. When challenged by Eyes he justifies his behaviour as having no meaning. It's an amoral universe. Everyone just does what they want...They’re acting on urges...Nothing’s good or bad…Nobody does anything because it’s right. That’s not why people do things.

- Kawakami gives us a superb and beautifully written ending. She could well have opted for sadness and tragedy, but she choses hope. 

(This review in the New Yorker is well worth reading)

(Pan Macmillan have priced this small 167 page paperback at $32.99, which is a complete and unforgivable rip off. In the UK it retails for £9.99. At the current exchange rate it should be no more than $24.99).

Martin McKenzie-Murray, The Speech Writer.

- This is so good and delightful, and a brilliantly funny book in all sorts of ways. It's clever, outrageous and way over the top. McKenzie-Murray's prose is punchy and often vulgar, and his Aussie dialogue hits the mark. 

- Toby Beaverbrook, son of English Baron George Beaverbrook II, tries to bring a measure of Churchillian eloquence to his political masters when he finally lands his dream job as a Canberra speechwriter. 

- The book has not received too many generous plaudits from Canberra-based political and media hacks who seemed to want something far more satirically serious, but these leaden sensibilities are tiresome. The author obviously set out to write a witty, comical, lighthearted read, and he's totally succeeded in my view. 

- There is perhaps an underlying critique of our political and public service elite, where rank self interest and stupidity rules, but it's a light touch. That's all that's needed. 

- The narrator, our junior speechwriter, ends up being thrown in jail for infusing a few drops of LSD into the prime minister's coffee, so he gets to read his memoir to Garry, his cell mate. Garry's comments, dotted throughout, are hilarious.

 - If you're stuck in lockdown, here's something to well and truly lighten the load.