Love & Vertigo

A Novel by Hsu Ming Teo

I've had this book on my 'to read' list for a very long time.

I have a little black Book, with artist's acid free paper inside. I carry this little book with me almost everywhere I go and when I stumble across a book, or when I see someone else on the bus or in a park reading something that looks interesting, I note the title & author down. Sometimes, I ask other people to write books down for me. I read in circles and tangents, following authors I like and recommendations from other people.

When I first met my partner, and we were having meetings at cafes to establish whether we were going to become friends, lovers or just not bother, he always had a book to hand. It was one of my little check-ups: I would occasionally turn up just a little bit late and guage his attitude to waiting. The man who kept looking at his watch and had nothing else with which to occupy himself was not for me. The man who, like my partner, had extracted a book and stuck his nose into it before my falsely tardy self appeared got a big 'tick'. I asked him to write a few recommended books into my Book for me to look up and read, eventually.

Hsu Ming Teo's Love & Vertigo was written into my Book, along with a number of other excellent Australian novels, by a poet former friend. The friend is former because she has moved away to another state and we have both been remiss in keeping in touch. She is, I am pretty certain, still a poet.

For some reason, I could never find Love & Vertigo – it was never at the library and I must have been looking in the wrong places in bookstores. I must admit, the title repelled me as well. I did not really have any idea what the novel was about, but I was not sure love and vertigo, together, were things that would capture my imagination.

I was wrong.

Love & Vertigo was an excellent read. Lyrical and humorous, it deals with the reminiscences of a young woman uncovering and telling her mother's life after her mother's suicide. Immigrants to Australia, her ethnic Chinese Malaysian-born father and Singaporean mother have an unhappy marriage and are dislocated in the Sydney suburb they find themselves in. The narrator and her brother absorb and reflect their parents' unhappiness. The novel reveals the disparate searches for Love an individual within a family undertakes and the multifaceted meanings of Love. And the Vertigo? Symbolically, it was the confusion felt by all the characters in the book with their expected cultural, gender and relational roles: obedient Chinese children, submissive wife, breadwinner husband, alienated immigrants.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel – it was incredibly well written and insightful. I finished the novel late at night, my partner asleep beside me. I sobbed through the final chapter: so much of the guilt and self-recrimination were familiar to me.

Hsu Ming Teo captures and documents experiences that I am sure are common to persons ethnically different from the mainstream, or from a family with roots in East Asian and Confucian ideology. And she also uncovers universal aspects of family relations, misunderstandings of love and self, the struggle of the developing individual with the expectations of family and society.

I am sure, had I read this novel in my teenage years, it would have been highly formative for me. It's too late for such a novel to become integral to my person – not any fault of the novel, just that I am quite fully developed in cultural, relational and gender understandings of my own identity – but I was nevertheless moved by the writing.

I eagerly anticipate an interview with the author, to be published in the very first edition of Peril, an Asian Australian journal.

Asian-Australian

Although I am resistant to the pan-Asian tag,* I have finally found some Asian Australian blogs that are worth reading. Yay! Of course, they are in Melbourne - wouldn't you know it? - but that's alright.

Now I no longer have to feel like such a fraud lurking around all the wonderful Asian American sites I had been reading. Especially with May being Asian Pacific Heritage Month in America - the whole thing has been making me want to bawl that nothing like that is happening here. Don't get me wrong - I most certainly will not stop reading the excellent Asian American bloggers I've found. But I'd been wondering whether we Australians were just really slow on the up-take or not introspective enough or ... something. So it's good to see that it's happening here too.

I know, I know - it's been out there all along and I wasn't looking hard enough ...

Anyway, I'm writing this ludicrously quickly (for my slow, proof-reader tastes). It's very late at night (for me); I've got a new resolution to blog only on weekends (although I'm still reading during the week); I don't particularly like this diarising / stream of consciousness posting (who's really interested anyway) but I don't want to forget these links:-

http://tseenster.blogspot.com/
http://hoapham.blogspot.com/
http://bananaasian.blogspot.com/
http://www.asianaustralian.org/

I'll pretty it up later, promise.

* I prefer Viet-Australian, if you're curious.

Women's Magazines

Women's Magazines greet you with pictures of poutingly pubescent girls, extolling a laudable desire to be comfortable with your body while deploring famous people for either being too fat or too thin. Magazines ask that you purchase and consume. There's something out there that is just the thing to make you thinner, younger, more desirable.

I once said to a university friend: I'm never going to look like these women in the magazines. For starters, I'm Asian. The friend thought it was a joke. I wondered if there was something I could buy to make me whiter.

Now, there is diversity. Not only are we confronted with preteen white beauties (and the occasional black beauty), there is also the Asian teenaged beauty, whose skin is just barely yellow, whose eyes are rounded almonds, who's as tall as those white girls.

And somewhere someone tells us it's easier to keep the weight off, if you're Asian.

Pardon?

Sure, it was pretty easy being a skinny kid. I grew up malnourished. Something to do with growing up in a refugee camp. But I now live in the minority, developed world and if I can afford to spend my money on these magazines, I also have full access to the smorgasboard of food high in cholesterol or sugars or fats or salt or all of those things. Being a teenager, physically active and with high metabolism, the weight was pretty easy to keep off. Then I was in my mid 20s, got an office job, was on oestrogen and progesterone for a few years, ate irregularly and exercised less. All the while, I remained Asian, and my tummy rounds out nicely, my thighs develop a fullness that I flatter myself Picasso would have liked.

I grew up. I stopped reading women's magazines. I stopped watching television. I ceased to pay attention to advertisements. I forgot that I was supposed to be beautiful and got on with being myself – I stayed fit and healthy, and the belly bulge didn't bother me. I am enamoured of the idea that Picasso would like my fullness (although I am not Blue. Would Picasso paint “Orangey-Yellow Nude”?)

And then, last week, I read a Women's Magazine. I was at a little cafe for lunch. I did not have my usual armory of random novel. Someone else had taken the daily paper. So I took the first Women's Magazine to hand. It was a foolish, foolish thing to do. It took me barely any time at all to flip through the entire 100-odd pages, but by the end, a creeping sense of dissatisfaction lodged itself below my heart (above the not-flat tummy). The feeling – like the belly – won't budge. I don't look quite right. I'm short. My clothes are shabby. My hair is shapeless. My eyes are too narrow. My skin has imperfections: a mole above my lip, blackheads scattered across my forehead like watermelon seeds spat out onto a barren field, and wayward freckles on my nose are falling onto my cheeks.

Picasso's women are not fashionable.

When I was a teenager, I could dismissively say: oh, they don't represent me, those white girls. But now, these magazines have something on me – they are inclusive. Bai Ling, Zhang Ziyi and Lucy Liu glare out at me. Asian is in (it might even be the new black). If you're skinny, and accord with their notion of perfect, product-selling beauty, they won't care what your skin colour is. Isn't that admirable?

Instead of succumbing to the easy availability of the Women's Magazine, I will confront my abibliophopia and sit, eating my lunch with no reading material. Or I will keep novels like I keep band-aids – at work, in every bag I carry, in the car, hidden along the streets I walk regularly. Or I will read the detritus of receipts that gather in my wallet.

I will not pick up another Women's Magazine.

And I will, eventually, repair my damaged sense of body-worth.

No person's body image was permanently hurt in the writing of this post.