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    Critique on Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    560 views12 pages

    Sour Sweet

    Uploaded by

    kenchua12
    Critique on Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    BritisH ASIAN FICTION peas Framing the Contemporary Edited by Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim Se CAMBRIA PRESS AMuerst, New York ‘Copyright 2008 Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim All ights reserved. Printed in the United States of America ‘No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permis sion of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: permissions@cambriapress.com, ar mailed to: Cambria Press 20 Northpointe Parkway, Suite 188 Amherst, NY 14228 Library of Congress Cataloging: ISBN 978-1-60497-541-3 (alk. paper) 1 English fiction—Asian authors—History and c South Asian authors—History and criticism. 3. Engl History and criticism. 4. Asians in 6. Asians—Great Britain—Intellecual ual life. L Murphy, PR120.475B75 2008 8237,90995—de22, 2008022008 236 BRITISH ASIAN FicTION 8. For a comelation between adultery and female emancipation in Bangla- deshi literature, see, for example, Selina Hossain’s “Motijan’s Daughters” in Zaman and Azim (98-109). 9. Compare Ahmad (199-200) and Huggan (74). 10, It is worth noting, however, that certain real-life testimonies in Kabeer (233) validate Ali's portrayal of a closed community, especially for women; see also Ahmad (201). \n, howe ply end ian (208) tr a2} -5:4. Cuaprer 13 CULTURAL MISRECOGNITION: A Post-911 REREADING or TimotHy Mo’s Sour SWEET Kenneth Chan Timothy Mo’s novel Sour Sweet is a politically dated novel. I make this seemingly unfair opening statement in order that I might both affirm and resist it. Sour Sweet is a “dated” text when located within the rich cultural and literary history of the Asian-immigrant narrative in Britain, a history which this volume on British Asian fiction amply displays. My calling it “dated” is less 2 slight than it is an acknowl- edgment of its important role in helping to open up an otherwise cul- turally insular British literary establishment to talented Asian authors, First published in 1982, the novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize 238 BRITISH ASIAN FICTION and the Whitbread Prize, and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1983. This critical acclaim spurred Elaine Yee Lin Ho to call “the publication of The Monkey King” (Mo’s first novel) “and especially Sour Sweet in the late 1970s and early 1980s...one of the significant landmarks in contemporary British literature” (1-2). Ho’s praise rests on the argu- ‘ment that Mo is ahead of his time and “that his imaginative access to certain communities and cultures antedates and anticipates popular attention to them”. Sour Sweet “precede[s] the explosions of interest of British literature and the reading public in ethnic communities and subjects” (5). Interestingly, Mo’s work parallels that of his American counterparts Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, who were writing at the same time and were grappling with similar cultural and political concerns: the trials and tribulations of the Asian immigrant in a cul- turally alien and often ravist environment within their adopted home country. Mo generates in Sour Sweet a narrative where members of a Chinese immigrant family negotiate elements of their cultural identity as they struggle to survive and fit into British society; they do this even as they resist the threatening influence of Triad societies on the Chinese migrant community. Though retrospectively, this seems like a rather predictable plotline, it is a critically significant one for its time, as the cultural politics of assimilation, resistance, and reclamation resonate deeply with readers sympathetic to the ethnic minority’s plight. How- over, itis also crucial to understand that this immigrant narrative has its historical place, and thet British Asian writing has sines moved beyond this narrative logic in order to pursue other political, cultural, and aes- thetic concems, Mo’s later work demonstrates this latter tendency: An Insular Possession transcends the microcosmic private spaces of his first two novels to engage the public world of Sino-British geopolitics in Hong Kong’s history; while The Redundancy of Courage, Brown out in Breadfruit Boulevard, and Renegade or Halo? see Mo’s creative imagination roaming the world beyond the Britain-Hong Kong setting, hence signifying the intercultural connections of identity formation and political resistance in a postcolonial era of globalisation and late capi- talist hegemony. Cultural Misrecognition 239 Despite Mo’s recent prolific literary outout, I have chosen to return ‘to Sour Sweet, in resistance to my earlier accusation that the novel is dated, in order to establish why it bears rereading and is deserving of an updated evaluation in relation to contemporary cultural politics. Mo has called his first two novels “exercises” (gtd. in Ho 15), a modest qualifi- cation that characterises the novels as apprentice attempts towards more- ‘mature future efforts, which I completely appreciate from the standpoint of artistic development. However, to complicate this from a cultural per- spective, one could ask: What does it mean to describe Sour Sweet as an “exercise” when it offers the main depiction, in Mo’s oeuvre, of immi- grant life and the construction of a Chinese identity in Britain? In trying to answer this question, I want to point first to a risk that the label “exer- cise” harbours for the British Asian writer: an ethnic rite of passage. The ethnic writer, artist, or filmmaker is frequently expected to produce culturally or ethnically specific work to fulfill their cultural obligations before mor to more “mature” writing that caters to a mainstream Western readership. (I wonder, for example, if the earlier films of Ang Lee constitute a popular cultural instance of this phenomenon.) On the other hand, I also completely empathise with ethnic author’s urgent need to articulate, in literary form, this cultural-identity struggle, which is a cause dear to his/her heart. Therefore, because Sour Sweet offers readers precisely this cultural turn of identity reformulation, it becomes a fasci- nating text to examine the mechanisms of ethnic (in this case, Chinese) identity logic as it informe the literary and narrative structures in the immigrant novel, despite any misgivings ore might have about its artis- tic merit in Mo’s development as a novelist. My goal is to demonstrate that a close analysis of the novel’s narrative form and the discourses ‘emerging from the characters will reveal Mo's literary strategy of expos- ing the problematic culturalist logic present in numerous Chinese immi- grant communities today. In connecting literary formal analysis to the Chinese cultural politics of the novel, I wis to make relevant to a gen- eration of contemporary readers Sour Swe2t’s critique of cultural and material violence that we unfortunately see running amok in a post-9/11 world order. 240 BRITISH ASIAN FICTION Before I begin my analysis of the text, let me provide a brief synopsis, Of the novel’s two plotlines, the central one focusing on the somewhat humourous adventures cf the Chen family, and the other a serious, realist exposé of the Wo Triad society and its exploitation of the Chinese migrant community in London, Chen, an immigrant from Hong Kong, retums to his home village to take Lily, a native of the mainland Chinese province of Kawangsi, as his bride. Lily Chen, whom I consider to be the central pro- ‘agonist, has been trained by her father in the martial ants of the Hung gar tradition, but upon marriage has been relegated to a comfortable but mind- numbingly lonely and bleak existence of domesticity. With the arrival of her baby boy Man Kee, and later her elder sister Mui (who has been invited to join the Chens in London to help with the baby), Lily begins to fill her time with plans for 2 better life for her family—plans that her husband Chen is ignorant of while he works as a server at the Ho Ho Chi- nese restaurant. News fiom Hong Kong regarding his father sends Chen into filial-piety overdrive. The father is under great financial strain from a persistent lawsuit and a medical bill resulting from a fall he suffered. To do the right thing, Chen tums to an unsavoury colleague for assistance, who then introduces him to the Wo Triad society. The Triad society sends ‘money to his father in retura for Chen’s loyalty and allegiance, resulting in his being blackmailed into playing a role in the drug trade, in what capacity the reader is not explicitly told. Meanwhile, on Lily’s initiative and resourcefulness, the Chen family moves to a remote part of London to set up a Chinese takeout restaurant, which becomes a very successful enterprise. One day, Husband Chen vanishes without a trace, leaving Lily, ‘Mui, Man Kee, and Chen’s Father (who has just arrived in London to Join the family) to fend for themselves. Just as suddenly, money begins to arrive from Amsterdam, which Lily believes comes from Husband. The truth, however, is only hinted at through the Triad narrative where a case of mistaken identity has led to the accidental erasure of a drug runner, ‘whose family now benefits from Triad financial support. ‘Writing in his usual realist mode, Mo provides the reader with a third- person narrator’s point of view with a selectively limited perspective. In other words, he holds back sufficient details of the relationship between Cultural Misrecognition 241. the Triad and the Chen family to create suspense and anticipation—will the two narrative worlds finally come crashing into each other at the end of the novel?—while providing only significant hints of the nature of the relationship between the two to effect an ominous expectation of the terrifying drama that is expected to come. The central narrative offers the comforting melodrama of the Chen femily while the Triad narrative forms a sinister secondary plotline that weaves itself around the larger narrative end places a stranglehold on it; or, as Shirley Lim so aptly puts it, this literary structure “shadows, juxtaposes, and imprisons the domes- tic family within the criminal family” (Writing 97). From this stand- point, the interconnecting narratives mirror the socially insular world ‘of London’s Chinatown. The Triads’ social and cultural tentacles find their way into various parts of the Chinese community, hence asserting their control through both cultural influence and violent coercion. Apart ‘from the terrorist methods that they wield, a key reason for their success is the fact that racism in British society has produced ghettos of vari- ous racial kinds, Chinatown being one such urban space. The Chinese community, unfortunately, tums inward as a knee-jerk response to the antagonism directed at them as racial minorities. The Triads then exploit these twin notions of communal vulnerability and cultural patriotism 25 a means of recruiting Chinese members to maintain their network of criminal activities. The cultural reasoring and appeal that the Triads deploy cannot be underestimated here. As Martin Booth, in his book on these Chinese eriminal societies, has estastished, “Ue Triads are related totically to secret societies whose primary aim was originally patri- otic: the re-establishment of the Chinese as rulers of China” (2). Even Dr. Sun Yat-sen was a Triad member who marshaled the societies to defeat the Manchu dynasty in order to set up the Republic of China in 1912 (Booth 14-16). The Triads’ turn to c-ime only began in Hong Kong during the late nineteenth century, and they flourished globally in the twentieth into “an intemational crime network” (Booth 40). Hence, the call of Chinese nationalism is so entrenched in the Chinese psyche that it serves to lock the community and the Triads in a deathly embrace, intensifying the insularity of Chinatown. | 242 BRITISH ASIAN FICTION While the interlocking narratives of Sour Sweet represent and symbolise a cultural and communal tightness, the narrative worlds touch each another (through Chen, who is erased in the end) and never quite meet, creating a sense of alienation in the midst of cultural “connected- ness”. Furthermore, the Chen family and the Triad society inhabit claus- trophobic worlds. In the opening of the novel, the narrator describes Husband Chen as “an interloper” in Britain, a “land of promise”, despite the fact he and his family have “been living in the UK for four years” (5). Depictions of the Chen family locate its members almost exclusively within their home spaces, punctuated by infrequent and tentative forays into the outside world. Lily’s sister Mui becomes obsessed with the tele- vision as a means of escaping from the need to be social. Non-Chinese characters take on a kind of monstrous and alien Otherness. For instance, the Chens’ neighbour Mr. Constantinides is conjured up by the narrator in hyperbolic terms of difference: “You couldn’t very well get a more flesh and blood specimen, redder and hairier, than the present example of, ‘an Englishman” (109). Mr. Constantinides is representative of the nature of the Chen family’s interaction with the British community: business transactions of necessity. ‘This sad isolation is ironic in the context ofthe celebration of worldly connectedness by advocates of globalisation, The Chen family is part of the Chinese diaspora thet rides what Arjun Appadurai has termed the “global cultural flows”, specifically the dimensions of “ethnoscapes” and “fnancescapes”, the movement of people and of funds (33), the lat- ter in the form of Husband Chen’s and the Triad’s remittances to Chen’s family in Hong Kong and, later, the Triad’s money to Lily after Chen’s disappearance. However, transnational mobility does not automatically translate into a better life in a utopian “land of promise”, as Mo so iron- ically points out through the narrator. Like many diasporic and exil individuals caught in the class-defined gaps of global capitalism, Chen pays the ultimate price with his life, and with his family suffering iso- lation, loss, and heartbreak. This migrant family experiences not only racist alienation, but also oppression from their own. Like the Chens, the ‘Triads also take advantage of the global flow, but they belong to a different Cultural Misrecognision 243 diasporic class, which can lay claim to a “flexible citizenship” as the means of exploiting the unfortunate souls in need of help. Aihwa Ong defines “flexible citizenship” as “the cultural logics of capitalist accumu- lation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions... These logics and practices are produced within particular structures of meaning about family, gender, nationality, class mobility, and social power” (Flex- ible Citizenship 6). The Chinese flexible citizen, hence, is the consum- ‘mate businessman who works with a guard capitalism (guanxi means familial or cultural connection in Chinese) to build his capital network. In the same fashion, the Triads tap into this concept of guamxi as a dis- cursive tool of control, exploitation, and violence. The darkness of insu- larity and violence in the intertwining narratives of Sour Sweet denotes this disjuncture in globalisation. The culturalist rhetoric that encodes this

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