Australian Triptych in Chinese-Language Migrant Fiction: Three Tales, Three Periods, Three Images

In 1995, Brian Castro reminded Australians that ‘Other cultures and languages reinforce and enrich us by powerfully affecting our familial tongue. We gain by losing ourselves’ (9). Though Castro was offering a reasonably commonplace transnational musing, Australia’s monoculturalism has often made it particularly hard of hearing when it comes to such pleas for enrichment. By the time Castro wrote, Anglo-monoculturalism, already perturbed by Aboriginal rights movements and sallies from the children of Southern European migrants, had been looking untenable for a decade (Gunew, Framing Marginality 8–10). True, writing by European migrants and displaced people had for some time been incorporated into ‘the new political vision of multiculturalism’ according to which ‘authors were representative of an ‘ethnic’ viewpoint under the rubric of national narrative(s)’ (Persian 155). But such accommodation was unsatisfactory, for multiculturalism tended ultimately to require ‘a final moment of absorption of difference back into unity at the level of language and national identity’ (Morris and Frow ix). Therefore, even as the ‘cultivated singularity of Anglo-Celtic (white) Australianness’ (Khoo 15) was being officially dismantled, few scholars ventured beyond the boundary of the English language to gauge perspectives ungrounded in a national Anglosphere. Australia might now have many cultures, but everything could be relied upon to occur in English, it would seem.

The Anglophone assumption for Australian writing was so dominant that even a category such as ‘Chinese-Australian literature’ has been constructed, without much scrutiny, as a category of work in English, with Brian Castro’s 1983 Birds of Passage a landmark publication for its formulation (B. Chen 5). Studies of this body of work thematically defined it in terms of diasporic memory and identity (5) or questions of cultural hybridity (8). This can be worked out in political binaries that apply to wider categories of ‘migrant’ writing: the ‘migrant success story’ and ‘migrant as problem – the reverse side of the success story’ (Framing Marginality 194). Sneja Gunew, who identified that binary, has been a key figure in seeking to look beyond the Anglo-Celtic space. She was already doing this in the 1988 anthology Beyond the Echo (with Jan Mahyuddin), which selected works by women of non-Anglo-Celtic background, but also in critical work such as Haunted Nations in which she sought to dissociate nation and multiculturalism to create ‘multi-multiculturalisms’ (132). Despite eloquent calls for attention to the ‘multilingual archive’ (Huang and Ommundsen ‘Towards’; Gunew Post-Multicultural Writers; Ommundsen ‘Multilingual Writing’) the framework for Australian literary studies has proceeded within steel-clad Anglophone walls, even as many of the critics and authors have themselves been multilingual.

It is only very recently that other languages of Australian literature have become more audible. However, as Wenche Ommundsen noted over a decade ago, ‘by far the largest body of writing produced by Chinese Australians is in Chinese and not in English, and for that reason very rarely taken into account when critics survey the field of Asian Australian literature’ (‘This Story’ 507). There is also a substantial reception history in Chinese, not only from publications in Australia but also in literary studies publications in Sinophone Asia. The work of bringing that scholarship into conversation with Australian literary studies as practised in English remains to be done (Zhang; Y. Wang).

In parallel with ‘Chinese-Australian literature’, almost invisible, a lively Chinese-language creative and critical world was also considering the question of Australia. Attempting to deal with this corpus, little noted in the Chinese world, and marginal in Anglophone Australia, means that the researcher ‘must document the existence of the corpus, of the tradition, while grappling with the criteria that establish them’ in the hopes of ‘render[ing] public a literary vein’ (Loriggio 21). In recent years, the most prominent development in this area has been surrounding The Poison of Polygamy 多妻毒 (1908-10), a historical novel of Cantonese gold rush experience in Victoria (Huang and Ommundsen ‘Poison’; Wong). New interest has also begun to attend the poetry produced in the years shortly before and after Federation in the Chinese press (Stenberg and Lam Travelling). Arguably, it is the influx of migrants from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the late 1980s and early 1990s that constitutes the most important corpus of writing about modern Australia in any language besides English, representing as it does a large body of fresh new experience from a group of migrants largely unfamiliar with Australia’s national narratives and liberated from the restrictive publishing environment of the PRC. Since that time, while never as effervescent as in the 1990s, Sinophone writing on Australia has remained an intriguing and understudied area, offering a vital resource for broadening and complicating the Anglocentric base of Australian literature.

Australian Chinese studies took sporadic note of the literary production of these new arrivals. Translations of two novellas were produced early in the emergence of this category of writing (Jacobs and Ouyang) and elicited a modest academic response in the 2000s (McLaren; Louie ‘Australian Lovers’, ‘Returnee Scholars’; Liu). That response was largely focused on identifying how these texts envisaged life in Australia and how employment and race relations were represented. Occasionally, an effort was made to situate the work within a broader PRC literature, such as Shen Yuanfang’s comparison of work by Shi Guoying and Chinese literature’s 1990s succès de scandale, Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (Shen Y.). But that clutch of articles only scratched the surface of this rich corpus, and little more was translated. A vast body of work of writing in Chinese about Australia since that time has barely been subjected to research at all.

Chinese-language writing also has consequences for Australia’s image, since these texts both shape and reflect the views of this country in China’s global imaginary. Liu Xi Rang, himself a prolific author of Chinese-language fiction set in Australia, sometimes of an autobiographical character, described the influence of his generation’s writing in the following terms:

Chinese people had an impression that Australia was a kangaroo country, with the Sydney Opera House and a lot of sheep. However, after Chinese students started coming to Australia around the time of [the] Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, together with migrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, Chinese-Australian writers have opened a window on the Australian landscape for Chinese readers around the world (10).

Similarly, Bruce Jacobs and Ouyang Yu in 1995 characterised a Chinese (and American) point of view of Australia as ‘a large, empty country with a preponderantly agricultural and mining economy, strange animals like kangaroos and koalas, a “white Australia” which discriminates against its Aboriginal population, extensive beautiful sandy beaches, good sportsmen and women, a British offshoot located in the Pacific’ (3).

Ommundsen is among several scholars who have worked hard to bring Chinese-language writing into focus for Australian studies. Work of the last fifteen years on Chinese-language writing in Australia considers both the early heritage in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of Federation (Huang and Ommundsen ‘Towards’, ‘Poison’; Luo), as well as the writings of the Tiananmen generation (Huang) – i.e. the migrants of the late 1980s and early 1990s who remained in Australia due to new legislation in the years following 1989 enabling permanent residency for PRC citizens who had entered on student visas (T. Wang). Ommundsen has also led the way in trying to integrate Chinese-language and English-language literary production, sometimes while attempting to absorb Chinese-Australian texts into a wider category of Asian-Australian literature (Ommundsen ‘This Story’, ‘The Literatures’). Increasingly, too, the work of Ouyang Yu, prolific writer and translator of fiction and poetry as well as anthologist, academic and longtime commentator on Chinese-language Australian production has begun to be incorporated into global accounts of Sinophone cultural production (Gallo). At the same time, efforts are being made to lay the groundwork for more substantial engagement with the Chinese-language cultural production of Australia and its place in global networks (Stenberg ‘Chinese-Australian). Nevertheless, this corpus has remained generally outside the purview of both Sinophone mapping and accounts of Australian multilingual literature.

Much has changed in Chinese-language views of Australia since the ‘Tiananmen Generation’. This article extends the existing scholarship by situating the Australian image of the 1990s texts within a longer historical perspective. To do so it takes a key piece of fiction set in three different periods of the Sino-Australian relationship – The Gates of Decadence by Shen Zhimin, set in the Hawke/Keating years among migrants of the ‘Tiananmen Generation’; Travels with Anthony through Time by Andongni, set among Chinese students in the first decade of the twentieth century; and ‘The Australian Uncles’ by Yang Fang, a tale of Chinese migrants to Australia written at the nadir of bilateral relations in 2021. With attention to the archetypal account of Australia each work offers, I examine how the images track against migrant social class shifts and geopolitical dynamics, suggesting how fiction represents an arena where social forces are brought into human relations with one another (Lukács 1955) and in so doing shape the representation of the country. While in the 1990s themes of employment hardship and sexual intrigue predominated, by the 2000s conditions had improved for many in China, and new migrants to Australia arrived with greater financial resources. ‘The Australian Uncles’, the most recent example dealt with, is by contrast written from a position of China's cultural confidence and reflects a more brittle attitude towards migration to the West.

Like some other recent work on Chinese-language cultural production in or about Australia (Yue ‘Contemporary Sinophone Cinema’, ‘Notes’; Gallo; Stenberg ’Chinese-Australian Culture’; ‘Remembering’) this article makes use of the idea of the ‘Sinophone.’ This concept, built by analogy on active categories of literature such as Francophone and Lusophone, was first popularised by Shu-mei Shih (‘Global Literature’; ‘The Concept of the Sinophone’) and since then has been much debated and elaborated. At its core the Sinophone seeks to separate literature written in Chinese from that written in China. In this article it is used denotatively, designating ‘Chinese-language texts’ about Australia. While maintaining the default frame of national literature to some extent (as one must, to some degree, while writing in a journal called Australian Literary Studies) it expands that frame linguistically. What is revealed, rather than a marginal multicultural minority in a deaf Anglophone outpost, is a node in an important and global pattern of Sinophone literature.¹ The Sinophone thus highlights the problems with installing nationality as a default frame, a literary iteration of a problem also familiar from social sciences (Wimmer and Glick Schiller). Use of ‘Sinophone’ moreover usefully clarifies a separate corpus, since the monolingual default in Australia means that the term ‘Chinese-Australian literature’ both implies citizenship and belonging and is already occupied by Anglophone works of Australians of Chinese descent.

The measure of how inapposite simply subsuming this corpus into a ‘Chinese-Australian’ category is illustrated by the fact that none of the protagonists in the works under examination are Australians by citizenship during the course of their respective works. The Gates of Decadency features a Tiananmen Generation migrant who overstays his visa but ultimately acquires permanent residency; in Travels with Anthony the protagonist is a Chinese student; the narrator of ‘The Australian Uncles’ visits Australia only as a tourist. Regardless of whether the authors of these texts are Australian citizens or residents, they reflect and shape Chinese-language views of Australia, but have differing relationships to the category of ‘Chinese-Australian’ and cannot be adequately incorporated under that category. Using the Sinophone frame has the added advantage of coherently distinguishing between Chinese-Australian texts written in English (Anglophone) and those written in Chinese (Sinophone), a distinction which the polyvalence of the term ‘Chinese’ in English – ethnicity, language, citizenship, culture – reliably muddies and confuses.

Shen Zhimin: 'The Gates of Decadence'

Australia in The Gates of Decadence: A Chinese Man Sinking to Australia 墮落門：沉淪澳洲的中國男人 (2011), as in Shen’s fiction generally, is a site of hardship and struggle, a feature which it shares with the more classic Anglophone migrant novel of navigating and overcoming challenges through hard work. The antagonists of this struggle are not only the Australian state and its employees but also the protagonist’s rivals and enemies within the Chinese community. The goal of the struggle is to progress from holding a student visa to becoming a car-driving homeowner with a settled Migrant status. Australian society is represented as materialistic and callow – it represents the ‘decadence’ of the title, which infects the Chinese migrants. Ironically, having come to Australia to pursue a dream of riches, these migrants seem to be falling behind as China rapidly grows rich and Australia stagnates. However, despite its negative attributes, migration to Australia seems in the end to be a positive decision, a paradox rendered possible due to the picaresque qualities of the novel. The hero, Old Xie, is a rogue, and so he is well-equipped to identify and don the roguishness of his host country. It is a place where, if necessary by hook or by crook, anyone can make good.

The novel’s cast and setting among the migrants of the ‘Tiananmen Generation’ presents a social milieu which maps closely onto social history. In the late 1980s, the number of Chinese speakers in Australia suddenly mushroomed due to the establishment of visa pathways by enrolling in ‘English Language Intensive Course for Overseas Students’, making Australian visas the ‘easiest as well as the cheapest to obtain’ among desirable foreign locations. The resulting language students largely ‘had little intention to study English’ and instead ‘planned to work and to save as much money as possible’ (Jacobs and Ouyang v-vi). Freed from the strictures of state censorship and presented with a raft of new experiences, arrivals to Australia from the PRC in the 1980s and 1990s rapidly began to chronicle their lives in Australia in reportage, fiction, poetry, radio drama and any number of other genres (Jacobs and Ouyang; Louie ‘Australian Lovers’; McLaren; Stenberg ‘Remembering’, ‘Troubling Others’; Sun et al). After the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, pathways to permanent residency opened gradually, and this wave of migration resulted in something like 45,000 people from PRC becoming residents of Australia.² This period was fruitful for fictional accounts of migration to and life in Australia in Chinese, little of which has become available in English translation. The Gates of Decadence was published two decades after the events it describes, but Shen himself belongs to this generation of migrants, and his fiction has remained focused on that period and milieu. The Gates of Decadence is a satirical account of the life of a Chinese immigrant in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne, in the 1990s. Publication occurred in Taiwan, with funding from the Sinophone Australian Nanmin Foundation.³

Clues in the text indicate that the protagonist, Xie Changjia, known to all as ‘Old Xie’, arrives in Australia at the tail end of the Hawke years (1983–1991), lives there throughout the Keating era (1991–1996), with the novel concluding during the Howard administration, likely shortly after the millennium (and about ten years before the book was published). Shen arrived in Australia in 1990 and had published in the Australian Sinosphere since at least 1996, when his fiction appeared in Ouyang Yu’s journal Otherland. Old Xie had appeared in Shen’s earlier fiction; in curriculum vitae he hews closely to the author. In his postface, Shen positions The Gates as addressing a particular group of readers, peers of his: ‘those people who came to the new continent Australia 20 years ago from the Mainland, at about the same time as me, the so-called ‘foreign students’, but who were actually people just drifting abroad’ (332).

The episodic plot is concerned with characters’ erotic desires and misadventures on the one hand and bureaucratic entanglements on the other. Sometimes amusingly, sometimes poignantly, Shen chronicles the personal and professional travails of this migrant generation, but the author’s introduction makes it clear that the book’s central theme is experience abroad per se. This experience is marked by material and idealistic dreams:

Old Xie went abroad, Old Xie became an illegal immigrant, Old Xie got shut up in the Ministry of Immigration’s big prison, with a shake of his tail Old Xie became an Australian permanent resident. Old Xie got married, Old Xie had to get divorced. Old Xie is an ordinary bloke but he has followed an extraordinary path – ordinary and extraordinary, like the cracking of two eggs against each other. What oozes out is a heap of sticky egg white and egg yolk, and that’s the tragicomedy of Old Xie’s life. (6)⁴

The episodes present Australian migration as a constant spin of the wheel of fortune. Xie experiences sudden financial windfalls including a lottery fortune won and lost, not to mention the rapid gains of the 1990s Chinese stock market. Erotic liability and the search for status go together; thus, his time spent in Western Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre is a result of an attempted seduction of the wife of his (Chinese) boss at Paris Bakery. While in Villawood, he initiates another romance with a woman detainee, who remains attached to him – at least while they are both inside, after which she drops him. Xie Nina, his wife, reappears in the last one-third of the book when she unexpectedly arrives in Australia, although the marriage breaks down and she has a child by another man, Old Xie’s former close friend. By the end of the novel, Xie has no money, wife, or girlfriend, but remains at his house in suburban Melbourne, essaying survival schemes by raising chickens and cabbages.

Old Xie and his friends are something between the archetypes of Lebenskünstler and schlemiel, always looking for the get-rich-quick angle and a portion of belonging in the face of a usually absurd and sometimes clueless Australian bureaucracy. Attempts to play the system frequently go comically awry, as when an effort to secure a friend’s residency through fake marriage with a prostitute proves useless when it emerges that she is in fact a New Zealand citizen.

For these characters, schooled in the reemergent capitalist social relations of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up period and receptive to Australian property fetishism, success in Australian society is defined by house and car. Xie’s wife, coming belatedly to join him in Australia, does not learn much English. But she does

learn some things at the immigration school, she had found some things out about Australian society. Australia was big and sparsely populated, you saw next to nobody on the streets, but every household had a car, the streets were full of cars. So one day she just asked Old Xie ‘Everyone goes in and out in their own cars, you’ve been here so many years, how come you don’t even have some crappy car?’ (212).

He buys a car to placate her. Xie takes his wife out driving and

said to his wife with satisfaction: ‘Now we’re part of the car-owning classes, just look how powerful it is. If my pals in China knew that I’ve got my own car now, they’d die of envy.’ Xie Nina [his wife] answered, ‘There’s more and more car-owners in Beijing now, and everyone gets new cars, and what used to be Nissans are Mercedeses now.’ (212–13)

China’s rapid development means that Xie's Nissan no longer suffices to impress fellow migrants. Even as these characters achieve material goals, they are challenged by a new affluent class back home. Before long that class would be sending its teenagers to study at Australian universities, as is the case in our next text.

Andongni: 'Travels through Time with Anthony'

The Hu-Wen administration (2002–2013) was marked by the internationalist mega-festivals of the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo. In this period, China’s political establishment and urbane middle-class reached a peak of openness towards the world and acquired considerable self-confidence. This shift coincided with developments in literary culture, for the arrival of the internet created a sea change for the Chinese literary scene. Very quickly it began to eliminate the gatekeepers of Chinese fiction by making works directly available online, and to affect the style of print publication (Lovell). Andongni’s novel Travels through Time with Anthony陪安東尼度過漫長歲月 (2008), reflects both these political and literary transitions, representing a middle-class immigrant voice accustomed to digital communication and with substantially more social and economic capital than the Tiananmen generation. Like the 2007 television series Wait for Me in Sydney 在悉尼等我, such fiction ‘satisf[ies] Chinese curiosity about foreign countries and display[s] a fetish exoticism in depicting the Other’ (Song 108).

Travels through Time with Anthony is a 2008 novel composed as a series of diaristic autofiction in fragments by the pseudonymous author Andongni (the standard transliteration of ‘Anthony’). Andongni, born sometime after 1980, authored a series of works (of which this is the first) that deal with the life of a student, also called Andongni, in Melbourne. The series was successful enough to spawn a 2015 film of the same name, and at the time of its greatest popularity was an important element of the Chinese popular view of Australia.⁵ Travels concerns the impressions of Anthony as he transitions from adolescence in China to student life in Melbourne.

The novel situates itself firmly among works known as the ‘youth fiction’ of this period, as signalled by the preface to the novel by the best-known ‘youth author’ Guo Jingming (b. 1983) – in 2008 himself at the apex of his popularity (Lovell 12). Andongni aims for a similarly popular and youthful vein. The voice of the narrator in his diary entries is casual, distractable and reminiscent of blogging. This feature corresponds to an episodic but chronologically linear and realistic structure of the text.

Andongni got his start publishing in Guo’s literary journal Zui xiaoshuo, with Guo’s staged ambivalence an indication of the urbane detachment associated with such fiction:

On the phone, he [Andongni] resolutely told me ‘You have to write it [the preface],’ sounding like he was the CEO of [Guo’s company and the book’s publisher] CASTOR. Since he was phoning from Australia, I decided not to hang up on him. But when I heard him say ‘I think it was amazing that I got to meet you, and that I started to write, and that now I’m bringing out a book is entirely because of you, so, Number 4,⁶ I beg you!’ I was defeated. (21)

Andongni’s narrator bears similar features to Guo’s Shanghai characters, who represent ‘the entitled middle-class self of the global city’ (Huang and Dong). Like Guo, Andongni typically follows ‘stories focusing on the tribulations suffered by young Chinese adults against contemporary urban backdrops’ (Lovell 12) although the tone is desultory and disconnected. Andongni’s Travels adopts a similar tone and theme, with the innovation that this impressionistic backdrop is Australia and these characters are PRC students in Australia or their local acquaintances.

Guo’s introduction characterises the novel as resembling ‘a long holiday, as nice as lying at the beach reading a great book, drinking black tea, listening to good music’ although it also contains ‘solitude and loneliness, occasional accents to these long and quiet times’ (23). Where The Gates was episodic but eventful, the days trickle past in Travels, barely distinguished by events. The narrator Andongni meditates on how to fill his leisure time, what consumer goods to buy and where to travel, what profession to pursue, and occasionally the prospects of heterosexual romance. The novel’s mundane observations of student life in Melbourne are enlivened by frontmatter containing whimsical cartoons of a boy in a rabbit suit, occasional interpolations in English, and sporadic sallies into wry humour. Punctuation is sparing, and most observations are presented as clauses separated by oversize gaps, giving the impression of diary entries input into a word processor, or of the era’s texting (when punctuation was relatively onerous, and often left out). Everyday observations outweigh the lyrical, and very few passages gesture at the reflective, let alone the philosophical. The tone is at times rather fey, not least because of the considerable attention given to a temperamental pot plant called Guzzi. Some entries are addressed to a stuffed rabbit.

If the form is a reflection in literary style’s response to technology, the dissimilarity between this view of Australia and that of The Gates is a result of Andongni’s better migrant class position. Like many migrants and sojourners in the Hu-Wen years, Andongni arrives in Australia with far greater resources and security than the characters of Tiananmen generation writing. On his first evening in Melbourne, in March 2006, he notes ‘when I went to sleep didn’t have any special feeling just when I got up in the morning I just said silently to myself i’m abroad hey’ (63). He experiences less status anxiety, faces no visa insecurity, arrives in Melbourne already speaking competent English, and spends disposable funds on regional trips as a curious backpacker. For Andongni, the choice to study abroad in Melbourne also allows him to see the world (he returns to China for the holidays by way of a tourist trip to Japan), improving his status (this generation’s employment prospects were greatly improved by foreign study), and broadening his experience. He is comfortable but not super-rich: though the struggle to keep legal and financially afloat which dominates Tiananmen Generation writing has disappeared, Andongni still needs part-time work to get along. However, rather than manual labour or doubtful get-rich scheming (the occupations and preoccupations of Shen Zhimin’s characters), Andongni takes traditional student employment: part-time gigs at stores and restaurants, much of which gives him the impressions and anecdotes that constitute his image of Australia.

A typical entry, dated October 20, 2006, notes:

Got two more jobs

Greek restaurant met Vincent who’s super sweet he’s worked here for over three months next week he’ll be made chef then i can get promoted from dishwasher to making salads and entrées

Aged care job starting day after tomorrow i guess it’ll be a challenge because i have to prepare lunch dinner for fifty or sixty people

oh we’re on summer time now it’s three hours difference with china (115).

Much of the novel is occupied with such inconsequential, sometimes mildly amusing notes and observations. An entry for the Queen’s Birthday (June 21, 2006), ‘so we have a day off work even though it’s Monday’ contains the musings ‘In that case the Queen is a Gemini I guess that suits the British style full of love’ and reflects on how Australian beer caps look the same as Chinese ones but in fact are twist tops (84).

Minute observations accumulate, generating a vision of Australia where plurality and diversity are valued and where Chinese students exist on more or less equal terms with other residents of a diverse society. For instance, Andongni’s working life involves meeting gay colleagues. An entry for September 10, 2006, reads in part

Mum found out I’m working in an Aussie restaurant when I started working she sent me a mail: the restaurant people aren’t mistreating you are they? i wrote back and said no

later after working there for a while i found out that the boss was a homosexual and that among the kitchen staff and servers there were some other men who like men sometimes they ask each other how is your boyfriend?

and then once when I was on a video call with mum I happened to say a couple of things about what was going on the restaurant and much to my surprise she started going nuts over in china told me i had to get a different job i had to talk till i was blue in the face and all i got out of that was well see what you can do about it it’s made everyone really unhappy

and then after a while i had forgotten all about this and then yesterday i got a mail from her at the end of it she carefully asked me they don’t treat you too well do they? I answered her and said no

Oh [The pet stuffed rabbit] Peerless I feel like my mum hasn’t got one thing straight which is men who like women don’t just like every woman they meet right never heard that some girl because her co-workers are straight men decided to get a different job right (98).

Cultural difference and sexual minority here is the stuff of casual observation rather than racial anxiety, and the education system, without being too onerous, seems to provide a way forward to a middle-class profession and a cosmopolitan lifestyle. While it is not a style given to great enthusiasm or analytical rigour, the impression of Australia is generally pleasant, and Australian racism, whether in everyday or political manifestations, makes little appearance.

Chinese-Australian political relations took a turn for the worse in the decade that has followed, as part of a general Sino-Western and indeed PRC-foreign deterioration. While the reasons for this are complex, including both PRC ambitions and Western anxiety, what is relevant to reading the image of Australia in Chinese texts is the increased antagonistic sentiment towards the foreign in general and to Australia in particular, in the years of the Xi administration (2012- ). Accordingly, the next piece of fiction we examine, appearing thirteen years later, takes a starkly different view of Chinese lives in Australia.

Yang Fang: ‘The Australian Uncles’ (2021)

Looking at the hardship novellas translated by Ouyang and Jacobs, as well as the work of the non-fiction author Sang Ye, Anne McLaren considers the representative view one of ‘Australia as dystopia’ (193). The vision of Australia in The Gates likewise does not represent a romantic view of Australia, with even comic writing depicting a community beset by uncertainty about documentation and compelled to hustle to make a living. There is little sign of Australia’s dystopic side in the fiction of student writers such as Andongni in the early twenty-first century. However, that image might be said to be reanimated by a recent work by the Xinjiang Han author Yang Fang 楊方 (b. 1975).

The blog-like texts of writers like Andongni have continued to have an important presence in contemporary popular fiction, which is increasingly prominent online. Yang works in the realist vein that ‘is still the privileged form of fictional discourse’ (D. Wang 24) in the PRC, and her work fits comfortably into Xi Jinping’s injunction in a 2013 speech to ‘tell the good story of China, disseminate the good voice of China’ (D. Wang 1). First published in the September 2021 issue of Youth Literature 青年文學, Yang’s short story ‘The Australian Uncles’ 澳大利亞舅舅marks the unusual appearance of an Australian setting in the major fiction publications of the PRC. Publication in Youth Literature was itself significant, but its choice in November of the same year as the leading item in the influential anthologising journal Fiction Monthly 小說月報,⁷ indicated strong approval from the cultural establishment. The Australian setting was visible in the title as well as the layout; Fiction Monthly’s set the title story against an image of Australia’s two most recognisable icons: the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House, fading into shadowy figures crossing the street.

The attention given to the short story and the rise it produced in Yang Fang’s profile suggests that ‘The Australian Uncles’ has been a major success for her within the PRC’s official cultural establishment. The fact that the story emphasises the interethnic harmony of Xinjiang and provides a romantic depiction of Uyghur culture would have been highly welcome to the government, helping to refute Western criticism of the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, at a time when Xinjiang issues were a thorn in the side of China’s international image. Less predictable and more interesting for our purposes is its account of Chinese migration to Australia as family tragedy.

When Andongni was writing Travels, Chinese-Australian relations were warming and Chinese students were widely welcomed in Australia, not least for the economic opportunity they represented (Yang and Welch). In contrast, by 2021 the prominent Australian Sinologist Colin Mackerras could note that ‘Australia–China relations began to decline sharply in 2017 and have continued to deteriorate since then, reaching a very low ebb from which it seems difficult to escape’ (37). Foreign minister Marise Payne’s 2020 speech to the UN Human Rights Council placed Australia at the forefront of Western criticism of China for human rights in Xinjiang, drawing a quick response from the PRC embassy that Australia was applying ‘typical double standards’ and making a ‘blatant smear against China’ (Hurst). PRC media compared Australia to ‘chewing gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe’ (Kuo). The pairing of a Xinjiang story with Australian migration therefore especially invites a geopolitical reading. This invitation is reinforced by how Yang’s story also foregrounds anti-Asian violence in Australia, a danger which the Chinese embassy had warned Chinese students about as early as 2017 (Birtles).

Yang is a Xinjiang-born Han Chinese author whose work offers romantic accounts of her native region, including its mostly Muslim non-Han populations. Before ‘The Australian Uncles’ it had been her poetry, full of lyrical accounts of Xinjiang people and scenery, that had established her reputation. On the official China Writers’ Union website, Yang was featured in October 2021, remarking on a Uyghur character she often writes about, ‘riding a donkey to pick apples in an orchard and singing muqam’ (‘Poetry Is an Earnest Art’). According to Yang, he is not an idealised figure but ‘a real personality, you can often see him or them in the orchards along the Ili River. They have to labour hard for a living, their shoes are dust-covered, their faces full of fatigue and wrinkles, but it doesn’t stop them from uninhibitedly singing muqam’ (‘Poetry’).

In the story, Xinjiang is represented as multilingual, multiethnic, multicultural and thrivingly harmonious. Old Man Sidiq, Yang’s idealised singing and labouring Uyghur character, makes an early appearance in ‘The Australian Uncles’:

When Old Man Sidiq chewed people out, the first sentence was always in Chinese and the last two sentences in Uyghur. In Wool Hutong [where the narrator lives] most people spoke that way, Chinese mixed into their Uyghur, or Uyghur mixed into their Chinese, this mixed mode of switching between languages at any time – people from other places would find it odd to listen to, but we didn’t think so ourselves.

Of course, this is fully in line with the regime’s account of the area as defined by natural beauty and ethnic harmony. This, Yang tells us, has ever been the case in Xinjiang, with the history of harmony going back far in the past:

The Han Chinese people in Wool Hutong were mostly people who had come to Xinjiang before 1950, and they could speak many different languages: to express love they used the romantic Uyghur language, to chew people out they used the humorous Kazakh language, when singing they used the expressive Russian language, to argue with people they used the versatile Chinese language, and when they had secrets they didn’t want other people to understand they used the Xibe language.

The image of Xinjiang as a paradise of multilingual harmony contradicts Western (and especially Australian) accounts of the territory as an intolerant labour camp and Australia’s own liberal multicultural self-image. But for Yang it is Australia, not Xinjiang, which offers examples of racist oppression.

It may be that one purpose of the story is to furnish this contrast. There is no indication that Yang has personal experience of Australia, and the story does not really require it, since it concerns the fortunes of the Cao family, the narrator’s erstwhile neighbours in Xinjiang and later migrants in Australia. Rather, stories reach their Xinjiang hometown second-hand, through correspondence and later through audiovisual technology. The narrator is an unnamed Han woman from this town, fifty years old in the approximate 2021 present of the story’s setting, and slightly older than the author. The narrator refers to the eight sons of the neighbouring Cao family as her ‘Uncles’ though they are no blood relations. The story begins in 1979, when the narrator, then a child, learns that the Uncles have suddenly all emigrated to Australia. For the rest of the story, the narration consists largely of the bits and pieces of information the narrator receives regarding their lives in Australia. These are conveyed by letters sent to her family and enhanced by visits home to Xinjiang from some of the Uncles.

At the time the Cao Uncles emigrate, the girl has already heard tell of Australia, and its distinction from the nearby Soviet Union.

But Australia was different, Australia was on a whole other continent, with blue ocean on every side, and I had heard that the country was very rich, so rich that everyone had a car, and people without jobs got unemployment money from the government, six or seven hundred a month, so that even if you did nothing at all you’d still have bread to eat. Su Meilan [the narrator’s mother] said that doing nothing and having food and drink was such a beautiful life (5).

In this way, the common stereotype of Westerners in general and Australians in particular as lucky and lazy and the country’s economy as ill-managed makes an early appearance. In the first instance, they are the preconditions of a ‘beautiful life’. This trope of Australia, appearing also in Travels, was summarised by Nicholas Jose as ‘a rich land given rather unfairly to a small group of whites rendered lazy (if not slow and stupid) by the ease of their circumstances’ (413). Like the related (but probably not causally connected) Anglophone trope of Australia as a ‘lucky country,’ this turns out to have a dark side.

For one thing, Chinese people are not allowed to share in the luck. Instead, they work menial jobs, live several people to a room, and must struggle to survive, some of them by engaging in ‘carrying exploration equipment’ for ‘wilderness work’ (21). Although the exposure to the sun makes Eighth Uncle ‘as black as an Australian Aboriginal’ the Chinese people are treated much better than the Aboriginal guides they work with, who are described as having ‘lived a nomadic life in tents, mainly gathering and hunting, living freely’ until their way of life was destroyed by colonialism. It was only ‘a little over a decade ago that they finally gained equal status and the right to vote’ (22). As the narrative progresses, the migrant uncles are beset by misfortunes caused by their migration to Australia, and the corrosive nature of the white settler colony is extended in a different way to the Chinese body, for the sloth and obesity of white Australians proves contagious:

Fourth Uncle remarried, and sent us a picture, and the woman standing next to Fourth Uncle was blonde, fat – extraordinarily fat – of an uncertain age. We don’t really know how to judge the age of woman of other races. Anyway the woman must have been quite a bit older than Fourth Uncle, or it could be that maybe she just looked old. Su Meilan said, a woman that fat, and of that age, she might not be able to have kids (20).

That inauspicious prophecy is fulfilled: in his old age the childless Fourth Uncle is forced into an aged care home. Again, a broader agenda appears to be in play: traditional Chinese culture is often assumed to have provided, with the values of filial piety and family care, an (often explicitly superior) ‘Chinese answer to long term care of older people’ (Woo 1).⁸ Fourth Uncle explains to his relatives that ‘Australian women didn’t like to have kids, a lot of families were DINKs, and when they got old they went to the old folks’ home[...] “Old folks’ home” sounded pretty strange to our ear’ (20). Not only that, but his wife’s weight has ‘infected’ Fourth Uncle, and when he ultimately returns to China he is so obese that he ‘barely able to walk’ (20). This too, is because ‘Australian women liked high-calorie foods, she had forced him to eat all that meat and butter, and it had all turned into his flesh and fat. Any fatter and he wouldn’t have been able to come back home anymore, because the airplane seats wouldn’t be able to fit his fat ass at all’ (20).

Obesity is not the only medical danger of migration to Australia presented here. The obtusity of Western medicine in patient care, too, represents a great and explicit peril, for the Australian doctors callously insist that the patient be told the truth about his illness.⁹ Upon hearing the results of his medical analysis in Australia ‘First Uncle immediately collapsed. Whereas before he had been able to eat and sleep, now he was suddenly unable to do either. A month later we heard the news of First Uncle’s death. If he had remained in China, perhaps he wouldn’t have died so soon’ (20).

The catastrophes of the Uncles keep coming, forming a kind of catalogue of Western ills. Relief can only be obtained by return to Xinjiang: when Eighth Uncle returns ‘love returned too, poetry returned too: when [his old flame] Walnut and he sat in the moonlight, the moonlight made them look like they were young again’ (36). But Eighth Uncle returns to Australia and the litany of misfortune concludes with his random street murder by a white Australian racist. This occurs only moments after the narrator and her family have completed a video call with Eighth Uncle. Immediately after the call ends, he is stabbed to death:

We didn’t see how Eighth Uncle was slashed by someone coming toward him, how Eighth Uncle drew great breaths, constantly inhaling time, exhaling time. In the end, he ran out of time. The white person looked at Eighth Uncle at close quarters with his blue eyes, then turned and went away. It was like Eighth Uncle had been killed by the gaze, not by the knife. He lay on a given concrete highway of a given Australian city, and there was almost no one about. He lay there for two hours before someone dragged him away (21).

If that episode were not explicit enough, the murderous racism of the white Australian is aggravated by the lenient justice system and directly echoes the original dispossession of Aboriginal people:

The Australian who slashed Eighth Uncle loathed foreigners, which was a little strange, since their ancestors had been foreigners too and only the Aboriginals were the original owners of the place. Because Australia doesn’t have capital punishment, he would be living in the prison, and maybe in a few years he would be set free. (21)

Both features are frequent targets of PRC attention, the first because the light sentence typically offend the reader’s sense of justice, and the latter because it can counter criticism of the PRC with an account of Australian original sin. Thus, when in 2024 Australia’s ambassador to the USA delivered a joint statement with fifteen countries, voicing concern about Xinjiang, the Chinese foreign ministry’s response was that ‘Australia, long plagued by systemic racism and hate crimes, has severely violated the rights of refugees and immigrants, and left Indigenous people with vulnerable living conditions’ (Calderwood and Dziedzic).

With its compendium of negative stereotypes of Australia – dangerous, lazy, unhealthy, racist – the story’s account of Australia was geopolitically convenient theme for this up-and-coming writer, conscious of an opportunity to score some points against Australian hypocrisy, and to place claims about Xinjiang against Australian abuses in much the same way Chinese diplomats did at the same time. While the role of fiction in advancing geopolitical goals may be more familiar from science fiction studies (Silk), Yang’s work is a reminder that the current regime’s exhortation to ‘disseminate the good voice of China’ is a powerful motivator across cultural production (D. Wang 1).

Yang’s work is squarely within the mainstream of Chinese social realist fiction, a genre which stakes its value on truth claims about history. Placed in that context, the story departs, perhaps unknowingly, from its realist basis for the purpose of giving the migration story a suitable arc. The story could not map onto actual Chinese-Australian history, since Sino-Australian relations and Australian migration policy in 1979 would never have permitted more than thirty members of a Han Xinjiang family to move simultaneously to Australia in 1979. The reason given for migration, at least as the then-young narrator understands it, is that the wife of First Uncle is a Shanghai woman, banished to Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution due to connections abroad. Now her auntie has arranged the migration to Australia. One would, I think, be hard-pressed to find any example in that period of Australian migration history of such a large simultaneous family migration from 1979, especially since it relies on an even earlier migrant from the PRC (the auntie) – all but impossible for a PRC resident, while the Cultural Revolution limited emigration and White Australia made entry into the country for Chinese citizens exceedingly rare.

There is thus probably no history of actual migrant experience that lies behind Yang’s sweeping account of forty years of Chinese diasporic life in Australia, nor does the text show remarkable achievement in language, plotting, or characterisation. Since it also is the first work of Yang Fang to appear in such prominent venues, it is reasonable to assume that its success is due to its contrasting depictions of Australia and of Xinjiang, linking these two places at a moment when China-Australia relations were marked by Australian accusations of Chinese violations of human rights, prominently including in Xinjiang. This suggests that the political reading also is primary: in this story, migrants to Australia have drawn the short straw as regards ethnic harmony as well as ethical life and human comforts, all of which are better in Xinjiang. Needless to say, the detention without charge of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs accompanied with a brutal suppression of Uyghur culture, at their height at the time of the story's publication, goes unmentioned.

Australia thus features in this story as an admonitory tale. In it material greed, linked unsubtly to the avarice and corruption of the Republican elite, a favourite and enduring target of establishment PRC political writing (Weatherley and Zhang) leads to the destruction of a Chinese family. They thus lose not only the core values of the traditional Chinese system of ethics but also are cheated of the economic gain they have been enticed by, reaping in the end only violence. This combines a familiar recent PRC critique of state multiculturalism in liberal democracies as a manifestation of colonial hypocrisy with the romantic defence of Han state hegemony, also imposed by means of settler colonialism, in Xinjiang.

Conclusions

Fiction, despite its limited autonomy and its revelatory power, is also a cultural practice rooted in historical conditions, and a critical tool for understanding social change, including migration. However, what is not in English remains invisible to the broader society and literary establishment in Australia. We are still only a little way to discovering what ‘new “Australias”’ (Gunew and Mahyuddin viii) can be made available through multilingual literary criticism.

Read with and against each together, each of the three pieces examined here offers a distinct image of Australia linked to an attitude to migration. Together they offer one legible trajectory for the uses of the Australian setting in Sinophone letters; at the same time they also clarify developments in the images of Chineseness, since each partakes of a familiar practice of ‘alluding to the Occident as a contrasting “Other” in order to define whatever one believes to be distinctively “Chinese”’ (X. Chen 39). Shen’s account of Australia as a place to eke out a living, starting from next to nothing, exemplifies writing from the ‘Tiananmen generation’, the first large group of migrants from the PRC. Andogni instantiates an attitude associated with a later wave of middle-class urbanite arrivals who experienced Australia as part of an elective, cosmopolitan and multilingual lifestyle. Another fifteen years later, when ‘The Australian Uncles’ was published, Australia had developed a bad odour in China, resulting in Yang’s treatment of Australia as a near-dystopic site of disadvantage, violence and disaster – a continent to be avoided, as viewed from idyllic, harmonious Xinjiang.

Even such a cursory glance reveals the urgency of examining texts written in Chinese, since none of these three images closely mirror Australian Anglophone literature’s representations of Chinese migration to Australia, including those by Chinese migrants writing in English. Nor could they be predicted from the Anglophone media’s representations of Chinese migrant populations. Sinophone sources address a distinct readership and tell different stories about Australia as a land of grifters, or of middle-class student urbanity, or of unrelenting disaster. This image, changing according to patterns of migration, class dynamics, and the tenor of Sino-Australian diplomatic relations, offers Australia and its Chinese communities a different suite of mirrors.