An unlikely review of The Unlikely Doctor by Dr Timoti Te Moke (2025)

 An unlikely review of The Unlikely Doctor by Dr Timoti Te Moke (2025)

 

 

In situations like this I always like to quote Noam Chomsky’s quip that nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely, although a hard-boiled rationalist might point out that, actually, many things are impossible. Nevertheless, many things are unlikely, as indeed the unlikely doctor is. Timote Te Moke’s moving account of his long journey from oppression and destitution to becoming a doctor is of course an outlier, a statistical anomaly, and yet a reminder that in Aotearoa/New Zealand society, on an individual basis, the seemingly impossible can be achieved – one can foreshadow Te Moke’s eventual realisation that being such an unwanted statistical outlier is due to the injustices of a racist, capitalist system. 

 

Born into dysfunctional family circumstances his first 6 years are saved by being taken care by his loving grandparents. When his Māori mother reclaims him to live with her and his Pakeha stepfather and a younger step-brother, all hell breaks loose. Daily physical and mental abuse – including sexual abuse – drive Timote into the arms of similarly abused boys and girls living on the streets, living of petty crime, being constantly harassed by police, jailed and further driven into the arms of gangs. A life of unimaginable cruelty but a life of streetwise brotherhood with its own codes of sticking together no matter what. Alcohol and drugs turn these youngsters into a potent force of solidarity, and yet, Timote retains a certain reclusiveness that stays with him always. There are rescue attempts by the kind Kayes family whose mission is to save street kids from themselves. Mary Kayes, a teacher, re-instils in Timote a love of reading (which he had acquired during his early primary school age when still in the care of his grandparents) but he is always drawn back into life on the South-Auckland streets, in and out of jail. His most serious offence was throwing a Molotov cocktail in front of a bus – no one was injured.

 

Eventually he has one of these Eureka moments that he describes as thinking ‘this doesn’t have to be this way’ and off he goes, on a whim, to Sydney, a change of scenery undertaken by many a Kiwi bloke who sees no future in Aotearoa. Ending up in Adelaide where he first undergoes rehab with good results, sobering up and getting a good job in a security business. Having done yoga and meditation in rehab, he also does gym workouts to get his body into shape, and he became the ideal security recruit, being able to handle any situation, especially as bouncer in clubs and pubs which unfortunately were not exactly the best environments for a recovering drug addict. He even gets married to the daughter of a pub owner and they have a son, having settled down in a suburban house he had bought. Timote for some reason describes their marriage as ‘toxic’ because they both are too smart – both manipulating each other in ways that are not really addressed. While he dotes on his son, the increasingly violent husband-wife relationship ends in divorce – he having hit her. 

 

Having gained a reputation as a tough security worker who took no nonsense, he was eventually recruited (patched) into a local gang involved in gang warfare, notorious for the Australian scene at the time. Having started his own successful security business and being high up in the hierarchy of his gang, he became one of the number one gangsters in Adelaide, navigating this situation with a mix of business-savvy and bouts of violence. Having been in and around Adelaide myself, I recognised some of the locales described by Timote.

 

One of the telling experiences of that time he describes as not being the usual Australian gangster whose main aim in life, is to get filthy rich, but to splash the dough around like a latter-day Robin Hood, with a memorable line (p.129):

 

                  But I guess you could call me the socialist gangster, the outlaw Karl Marx.

 

An interesting idea but one that could not last. The Australian governments of the day put pressure on the otherwise notoriously corrupt police forces to shut down the gangs by all means, including infiltrating, doing double deals, sort of psych-ops as known these days. This caused Timote untold problems trying to figure out who is who – a skill he had honed to good effect until then. His instinct told him that being trapped in a police under-cover operation was endangering his life. He handed in his patch on the way back to Aotearoa. There is a funny sort of story how he sought to repatriate his money - $10,000 cash at a time – flying back and forth with a cousin courier who freaked out, with the end result that most of Timote’s Australian dollars were left behind. 

 

Being back home he reconnected with his whanau, but more importantly he took an interest in Māori politics, getting involved with the Māori Party, learning te reo, and when his beloved nana dies, he feels like being the surviving link in the long chain of Māori ancestors who had established a honourable culture that was destroyed by the European/British colonisers. Part of his mission was now to resurrect Māori culture and society to its rightful place in Aotearoa. Not that Māori politics are all on the same wavelength, what with internal conflicts that can arise from Waitangi settlements. He describes a few instances when on his marae there was an attempt at a power grab to get hold of the compensation assets. Good on him and his cousins to prevent it. Timote’s renaissance as a Māori activist did however nothing to improve his financial situation. Remembering his days at the Adelaide rehab where yoga and meditation had done him good, he had the interesting idea to enrol in the New Zealand College of Chinese Medicine to study acupuncture. While some Chinese migrants to Aotearoa can be quite dismissive of Māori, there are others who appreciate the ancient history of Chinese-Polynesian connections that emanate from Taiwan – not that Te Moke elaborates on it. Maybe it was just one of these subconscious evolutionary memories that rose to the surface. On the surface too, this was the beginning of a most unlikely journey. Now in his thirties, he had to relearn to study, to read textbooks, pass exams, keep on the straight and narrow, avoiding distractions, temptations, voices from the past. He graduated against all the odds. He travelled from marae to marae to offer acupuncture clinics, a service much appreciated but as it was not covered by ACC, there was no money to be earned from it. 

 

Having gotten a taste of study – it took three years to graduate as an acupuncturist – Timote looked for more opportunities. He found it by searching on the Internet: paramedicine. He enrolled for the three-year degree at AUT but initially wasn’t given permission to do the practicum because he needed a police clearance for it. Even though he had a clean record since his teenage years apart from a minor traffic conviction, he was refused. Only after re-applying he was granted permission. But now start the most traumatic events in his life. Having gotten a part-time student job at the Salvation Army Bridge programme to supervise the residents from midnight to morning, this would lead to a catastrophic event. In 2012 one of the residents had returned drunk, smashed the front door and ran out onto Dominion Road. Timote ran after him. The drunk resident advanced on him. Timote held out the palm of his hand. The resident fell back onto the concrete footpath. He died a week later. Another drunk had been on the scene when ambulance and police arrived. He accused Timote of having punched the other guy. The police charged Timote with manslaughter. All the other sober witnesses denied this had happened. It was on the news. I remember it vaguely, sold as typical violent Maori man punching and killing an innocent Pakeha. His former involvement with the Māori Party was played up in the right-wing press as evidence that the Māori Party too was essentially a terrorist organisation. It took 12 moth to get to trial. AUT had again suspended his permission to do practical ambulance service. His defence layer was totally useless colluding with the police prosecution. Timote had to defend himself. All the evidence pointed to his innocence of merely having defended himself from the drunk’s assault. Even the other drunk who had accused Timoti of punching the guy now admitted not actually having seen Timote hitting the guy. Timote was judged not guilty. In the aftermath it dawned on Timote that the prosecution was in itself a racist attack on Māori, so he raised awareness by first complaining to the IPCA, unsuccessfully of course, and then to the Waitangi Tribunal. The media took an interest, e.g. Māori Television and on a TVNZ programme called I am Innocent. Having gained a national media status was of course not welcome in his job as an ambulance officer – having graduated in the meantime, saying (p.201)

 

                  … while I loved the job I hated the company and the comments I would get.

 

Racist morons would call him a killer on the job. There were complaints from fellow ambulance officers, none of any substance. Te Moke then describes his work as an ambulance officer. It is recommended reading for anyone who wants to take up this profession. The life and death situations faced every day and night require a mental and physical endurance of the highest order. Timote’s life experiences to-date had fortified him, and he was very good at communicating with the patients, being non-judgemental, non-racist, non-sexist – pro-human. Eventually he was frustrated at his inability to treat patients as an ambulance officer with limited medical authority. With an amazing sense of logic Timote decided to apply for medical school.

 

Wanting to enrol at Auckland Medical School he sat the UMAT test, got an interview but was not selected. He tried again next year. He missed out again. So, he tried Otago. As a postgraduate student of paramedicine, he could do a one-year pre-med course and if successful enter medical school for the second year. One had to do chemistry, physics, epidemiology and microbiology, which reminds me of having done the same. As a migrant from Germany, having studied psychology at LMU but not having completed it, I had applied to do pre-med at Otago, with a vague idea of emulating my younger brother who had become a famous surgeon in Germany. Being unaccustomed with the English way of university lectures, I had some problems with physics, and just like Timoti, I was not selected for medical school. I had developed an interest in linguistics instead and eventually I got my PhD at Auckland University. Timoti of course, determined as ever, did not give up his dream of medical school. There was one other pathway to apply: as an applicant that had broad life experiences, skills and perspectives. He received an invitation for an interview. He was accepted. Wow! Off he went to Dunedin. He studied hard. I know from my brother that it is a hard slog, especially for the first three years of mainly theory apart from practical anatomy. In Aotearoa it takes six years to graduate. The last three years are mainly practicum. Timoti did his in Wellington. Given his status as a mature student, now in his 50s, he was confident enough to get through even when the going was tough. He still encountered the odd racist medics and the disbelief of some hospital patients that a Māori could be clever enough to become a doctor. Of course, there had always been an elite of Māori academics but none with his background. He heeded the advice he got from a Rarotongan doctor who perhaps in typical Polynesian fashion had told him to become a doctor, not for personal gain but for the betterment of his community, if not the world. Such lofty ideals are often belittled as disingenuous given the salaries earned by even junior doctors, but then again there are those doctors who do live up to the ideal, at least in degrees. One might quote the Chinese barefoot doctors or the poorly paid Cuban doctors who elevated healthcare not only in Cuba but in South America as well, cf. a medical student called Che Guevara. 

 

A graduated Dr Timote Te Moko applies for a position at Middlemore Hospital, on his home turf. He is accepted at the age of 56. Te Moke ends his book by coming back to his Waitangi Tribunal submission about police treatment of Māori and Pasifika, a slow process that even involved having conversations with Police Commissioners, with the somewhat naïve expectation that even the NZ Police could be part of the solution. Unfortunately, in my view, there is much more at stake than that. Harking back to Timote’s quip about being an ‘outlaw Karl Marx’ and my allusion to Chinese barefoot doctors (and Che Guevara) we need Dr Timote Te Moke to be a die-hard socialist, or even a revolutionary, in order to fulfil his last line (p.271):

 

So I will keep going, creating change in such a way that when it’s time for me to leave the earth, the world will know my name; the world will be a better place because I was there.

 

So what the fuck? In terms of literary criticism, one does understand the book’s inclusion of street lingo of fuck this and fuck that and other such shit, but maybe, just maybe, to make this world a better place one should begin with the use of language. I’ve always liked the tragic comedian Lenny Bruce’s routine of saying that since fuck means to make love, one should say ‘unfuck’ you as an insult (Bruce was arrested many times for obscene language). Te Moke’s liberal use of so-called swear words may well reflect the reality of both lower and upper classes using them in abundance while the polite middle classes pretend not to hear them. Perhaps the newly liberated working classes will use language as a medium of cooperative thought and communication with a rational vocabulary that reflects the Marxist call for ‘workers of the world, unite’.  

Leonard from the Beyond

 Leonard from the Beyond

 

There is a three-headed person on my bathroom floor

Next to a large man with a skull cap on his head

There is a dolphin swimming above the door

No, I’m not on acid, he said

 

I’m on a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen

I believe it’s called air

I got it from a dealer selling medicine

In a bottle with chocolate éclair

 

She said just give me the dough

I said go easy on the colloquialism

Five hundred dollars ain’t cheap you know

She was well read in romanticism

 

Lost for breath I walked away

Across the horizon to another airy beach

The poet didn’t know what to say

The future it is murder and out of reach

 

All the bridges were gone, flooded

Electric cars floating past the queen

You are standing on the other side, hooded

Her head waiting in vain for the guillotine 

 

Finally, there is some good news

The violent sun stopped shining

Leonard no more singing the blues

The river lady with her cats is reclining

 

There is no rhyme and reason in eternity

Phoenix smashed to smithereens

Gendered men looking for non-existent fraternity

Women testing their genes

 

He’s not alien life as we know it

We love his past glories and literature

Reading and reciting blank pages of it

 Un-published in a magazine called ob-literature

 

Like the ghost who got lost the dark

Paradoxes and contradictions multiplied

The Cretan liars missed their intersection mark

Human divergence is horrified, glorified, crucified, we lied

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LEN LYE AND ROGER HORROCKS

 LEN LYE AND ROGER HORROCKS

 

 

Strange coincidences (or evolutionary fate): two years ago, we drove from Auckland to New Plymouth, for the first time, for a garden show. With accommodation in the city centre, we had ample time to explore the city, and perhaps not surprisingly, we came across the Len Lye Centre, a totally surprising building clad in gleaming steel. Inside we marvelled at the kinetic and film displays, like something from a different planet. We might vaguely have heard about Len Lye before, but we certainly did not know anything about this Len Lye centre, nor did we really associate the wind wand on the coastal city walk with Len Lye. So much for our poor education. Sadly, on our return to Auckland we more or less forgot about Len Lye and his art, as it had not left a truly memorable impression (we did take pictures of the building). 

 

Move forward to July 2026, when at our Titirangi Poets meeting we were treated to a talk by Roger Horrocks, introducing his re-publication of Len Lye’s Happy Moments, explaining that it had been previously published as an expensive art booklet in 2002 by Holloway Press, i.e. now wanting to make it available to the general public for $30.- a copy. I duly bought one and talked to Roger about Len Lye and the Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth. Only knowing that Roger was a film studies academic at Auckland University, I was quickly brought up to date on Roger’s connection with Len Lye, including the fact that he worked for Lye as an assistant in New York and that he is now intimately involved in the Len Lye Foundation. 

 

Flicking through the Happy Moments booklet, my interest was aroused. Then reading through it in more detail, including Roger’s introduction, and looking at the photographs and Len Lye’s illustrations (his doodles) I was convinced enough that here was an extraordinary combination between two artists (the term used in its wider sense). So, next, I got Roger Horrocks’ 2001 biography of Len Lye, which proved to be a most fascinating read. Having read many a biography (see various reviews on my blog) and having dabbled in this genre myself (with a short 2006 biography of Noam Chomsky) I can now say that this biography is definitely the best I have ever read. The scholarship is impeccable, what with the author remaining at a respectful distance, letting the many voices speak that knew Len Lye intimately and not so intimately. Art critics have their say as much as children’s voices when they see one of Len Lye’s kinetic installations. Along the way one receives an education in modern art, especially film, kinetic sculpture, painting and batik screen printing, and not forgetting writing – in other words, an extraordinarily wide field of artistic endeavours that Len Lye encompassed in his life. 

 

Yet another dimension, as pointed in many a chapter, is Len Lye’s embodiment of an artist per se, the way he dresses, the way he speaks, the way he uses his body and mind to generate art, including his theories of art as an embodiment of the ‘old brain’ that reaches back to the beginnings of evolutionary life forms. Roger Horrocks provides excellent, insightful summaries of Ley’s writings that otherwise might be difficult to comprehend. 

 

The life and times of Len Lye are illuminated with an understated passion and crips precision, so the reader becomes deeply immersed in the subject but always keeping a cool eye on the realities of an artist who is uncompromising in his quest for art for art’s sake, eschewing commercial success or rewards. While Lye does achieve a high measure of critical success, it is never translated into the sort of riches showered on modernist like Picasso, Rothko or Pollock. While Lye is reported to have left no stone unturned in finding sponsors or commissions for his projects, he was always spectacularly unsuccessful. Amazingly he was never daunted by such lack of financial success, maintaining a positive if not always sunny outlook that surprised all his many friends and supporters. Depressive artists are legend, but Len Lye was not one of them. Roger Horrocks evokes a man whose joie de vivre is undiminished until his death that he proclaimed to be ‘sleepy time down south’. Equally there could never have been a more touching note left to his wife Ann: ‘ … No one has had a better life and it was had with your love and unselfish help’. 

 

How did such a man emerge from down-under in New Zealand? Roger Horrocks’ vivid descriptions of Len being brought up in dire straits, what with his father dying when he was only three years old, sending his mother into servitude and having to periodically farm out her children to relatives and friends of the family. Even so Len’s first memory is told us by Len Lye himself in his Happy Moments, a short tale called ‘Flash’. Horrocks reminds us of this foundational story as well, i.e. the uncanny knack to see the ‘light’ in the most unlikely things, like an old kerosene can that he kicks around in a rage as he has been kicked out of the house where his father was dying. As the can is momentarily caught by the sunlight, creating a ‘flash’, little Len ‘stood stock still at it. Lye concludes this first ‘happy memory’ with:

 

We’re all stopped short by wonder sometime and that’s when it first stopped me in my tracks.

 

Lye’s idiosyncratic use of language is ‘wonderful’ to behold. A peculiar mix of colloquial, working class New Zealand English and profound expression makes this what Horrocks calls ‘poetic prose’. While Lyse did not write much poetry himself, he was clearly enchanted by poems or epigrams that supported his ideas about happiness being rooted in individuality. Lye, one of the greatest autodidacts known to mankind – although strangely enough not having much talent in learning languages – must have come across an epigram by Goethe which he ‘loosely translated’ into English and included it in his own introduction to his Happy Moments:

 

                  Kings and commoners,

Rich and poor,

Beggarman, thief,

Will all agree

Happiness is Individuality 

 

While Lye did not identify Goethe’s ‘poem’ in German, it can be identified as

 

Volk und Knecht und Überwinder

Sie gestehen, zu jeder Zeit,

Höchstes Glück der Erdenkinder

Sei nur die Persönlichkeit.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

 

The interesting question is how Lye came across this epigram in German – and not known to know German – and translate it inro English. The mind boggles, unless his polyglot friends like Robert Graves pointed it out for him.

 

In any case, Lye’s philosophical axiom of Individual Happiness Now (IHN) – as the title of a book published with his friend Robert Graves in 1941 – sounds like an unlikely battle cry in the age of leftwing youth politics that championed theoretical collectivism, à la Marx if not Mao Zedong. The hippie movement of the 60s did of course reinsert a type of individualism that at times did not seem to align with purist, Marxist-Leninist politics, e.g. drugs, spiritualism and the like.  Lye’s conception of happiness was however more directed towards being in harmony with nature, to be moved by and with it, and finally to be consumed by it. While he may have been somewhat seduced by the American ‘pursuit of happiness’ – as guaranteed in the constitution -  he never seems to have subscribed to the American capitalist notion that happiness equates to money, indeed he rejected such gross manifestations. The episode, as described by Horrocks, when Lye got close to the seat of American power by making the acquaintance of a Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, seems out of character in the somewhat mistaken belief that such a political grandee might share his particular notion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’. More likely he thought more about the prospect of securing a government commission. However, neither does iit look like that Lye hereby subscribed to the Marxist-Leninist notion that art for the people is to be commissioned solely, first by a dictatorship of the proletariat, and then by participatory democracy as envisaged by Rosa Luxemburg. Art and patronage in the capitalist West have always been difficult subjects for leftwing artists, and while some unashamedly embraced the corporate art market, Lye’s many efforts to get financial support for his projects in the main ran into no-thank-you rejections, mainly to do with the art market’s realisation that Lye’s art is not very marketable, i.e. not profitable. While this was a fate for many a modernist, Lye’s uncompromising stance towards commercialisation added another layer of rejection, especially from the academic art sector that in America – and less so in Europe – equated marketable art as an academic exercise that filtered out non-academic art as dilettantism or as mere craft. Since Ley’s kinetic art has many engineering aspects, it was relatively easy to dismiss his art as craft. While in later life Lye was given the opportunity to enter academia in New York, he did not live up to the academic rigors expected. His freewheeling approach to art as doing and discovering it by yourself – and not learning it from a teacher – left both colleagues and students bewildered. Only the truly dedicated followed his path. Ultimately one might say that the socialist model of art as a domain of the common people – if not the workers – has, to some degree, rescued Lye’s art in the form of a Lye Art Centre in New Plymouth, one that is operated by the New Plymouth City Council, even though, like many an Art Museum in the West, being heavily dependent on private and corporate sponsors. Still, as Roger Horrocks notes, the Lye Art Centre is the only exhibition place in New Zealand dedicated to a single artist. That Len Lye never saw this to come to fruition is perhaps a sad indictment of the Western Art Establishment during his lifetime, i.e. always keeping him on the sidelines. Only his perpetual sunny disposition saved him from getting depressed about such an uncomprehending state of affairs.

 

Getting back to the question where Lye got such a happy disposition despite growing up in relative poverty in the gloomy colonial outback of New Zealand. Roger Horrocks, as a New Zealander, gives us some credible clues. One being the natural environment that even today is a magical concoction of oceans lapping onto rugged lands, still largely uninhabited, and even in the outer suburbs of centres like Auckland and Wellington, the working classes still live in small houses with a bit of garden around it. In Len Lye’s times most everybody lived in houses – however rickety – and like for Len Lye it was easy just to step out and wander up the hill, sit on a rock and take in the vista, watch the sun go down, watch your toes wriggling in the grass, the birds and the bees, the wind whistling, clouds moving fast, in short a rustic splendour for someone who has the eyes and ears for it. Little Len certainly had. At home, wherever that might be, in the evenings, at night what was there to do? Someone had given him a scrapbook and he was happy to draw, to doodle. Pages and pages of it. The artist is born young. To help his mother survive, he and his brother did the paper run in the mornings before school. Money was scarce and sometimes food too. Hard to imagine such a life today. As I was brought up in a little village in Bavaria, us kids too had ‘nature’ all around us, forests, rivers, lakes, hills and mountains, and yet, none of us sat still for a moment to contemplate, to see, to hear, to feel. All we did was to play cowboys and Indians and hang around the village square. On Sundays everyone went to church. I was 18, when to everyone’s great alarm, if not disgust, I filled out a form to say that I officially leave the Catholic Church to become an atheist. Len Lye, to his credit did this much earlier, figuring out that religion did not make any sense, that nature did not need a creator, that nature created itself. In my case, none of us village kids developed any artistic talents, reined in by the credo of the day that making a living meant to make money, and how could you make money with drawing pictures. A ridiculous idea. Once a few select primary school kids, like myself, were shunted off into a Gymnasium (the German version of a select high school) we did have art lessons which some of us quite liked but did not really take seriously. One of my cousins did however enter art school and eventually became an art teacher at a Gymnasium. For some reason he never became a practising artist -maybe because teaching art kills it. However, for some reason, Len Lye did transcend the teachers. To the credit of his art teachers at the Wellington Technical College, they recognised this unusual young man as an artist-to-be even though he seemed to be determined to follow a modernist movement that was as yet unknown in New Zealand, known only via obscure art magazines that Len would find in the odd library. Libraries became his real school, schooling himself, reading assiduously about art theory, art history, art and philosophy, and then later going off to museums and galleries to see what was on offer. Museums held ethnographic art objects from far and wide in those days, and he was particularly impressed by what was then known as ‘primitive’ art, be it from Africa or from closer to home, Oceania (Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia) and even from very close to home: Māori art. Strangely, though, in those days there were few opportunities for a white semi-urban boy to get to know living Māori culture as it was still restricted to rural areas and generally seen as backward, not worthy of serious study. Len Lye therefore was ready to escape this narrow-minded human environment, and off to Sydney he went. Horrocks devotes a whole chapter to this interlude. 

 

Lye was impressed by the Australian landscape, as all people sensitive to landscape are. In those days it was probably only a short journey out of Sydney to go bush. Horrocks mentions that around the same time D H Lawrence was in Sydney, writing his Kangaroo novel, noting that Australians have no ‘inside to them’. While Lye did not necessarily share this point of view – coming from colonial New Zealand – he did however discover the real inside story by reading Freud’s Totem and Taboo – not having heard of Freud before. According to Horrocks, the discovery of the ‘unconscious mind’ was a revelation for Lye, especially via Freud’s contention that ‘primitive man’ projects his ‘inner perceptions’ into the ‘outer world’, what with Māori and Aborigine art at his doorstep.. Lye summarised and annotated (also with drawings) the whole book in a notebook which he carried around with him wherever he went. Ultimately this convinced him that archaic ‘doodles’ arise from the subconscious mind as much as dreams, and that so-called primitive art is in fact a representation of the subconscious mind, as much as much modernist art was to become a true reflection of the inner side of the artist. 

 

Not surprisingly perhaps the next stop is Samoa, having wrangled a job with Burns-Philip as a commercial artist – a line of work that would keep him alive in many of his future adventures. Life in Apia in 1924 must have been a strange experience, what with the NZ-British Administrator Major-General George S. Richardson running the show as a NZ colony, under the League of Nations mandate, having introduced apartheid policies that forbade Europeans close contact with Samoans. Len Lye of course moved into a Samoan village with his Samoan friend and his family, experiencing true Samoan culture that involved a lot of physical labour, gardening, fishing, building and maintenance. He didn’t have much time for his artwork. Still, when he was called to the Major-General to explain himself, he truly stated that he was studying Samoan design. Seen wearing a lavalava the Major-General nevertheless surmised that he was fraternalizing with the natives and thus threatened him with deportation. Len saw an opportunity in the inevitable and thus negotiated a free trip back to Sydney. Nevertheless, Samoa stayed in his conscious and subconscious mind. Samoan tapa cloth designs eventually surfaced in what in my mind is Len Lye’s very best film, namely the aptly named Tusalava which he eventually assembled in London. While he himself evoked Aborigine dreamtime representations, to me it is pure Samoana while at the same time being a universal expression – as indeed the Samoan phrase tusa lava conveys (something like ‘all the same’). Horrocks informs us that the animation film consists of some 4,400 drawings, a staggering feat for a solo artist. The primeval, playful, evolutionary, two-sided flowing motion of peculiar bubbles emanating from some birth-giving form is one of the most amazing animations ever seen. Indeed, I consider most of his other animations a mere variation of the lesser sort even when they turn to more rhythmic line presentations, following African drumbeats or American jazz tunes – Samoan drumbeats are not be disregarded either. 

 

Next in line is the escape to London via a stoker’s ticket on an ageing ship, reminiscent on Kafka’s imagined Stoker trip to America. That Len Lye actually did it, is all the more amazing. It must be one of the most physically demanding – and dirty – jobs ever. Shovelling cheap German Braunkohle sounds like a medieval torture. Living in and observing his body must have reinforced his fundamental belief that ‘movement’ lies at the heart of human existence, toiling away day and night for sometimes very questionable ends, like moving huge ships in the water. Machine movement had become a cornerstone of the industrial age and Len Lye, like no other artist, had come to the realisation that kinetic energy has taken over our lives – art included. While first exploring this idea via animation, Lye’s eventual transition into what he called ‘tangibles’ was his major artistic endpoint. 

 

Once in London, he took to artist colonies like a duck to water, literally living on a barge on the Thames. He made many illustrious friends like Robert Graves and Dylan Thomas, all down and out most of the time, doggedly pursuing artistic dreams that did not pay the bills. There were no corporate sponsors but luckily Lye got some work via the Post Office marketing film unit, baffling some with his line animations which in the end spelled a Post Office slogan like ‘post your letters early’. He also did batik prints that won acclaim, not commercially but amongst friends and associated small art galleries. As mentioned above, his Tusalaveanimation was completed in London but found few outlets as few people, even artists, understood the impact. European modernists as well as experimental film makers like the Russian Eisenstein – who had come to London to give a workshop that Len Lye attended – somewhat emerged from the artistic underground but Lye’s work remained at the periphery. 

 

The bohemian lifestyle of this London circle seems quite incredible in terms of today’s conservative norms, what with Lye and his friends engaged in a merry-go-round of sexual encounters. Semi-permanent relationships developed nevertheless and Len’s partner in crime became Jane Thompson.  A cause célèbre was the relationship between Robert Graves (married to Nancy Nicholson and having four children) and Laura Riding, resulting in a ménage à trois. Eventually Graves and Riding decamped to Mallorca from where they directed the London and beyond artworld. When Lye, Thompson and some of his friends visited them in Mallorca, they stayed for some four months, and Len collaborated with Laura in writing a book called No Trouble. Laura and Robert also produced books of their own and so the three volumes hand-printed by their Seizin Press, 200 copies each, were sent off to London. Even sympathetic reviewers couldn’t make head or tail of them. Horrocks quotes a number of amusing review clips, one which compares Lye to James Joyce and his style of writing, what with James Joyce being misunderstood as well. No Trouble next to Happy Moments is the only published work, even though Lye was a tireless writer of letters (some of which Laura Riding used for her book about letter writing), proposals for artworks, applications for grants, unpublished essays of sorts and ‘explanations’ of his art. 

 

Jane Thompson, the South-African escapee from South-Africa and her well-to-do family – and from her husband – had an unlikely fascination for Len Lye, and as described by Horrocks, eventually became Lye’s wife by marriage – having divorced her South-African husband – and kind of tried her best to both support and reign Len in. Len’s sexual politics that favoured an open marriage did not sit too well with Jane although she accepted it grudgingly. Len’s unique NZ-idiom extends to sex: in his Happy Moments chapter called Moon-dates, he writes:

 

I was just four-ish when two older girls played trying to fit my tassle into one or other of their quims, me mostly on top. It was fascinating manipulation. They’d seen it done. I’m pretty sure I tried to do my bit by trying to pee when my tassle got tucked in – Lord knowns, but I have a hunch I did something exotic.

 

How much more hilariously expressive can you get? Did they have exotic sex parties in London and later in New York? 

 

So, one might as well jump ahead to New York. The story how he got there – for some time without his wife and two children – is of interest to me as a linguist and teacher of ESOL. Lye was invited to New York by an old friend who now managed the March of Time in New York, which was an American newsreel series sponsored by Time Inc., and shown in movie theatres from 1935 to 1951. This film company now hired Lye to produce short films for Basic English that operated on the I. A. Richards and C K Ogdon principle to introduce basic vocabulary to learners of English. The theory was that even a limited set of basic words would be sufficient to communicate quite efficiently with English speakers, and also amongst speakers of other languages who had learnt English this way. Ogden and Richards unfortunately took this to mean that eventually all languages other than English would become superfluous, getting back to the time before the Tower of Babylon. When I studied for my teaching qualification for English and ESOL at the Auckland College of Education (later part of the University of Auckland, where I also had studied linguistics) in the mid 1980s, Richards and Ogden were still high on the list of compulsory reading, never mind that their basic assumptions had been long discredited. That Lye went along with this scheme is probably not a stain on his intellect, as he was simply desperate for any job in the USA to do with films and art. Lye’s eccentric behaviour was tolerated as his innovative technical film skills were a valuable addition to the humdrum filmic outputs that were typical of the time in the USA. Determined to stay in the US he lobbied for his wife (and by then also two children) to join him from war-torn London. While she was most reluctant to leave London she eventually came to New York, which she duly hated. By that time Len hadn’t seen Jane and the children for nearly two years. He had not been idle in his extra-marital affairs, as could be expected from his open marriage ideas. He had hit the jackpot when meeting the wife of a fellow journalist, Ann Hindle, and she was to become his life-long partner. They married in 1948, both having been divorced from their former partners. Jane however stayed on in New York, dependent on Len for accommodation and alimony, and the everlasting hope that he would make it rich and buy her and the children a mansion in England. Of course, it never happened. 

 

Any extra money Len made was spent on his increasingly more expensive art works that required special stainless-steel materials and motors to set his creations in motion. This period of his work is the culmination of his tangible art. Movement is everything. Connecting the moving picture with moving sculpture becomes a subconscious expression of Lye’s maxim of Individual Happiness Now (IHN), coupled with a life force that demands movement. Having read Freud in detail, it is perhaps no coincidence that in Lye’s Happy Momentswe find a chapter entitled Orgone, obviously in relation to Reich’s Orgone Theories – but not acknowledged as such – that in typical Lye parlance explains his experience of it as a ‘nicely balanced mixture of sex and ozone’. Interestingly Horrocks does not reference Reich in his biography of Lye – possibly a major omission. Lye in his Orgone story goes on to describe a seemingly simple experience of leaping around some boulders on the beach in Wellington:

 

I’ve never leapt better either before or since – spring-sprang-sprung – spring-sprang-sprong …

 

Reich’s orgone thus becomes an exhilarating movement, a sort of leaping petite mort – indeed a ‘nicely balanced mixture of sex and ozone’. It may be far-fetched to connect this to Lye’s kinetic sculptures, but an account of a Rorschach Test that Lye did – as detailed by Horrocks – yield a nice psychoanalytic picture of Lye, of his imagery type probably being ‘kinesthetic’. Interestingly Lye was also an enthusiastic – but a bit clumsy - dancer and he loved the vitality of jazz and especially the Blues. The idea that works of art should replicate movement is therefore a logical progression, albeit a very difficult one in its technical realisation. Exhibiting kinetic art requires the artist to install it, maintain it and operate it. Art collectors will not buy it because it needs the perpetual presence of the artist, or so they think. If the work of art is set in motion by natural forces like the wind, it must perforce be installed outside. As the force of the wind changes the work of art must be configured to withstand strong gusts – or must be somehow switched off to prevent malfunction. If installed inside and operated by a motor, the work of art only becomes a work of art when in operation. Lye the eternal tinker spent an inordinate time in his studios trying to figure out the technical requirements to choregraph the movements he envisaged. When it all works, the performance is much like one of his short film clips. Only this performance is also a feat of engineering. Sadly, quite a few of the engineers he worked with were not up to the task. In the end, however, his art works did get the right engineering attention – in New Zealand of all places. In New Plymouth Lye met John Mathews, an engineer who was on the same wavelength and who masterminded an exhibition of some of Lye’s tangible works to perfection. When after Lye’s death the Lye Foundation, based in New Plymouth, built the modernist Len Lye Centre, John Matthew’s involvement was again the key component to its amazing local success. Not that it is a well-known permanent art exhibition even today, seemingly operating under the radar of the wider art world in NZ and possibly in the wider world context where modernist kinetic art has never achieved the corporate prestige like modernist paintings or Tate-like installations. That Lye and his art was repatriated to New Plymouth is one of the more amazing NZ/Aotearoa stories that has come to light only through the effort of modern art aficionados like Roger Horrocks. Republishing Lye’s Happy Moments, while only a slim volume compared to the biography, seems to be an important aspect to unlocking Lye’s life as a work of moving art, arising like a phoenix from the soil of Aotearoa and spreading her wings across the wider world.

 

 

 

 

Shanghaied by J.G. Ballard (The Kindness of Women)

 Shanghaied by J.G. Ballard (The Kindness of Women)

 

 

There are many reasons for going to Shanghai to see the Bund. It was on our bucket list, having been seduced by literature and movies that feature Shanghai, like of course The Empire of the Sun (Ballard and Spielberg) and Once we were Orphans by Ishiguro plus various documentaries about the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. The great opportunity arose a few weeks ago when we visited family in Suzhou. A taxi took us to the Yangtse hotel on Hankou Rd., just opposite the People’s Park. The next day we walked down to the Bund. Being German I had always assumed -wrongly - that the name derives from the German ‘Bund’ given that the Germans also had a concession here. OK, it derives from English via Hindustani. In retrospect it makes sense as the English play the main role in this Shakespearian tragedy of sorts. Of course we were blown away by the views across the river, the incredible skyline of skyscrapers, and when turning back across the road to see many of the classical buildings of the Bund. At the Shanghai History Museum, we learned that Mao Zedong had ordered the troops not to use high explosives when entering the Bund so as to preserve the historic buildings. Good on him! Shame on re-developing the Bund as a raised promenade that is now thronged by millions of tourists. Luckily when we were there it was not too bad. Walking back via Nanjing Road, the most famous pedestrian shopping road in China if not in the world, we were transported into a future of great contradictions: capitalism and socialism living side by side, carefully controlled lest any capitalist decadence rears its ugly head, like sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Mind you from our hotel we saw a sign advertising a massage parlour, and we were wondering if the medicinal massage treatments on offer were a disguise for more decadent treatments one finds in massage parlours in many a Western city. We also came across D-Mall, an underground shopping heaven for all things Manga, what with teenagers dressed up in Manga garb but curiously careful not to show too much skin. One could assume that local authorities tolerated such outlandish behaviour as a safety valve for rebellious youth as long as it was confined to fashion and nothing else. 

 

From these contemporary perspectives it is quite difficult to imagine the Shanghai and the Bund that was the stage for the likes of Ballard. The decadence of the 1930s is certainly not documented in the Shanghai History Museum. For the young Ballard the sight of prostitutes and brothels around every street corner might have been recorded for cities like London, Paris, Berlin and New York, as much as vintage pornographic clips  grace the porn sites of today (although probably mostly AI generated). As every literary sleuth knows, J.G. Ballard’s formative years were first dominated by the Western concessions of the Bund and then the destruction of it, including the interment by the Japanese. Equally, as very psychanalytic sleuth knows, this brew of sex and violence can shape a character for the rest of his life, none more so than Ballard’s. Of course, the cliché of sex as violence has a much longer history, portraying penetration as an act of rape. I think it would be wrong to paint Ballard into this unsavoury corner. Ballard’s obsession with sex is not of this sort even though he flirts with violence for violence or art’s sake. His attitude to sex is clearly reflected in his title of his novel The Kindness of Women, i.e. all the women in his fictional life in this novel – no doubt in part based on his experiences – kindly offer themselves to an ever-obliging Jim (Ballard) playing to that quaint English idiom of ‘making love’. It’s a nice idea – and as far as I know only available in the English language, e.g. compare this to the unfortunate French (nation of lovers) metaphor (hopefully not a simile) of ‘la petite mort’. That sex equals death is unfortunately also invoked by Ballard, especially in his notorious ‘crash’ chapter (and made into a movie), albeit as a deviant interlude which sends his old (fictional) friend from way back in Shanghai to a term in the lunatic asylum. His very questionable redemption equals that of another fictional main actor, namely Sally who after Jim’s wife’s death assumes the role of the 60s drug-addled American beauty with whom Jim engages in anal sex, described in anatomical detail. Various critics have noted Ballard’s cold and ‘clinical’ descriptions of sex, presumably based on his time as a medical student (in the novel given space in a long chapter on dissecting a female cadaver). So much for making love as a poetic imagination. That Sally, when not engaged in anal sex and class A drugs, looks after Jim’s three children as a wonderful playmate is then a bit far-fetched. Indeed, much of the novel can be subjected to the critique of Chomsky’s saying that ‘nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely’. As such I prefer novels that resemble real life, as we (or at least I) know it, i.e. having consumed various drugs myself (LSD included as does Jim) I can confidently say that I, like Sally, would have made a terrible if not dangerous babysitter.  That Sally eventually redeems herself, extricating herself from the dreadful 60s, and towards the end of the novel becomes a mother herself, sounds a bit like a sob story. Ballard in his monumental effort to run down the 60s and the aftermath as crazed media (mainly TV) events, the proverbial sex, drugs and rock’n’roll excesses, not to speak of all the pornography that goes with it. While Jim claims to not ever having watched a pornographic movie, he does go down to the nitty-gritty in Rio catching a glimpse of bestiality being filmed. As such it becomes an odd obsession that is never defined, embedded only in the media (the chapter on the ‘lens’) that turns post-war Europe and the Americas into a dystopian hotbed of deviant sex, war, violence, advertising and celebrities. While much of this scenario is a fact of life as we (or at least I) know it, there are always glimpses of hope for a better world, some of which were indeed moments of ‘peace and love’ in the 60s that were extinguished by a reactionary elite that rules the waves still today. That Ballard had to further exemplify his dystopian take on things via his character Dick, the Cambridge psychologist turned BBC celebrity, is also an odd undertaking, i.e. that Dick had to record his own death (of cancer) for a documentary for the BBC. The same Dick also provides a whole chapter for recording an LSD trip with Jim. Ballard thus covers all corners of the field but mainly to score own goals. The grim succession of chapter after chapter occasionally leads to unexpected black humour, like the last one where he attends the premiere of The Empire of the Sun movie (in which he has a brief blurry appearance) in LA and (unexpectedly) meets up with his former Shanghai young governess Olga, now in her 60s and well-to-do, only to offer her still presentable body to Jim for a bit of a romp to make up for the missed opportunities in Shanghai. Even the also fictional Peggy, Jim’s fellow prisoner in the internment camp in Lunghua, who later becomes a paediatrician in London and always resists Jim’s advances on the grounds that they were innocent children in the camp, eventually gives in and they have satisfactory sex, something to do with a vulva and a penis. As the novel ends on Venice beach in LA (where I too sat in the sand) with the odd scenario of someone launching a replica Heyerdahl papyrus boat with ‘its bows set towards the China shore’, one wonders what it all means when the final sentence reads ‘Cleo, think where that might lead …’. 

 

Reading this novel – it is a novel, not an autobiography – in 2026 that was first published in 1991, one is aware that it is as controversial now as it was then. Not that the dystopian vision has diminished over time – in fact it might have become worse – and as such one has to be grateful to Ballard (RIP) for having alerted us to the corrosive media fault lines (nowadays so bad that social media is to be banned for under 16-year olds, along with alcohol, vapes, drugs, sex, pornography and whatever) that seem to rule all of our lives – at least in the capitalist West. 

 

Having just been in socialist/communist Shanghai – Ballard’s nostalgic place of departure from yesteryear – I am confused about this socialist utopia with its gleaming (phallic?) corporate high rises (also a dystopian Ballard topic, and made into a movie) and endless shopping malls, what with  CCP’s condemnation of Western decadence, all the while promoting temple tourism in the face of Marx’ ‘religion is the opium of the people’, and Reich’s socialist ideas about freedom from sexual repression, and what a possible future for Shanghai as much as Shepperton might look like. Ballard’s novel title The Kindness of Women actually sounds quite upbeat and might serve as a headline recipe for the future, if it were not for many of the unpalatable ingredients of the story line itself. He could have concentrated more on solutions to the dystopian dilemma, like the 60s Beatles ‘All you need is love’ and add generous dollops of love making (as in a way, Ballard does), however much such sentiments are soaked in clichés (on which some of us old geezers survive, more or less, to this very day, but still condemned to sit on the couch and watch the wildfire documentaries on BBC).

 

 

A translated review of TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yang Shuang-Zi (2026), translated by Lin King

 A translated review of TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yang Shuang-Zi (2026), translated by Lin King

 

 

Winning the 2026 Booker Prize for Translated Literature sparks many a review, some of which focus on the clever linguistic translation conceits of Yang’s novel itself, quite apart from the fact that King’s translation from Mandarin into English is part and parcel of the award itself. Many volumes have been dedicated to translation studies, some based on fundamental issues to do with the diversity of languages, e.g. whether or not language shapes our world view as variously debated according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Radically deluded proponents declare that it is impossible to learn to speak a ‘foreign’ languages to the standard native speakers do, and consequently also maintain that it is impossible to ‘translate’ from one language to another approaching equivalence. Research in second language acquisition and bilingualism (and multilingualism) has shown quite convincingly that this is not so, i.e. it is our world view that influences language, and further that - at least according to biolinguistics – different languages differ only in surface features, what with a language faculty in our brains being common to all humans. Advances in AI translation machines seem to also lean towards the latter language thesis, even if the methodology of statistical matching seems counter to human creativity, especially if one proposes that translating a novel is not so much a technical issue but an art form that almost equals the original. 

 

As a linguist and occasional translator leaning towards the biolinguistics model, I was of course interested in reading Yang’s Taiwan Travelogue in English. Added to that are several other aspects: I have lived, worked and travelled in Taiwan as an English and German speaking academic – with an interest in the Aborigine languages of Taiwan but with no facility in any of the Chinese dialects or languages. Our son is married to a Taiwanese, and he is bilingual between English and Mandarin, currently working as a linguistics professor at a university in mainland China. We have also family connections in Japan where we visited some years ago. On this blog I also wrote ‘an urgent review of The Struggle for Taiwan: a History by Sulmaan Wasif Khan (2024)’. It includes the historical period of Japanese occupation of Taiwan, as situated in Yang’s novel. As the occasional reviewer of books, one is of course also interested in what other reviewers have to say about one’s current reading material, if only to check if one’s own take corresponds to theirs – as often enough it doesn’t. As such I came across a review by a German writer in an obscure literary magazine I subscribe to, and to my surprise they got it, having transgressed all the linguistic boundaries, fictional and real, between Japanese, Mandarin, English and finally German. The author only wants to be identified as Dr K. My translation and annotations of his review from German into English are my endeavours alone, hence any mistranslations are my responsibility alone as well. If one wants to point out the historical connections between German and English (Anglo-Saxon), one may as well point out the history of Japanese as connected to Chinese. Maybe there is a translation lesson in that alone, especially in the face of the aforementioned Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

 

Let us assume, writes Dr K., that I picked up this novel without knowing much about Taiwan’s history apart from what one learns by way of academic general knowledge of having been there a few times, and of course the contemporary discourse about the struggle of Taiwan facing the mainland China claim that Taiwan is part of China, like it or not. Let us also assume that, at first, I did not read the blurb at the back cover that says ‘Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 …’. On opening the front cover, we get two short bios about Yang Shuang-zi the writer and Lin King the translator. On a second look it occurs to me that Yang Shuang-zi is written with diacritics as Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, which as far as I know indicate the vowel tones. Similarly, the tone diacritics for Taipei and Taichung are supplied. OK, very good. But what about the names provided for King’s bio, i.e. Yu Pei -Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin for whom King has also provided translations. Shouldn’t it read Yóu Pèi-yún? Sorry for being pedantic. Of course, the writer may prefer their name spelled without tone indication. Well, we know how confusing this all can be when you throw in simplified Chinese as well. And sorry for breaking my rule of not looking at the back of the book but I cannot help but to point out King’s rationale in her Translators notes:

 

… I decided to keep accents and tones … These may seem visually cumbersome to an English reader, but as a user of these three languages, I always find it frustrating when accents and tones are omitted in romanisation, which often means that a reader who knows the original language can’t determine how to pronounce the words (p. 292).

 

Fair enough (technically the phrase ‘accents and tones’ seems confusing because tones are indicated by diacritics that include ‘accents’ for languages like French – but never mind, we get the drift). But mind you nevertheless, here I am, a German-English reader who cannot read either Mandarin or Japanese character script, so I pronounce, if I have to, Taipei more or less according to German-English pronunciation rules (or I might look up a dictionary for approximate native pronunciation so as not to offend the locals). Since King is fluent in all three languages, isn’t she unlikely to read Mandarin and Japanese in Romanised versions (and there are a few)? As a linguist and bit of a translator myself I find these minutiae very interesting, but I doubt that the vast majority of English readers would care one way or the other how to Romanize a particular name. Anyway, what is in a name – as the saying goes? For some people it means a lot, so here is yet another twist even before we get to the narrative proper. The dedication page informs us that:

 

This book is dedicated to Yang Jo-hui, the younger of the twin sisters known jointly as Yang Shuang-zi (note that I have discarded the diacritics as I will do so for the rest of this review).

 

So, the author is one of the ‘Yang twins’ (‘shuang-zi’ meaning twins), why? Again, we have to jump ship and learn the reason, or do we? In the admittedly fictional (at least partially) afterword entitled ‘Translator’s note to Taiwan Travelogue, New Mandarin Chinese Edition 2020’ we learn:

 

Very special thanks go to my late older sister, the Jo-tzu half of the name “Shuang-zi”. I, the Jo-hui half of the “Shuang-zi”, may have held the pen that translated the book, but it is in fact a product of our shared work (p. 289).

 

Wow! So, the book is dedicated to Jo-hui, the ‘younger’ sister who takes on the name Shuang-zi? Sounds bizarre. Intended? A translation mistake? It is rather poignant and tragic when one reads elsewhere that her ‘late elder sister, Jo-hui’ died of breast cancer in 2015. Is this a door to psychoanalysis or just a mix-up of names? But let’s move on lest I be accused of being evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in that only Germans (especially in English translation) can understand Germans.

 

So, next we get a nice map of 1938 Taiwan, followed by the contents that promise an Introduction by someone called Hiyoshi Sagako, followed by twelve chapters, each named after a culinary delight, finished off with an afterword, an editor’s note and three translator’s notes. Sounds like an entrée, a 12-dish banquet with many supplementary desserts. 

 

The entrée, it turns out, is the tale of a “Japanese scholar” who locates the lost first Mandarin translation and the original Japanese version for the benefit of Yang’s new translation enterprise. Really? The tale veers off into a short discourse on the vicissitudes of ethnicity arising from colonialism, i.e. Hiyoshi Sagaku describing herself as “wansheng” (Japanese people born in Taiwan), situating them in a hierarchy between first (Mainland Japanese) and second class (Taiwanese) ethnicities. Given that Japanese colonialism was relatively short-lived in Taiwan – as opposed, to say, enduring European colonialism in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand – one can understand the dilemmas posed. In other relatively short-lived colonial contexts, like, say, Kenya, many Europeans (like my wife and her parents) born in Kenya were nevertheless driven out of their ‘homeland’ due to being associated (sometimes falsely) with colonial crimes committed by armed forces that were simply withdrawn after independence. Strangely though, this “wansheng” issue does not feature much in the novel itself. The introduction then tells us about the genesis of the tale as a ‘real’ historical account with all protagonists having lived real lives. In conclusion, there is an explanation as to how the 12^th chapter was added in a subsequent edition, perhaps as a sort of apology by Ms. Aoyama to Ms. Wang, and in the hope Ms. Wang would read it and accept it, and furthermore agree to a reunion after all. Of course, nothing of the sort happened – I mean the ‘reunion’ but also, since everybody knows by now, the whole account, it being a pure fiction, but so cleverly done that when the ‘novel’ first appeared in Taiwan, some readers believed the conceit, occasioning subsequent editions to tone down the title of the ‘novel’ to simply Taiwan Travelogue. However, the last sentence of this ‘introduction’ seems to give away the whole plot idea, namely the appeal to the reader to ‘remain cognizant of Aoyama Chizuko’s status as one of the colonizers within the story’. So, since this whole story is written from the point of view – first person – of Aoyama Chizuko, are we to expect a tale of fascist Japanese colonial brutality? Obviously not since the novel is also sold as a love story between Ms Aoyama and her Taiwanese interpreter Ms Wang. Would an anti-fascist Japanese visitor to Taiwan during this time be accorded the same ‘status’? OK understood, anti-fascist Japanese were all in prison or worse, executed. But are there still shades of grey? 

 

In chapter ‘one’ we learn that Ms Aoyama is a young and successful writer whose novel has been made into an even more successful film in Japan, and since she has always been hankering to visit Taiwan, she wrangles a Japanese government assignment that allows her to travel in Taiwan for a whole year, with the assignment to publish Taiwanese travel stories in Japan, with the unspoken expectation that she thereby supports the Japanese Southern Expansion Doctrine, which she does not. A Faustian deal with the devil? Compare this with fascist Germany where many an unsuspecting artist was lured into the net of fascist propaganda, even if they rejected the very idea. Note the movie Mephisto (based on the book by Klaus Mann) that plays out this scenario for the then famous German actor Gustaf Gründgens, with Gõring as his protégé, but Gründgens also using his position to save a few of his Jewish fellow artists. Nothing of the sort plays out in Yang’s Taiwan Travelogue. There are no references to the politics of the day, only hints of the Japanization (kominka 1937 – 1945) drive as partially impersonated by Ms Aoyama’s first (and last) interpreter/assistant Mishima who works for the Taiwan Governor General in Taichung. 

 

And then there is the young and beautiful Taiwanese superwoman Ms Wang, forthwith known as Chi-chan (term of endearment).

 

Chi-chan as the Taiwanese woman who deputises for most of the novel for Mishima as interpreter/assistant/cook and love interest is a now retired teacher of Japanese due to her getting married ‘next year’. As a paragon of anti-colonial sentiment, one would have thought that featuring the young and beautiful Chi-chan as a Japanese language teacher in Taiwan would be bit of a contradiction. Being a walking encyclopaedia on everything known to mankind, to suit the narrative, Chi-chan must of course also be an expert on Japan and particularly Japanese food, apart from being a supreme scholar on everything Taiwanese, and of course Taiwanese food. As a novelist with a certain obsession for travel and food it is little wonder that Yang fashions her main protagonists, Aoyama-san and Chi-chan, as female gods that transcend politics while all the while reminding us that the divisive politics of colonialism prevent the match made in culinary heavens. Yang, in an interview, quips that there were two consequences for her 4-year research period for writing the novel, namely her savings were depleted for the travel and second that she gained a lot of weight. 

 

As I translate this review my wife is watching Australian Master Chef, an endless series of culinary delights (with many an Asian dish) and the occasional disasters that condemn the competitors to the hell of dingy restaurant kitchens, condemned to study expensive cookbooks while washing dishes. I am not a proponent of Warhol’s dictum that it all comes out as the same (shit) but nor am I a proponent of 5-star Michelin cuisine that pretends to turn cooking into an artform of divine proportions. I do appreciate good food and a glass of good wine, but I cannot really appreciate Yang’s 12 dishes (and many more in between) that are described in great detail down to ‘pickled sea cucumber intestines’. Still the reviewer who shares my sentiments in this case did munch-read his way through every meal that Aoyama-san and Chi-chan devoured. 

 

Dr K. does allude – with his German obsession to psychoanalyse everything – to the well-known connection between food and sex, wondering if all that banqueting is a clever device for not mentioning sex even once, although hanging in the air like some delicious scent exuded by Chi-chan’s cute dimples that catch Aoyama-san’s eye at every opportunity, and with hints like ‘I filled her cup … she filled mine’. Some reviewers have noted that Yang is married to a female partner – same-sex marriage being legal in progressive Taiwan – thus being a champion of LBGTQ politics in Taiwan, and that this is somehow reflected in her novel like a LBGTQ manifesto. There may be some point to this as in the novel Aoyama-san is rather outspoken in her condemnation of Chi-chan’s marriage prospects, having to submit to some ‘bastard’ male’s desire for male descendants to keep the family fortunes afloat. Her invitation to Chi-chan to elope with her to Japan and follow her destiny as a translator – and they might as well get married – is definitely not like beating around the bush. On the other hand, were this anti-patriarchy sentiment subject to critique, as Chi-chan seems offended by the very proposal, and seemingly in acceptance of the traditional role of a Taiwanese woman’s child-bearing housewife duties while still in command of her intellectual pursuits, we might accept this as a valid interpretation, were it not for Yang’s personal adherence to the contrary. Dr K. alludes to logical inconsistencies in this matter – and there are others – in Yang’s narrative. Even so, we might laud Yang for her honesty in that life is not always a logical progression from A to B – in fact far from it if we look at history as a never-ending series of illogical acts perpetrated by insane emperors and other self-proclaimed leaders of nations (in fact so much so that history as such has come to a grinding end, at least according to the Japanese-American scholar Fukuyama). 

 

The official line, seemingly taken in the narrative, and in many reviewers’ interpretations, is that the reason for Chi-chan’s rejection of Aoyama’s advances is Aoyama’s colonial attitude, however benign, in that Aoyama-san offers Chi-chan ‘protection’ which Chi-chan never asked for, i.e. Aoyama-san oversteps her humanity by way of belonging to the colonialists which makes her offer of ‘protection’ a questionable gesture. Dr K. here also questions the logic of this argument, which seems rather convoluted, especially as the book is praised by many as a ‘post-colonial’ masterpiece. Since the argument is reinforced in the narrative by the strange story of the two students in the high school they visit, i.e. the petite ‘island’ student who is friends with the Japanese counterpart, seemingly (playfully) rejecting the ‘protection’ afforded to her by the Japanese student. It seems odd that in human relations at that level there is cognisance of the political context, i.e. the colonial power imbalance that in real life is enforced by brutal police and army oppression. Yang never alludes to the many resistance movements in Taiwan against the Japanese occupation (some call it Japanese ‘rule’ to downplay the impact) that resulted in shocking massacres perpetrated by the Japanese enforcers. That two girls in high school, seemingly being good friends, one a Japanese, the other a Taiwanese, are subject to such brutal ‘power imbalances’ seems somewhat far-fetched. It does not seem to work as a metaphor for the relationship between Aoyama-san and Chi-chan simply because human relationships can be exempt from political context, however much one denies it. There are examples, however rare, of genuine friendships between people from Gaza and Israel as much as there were human bonds between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans in Nazi Germany. Such relationships are of course getting ever more dangerous, especially if linked to political resistance, and the more paranoid the fascist-colonial powers get. Given that Yang does not refer to the prevailing political-colonial context of actual oppression by the Japanese forces, we can assume that either there were spaces for friendships and liaisons between occupier and occupied, especially if the former denounced in mind or deed their role in it. Yang could have also included a story about the “wansheng” (Japanese people born in Taiwan) who are sandwiched between the two opposing ethnicities, to exemplify the complexities of a colonial situation.

 

To apportion collective guilt, as Yang seems to do, in the end, just reinforces the primitive racism whereby all Germans, for example, are Nazis, Huns and Krauts, all French are Frogs, all Japanese are Japs and Slants, and so on. 

 

Dr K. gets even more confused when trying to interpret Mishima’s – the seemingly Taiwanese loyal employee of the Colonial Government – tirade against Aoyama’s ‘intellectual arrogance’. Dr K. writes: I suppose there is nothing wrong with a novelist giving her otherwise likeable main character the occasional cold shoulder, but there should be some logic to it. Mishima’s contention that Aoyama elevates personal preferences to that of an overarching political context whereby the Japanese Empire adds value to a local product, e.g. elevating the taste of Taiwanese pineapple juice by way of Japanese production technology. This sounds a bit like the silly adage that since Hitler built the first Autobahn (motorway), he couldn’t have been all evil. Aoyama’s preference for the Taiwanese railways – no doubt improved by Japanese engineering expertise – can also be a two-sided sword: the quaint beauty of an old Taiwanese railway bridge gets demolished to make way for a new and better Japanese-built version. One can still hear older folks in Taiwan praising the Japanese efforts to improve their infrastructure. I suppose it can be quite grating when such positives are pointed out by a member of the Empire. Mishima’s other missive is that Aoyama perceives the beauty and flavours of Taiwan not for their own sake but as exotica – of course it can be annoying when, as a native person, one is looked upon by the tourist like a beautiful exotic animal. Indeed, modern tourism is premised on that ruse, i.e. the locals have to dress up in traditional costume to provide photo opportunities for the tourists. But I wouldn’t paint Aoyama into that corner. 

 

The main point of the narrative seems to me to be to travel the length (if not breadth) of Taiwan and sample the culinary delights on offer. In between Aoyama-san and Chi-chan spend time in the river cottage In Taichung, having animated conversations. Since much of the narrative is consumed by their dialogue, interspersed with cute interjections like ‘is that so?’ or ‘oh dear,  oh dear’ or even ‘aigh’, one wonders how much of the original Mandarin discourse structure is maintained (Hemingway in his For Whom the Bell Tolls, much of the dialogue is an implied direct translation from Spanish). That Aoyama-san and Chi-chan call each other by their names, rather than - in English – referring to each other and themselves by personal pronouns, may well be a Taiwanese-Mandarin characteristic. Here King, the translator might have enlightened us further. 

 

Equally we would have liked more historical information about the differences between the Taiwanese Hoklo and Hakka peoples and their respective Chinese dialects. As far as I know the Hakka are from a later migration to Taiwan, finding most of the fertile coastal agricultural lands occupied by the earlier Hoklo migrations, hence having to find land inland, in the more mountainous regions, less amenable to agriculture (the whole situation may be much more complex). The culinary differences alone are of course very interesting but equally interesting would have been an elaboration of cultural and linguistic differences and/or similarities. Both ethnicities could also have been more embedded in the Aborigine cultures and languages, especially in treating the latter often as second- or third-class citizens. Only via recent interest in the origins of the Polynesian languages has there been the realisation that the Taiwan native tribes and their languages have a striking similarity with Polynesian languages like NZ Māori, i.e. Taiwanese aborigine tribes now being considered as the originators of the Polynesian diaspora that stretches over vast oceans and time, paying testament to their ancient navigational and seafaring skills that are unrivalled elsewhere in the world. 

 

Maybe this ancient travel bug has infected the (Chinese) Taiwanese as well, hence Yang’s voyage, following the old travel advice of ‘don’t travel abroad until you’ve seen your home country’. Taiwan may not be the biggest island in the world, but it is big enough to straddle a few of climate zones, i.e. as an AI inquiry says:

 

Taiwan's climate ranges from tropical in the south to subtropical in the north, while its towering central mountains introduce temperate and alpine climates. Influenced heavily by the Tropic of Cancer, monsoons, and the warm Kuroshio ocean current, the island features high humidity and year-round warmth, with dramatic microclimates driven by its rugged topography.

 

Yang is obviously enchanted by her island and hopefully, through her novel, engenders a literary tourism trail that follows her exploits in the novel. Having traversed Taiwan myself, says Dr K., I can attest to the charms of the countryside as much as the cityscapes. From Taipei 101 to Kaohsiung’s 85 Sky Tower, Taiwan’s high-tech economy is on show, as much as bullet trains that take you along the east and west coasts. To imagine such journeys in 1938 is of course a triumph of imagination in Yang’s novel, no doubt assisted by assiduous historical research. Best appreciated by a Taiwanese traveller like Yang, it is a case of falling in love with one’s hometown. Personally, I have never experienced such a sentiment for my home country and hometown, says Dr K. Travel broadens the mind, they say, hence travelling in one’s own home turf might seem less exciting, but when the pair of Aoyama-san and Chi-Chan travel, always starting out in Taichung, the reader can enjoy the sights as much as they do, not to speak of the culinary delights on every street corner. 

 

Indeed, the idea (foreign to Western foodies) that street vendors and street food stalls can provide tasty morsels that equal those from 5-star Michelin restaurants, is a phenomenon seemingly particular to Asian cuisine. However, since not all food stalls are created equal one must have insider knowledge where and when a particularly delicious dish is being served, as Chi-chan exemplifies in her outings with Aoyama-san. I have experienced this myself when employed by a Chinese company in Malaysia whose wealthy owners went to great lengths to impress me with their expertise to get the finest dishes served in the most improbable locations, like the world’s very best shark-fin soup served up in a dingy restaurant in Malacca, not much bigger than a food stall, and apparently patronised by connoisseurs from as far as Taiwan. Given the added medicinal values placed on particular foods, it is imperative that the dish is prepared in secret ways that have been handed down by generations, gaining a reputation that spreads far and wide. Some of these ‘medicinal’ values can seem a bit suspect such as the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of shark-fin soup. To Yang’s credit such food aspects are never mentioned in her wide range of delicacies. Yang did also well to situate her novel (and food) in the 1930s so as to avoid the contemporary US fast food culture that has gripped Taiwan in the most unfortunate way. 

 

So, what does Dr K. say for his final verdict? Once you have ploughed through the many afterwords and translator notes you have almost forgotten the novel you have just read. Too many cooks spoil the broth, as they say. Yang should have left it with the cute ending in chapter 12:

 

Chi-chan and I shared one bowl of fruit and jelly ice. It was very sweet. It was very delicious.

 

A great finale that distils the narrative: a sweet love story and delicious food. The reader, nevertheless, is left with a bitter-sweet feeling of whether or not this novel lives up to the claim of being a ‘post-colonial’ treatise, since the politics of the era is largely left out, tampering just around the edges as if the brutal Japanese occupation (or call it ‘rule’ if you must) of Taiwan was a non-event. Where are the many resistance movements that challenged the occupation? What about the collaboration between mainland China and Taiwan in these matters? It would be disingenuous to claim that Yang’s novel somehow is a manifesto for Taiwanese independence, equating possible reunification with mainland China under the CCP with the Japanese occupation. Such simplistic notions are not the stuff of a beautiful love story, however much unrequited it may be. Hence let’s keep it at this romantic level of ‘let’s make love (and food), not war’ and enjoy the ride through beautiful Taiwan.

 

Translator’s note: I couldn’t have said it better myself. Nothing got lost in translation.