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.

 

 

 

 

SEASON of the JEW (1987/1997) by Maurice Shadbolt

 SEASON of the JEW (1987/1997) by Maurice Shadbolt

 

This aged but ageless treatment of Te Kooti as historical fiction must remain as one of Aotearoa’s great reminders that all is not well in Godzone, what with her Vergangenheitsbewältigung in terms of ‘race relations’ - the Office of the Race Relations Conciliator (est. 1971) merged with the Human Rights Commission in 2001, ostensibly because ‘race’ is a trigger that needs to be submerged in ‘human rights’ where the nowadays more acceptable term of ‘racism’ can be dealt with.

 

When Hamiora Pere was hanged for treason in 1869, having been one of Te Kooti’s reluctant warriors, the spectre of overt racism in terms of expedient colonial practices at the time has turned into a more covert practice today, often couched as ‘institutional racism’. Shadbolt does a good job reminding his readers that overt racism is not a sign of the times but a calculated perennial design that has been employed by fascists throughout history, not least in our contemporary history. The boundaries between overt and covert become blurred. What remains is the perverted ideology of race. 

 

Shadbolt’s protagonist, George Fairweather, as the good guy in terms of personal relationships with Māori is of course a conflicted character when it comes to his exploits as a British army officer in the employ of colonial militias who are determined to put down any ‘rebellion’ that might hinder their quest for land acquisition, cleverly exploiting Māori tribal warfare, in this case Ropata’s warriors decimating Te Kooti’s lot. 

The colonial government of the time calculated that a pragmatic approach would serve them well, i.e. pronounce the lack of Te Kooti’s capture as victory nevertheless, having relegated him to his more harmless religious activities that in principle were in accord with British doctrine that accommodated Jewish religion of the Old Testament as part of British civilisation; an arrangement that was not accorded to Māori customary beliefs and practices, denounced as savage and anti-Christian, giving rise to the absolute need for missionaries to pacify and reform the Māori ‘race’, giving rise to mainly Anglican church conversions but also to a fair number of other so-called Christian denominations (Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist. Mormon, etc.), and tolerating homegrown churches like the Ratana Church and even Te Kooti’s eventual Ringatū Church, even though it had a Jewish religious element that was often ridiculed by the colonists – hence the moniker of ‘the season of the Jew’. After all the real Te Kooti had in his youth been taught by non-other than the revered missionaries Samuel Williams and his uncle, William Williams and also by the Reverend Thomas Samuel Grace, so what could possibly have gone wrong?

 

For Fairweather – and Shadbolt – all of this was most disagreeable when one disassembled abstract notions of society, race, government, religion, colonialism, racism and what have you, and reduces life as we know it to the personal story of human beings that muddle along as best as they know, or don’t know. Here fiction sometimes interferes with the facts, especially if that fiction is designed to somehow explain or set the scene for what happened in reality. Of course, one does not know what happened to the people without a history (cf. Europe and the People Without History by Eric Wolf, or The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon), hence making it up as fiction may well serve a purpose. In Shadbolt’s case the fictional pre-history is a bit problematic: Fairweather meeting the future Te Kooti (then named Coates – a fact that is disputed) at Auckland harbourside as a young, prosperous trader with his own ship (in competition with a European Poverty Bay trader called Reid from who he learned the tricks of the trade), conversing about religion and Coates’ home turf of the Poverty Bay, soon turning to more earthly matters in that Fairweather spies a young  Māori maiden on board a neighbouring ship who happens to be known to Coates as a fellow traveller from Poverty Bay, plying her trade, if not as a prostitute but as finding it acceptable via Coates’ introduction to Fairweather to spend a profitable (for both ) night together. Shadbolt’s use of Victorian conversational English in these situations is both hilarious and depressing, what with Fairweather’s ‘tides rising’ and Mereana’s expertise in such matters. The whole scenario seems bit of a cliché that is designed to foreshadow Fairweather’s eventual journey to Turanga (later renamed Gisborne, sic) where the real story begins with Te Kooti and his band escaping from imprisonment on the Chatham Islands while Fairweather rejoins Mereana Smith (now revealed as a half-cast, her father being a Yankee who had deserted his post to take up matrimonial duties with Mere’s mother) who lives with her two desultory bothers, identifying as Māori, whose ancestor is one of the  Tuhoe chiefs in the Uruweras. Mere joins Fairweather in his rough abode by the river for many an agreeable tryst, what with more rising tides and Mere’s expert oral treatment thereof. If one didn’t know the rest of the story – they tie the knot -  it would again sound like cliché, i.e. the good, somewhat melancholy man finding heavenly pleasure in a human landscape that otherwise revolves around the Turanga trading post of the portly, very cantankerous colonist Reid, who, for comical impact it seems, is married to an equally portly Māori woman who keeps a suspicious eye on him, especially in terms of his supplies of rum. Major Biggs from nearby Matawhero is the other fly in the ointment, forever scheming to acquire more land from mainly pacifist Māori. Of course, with Te Kooti’s return all hell breaks loose. Literally, because Te Kooti is no pacifist anymore, especially as he had been imprisoned on trumped up charges and now as an escaped prisoner faces the local militia being intent to hunt him and his supporters down, and no doubt kill him. Fairweather of course saw this differently: let Te Kooti escape to the Uruweras and negotiate with him, for up to this point he had attacked nobody on the plains of Poverty Bay, allowing for his Israelite fantasies to play out in the forests of the Uruweras. Major Biggs and company, however, could see no reason in Fairweather’s reasonable assessment and as such coax him into joining the scouting parties to assess Te Kooti’s militant plans of attack. This turn-around by Fairweather seems to be another deus ex machina that enables the story to move on with Fairweather as the main protagonist (his retirement from the story at this point would have made more sense). Fairweather’s meeting a young Māori boy called Hamiora in his bush walks (for checking out subjects for his landscape paintings) and later reconnoitres is yet another literacy device but on this occasion very well done, for it brings us eventually to the very painful conclusion that a great injustice has been done, i.e. to hang Hamiora for trumped up treason charges. Hemiora is portrayed as a ‘cheeky’ boy (as young men were called then and perhaps even today) whose mangled English is a source of much mirth. Hamiora even shows Fairweather a track in the bush that might be an access route for Te Kooti’s warriors that are by then clearly bent on attack and revenge. Fairweather’s warning to Biggs to evacuate comes too late: Te Kooti attacks the settlement and kills some 54 Māori and European settlers, Biggs and his wife and infant son included. The slaughter is described in gruesome detail. Mereana’s two brothers are cut up limb by limb while Mereana is abused and possibly impregnated by Te Kooti himself, leaving a message for Fairweather. These fictionalised details serve to convince the reader that Te Kooti is a monster that needs to be brought to justice. The local army commanders assemble a fighting force that includes the Ropata warriors who will do all the dirty work. Te Kooti’s Ngatapa mountain fortifications are taken – the battle scenes are described in great detail – and while Te Kooti escapes, hundreds of his warriors and supporters (including women and children) are taken prisoners, what with the males’ summary executed by Ropata. To Fairweather’s surprise he hears Hamiora in the line calling out for him. How the bloody hell did he get here (to imitate Hamiora’s supposed diction)? No matter, Fairweather just manages to get Hamiora out of the execution line, eventually asking him that same question. Well, Hemiora happened to be recruited by Te Kooti’s men just before the massacre, the choice being join or die, or maybe with a hint of Hamiora having been impressed by Te Kooti. In any case he took part in the killings although it was never established – in fact – whether or not he actually killed anyone. The fact was that Hamiora Pere and four others (including his brother) were taken prisoners that were transported to Wellington to face murder and treason charges. Hamiora’s brother killed himself in his prison cell, and as the official story goes, that left Hamiora as the sole candidate for being considered for execution (the others were given prison sentences for murder), the idea being that one execution would serve a deterrent (executing all of them would only be interpreted by Māori as martyrs - there was also the idea that the other two prisoners had land that could be confiscated, so better not to kill them). In Shadbolt’s fictional story, Hamiora is first saved by Fairweather only to be arrested when Fairweather is out of town on another scouting trip seeking to locate the elusive Te Kooti who keeps popping up here and there. Fairweather travels to Wellington to advocate for Hamiora. Even an audience with the Prime Minister, William Fox, is to no avail. A memorable quote from that conversation is that Fox says something like ‘if people were all reasonable we wouldn’t need the law’, i.e. the law in this case must proceed, come hell or heaven for Hamiora, paying homage to the law being a very useful ass for the likes of Fox. Fairweather is duly incensed but what the bloody hell can be done? To fortify Hamiora in his prison cell, to tell him that his mana will increase immeasurably by his brave death? The detailed description of Hamiora’s execution by hanging (the British law at the time included beheading and quartering, mercifully not applied in Hamiora's case) is as gruesome as any details of Te Kooti’s massacre, no doubt designed to remind the reader of Stalin’s dictum that one death is a tragedy but a thousand is a mere statistic.

 

In a sort of epilogue, Shadbolt attaches a ‘fact and further’ note briefly detailing the bios of the main characters. We learn that Fairweather lived on in holy matrimony with Mereana, who bore him three children, including a son who, along with his adoptive brother perished as soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915. Of more fictional impact, we learn that Fairweather in old age travels to meet Te Kooti at his coastal church community, possibly with a plan to shoot him, but relents, and the two of them politely forgive each other, only to land the final sucker punch by Fairweather saying to Te Kooti:

 

In which case, may Hamiora Pere, wherever now residing, find leniency in his heart too.

 

Te Kooti knows of no Hamiora Pere, and Fairweather’s last words are:

 

                  Quite. Nothing. No one. Never mind.

 

And the novel ends with them both looking ‘out on dark sea’ (I like the elision of the article). Dark indeed.

 

A distressing ending. One that had no real resolution even after the novel’s first publication in 1987.  So-called race relations, now, in 2026 are mired in so-called political debates about the Treaty of Waitangi and the Waitangi Tribunal what with right wing racists gaslighting the debate with calls of One Nation (as borrowed from the likes in Australia) and One People, denying the injustices heaped upon Māori, denying history (those who do not learn from it are condemned to repeat it) - as exemplified by Shadbolt’s remedy by means of historical fiction. 

 

I am currently marking university student papers on a course called Te Tiriti Ora, with a focus on colonialisation and the implications of the Treaty articles on hauora. While it is a valuable exercise for first year health science students to learn about real issues of health inequities (statistics don’t lie), one comes to the conclusion that by quoting relevant sources one is also absolved from any further considerations. Academic abstraction is a great tool: the definition of colonialism can be gleaned from any dictionary or AI summary. Academic discourses about societies, indigenous and non-indigenous, in historical or contemporary contexts are starkly at odds  with Shadbolt’s ideas about multiple versions of history, depending on who is in or out of it, based on lived experiences, real or imagined. If only the students mentioned above would entertain a meeting of reasonable, neo-communist minds, Māori and non-Māori, maybe the history of New Zealand/Aotearoa could be reshaped into the beginnings of novel tales that can be told by grandparents to their grandchildren, of the times when neo-fascist racism became less of the terrible burden that it is now and has been all along.