a On Australian Poetry and Poets: Longer Views on Individuals 231 into everyone’s heart.” That optimism, reflected in times when “to be learned is a crime,” times of dictatorship and oppression, captures what drives Ou- yang as poet. Angry, yes, but holding fast to a vision of beauty and hope. That’s his ultimate message. It is possible, though the reality is grim and fore- boding. It’s up to us – all of us.

Letter to Ouyang Yu118

N A SENSE, WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE DRIFT OF AN INTRODUCTION I might write on your work – I think you might disagree with a lot of it. I I am not sure. Much of it appears in ‘scare quotes’ – that reflects my sense of inadequacy in dealing with the complexity of your work, and, I guess, your ‘self’. By way of subjectivity, I am going to remove your self from your self. This is the way Australia makes life ‘hell’ for those it can’t get around ‘making belong’. You become the other ‘Ouyang Yu’. The public ‘Ouyang Yu’ who puts it out and expects to get it back. Thing is, I’m on your side. Or is that a little too easy? Subjectivity in an Ouyang Yu poem, or an Ouyang Yu work of critical prose, even fiction, resides partly in the slippage between languages, partly in a reader’s expectation that there will be such slippage. Language is both tactile and a state of mind. When we first communicated, you politely correc- ted me on my misunderstanding of Chinese naming. Which was your first name – ‘Ouyang’ or ‘Yu’? You were correcting not cultural transcriptive problems but an unspoken (possible) idea that the necessity of understanding wasn’t also part of my cultural register. If it wasn’t, it should have been. I in- tend to learn Chinese – not because of a need to accumulate ‘other’ languages (though it does specifically interest me), but because I cannot understand the cultural space I think I occupy without doing so. As a writer coming out of an Australian landscape, I have many obligations – a recognition that I am on stolen land, and that culpability is ‘shared’, not exclusive. Australia, if not indigenous, is a migrant nation. We share responsibility in every way. Recognizing a shared responsibility, however long one has been in Aus- tralia (or elsewhere), is crucial to acknowledging our own limitations. Ouyang

118 “Letter,” in Ouyang Yu, Bias: Offensively Chinese/Australian: A Collection of Essays on China and Australia, foreword by J.V. D’Cruz (Melbourne: Otherland, 2007): 9–14. 232 S PATIAL R ELATIONS a

Yu’s life has been a journey in which different forms of exile are played out. His is a search for ‘belonging’, but not on anyone else’s terms. His poetic is formed out of an expectation that an individual (and, by possible extension, a community) will have equal access to privilege. Not that privilege is neces- sary, but that, should it exist, it should do so en masse. A particularly illumi- nating passage in this book of essays runs as follows:

Again and again, there is something that keeps coming back to me like a refrain, twelve years into living in Australia, until I realized what it was when I dug up a line that I wrote a few years ago in my sequence, Soul Diary, which goes, “to be asian in australia is to live on the reverse side of paradise.” That is to put it gently when I compared it with what I said in a recent interview with a newspaper based in Hong Kong. I said, “living in Australia is like living in hell.” A personal conclusion from my own experience, I nevertheless find an echo to it from Chinese intellectuals I know in Australia and elsewhere. In his own words, Zhang told me that he sometimes felt that “it was like living in hell” in Australia when I mentioned that it was so difficult for Chinese intel- lectuals to live intellectually in Australia. What has now become obvious is that those Chinese intellectuals who came to Australia in or around the June 4th Incident in 1989 with great hopes for freedom and democracy have found them but, ironically, have had little use for them. Like sunshine and clean air, two great qualities of Australian life most admired by Chinese nationals, freedom and democracy, much as they are found lacking in contemporary China, will not get them a job or food here in the land of plenty.

I would argue there is no paradise in Australia, at least for the majority, but there is certainly a worse ‘no paradise’ for some more than others, and cer- tainly for some ‘ethnicities’ more than others. Ouyang Yu goes to the heart of why this is so. His personal disillusionment has us reflect not only on the flaws of the ‘promised land’ but also on the systems of ‘freedom' and ‘demo- cracy’ themselves. It becomes a case of degrees of oppression (and suppres- sion, as noted in the foreword). There is a particularly terrifying bumper- sticker doing the rounds in Australia at the moment, something like: ‘If you don’t love Australia, then leave’. This is, of course, primarily aimed at refu- gees and recent migrants, and migrants of non-European heritage even if their families have been in Australia for a hundred-and-eighty years! It is, in es- sence, the phantom limb of the old ‘White Australia’ policy.