Chapter Five Absenting the Chinese Man in the Ancestor Game In

113 Chapter Five Absenting the Chinese Man in The Ancestor Game The novel retells again and again the story of the person who is marooned on some kind of island of metaphor and who comes upon the tracks of another self. But always it is the story of the isolated self seeking to transcend its isolation by becoming the other, the other self, through communication of the subjective reality of the self. When we were children we all asked someone close to us the awesome question, What is it really like to be you? (Alex Miller, "Chasing My Tale" 6) In an interview, Alex Miller has said that The Ancestor Game was written for a Chinese artist friend: "I followed his experience. I wanted to validate him" (Ryle 1). Notwithstanding that the character Lang Tzu Feng is at one point described as having a "mischievous, primate quality of cunning" (17), Alex Miller's The Ancestor Game (1992) has one of the more sympathetic representations of a Chinese man in recent Australian literature. Although it presents a sympathetic representation, The Ancestor Game is also predicated upon the displacement of that Chinese male subject by another. Representation, as Sneja Gunew tells us, involves two meanings, "on the one hand... as 'depiction' and on the other as 'delegation' (speaking for)" ("Playing" 87). Within this "speaking for" we can see representation is also an impulse to displace. In the second of these meanings a line of authority is assumed, a position vis-a-vis the one who is spoken for. However representation is also a practice in the absence of the one spoken for, and despite Miller's validating intentions of "speaking for", I will argue in this chapter that it is also possible to detect how ambivalent, limiting and marginalising this representation as depiction of a Chinese man is across the text, and how it is predominantly a practice of absenting the other. How also appropriate then that Miller's "central" Chinese male character should be named Lang Tzu, "two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away" (Ancestor 116). 114 In the first chapter of The Ancestor Game the narrator Steven Muir, a writer, has returned to England from Australia for his Scottish father's funeral. When he asks his mother whether she wants him to stay with her in England she replies no. At the end of the chapter Muir then contemplates: "Was I returning to Australia... to continue my exile, or was I going home?" (Ancestor 8). The sentence encapsulates the dilemma faced by the central character Muir and a number of the novel's other major characters; the ambivalences and ambiguities of migrancy, feelings of dislocation, longings for return, and the possibilities of multiple geographic and cultural belongings. In Melbourne Muir meets and befriends the art teacher Lang Tzu Feng and the artist Gertrude Spiess. Gertrude, who is part Chinese, although her Asian maternal genealogy is deliberately elided from the story, is the daughter of Dr August Spiess, a German, Lang Tzu's former tutor/mentor, and the Feng family doctor, who accompanied Lang Tzu to Australia from China in 1937 in order to escape the Japanese invasion. Through this friendship with Lang Tzu and Gertrude, Muir becomes involved in writing a book The Chronicle of the Fengs, itself a parallel representational endeavour. Lang Tzu might well be the representation of the Chinese artist friend Miller had wanted to validate, however the novel is framed within Gertrude's preparations for a solo art exhibition and the novel concludes with the exhibition's opening. Within this structure are multiple movements of the Chinese male into western space; beginning with Lang Tzu's great grandfather, the first Feng as a ten-year old boy, and then Lang Tzu at a similar age in the 1930s. If the young are inherently incapable of representing or speaking for themselves then the line of representation through delegation might appear a more legitimate and authorised task. Miller's sympathetic representation of the Chinese male spends many more pages of the novel narrating the positions of the prepubescent first Feng and the young Lang Tzu, than the adult life and experiences of an adult Lang Tzu. When Miller does take to the position of the adult Lang Tzu, then we see that the representation is narratively limited by comparison. The main conflict in The Ancestor Game is about resisting the cultural pull of one's ancestors and their demands. Lang Tzu's mother, Lien, sides with her traditional Chinese father. Lien, which means Lotus in the novel, also happens to be a homonym for the word to connect, to join, or to be in succession — thus in continuity with tradition. Lang Tzu's father C. H. Feng on the other hand has become completely westernised and all the more powerful, ruthless and masculine for it. Between the pull of these oppositions is a space that can, if only superficially, open up to others. Ien Ang has 115 stated that in the era of multiculturalism, "racially and ethnically marked people are no longer othered today through simple mechanisms of rejection and exclusion, but through an ambivalent and apparently contradictory process of inclusion by virtue of othering" ("Curse" 139, original emphasis). Ang draws on Ghassan Hage to assert that this inclusiveness is based in part on a form of "cultural enrichment" for the dominant culture (142), which in turn maintains a relational positioning of the self and the other, or in other words the dominant figuratively nourished by the difference of the minority. In The Ancestor Game we see this kind of inclusiveness in the character Muir recollecting that since his earliest childhood he believed that within himself, one day he would "come upon extensive and complex landscapes rich with meaning and mystery, waiting for [him] to explore", and that the purpose of his "life would be in the exploration of these places"(10). He observes Lang and Gertrude and realises that: "The way I began to understand them offered me the outlines of a story... it seemed to me that Lang and Gertrude might occupy the vacated homelands of my interior, which were in danger of being colonised by the chanting spectre of my father" (17). Through a position of incorporating the other, the subjective self it would seem is then both sustained and strengthened. It is not however to Muir's interior that we have direct access, but to a specular (other) one. Most of the intrusions into the terrain of the other are performed by Muir himself. Muir through a number of furtive forays observes: "I witnessed myself penetrating more deeply into Lang's domain. Leaving him, I could not resist the impression that I was becoming the person inhabiting the landscape within his mirror" (39). And again: "I had not retreated in confusion from his door... but had inserted myself into the interstice created by his momentary absence... if he wished to reinstate himself then he would have to read my signs." (154). Like a good coloniser, the stability of place is disrupted through resignification, as if to disorientate the former occupier should he or she wish to return. The imposition upon the other extends not only to the Chinese male but also the female, as when Muir enters the house of Victoria Feng, Lang Tzu's great aunt, and has at least the semblance of a spatial dialectics: Placing myself at the place where she [Victoria] had first insinuated her own presence into the landscape, insisting on my own existence in the place from where she had observed the artist at work... Victoria had become the landscape. She had 116 determined the way I was seeing it, directing my attention towards the significance of certain features and away from others. (100-01) Such passages indicate alternating occupations of the self into the space of another, so that nowhere is free of incursion; instead everyone is both a potential coloniser and exile. This exchange of places becomes an overriding state of universality in The Ancestor Game; Muir says: "My mother identified our caste as both refugees and colonists. But isn't that, sooner or later, what everyone must become?" (109). The political character of refuge and colonisation in such landscapes becomes universal practice; ordinary individuals who may never travel and itinerant cosmopolitan citizens may practice it by design or unwittingly. But these instances of furtive "colonisation" and occupation of other places are surprisingly free of actual encounters; rather they are more likely to occur in the absence of the other. Why then does Muir enter the space of the other when the other is paradoxically absent? What is the purpose of this spatial clearing? James Moy states that it is "within an ideologically enforced space of absence that invites political manipulation" (qtd in Metzger "Example" 642). It is at this point that Miller is attempting not representation but appropriation of that minority space for himself, or at least his principal character Muir, and by extension still further for all diasporic subjects. Within such unfettered movements Alex Miller is himself a coloniser. Miller came to Australia from England as a young man and became a jackaroo in north Queensland in the early 1950s. It is not surprising then that Miller enlarges the diasporic condition of dislocation and exile to include such white European characters as Muir and Spiess. "Here" writes Spiess of Australia in his journal "the displaced are in place" (284)1. Whereas the concept of the diaspora might have once referred to the dispersion of Jews among Gentiles, and then more generally to the displacement or exile of groups of people of common national or cultural origin, William Safran has noted how currently the terms diaspora and diaspora communities "seem increasingly to be used as metaphoric designations for several categories of people — expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities tout court" ("Diasporas" 83).

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