The first debt of this project is to Kenneth Slessor’s elegiac poem, Five Bells (1939), which returned to me, like a remembered song, one midnight on a ferry in the centre of Circular Quay.
I wish to thank my colleagues at The University of Western Sydney, especially members of the Writing and Society Research Group led by Professor Ivor Indyk. The solidarity of members of this group is deeply appreciated. Thanks to the Shanghai Writers’ Association (SWA) for sponsoring my residency in Shanghai in 2008; Madeleine Thien and Yukiko Chino had coterminous residencies and were both congenial and supportive companions. Particular thanks to Claire Roberts and Nicholas Jose, for their patient kindness and circumspect advice on Chinese cultural matters. Hu Peihua, Rowan Callick, Wang Anyi, Ye Xin, Antonia Finnane, Guo Wu, Julia Lovell and Jiang Liping have all offered Chinese advice of one sort or another. Thanks to Jia Zongpei (my Chinese publisher), Zhao Lihong and the SWA for arranging my visit to Chongming Island. Jang Luping (Lucy) was a wonderful translator; Hu Peihua (SWA) was tirelessly wise and helpful; Francine Martin offered hospitality in Shanghai; thanks too to Michelle Garnaut, for her friendship and advice. Thanks to Paddy and Clare Callanan for hospitality and good-humour in Dublin, Fiona Wright for the clepsydra image, Fiona Stanley for medical knowledge, Kathleen
Olive and Melinda Jewell and Suzanne Gapps for collegiate generosity and support.
Special thanks to Geoff Mulligan for editorial advice and to Meredith Curnow and Catherine Hill, two extraordinarily gifted and sensitive readers. Rebecca Carter and Laurence Laluyaux have been especially kind. I have the good fortune to work with Zoë Waldie, my wonderful agent. Victoria Burrows, Susan Midalia, Prue Kerr and Michelle de Kretser have each offered utterly essential moral support, as have Robyn Davidson and Drusilla Modjeska. My daughter Kyra has made this book possible.
Among textual resources, the works of Gelin Yan, Qui Xiaolong, Yu Hua, Ha Jin, Xinran and Yiyun Li have been helpful. Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai (Penguin Books 1988) and Anhua Gao’s To the Edge of the Sky: A Story of Love, Betrayal, Suffering and the Strength of Human Courage (The Overlook Press 2000) are two fine memoirs of women’s cultural revolution experience. Wang Zhousheng’s story ‘The Beautiful Mushrooms’ is the source of some of my knowledge of labour conditions at Chongming Island. It is in Selected Short Stories by Contemporary Writers from Shanghai (II) (Better Link Press NY 2008). I also consulted Feng Jicai’s Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China’s Cultural Revolution (China Books and Periodicals Inc. San Francisco 1996), the website Morning Sun http://www.morningsun.org/ and Li Zhensheng’s Red-Colour News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Though the Cultural Revolution (London: Phaidon, 2003). Simon Leys’ work, most recently a return to articles in The Angel and the Octopus (Duffy and Snellgrove 1999), was also inspiring.
The opening stanza of ‘On Raglan Road’ by Patrick Kavanagh is reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Alan Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency. The stanza of ‘Five Bells’ by Kenneth Slessor
is reprinted from Five Bells: XX Poems (F.C. Johnson 1939), by kind permission of Paul Slessor. I thank Paul for his warm-hearted and affirming response to this project. The quotes from Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Harvill Collins Edition 1988) are reprinted by kind permission of the Random House Group Ltd.