This Door Is Close

Halfway up the stone staircase to the Pousada de Coloane, there is a door with a sign that reads “This Door is Close” (fig. 11). My English-language mind asks—adjective or verb?—and adds the “d” to what must be the verb once the rest of the sign’s meaning becomes clear. The Chinese translation brooks no such confusion, tense being happily absent from Chinese grammar. Were there a Portuguese version as well, I imagine it would be accurate, here in this former Portuguese enclave, this Chinese city of Macau. It’s a little like the name of this verdant bay, 竹灣, otherwise known as Cheoc Van in Macanese, where the pousada is located. Bamboo bay would be an accurate English translation, but I imagine that Cheoc Van perfectly captures its essence for any Macanese, either Chinese or Portuguese.

Earlier this year, 2012, at Macau’s first international literary festival, my mind danced between languages in much the same way. It was not always easy to follow the simultaneous translation of Portuguese into Mandarin, as my primary Chinese dialect is Cantonese. My sense of Macau has always been that of a Canto-Euro space. My late “Portuguese uncle” who lived here in the latter part of his life first introduced me to vinho verde and the cuisine of the Clube Militar—he spoke Portuguese, English, Cantonese, and probably a little Thai and Korean and a smattering of other languages as well—and I loved the stories of his life and travels around Asia, his familiarity and ease in both the Asian and European worlds he inhabited. At the festival, I was struck by a similar feeling of entering a truly global experience, unlike those of other “international” literary festivals around Asia. The difference, of course, is that English was not the dominant language.

For an English-language author, globalization can be advantageous. English has become the lingua franca of commerce and diplomacy, and the spillover into what passes as “global literature” favors those who write in English. The Anglo-American publishing centers of London and New York are dominant financial powerhouses, and when their best-selling authors trot the globe, everyone pays attention. It’s no different in Asia. Since 2001, when an international literary festival first established itself in Hong Kong, the race to bring best-selling authors, especially those with Asian faces or backgrounds or who write about Asia, has mushroomed around the region. As an author from and often in Asia who gets to attend such festivals, this mingling with the stars can be heady fun and a great way to win new readers and sell books. But I must confess I have grown a little fatigued by and impatient with the Anglo-American dominance at the expense of authors from elsewhere on the globe in terms of what gets publicized, translated, read, or taught as “significant” literature.

Which was what made the Macau Literary Festival, and what makes Macau, a space that ignites surprising possibilities.

Which brings me back to doors.

Literature is exciting when there is a collision of sensibilities, when you can open doors that were previously closed to you. My entry into Portuguese literature was like that. More than a dozen years earlier, a Colombian painter who was at the same artists’ residency I attended introduced me to Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. This was before Saramago won the Nobel, and his work was new to me. An English translation of that novel was in the residency library; he, the painter, had read the book in Spanish. This was to be the beginning of my ongoing love affair with Saramago, and Portuguese literature generally, and I eventually found my way to Lisbon in 2006. The advantage of the Nobel was, naturally, that Saramago’s novels suddenly became readily and widely available in English. In fact, if not for the Nobel, I would probably never have read Kawabata, Mahfouz, Canetti, Jelinek, Gao, or Miłosz. Also, the Columbian painter made me realize how much literature was translated into Spanish that never made it into English. Which was why the Macau Literary Festival excited me with its possibilities of an alternate kind of international literary discourse, one not dominated by the Anglo-Americans.

Fringe is an American sci-fi TV series that captured a cult following since its first airing in 2008. In this drama featuring the FBI, a unit called the Fringe Division investigates unexplained occurrences. There is a parallel universe that can be accessed by a mysterious portal, where a doppelganger of every person on earth exists. Part of the dramatic suspense hinges on the possible collision of these two worlds, especially when timelines are interrupted and destinies fractured.

The door, you see, is extremely close, the adjective, not the Chinese English verb.

The notion of parallel universes entrances me because my fish-fowl existence is manifest in parallels. The point of traipsing around the world in search of writers and literature is to prove to myself that yes, this “global literature” I claim as my heritage really does exist. It has been a long and oftentimes frustrating journey as a writer in English who is not situated clearly within a single Anglophone literary tradition, who is constantly on the verge of being fish or fowl or neither. It is too 複雜 to be constantly attuned to the borderlessness of existence, whether in languages, cultures, ethnicities, literatures.

Or even memories. Parallel universes, like the Pousada de Coloane.

I originally booked this Macau trip to hide out for a weekend away from my Hong Kong life. This impulse arose after months—actually, two years—of an intense twenty-four-seven work schedule between Hong Kong and the United States. I had seen the pousada several years earlier when it was closed, just before its refurbishment and renovation. My visit was postponed once, I almost canceled the rescheduled one, and to finally have arrived still startles me. The turbojet ferry ride from Hong Kong was uneventful, check-in relatively easy, and the water in the swimming pool pleasantly cool. So what made me ask myself, with a slight annoyance—what are you doing in Macau?

Late yesterday afternoon, I walked along the beach toward the Piscina de Cheoc Van, luxuriating in the sun and sea breeze and fresh air, thinking that perhaps the why was simply R&R, nothing else, and that I need not search so hard for meaning in every act. But my walk eventually led me to a parallel world, one arising from memory, from childhood, from when my world was a Canto-Anglo city that readily embraced hybridity because that was just the way things were.

At Dragon Inn, monkeys pranced, a ping-pong ball shot up in a cage on a jet stream, and the swimming pool was fringed by bamboo groves. Once, a green snake fell into the pool, and we screamed as we scrambled out of the water. Down the hill, the nineteen-and-a-half mile beach stretched out across the Rambler Channel toward the horizon. Long summer afternoons were spent on that seashore, climbing rocks, fishing, tasting the salt of the sea when we swam. Afterward, back up the hill, after we had rinsed the sea and sand away, my sister and I would explore the grounds of Dragon Inn, where waiters teased us in Cantonese, where the jukebox played American hits and I first heard Earl Grant sing “House of Bamboo.”

Later, dinner was served at the open-air restaurant, where dragonflies and butterflies flitted. Huge bowls of steamed shrimp were shelled and consumed, followed by Cantonese dishes that my extended family and friends feasted on; the noisy chatter across the large, round table was in Javanese, English, Cantonese, Dutch, Mandarin, Japanese, and more, all those languages of my childhood. I don’t recall that my Portuguese uncle was ever with us at Dragon Inn, but he might easily have been, along with all the other Europeans, British, Chinese, Indonesians, Japanese, and international people my parents seemed to know. At night I fell asleep to the sound of the waves below.

Dragon Inn Villa used to be an actual inn, a holiday beach motel that offered spare, clean rooms on two floors. The walls were white, the roofs and shutters were a bright Chinese red. The location was often featured in Cantonese films of the fifties and sixties. It was not luxurious, did not have a five-star brand on its logo, and probably had no logo, just a painted sign in Chinese and English at the foot of the hill to indicate you had arrived. Back in the sixties, this inn was rather remote, more than an hour’s drive to the countryside where the hills were green, the beaches accessible, and the waters clean enough to swim.

The establishment still exists in 2018 but only as a seafood restaurant. The general area has been developed over the years, transport improved with a new highway, and, in the mid-1990s, all the beaches gracing the old Castle Peak Road—including my childhood seashore—were officially closed by the Hong Kong Government due to the polluted water quality of the Rambler Channel. Four were finally reopened in 2011 with the remaining three scheduled to reopen in 2013. They simply fell victim to the unrelenting pace of progress in Hong Kong, the same progress that assails Macau, which no longer resembles the sleepy village I knew as a child. But you cannot get too sentimental about change in our Chinese-international pinpoint on the globe. New and uncharted territory of twenty-first-century possibilities abound, the way the Macau Literary Festival offered me new mindscapes.

Coloane, 路灣, the district where this pousada sits on a hilltop, is still the beach road it once was. There is still a remote feeling to this area. On a partially sunny weekend the beach is relatively empty and the piscina not so crowded as to be unbearable. The Pousada de Coloane itself is a heritage space, and heritage, in our rapidly transforming world, matters, as literature should. A literary festival is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Macau, this city where the golden sands of 金沙 denote a casino, not a beach. The literary here is fringe, as fringe as my writing in English as a Chinese Indonesian author from Hong Kong is, while I continue to wander and read the world in search of connection and meaning.

At times I wonder, am I trying too hard?

There was a moment in my writing life, back in the heady days of a late eighties and early nineties success streak in New York, when I thought I could shut out these parallel worlds forever. It was exciting to be able to walk up to Don DeLillo in a bookstore, one of my longtime literary heroes, and have him sign my copy of Mao II, which had just been released. The Quarterly edited by Gordon Lish was a thing at the time, and I attended their readings and met Lish, who was generous with introductions to agents and editors. You could talk to editors at the major houses, and a few actually talked back. And then there was the NYFA, a fellowship for writers resident in New York State, and among my year of fellows, I met Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Eric Darton, Robin Hirsch. The latter runs the Cornelia Street Café, a legendary space in the Village for readings and other artistic performances, where I got to read as a younger, aspiring author. Some years later, I was privileged to stage a jazz fiction reading there, accompanied by composer David Amram, whom I’d met through the Kerouac House where I was one of their earliest writers-in-residence. And there always was the Asian American Writers Workshop, a home for all of us with Asian faces in the United States who wrote, and the English language was simply the obvious literary one.

Why should I care about Hong Kong or Macau and the multiplicity of the global literary world, on their precarious perches far away from the center of the literary world? Didn’t every author still desire translation into English for an “international” readership? What did my parallel realities and memories and echoes of other languages matter?

Wasn’t New York good enough?

Once, in the early 2000s, at a reading I gave in the East Village back when it was still hip, a strange encounter gave me pause. I had read a new story set in Hong Kong. One of the reading series organizers, a bookseller and East Village denizen, said to me afterward that Hong Kong was not a city he had ever thought about and added it was not a place he would ever want to visit. Remarkably, he was not being nasty, simply stating a fact of his existence, and that, I by then had begun to suspect, was the truth of many of the literati who swarmed around the provisional village that was the city. Later I told myself that no, New York was not nearly good enough, or at least, not as good as it thought it was when it came to taking the pulse of the world.

Over a decade later, wandering around Macau, I knew the reason to walk the sands of this bamboo bay that is Cheoc Van because it became a doorway to imagination. I know why I came to Macau: to enter this point of an alternate universe, this memory, where Cantonese Portuguese China serves as a portal to a hybrid, transmigratory, international experience unlike any other. Not unlike my life. In the end, you write who you are, fish, fowl, mongrel, or whatever hybrid creature you happen to be, regardless of what supposedly equals “success” for a writer.

It is almost June, the month of the death of Jose Saramago. By now, I have read well beyond this author in Portuguese literature, and thanks to a forward-thinking fringe division in Macau have been introduced to even more Portuguese writers and their literary notions. As Fernando Pessoa—creator of the imaginary poet Ricardo Reis—suggests, we are all heteronyms of ourselves and each other. This is perhaps an even more urgent reality today in our hybrid, complex, multilayered, global twenty-first-century world, regardless of the current reactionary, backward isolationism in some nations. All we must do is locate the right entry point.

As I write this, it’s already 2018, and another door is about to close on one parallel track that has been my life. This summer, I will finally leave Hong Kong for good and no longer keep a home in that city. The prospect is both exhilarating and daunting. My mother’s death freed me from having to be close by and allows me to live in my rural New York enclave, and also in Manhattan, with Bill. It’s a long-imagined dream, exhilarating in its prospects. I will have a road back in time to a parallel piece of my childhood, the sleepy rural world that was Macau, the idyllic summers along the Rambler Channel and at Dragon Inn when the New Territories was truly Hong Kong’s “countryside.” Both my parents grew up in tiny Javanese villages, and I sometimes think that despite their very urban lives—just as my own has been—a part of them, and me, are really country mice, scurrying out of the city whenever we possibly can.

Yet it’s daunting to think I will no longer have a home base in Hong Kong and Asia.

The thing about doors, though, is that they don’t stay closed. Late last year, after some two and a half years of pitching proposals to universities around the world, I got the nod from Vermont College of Fine Arts to recreate and expand what the “murdered MFA” (as some of the students named it) envisioned when I first set it up. The program in Hong Kong was a kind of Asian writing MFA; now I codirect a new low-residency program, an international one, offering both creative writing and literary translation. The residencies will simply move around the world, and in each location we’ll read the literature, meet the writers of that country, while focusing on the art and craft of becoming a writer, one with international influences and characteristics. One of the residency locations already on the schedule is Lisbon, so that my love for Portuguese literature, albeit in translation, will help shape other writers the way it did me.

As an insomniac child, I used to talk-story to myself in bed about a grown-up life that would place me among peoples from all over the world. The location was immaterial. I made up friends of both sexes, we had no language barriers, and it didn’t matter where we came from or what we looked like or where we were in the world. These people became more real to me than those from the provincially insular Cantonese majority in Hong Kong. Yet I had no illusions that they could rescue me from my situation; even then, I was a fiction writer and understood that the imaginary was simply a point of departure. The Purple Rose of Cairo was not the rabbit hole I tumbled down because books, unlike movies, are not dominated by sight and sound. Instead, the imagination fills in the blanks around the written word.

I wandered the streets of Lisbon or Istanbul long before I ever arrived in those cities because of Saramago and Pamuk, just as South Africa came alive for me in Lessing’s books. Which was probably why, despite the overall insularity of Anglo-American publishing, I decided that there would eventually be readers who would walk the streets of Hong Kong, whether or not they ever landed on these shores, because of Xu. It might take me a little longer, and I wouldn’t have the privilege of being yet another New York writer who could simply embrace and write herself into the heritage of American literature, the content and approach to be defined by that tradition. But isn’t that the point of writing? Isn’t that the reason for parallel worlds? We need them because they offer us alternative imaginaries, those that show us that these are really more like our own worlds than we imagine. Only then may we usefully contribute to broadening Anglophone literature beyond its traditional borders. The door, as some might say, is close, and Macau my unexpected portal.