BODIES CHANG’D TO VARIOUS FORMS

Tom Cho
LOOK WHO’S MORPHING
Giramondo, AUS $29.95, 180pp, ISBN: 978-1-920882-54-9

One year at the Melbourne Writers Festival, literary provocateur Tom Cho distributed a parody program. The guest list? ‘Barry, Ethel, Publishers, Token Ethnic Writer A, Token Young Writer.’ A description of the emerging writers’ panel followed: ‘They’re young. They’re hip. They’re even writers. Grunge drugs sex risk-taking behaviour those young scally wags youth of today no respect for their elders.’ Given Cho’s past cheekiness toward his seniors, it isn’t surprising some of them have been hostile toward his debut short story collection.

David Messers of the Sydney Morning Herald, slammed Look Who’s Morphing for its use of ‘modernist gimmickry that had lost both its shock value and intellectual allure long before the end of last century’ (39). The author, who is Chinese-Australian, struck back against his ‘unadventurous’ reviewer online, suggesting Messers was guilty of pigeonholing ethnic writers. This clash, I’d argue, reflects broader differences in aesthetic taste separating Ozlit’s baby boomer gatekeepers and the young scallywags who’d like to replace them.

An important element of this generational divide is Gen X/Y’s very particular relationship with popular culture, especially that of the 1980s. In these 18 stories 80s pop becomes a sign of generational difference, a marker of a distinctive Gen X/Y sensibility that simultaneously sees through and celebrates commercialism and kitsch. Cho’s characters aren’t nostalgic about their youth the way their parents tend to be about the 60s and 70s. Only heavy irony can make the age of Margaret Thatcher and Motley Crue charming.

Opener ‘Dirty Dancing’ is a good example of this aesthetic, the literature of the knowing smirk. Here the classic coming of age flick of the title is rewritten with a 34-year-old Chinese-Australian short story writer named Tom Cho as protagonist. After a transformative holiday fling with his dance instructor, he can no longer accept his parents calling him ‘baby.’ By telling them, ‘nobody puts baby in the corner’ and inviting them to join him in ‘a big raunchy dance number,’ Cho finally forces his mother and father to accept him as an adult (8). In this piece pop playfulness defeats conservatism. But across the collection intergenerational conflict is not so easily overcome. The protagonist continually struggles to connect with older relatives: ‘I am not that close to Auntie Wei’ (17). ‘Uncle Wang and I do not have any long and personal conversations’ (38).

Perhaps the fictional Cho has no time for family bonding because he’s busy fantasising about further cameos in ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘Dr Phil,’ and ‘The Bodyguard.’ His self-insertion into these pop texts disrupts classic heterosexual Anglo narratives, asking readers to re-examine their own identification with popular culture. To note the author is particularly sharp when dissecting the special East Asian affection for western kitsch, is not to typecast him as an ethnic writer, or to suggest he confine himself to this material. More often his stories involve fantastic transformations – becoming a cyborg, a Ford Bronco 4x4, a fifty-five metre tall cock rock guitarist – with the theme of migration as metamorphosis a subtle presence in the background. Echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses can also be detected; like Cho, the enfant terrible of ancient Rome wrote of ‘bodies chang’d to various forms.’

Above all, these stories are concerned with the forces that shape contemporary selfhood. Cho may occasionally resort to ‘gimmickry’ as Messers suggests, but he is certainly no modernist. Gone is the concern with interiority, the struggle to forge identity through opposition to both tradition and mass culture. Like figures in an Andy Warhol silkscreen his characters are all surface, gleefully surrendering any stable sense of self to the seductive play of images. ‘Aren’t we all composites of various entities in our lives, family members, friends, lovers, certain people we watch on TV?’ (48). Only in the anthology’s best piece, the prose poem ‘Chinese Whispers,’ is there a hint of critique. Here Cho juxtaposes a racist American pop song ‘Nagasaki’ from 1928 with the dropping of the atom bomb, reminding us pop culture has long been one of empire’s most effective weapons.

Mostly, however, the tone is one of deadpan zaniness. While this works for a satirical Writers Festival program, it doesn’t necessarily hold us over a 180 page work of prose fiction. Passages of the weaker stories read like poststructuralist literary theory paraphrased by a celebrity impersonator with a taste for ribald asides. Nevertheless, for this Gen Y reader, Look Who’s Morphing is finally redeemed by its daring and inventive language. Pop culture may be the 21st century lingua franca, but these literary short stories – as prone to experimental shape-shifting as Cho’s eponymous protagonist – succeed in making it strange for us once more. If older writers want to know where fiction is going they best become fluent in this language. If young writers want their elders’ respect they will have to do something even more difficult – learn to escape it.