Echoes, a Reflection

Jasmeet Sahi

This piece was written on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to the Elders of these communities past, present and future and extend that respect to all First Peoples. I acknowledge and bear the knowledge of my role in the ongoing colonisation of this land and its First Peoples and promise to seize every opportunity to resist it.

— —

It is a particularly peculiar time to be writing about memory and family.  

The scale of loss, especially of those without rituals and rites to memorialise them, has been colossal. 

To memorialise is to maintain an idea for eternity, a veneer of forever-hood. 
To memorialise is to resist an end, in some way.  
To memorialise is to repeat repeat repeat 

‘I’m glad you enjoy these old songs. It means they will live on.’

Echoes is a petite book. It is expansive in its scope and the places it takes its reader. It comprises three essays by Shu-Ling Chua, who in her bio situates herself as being born in Melbourne to Malaysian-Chinese parents. Geography is key in this collection, both of the world and of the people in the collection; Shu-Ling’s great grandparents, grandparents, her mother, and herself. 

For a book B6 in size and 86 pages long, it took plenty of time reading it because of how rich it was with meaning. I had to chew and dissolve a few bits before I dove in again. 

B6, is almost palm size. To me, that is unique. A collection of memories in your hands. 

Geography. Shu-Ling traces her family’s history from Swatow/Shantou in China, to Malaya, Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne and Canberra in Australia, through languages and dialects lost and somewhat reclaimed; Cantonese, Teochew, Hok San, English. 

We meet one evening to talk about these essays. It’s a cold Autumn evening and we’re both aiming for a cup of hot chocolate.  

Shu-Ling tells me her Ah Ma lives in Kuala Lumpur, and she lives here in Australia, so the book was an attempt to get closer to her grandma. She speaks of envy at hearing friends speak of spending weekends with their Nans, baking cookies. We talk about how easy it is for some: to connect and share time with grandparents, speak the same language, to really know and understand their life and feel you’re a part of it; a continuation of it, whereas for some the gaps are vast and void-like. Unmappable. 

Shu-Ling was always curious about what life was like when her Ah Ma was a young woman growing up. She wishes to ask her about her hobbies but cannot because she is not fluent in Cantonese. But it’s not fluency of language alone that acts as a barrier in connecting to the grandparents. The barrier is cultural too; ‘...why are you asking all these questions? You weren't there? You wouldn't understand, you don't even know the person.’ 

'‘Why look backward? Don’t just look backward,’ Mum said, preparing dinner.  
’Look forward.’ 

A particular characteristic of analysing diaspora literature is to employ the lens of loss, trauma, and nostalgia. There is often an unsaid expectation for writers of migrant background to write about family, or food or both. Memoir. 

Perhaps these are lenses to ‘easily’ understand a life that is culturally and geographically very different to yours. But I find that problematic because the emphasis is on the ‘easy understanding’ by the reader and not on the writer’s expression of difference, nuance, uniqueness or even plurality. It is a consumer-oriented lens, which both serves many a newcomer writer from typically ‘migrant’ or diaspora backgrounds to enter into the writing world, but a lens that also shortchanges them eventually by being formulaically received, read and reviewed. 

When she started writing, Shu-Ling tells me she resisted writing about family because she found it hard to do, but eventually realised it was what she wrote about most. 

We start talking about legacies and what one leaves behind to remind others of what came before them, to be remembered. Shu-Ling feels often First Nations writers and writers like herself are expected to write about trauma and care, and sadness, but, to her, legacy is about leaving behind joys. ‘We write about joys as well,’ she adds. 

She feels her earlier writing was often about people she didn’t particularly like and now she refuses to lend those memories any page time, or any more space in her thoughts. Despite confessing to be melancholic in her approach to a lot of her writing, she tells me Echoes is a collection of small joys and perhaps it is radical to write of joy mixed up in melancholy and yearning.   

In the first essay, (Im)material Inheritances, Shu-Ling writes of her shared love of fashion, pop songs, and makeup with her Ah Ma, separated by a generation and a culture, Shu-Ling writes how delighted she was at discovering pictures of her Ah Ma as a young woman. There is a delight in viewing your history, especially so if there are echoes of it in the present. Shu-Ling revels in the fact that she too enjoys dressing well, just like her Ah Ma. Throughout the collection, it is mostly her mother that does the recollecting of memories. In our conversation, Shu-Ling refers to her as a literal bridge between the two generations.  

Can one physically, unknowingly inherit memories, knowledge, trauma, joy? 

As a writer of memoir, she is interested in memory and its slippiness. She is currently enjoying reading In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale) and feels perhaps writing about the people we love is one way to remember and keep them close, even after they’ve passed on.

This desire to hold on, commemorate, or to grasp on to that, which is slowly disappearing is characteristic (to me) of diasporic writing. It calls upon memory and nostalgia to have a function and not simply exist as ‘happenings’ or ‘feelings’.

I find Ghassan Hage’s essay Migration, Food, Memory, and Home-Building useful to explain this. In it, he writes about nostalgia and homesickness as two distinct feelings. Where homesickness may play a debilitating role, producing ‘states of passivity’, nostalgia is something altogether different. He urges us to not collapse the two terms together. He writes, ‘Far too often, the collapsing of all migrant yearning for home into a single ‘‘painful’’ sentiment is guided by a ‘‘miserabilist’’ tendency in the study of migration that wants to make migrants passive pained people at all costs.’ 

Of course, there are joys, happiness there too. He goes on to explain how homesickness can be a form of nostalgia, especially within the disempowering feeling of losing control to be like how one was before; the gradual loss of the ability to speak a native language fluently, difficulty socialising and feeling ‘at home’ in a new country. At such point, Hage adds, one may take refuge in the memories of the past, but points to a crucial difference between ‘having memories and inhabiting them.’ Feelings of homesickness, he writes, are akin to inhabiting memories, perhaps to the point of inaction whereas ‘Nostalgia…is an active insertion of memory in the construction of the present and the future’.  

It is a deliberate act. 

Writers writing from the perspective of migration, family, loss but also rediscovering joys get critiqued around nostalgia and the abundance of it in their work. But I guess it is essential to understand how nostalgia gets employed conceptually in such writing and is almost a type of world-building or, to some, wayfinding.  

The choice of black and white images in Echoes but with no caption was intriguing to me at first. But, of course, you’re left to your own devices to conjure meaning, and that to me has been one of the most rewarding experiences of reading the essays. The reader is given work to do, not in a didactic manner…rather things are left unexplained and the reader embarks on their own journey to make meaning and memory; like listening to Teresa Teng’s Tian Mi Mi or watching Anita Mui perform in a glorious diaphanous wedding dress, feeling rapture and curiosity in equal measure. 

My experience of reading Echoes has been one of constantly finding new meaning tucked away. For example, at the tail end of writing this reflection, I notice the circles, the compact, the vinyl and the washing machine.  

If an echo had a shape, after reading these essays, I’m convinced it would be a circle.  

The saying 水中亮月 means ‘to fish for the moon in the water,’
or more plainly, ‘to make impractical or vain efforts.’ 

Right before the pandemic hit the world, Shu-Ling had plans of going to China. In our conversation, she says her dream of doing that died in March 2020 and those feelings are expanded upon in Echoes, where she explores what she calls the ‘layers of impossibility’ to truly connect and know what life was like for her family before they moved to Australia. All she could do then was to geolocate the ancestral village via Google maps or watch black-and-white films and some old song clips on YouTube to recreate a feeling of knowing.

The essays are lush with a yearn to recollect and a deep desire to feel. But what’s also present is the impossibility of these efforts given cultural and historical differences through language, age and distance.

‘So it means that when I listen to a song, like sure, I can use a dictionary and translate the words, but there's always going to be some underlying contexts or subtext or historical references that I miss. And I won’t know because I wasn’t alive when that song first came out.’ Like Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands says that to exist in the diaspora is to perform daily an act or several of translation…And that this act of translation is not a process of loss of cultural meaning, but in a way is a kind of gain through the act of translation.

There is an understated moment in Echoes where she declares she doesn’t intend to experience motherhood. And so for her, ‘writing Echoes, and in particular “To Fish for the Moon”, is a way...or the beginning of a way...to create echoes that might reverberate after Ah Ma, Mum, and I are gone. A book is not a baby. My body of writing isn’t a replacement for a baby but I’m definitely thinking about legacy and what this means to me.’

I’m reminded of Tishani Doshi’s poem, ‘The Immigrant’s Song,’ from her collection Everything Begins Elsewhere.

… 

Let us stay here, and wait for the future 
to arrive, for grandchildren to speak 
in forked tongues about the country 
we once came from. 
Tell us about it, they might ask. 
And you might consider telling them 
of the sky and the coffee beans, 
the small white houses and dusty streets. 
You might set your memory afloat 
like a paper boat down a river. 
You might pray that the paper 
whispers your story to the water, 
that the water sings it to the trees, 
that the trees howl and howl 
it to the leaves. If you keep still 
and do not speak, you might hear 
your whole life fill the world 
until the wind is the only word. 

I’m thinking of these lines particularly because for many of us, away from our families, grandparents, the stories and memories that may have filled our days, the uncertainty of the current times is inescapable. I wonder what the many forebears might be thinking as they lose weeks, months, and years of not being able to set memories afloat through the generations yet to come.