Pronouns have never been of more … pronounced … importance. In an era when the young prize the search for identity above all, a first-person study of what it’s like to grow up Chinese in 21st-century Australia could not be timelier – and when the study’s title consists of just three pronouns, you’re looking at a form of perfection.
Yen-Rong Wong’s first book, Me, Her, Us is a collection of essays exploring the intricacies of navigating sex and relationships as a young Chinese-presenting woman in a Western society. It won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at the Queensland Literary Wards in 2022 and has just been published by UQP.
Pushing 30, author Yen-Rong Wong is ideally placed to explore the pressures, early and relentless, on her to be “a good Chinese girl” but she achieves much more than that. From the raw ingredients of sex education, Orientalism and mother-daughter relations she has distilled a heady brew.
When traditional Chinese attachment to the collective collides with the individual, guess who comes off second best? “… my life is not just my own; I am an unavoidable point of consideration when it comes to my parents’ standing in their communities” she writes. Thus begins her explanation, in nonfiction form, of the same mother-daughter-dynamic traversed by Alice Pung in her 2021 novel One Hundred Days.
Wong is in proud rebellion against her mother’s strict Christian upbringing and prudery. Early on, we discover that this highly intelligent and independent-minded daughter has had sex with women. And there are other personal revelations in her honest and revealing essays.
Authorial self-analysis is obviously flawed when claiming she now has “the appropriate distance and the emotional maturity to be honest without being cruel”. In the next section, titled Monsters, Wong writes: “It was too hard for me to believe my parents could be monsters, too.” When emotional truths clash, the authentic you can also be cruel.
Discussing American writer Sheridan Prasso, Wong comes perilously close to suggesting only Asian women should write about Asian women. This flubs the novel test: did Gustave Flaubert have to be a bourgeois woman to write Madame Bovary? Was Tolstoy a general? Imagination may not be lived experience – but (to crib from Julia Gillard’s resignation speech) it’s not nothing.
The author is on stronger ground defending against the trolled accusation that she’s a traitor to her race for dating a white man, rightly calling bullshit on it. In one epigrammatic line, she proclaims: “Just as I’m not any less a woman because my partner is a man, I’m not any less Chinese because my partner is white.”
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And so, we come full circle to the vexed issue of identity. Can one be filially loving daughter, contrarian, rebel and woman in full? One is so divided. Yet if the frail barque of leaking selves is ever to reach port before it breaks up, “one” may be the only safe pronoun left.
Me, Her, Us by Yen-Rong Wong, UQP, $32.99
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