fiction
EASTERN AND WESTERN MYTHOLOGIES
Katharine England
Lau Siew Mei
Playing Madame Mao
Brandl & Schlesinger $24.95pb, 240pp
1 876040 18 1
It is not unreasonable to speak of Lau Siew Mei in the same breath as the formidable Brian Castro with his string of awards, his knotty, erudite, postmodern fictions. Lau Siew Mei's first novel shows promise of a not dissimilar talent for synthesising Eastern and Western mythologies, history and story, the intellect and the imagination.
Playing Madame Mao is a fascinating mirror-maze of politics and passion. Its spiral of reflections superimposes the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the authoritarian development of the republic of Singapore, and reflects both in a mythical underwater mirrorworld of trapped and now vengeful spirits.
The main character, Chiang Ching, shares the chosen name of the one-time actress and third wife of Chairman Mao, the role that she plays to acclaim in the wayang or opera, where she has previously performed similarly pivotal female roles: Helen of Troy and Ibsen's Nora. Her friend, the journalist Roxanne, bears the name of an American journalist who has written on the real Madame Mao. Ching's husband, the scholar Tang Na Juan, is found guilty of writing articles under a pseudonym for a Catholic periodical and is detained, like many others, without trial. Roxanne's husband Jeff may have been his betrayer.
A circling, contradictory, kaleidoscopic tale of civil disturbance and brutal suppression, of betrayal and interrogation, disgrace, dejection and death is interwoven with dreams and stories and countervailing philosophies of masculine and feminine power. In the mirrorworld 'power is bending in the wind like a reed, like a Tai-chi movement, softness not aggression; power lies in the feminine.' The mirror people build their world on the feminine characteristics of stillness and space -- the empty hub without which the wheel is useless, the space in the wall that allows a window.
In contrast the Chairman's dream of power is represented by a stuffed eagle with 'tearing beak...stern profile and...cold eye', and the Emperor rules according to a fixed and unforgiving law. The theatre director, whose plays hold up another mirror to real life -- and one that particularly harbours the possibility of distortion -- is intoxicated not only by his power over his 'actors', but by 'the charm of seeing them resist. Stupid fools. They never understand that everything in their lives is contrived at a higher level...', while the 'unfeminine' Chiang Ching orders and demands, manipulates and executes, following in the footsteps of her namesake: 'I will be your right-hand woman,' she says to the Chairman -- 'I know all about the theatre. I will rewrite history for you.'
The characters are memorable: Tang for the bittersweet humour he brings to the book -- he tries, in a far-fetched moment, to post himself away as a parcel, and takes up bonsai, seeing his own condition mirrored in the stunted and unproductive plants -- and Roxanne largely for her insights into Chiang Ching. Ching herself is a powerful enigma, a multifaceted personality with a host of conflicting roles and responses, a range of metaphors which the reader sorts through in the pursuit of truth.