In the opening short story of Ouyang Yu’s short story collection The White Cockatoo Flowers, the main character of the titular story asks himself: “If I were in China now, I would be…” The line sets the stage for a collection of stories that explore what it means to become Australian and the tensions of being part of —or between—multiple cultures.
In the titular story, a father compares China and Australia as the New Year (calendar; not Lunar) begins. He observes his young son who has formed a friendship with their neighbour, an Australian boy named Tommy. And as the father searches for his place in Australia, he and his wife argue. She says:
And now you feel as if you are not Chinese and have gone beyond being Chinese. In fact, you are more Chinese than all of them put together. Take our son, for example. You wouldn’t like it if he had two school holidays. You’d force him to sit at his desk reading and writing every day. Nothing like the relaxed and smart Australians. A holiday is a holiday. If they have a two-month holiday, they take sixty days off.
The comparisons go from holidays to friendship, to the vibrancy of the places (one character in a later story calls Australia boring and his companion agrees, explaining why a mutual friend left to go back to Shanghai.)
As part of navigating these tensions, Yu plays with words—“The word ‘friend’ becomes ‘fiend’ if you take out the letter ‘r’”—and he also looks at untranslatable terms, in Chinese, but also in Australian English.
In another story, the protagonist asks a bus driver and another passenger about an oft-used Australian slang.
Hence the nickname, ‘All good’, translated to Australian English as ‘She’ll be right.’
“Do they say ‘He’ll be right?’’ I asked the driver.
“No. It’s always, ‘She’ll be right’
Neither of them bothered answering my simple and probably simplistic question, ‘But why?’
Yu uses the observation to continue a conversation about the adoption of norms—the driver and the other passenger have differing views on assimilation of Australian migrants.
Many of the stories touch on customs. The start of the new year, but also Christmas in “Wolves from the North” where Yu’s protagonist is walking around central Melbourne on Christmas Eve, comparing Russell Street with Shanghai’s Nanjing Road. A drunken voice shouts at the man to “go home” and Yu takes the phrase to discuss ideas of home.
With the exception of the novella that closes the collection, most of the stories are short with some only just a few pages long. Many of Yu’s narrators are writers and there are often scenes of the protagonists struggling to put pen to paper. There are moments of joy, but also ones of frustration, tenderness, heartbreak and of feeling unsettled.
This is Yu’s first collection of short stories in English and the stunning cover of the white cockatoo and its flick of yellow on the crest feels perhaps like a visual representation of what it can feel like being a minority in Australia. The native flora perhaps speak to the lands that Yu writes on and from. Yu writes with careful, detailed observations to give his stories a sense of place.