Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 2, Issue 2

by Linda Jaivin

  Volume 2: Issue 2

  Linda Jaivin & Daniel Ducrou

  Imprint

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “The Frenchman’s Kiss” Copyright © 2012 by Lina Jaivin

  “Ruthless” Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Ducrou

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  Editorial

  The lead story in this issue of the Review of Australian Fiction is by Linda Jaivin. Best known for her erotic comedies, such as her debut novel Eat Me (1995), Jaivin has also drawn on her scholarly work on Chinese culture, history and politics, to produce exceptional works, such as the memoir, biography and travel book, The Monkey and the Dragon (2000), and her more recent novel, A Most Immoral Woman (2010).

  “The Frenchman’s Kiss” is a remarkable story that draws on all aspects of Jaivin’s oeuvre. For the uninitiated, it will be a good introduction to her work, and after reading this you will want to go and seek out her books. For the experienced, it will confirm what has kept you going back over the years, and after reading this you will want to go and reread her books.

  This story charts the relationship between an Australian postgraduate and a Frenchman, set against a 1970s Taiwan, with a youth culture influenced by the West, and a political culture cast under the shadow of China. I don’t want to give too much away, but yes, there is a kiss involved.

  What is appealing to me about this story is that it is heavy with objects and emotions unmediated by digital technology. “In the days before mobile phones, Chinese people commonly employed a magnificently simple phrase that encapsulated the stubbornness, patience, and trust required by both friendship and love: bujian busan, literally no see, no scatter, a commitment to wait on the spot as long as it took.”

  It is this practice of patience that has been largely lost with our use of technology to occupy the instantaneous. The problem, of course, does not lie with technology itself, but with our use of it. It can also be used to rehabilitate lost virtues such as patience and slow reading. This is, after all, what the Review of Australian Fiction aims to achieve. Our format, which fits perfectly with writing such as Jaivin’s “The Frenchman’s Kiss”, encourages the reader to wait, and take the time to read, for as long as it takes.

  Bujian busan.

  The second story in this issue is by emerging writer, Daniel Ducrou. “Ruthless” and “The Frenchman’s Kiss” go together very well, but only in the way that sweet and sour works together. While Jaivin’s story is tender, Ducrou’s story is brutal. Where Jaivin, in her early books, draws on erotic comedy, Ducrou’s story is more concerned with sexual tragedy.

  Interestingly, while the absence of mobile phones was brought to our attention in Jaivin’s story, in “Ruthless” the presence of a mobile phone is central, with a daughter trying to make contact with her estranged father. The consequences of this inability to communicate results in an unmediated experience for both, where emotions are warped and bodies become objectified.

  Daniel Ducrou was shortlisted for the 2007 Australian Vogel Literary Award and the 2008 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for his debut novel, The Byron Journals, which was published by Text Publishing in 2010. Ducrou has also had a couple of stories published in The Sleepers Almanac series. He is currently working on his second novel, a surf story set in Indonesia.

  If “Ruthless” is anything to go by, I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from Daniel Ducrou in the future.

  Enjoy.

  The Frenchman's Kiss

  Linda Jaivin

  Ne nous mangez pas! Monkey exclaimed. On seeing amusement dance in Guillaume’s eyes, she thought, I think I screwed that up and tried not to laugh.

  Guillaume had nice eyes, hazel and deep. His wasn’t a classically handsome face – his nose was a tad too beaked – but it was a very appealing face, that of a man freshly hatched from boy. One part of Monkey’s mind adhered to this thought. Monkey – Margie – was freshly hatched herself; she still hadn’t shed her childhood nickname and it still surprised her when someone referred to her as a woman. Another part of Monkey scrabbled around for the French for don’t eat that in what scientists called the ‘language centre’ of the brain – at that moment more like a Tower of Babel. Until Guillaume had joined their table at the hotpot restaurant in Taipei’s university district, Monkey and her Taiwan friends had been speaking Chinese. Had she just said don’t eat us?

  The two thin slices of uncooked lamb pincered between Guillaume’s chopsticks continued their smooth arc towards his mouth.

  Monkey’s friends erupted in clamorous horror. Bie rang ta chi! Aiya! Shengde! Shi xia huoguode! Rang ta deng yi deng! Huoguo mashang dao. Tell him not to eat that! Yikes! It’s raw! It’s for the hotpot! Tell him to wait! The hotpot will be here in a minute!

  It was the late Seventies. Taipei was a gentle, slow-moving kind of place, where bank tellers took noon siestas at their desks and popular notions of Western cuisine centred on the gooey pizzas and dubious hanbaobao, ‘hamburgers’, introduced by the Yanks. Raw food of any sort was considered barbaric. Once, her friend Lifang asked Monkey to cook a Western meal for her family. Lifang’s grandmother had marched the salad back into the kitchen and thrown it into the wok. Humankind had mastered fire for a reason.

  Monkey performed an elaborate mime of using chopsticks to dip and swirl raw meat in a bubbling hot pot and then eating it. Her friends nodded vigorously while continuing to rain Mandarin exhortations upon the implacable Frenchman’s head.

  Gamely and cheerfully, Guillaume mimicked her actions. Then, just as as all those round the table burst into applause, he popped the raw flesh into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it down.

  A memory from university flashed into Monkey’s mind. In order to illustrate the uncertain qualities of precedent, one of her university lecturers had handed out a cartoon in which a dog pees on a sofa. The dog’s irritated owner marches the dog outside and makes it watch as he pees on a tree. They return to the house and the dog again pees on the sofa, this time standing up on two legs.

  As Guillaume reached for a second helping of tartare, the waitress arrived at the table with the actual hotpot. The centime dropped. Beginning with Guillaume, they laughed till they cried; not finding a serviette, Guillaume made a show of dabbing at his eyes with a shallot pancake, and they laughed some more.

  Monkey was a student at the Mandarin Centre of the National Normal University in Taipei. She also audited classes in the university’s Chinese Literature department. She’d made friends with students there, including Lifang, and it was they who were her dining companions at the popular hotpot restaurant that night when the young Frenchman had wandered in on his own.

  Foreigners were still something of novelty in Taiwan. Monkey’s friends, who had adopted her out of a similar guileless curiosity, beckoned to him to join them. Zhen shuai, whispered Lifang, giggling. He’s really good-looking.

  Monkey nodded. Hai keyi, she replied. He’s okay. She hadn’t immediately welcomed the idea of another foreigner joining their table. Every student of Chinese goes through a phase of desperately wanting to be the only foreigner in China. Still, there was something special about this one that made her happy he came over. Ni hao! her friends had chorused, one of the boys dragging over a chair from an adjoining table.

  Ni hao! answered Guillaume, and then, grinning apologetically: Parlez-vous français?

  At that, all the Chinese looked to Monkey.

  Un peu, she essayed. He chuckled. It turned out she had actually said peau, skin, a point he made by touching her arm, repeating the word, and then illustrating peu by squeezing his thumb and forefinger around a tiny spac
e. Somehow, through a combination of mime and French and English and Chinese, and in the way of university students the world over, over-excited by anything to do with the physical body, ideas, and each other, they fell into a lively, self-consciously intellectual conversation about the possibilities of skin as metaphor. It was then that, in advance of the hotpot, the waitress had delivered the plates of raw meat to their table.

  * * *

  The following evening, Monkey was making her way on foot to Idea House, a coffeehouse bar at the epicentre of the ‘campus folk music’ craze at the centre of Taiwan’s youth culture. Ai-di-ya, as Idea House was called in Chinese, served up lacklustre food. Its decor was bland and undistinguished. But it was the closest thing to a bohemian hangout that Taipei offered in those days. Lifang’s brother Weiguo, an aloof young man on whom Monkey had nurtured a crush for some months, was an Idea House regular. He played the guitar and sang brooding songs about love and innocence that Monkey wished had been written for her. She and Lifang went to all his gigs, where she secretly kept an eagle, if despairing eye on Weiguo’s legion of female fans. That night, Lifang had other plans, but Monkey, after some hesitation, had decided to go anyway.

  Allo! Bonjour! Guillaume jumped up from a roadside stall to plant a kiss on both her cheeks. Miming listening to music and drinking proved easier than explaining the mechanics of hotpot.

  Pourquoi ‘Monkey?’ he asked as they made their way through the bustling streets. C’est un peu, non, c’est un vachement bizarre prenom pour une belle fille.

  Monkey didn’t understand vachement, but she got the message. My little brother, uh, mon petit frère, il ne… uh, he couldn’t say Margie. I don’t really like Margaret. So Monkey stuck. I keep thinking it’s puerile, silly, that I need to stop using it. I could have stopped calling myself that here. But I didn’t. So that tells you. Or tells me, anyway, that maybe I’m not ready to say goodbye to it. Do you… you didn’t get any of that, did you? She shook her head and laughed. Anyway, uh, pas important. Importante.

  Monkey, said Guillaume. He pronounced it as though it were two French words. Mon qui. Ne pas pas importante. Très importante, notre Monkey.

  She gave him a look then, and realised she was flirting. This wasn’t part of the plan. Weiguo was the plan.

  When they got to Idea House, a cover band called Trinity, friends of Weiguo’s, had launched into their standard, weekly rendition of ‘American Pie’. Monkey and Guillaume found a table and ordered some beers. She scanned the room for Weiguo and guessed he was backstage. The band finished up to familial, enthusiastic applause, and the room thrummed with conversation. A pretty girl sitting close to the stage turned to look at something. Her gaze lingered on Guillaume. Monkey flashed hot with a jealousy that surprised her.

  After his set, Weiguo joined Monkey and Guillaume at their table, greeting Guillaume warmly and saying that Lifang had told him the story of the hotpot – was that him? Weiguo was a recent graduate of Taiwan University. Along with the boys in Trinity, he was serving his compulsory military service as a member of the ceremonial military band. Their main job was to greet and farewell visiting heads of state by playing both the visitor’s national anthem and that of the Republic of China. But there weren’t many state visits – most countries had already abandoned formal relations with Taiwan to establish them with the People’s Republic. So the military band didn’t have to do much at all. Weiguo and his mates frequently went AWOL, scaling the fence at the barracks just after roll call in order to abscond for a day of fun or a night of rock'n'roll. Some South American dictator, however, was arriving the following morning so, he explained apologetically, they had to be off early.

  Guillaume and Monkey left Idea House not long after. Monday was his first day of classes and she had a composition to finish. It had rained while they were inside, but the weather had cleared by the time they left. By now they’d worked out a system for communicating. As she relaxed, her French, though basic, began to reform on her tongue. And he understood more English than he’d let on the night before: You’re naughty! she gasped, punching his arm as he admitted he’d known all along that it wasn’t really tartare he was eating, that the meat was intended for the hotpot. You are so naughty.

  Naughty, he repeated, the emphasis on the last syllable, but nice. She punched him again. Ooh la la. Vous êtes Monkey ou Rocky?

  The warm, moist air had a dense, almost dream-like quality, a jungle sweat that was somehow less oppressive at night than by day. The island’s exuberant flora scoffed at the restraints of concrete and glass: ferns and grasses muscled through the cracks and pores of the pavement, house plants fought free of their pots, vines claimed walls and gates, and palms inserted their thrusting fronds into the urban skyline. The wet, tangled rainforest scents damped down the acrid fumes of the growling motorbikes that disordered even the straightest and broadest of Taipei’s avenues. Even the neon looked fresh. And the golden light brimming from the windows invested buildings that were dreary and anonymous by day with infinite, romantic possibility. Monkey ducked the fat drops of water that trees and awnings flung at their heads; Guillaume shook them out of his thick brown curls, comme un chien, she teased. Wangwang, he replied, and she was amazed he knew the Chinese word for a dog’s barking. What else do you know? she demanded, and he pretended not to understand.

  A pair of American Mormon missionaries in white shirts, ties, and badges identifying them as Elder This and Elder That, flew past riding ramrod-straight on specially designed bicycles with tall handlebars. Gossamer plastic rain capes sailed out behind them like windsocks. Miraculeux! Guillaume was a natural mimic, and by the time he’d finished with the Mormons, Monkey was in tears of laughter. She was also gut-wrenchingly, blindingly, in love.

  Guillaume walked Monkey to her door. She held up her face to him, offering her lips. She could feel herself trembling. As he passed over her lips to place a kiss on each cheek, she glimpsed in those hazel eyes a flicker of something like worry or sadness. Beaux rêves, he said, giving her a warm, close hug and another kiss, this one on her forehead, for good measure. Monkey had slept with five boys in university. She’d almost convinced herself she was in love with two of them. A third had been in love with her, which she thought would be less fraught, but it hadn’t been. The other two were one-night stands that turned into two or three-night stands before petering out from mutual lack of interest. In other words, she wasn’t the most sexually active or romantically experienced girl she knew, but nor was she completely inexperienced. Never, she was sure, had anything in her life felt quite like this.

  Alone in her bed, she contemplated the large laya spider – a relative of the Aussie huntsman – on the opposite wall with a distracted sort of calm. She realised, with disconcerting clarity, that her infatuation with Weiguo had arisen at least in part from a desire to be part of this place, to be on his arm as much as in his arms, as though a Chinese boyfriend could somehow raise her above the other pretenders to an imaginary throne of acculturation. It was stupid. Besides, she had to admit that Weiguo had never given the slightest sign that he considered her anything but a friend. She was relieved that she’d never given in to the temptation, strong as it was, to confide her feelings about Weiguo to his sister. When it came to Guillaume, who’d parachuted so unexpectedly into her life, she had no agendas, nothing but the rush of emotion that clenched at her heart, aerated her mind and transformed her physical self into a well of desire. She went over the events of the evening, and the one before, with forensic thoroughness, each detail a lolly from which she sucked every last drop of sweetness. Her hands moved between her legs.

  Just as she arrived at that somnolent place where thoughts, memories, and dreams merged, a sudden dread or apprehension invaded her throat and she was wide awake. She switched on the light, searching for the spider, eyes narrowed against the possibilities: it had grown to a monstrous size, it was advancing on her pillow, it was running up the legs of the bed. But no, there it sat, as it always did, in perfect
stillness. Sometimes it disappeared for a few days at a time, or assumed a different position on the wall, and once or twice she saw it race after some unseen prey, but generally speaking, it considered the wall opposite her bed home. She shut off the light and tossed and turned until the beating of her heart subsided and she fell into a deep sleep.

  * * *

  Zao. Monkey bid good morning to Lao Yu, a former soldier in Chiang Kai-shek’s army from Shandong Province who ran her favourite breakfast stall. The usual? She smiled and nodded. He ladled out hot soybean milk into a bowl, added a few drops of chilli oil, salt, chopped shallots and some dried shrimp, and stuffed a crunchy fried doughstick into a sesame-topped shaobing. She wondered what Guillaume had for breakfast. She imagined introducing him to Lao Yu and the delights of the Shandong breakfast. She looked up hopefully when she caught sight of a foreigner in the corner of her eye, but it was only some awkward American in her composition class at school.

  She had no classes till the afternoon. She took a bus to Chungshan North Road. The bus smelled of sweat and fuel and, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, fish. The monsoonal heat was far less romantic by day. She plucked at her top so that what passed for air could circulate around her breasts and armpits. She felt the oily sweat trickle down her scalp and bead above her lips and, for the first time since she’d woken up, she was thankful Guillaume wasn’t with her. Casting about for distraction, her eyes lit on a public service announcement in the form of a bus advertisement: Gongfei wu kong bu ru. There is no hole into which Commie bandits will not go. It gave the number of a hotline by which citizens could report on any Commie bandits that came to their attention. One of Weiguo’s friends could riff comically on the slogan for hours. For the hundredth time since waking up, she thought of Guillaume.