| Alex Kuo was
born in Boston but raised in wartime Chongqing. He went to primary and
secondary school in Hong Kong but has spent most of
his adult life in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where he
once fought forest fires for a living. Since
1988 he has taught and traveled extensively in China, as a Senior
Fulbright Fellow, Lingnan Fellow and lecturer. His most recent books
are Chinese Opera, a novel published by Asia 2000, and a
collection of poems, This Fierce Geography.
Alex Kuo is a major writer of trans-Pacific
literature. His work bridges oceans, cultures and generations.
Lipstick and Other Stories won the American Book Award, 2002 – a
first for a Hong Kong author. Also, a first for a book not published
in the United States. This new collection of stories, set mostly in
contemporary China, deals with the intricate and often murky
relationships between ideology, dissidence and just plain everyday
survival: from grade-school children terrorizing Beijing’s Bank of
China to Elton John at the Holiday Inn-Lido; from an imaginary
interview with a trusted confidant and advisor of Chairman Mao to an
encounter with a Christian evangelist at the Great Hall of the People.
In Chinese Opera, Sonny Ling and Sissy George are in Beijing. He's a hotshot
pianist teaching at the Central Conservatory of Music. She's a gutsy
nightclub singer. It's the political spring of 1989 but behind the walls of
the Conservatory Madame Zhou rules. While their friends struggle to keep
their humanity, Sonny and Sissy give the performances of their lives in a
Chinese drama played out to the accompaniment of Bizet's Carmen.
Maxine Hong Kingston said
of the novel, "An American goes to his
ancestral land, China, and confronts the strangenesses there. What
life after revolution? After many revolutions? Alex Kuo helps us hear
the music that strangers play to strangers, and a free individual
plays to society."
Sherman Alexis, the
brilliant young Native American writer who was once a student of Alex
Kuo, said, "When I hear music these
days, I think of Alex Kuo's Chinese Opera, a passionate novel about
the silent spaces between chords and the silent spaces between people,
and our mad rush to fill those spaces with love, hope, sex, and
dreams. There are passages of this book so beautiful, humorous, and
confident that it makes me jealous. This is a book I wished I'd
written."
Mishi Saran's Interview with Alex Kuo:
"Alex Kuo, like his writing, is a creature that
defies borders. Poised between countries, between poetry and prose,
his filtered fury and resistance to lazy views of the world have just
won him the American Book Award, a literary feather for his cap, for
Lipstick and Other Stories....For his Hong Kong publisher, independent
Asia 2000, it is a triumph of good writing against unfavorable odds, a
first victory for a small fry pitted against the big boys of the book
business.
"There are leaps of imagination, said Mr. Kuo in an
interview in Hong Kong, that address issues, it's saying something,
but don’t ask what. Pausing to light a cigarette and sip his coffee,
he decides to go one step further. "I contend certain experiences
cannot be handled linguistically."
"The author’s life hopscotched between continents,
Boston, Chongqing, Shanghai in 1945, British Hong Kong in 1947, where
he stayed from the ages of seven to 15; the United States, a stint in
modern Beijing, the U.S. again, where he is currently
writer-in-residence and chair of the department of comparative
American cultures at Washington State University. He has bushy dark
eyebrows, a tall rangy, athletic build and could almost, at dusk, be
mistaken for a native American sage.
"At home, in the early years, he spoke a hierarchy
of languages. "With my younger brother and sister, I spoke Cantonese.
With the elder siblings, Mandarin, with my mother, Shanghainese and
with my father, I spoke English." Perhaps this is what made him so
finely attuned to the impossibility of simplicity and drove him to
reach beyond the surface rhythms of the things people say and do.
After all, he has been known to write in English of Chinese people in
China supposedly speaking in Chinese – and manage fine.
"He refuses all limits, demands his own terms. In
the U.S., he says, identity politics, based on gender, sexuality or
race, have been a major issue. "I’ve had tremendous problems with
that. I think it is important for an individual, for a community to
grow up constantly, to know who you are." Perhaps America, politically
correct, at least within academic confines, has become an America
which settles into worldviews, loses the nimbleness required for
nuances. Perhaps it bores him. "Good writing challenges the perception
of the order of the universe," he said.
"Major trade houses in the U.S. have this
perception, Mr. Kuo says, that the American buying public is only
interested in a couple of forms of narrative. If you talk, say about
the Asian American experience, it has to be about immigration or an
ancient left-behind feudalism. He does not mince words. “It’s racist.
It’s cultural hegemony...My writing is very contemporary, I try to
explore...more questions are raised than answered.
"So the politically incorrect story Lipstick
was born, a jab at the media savvy planning of erstwhile Chinese
dissidents now scattered in relative luxury and safety across the
United States. Each story in the collection throws a gauntlet to the
reader, as though to say, “Swallow this, if you can. Define this, if
you dare."
"Mr. Kuo reached into a
Hong Kong boyhood for the delectably written story, "The Catholic
All-Star Chess Team." Its opening sentence is typical, anti-typical
bait: “My most immediate reason for recording this story is my
suspicion that the monogamous obsession of the Chinese for the game of
bridge will prompt them, when the island reverts to Chinese
sovereignty in 1997, to dismiss from history a most incredible chess
match that occurred in the middle of the century in the present
British crown colony of Hong Kong."
"Mr. Kuo flew back to attend Hong Kong’s Literary
Festival held from April 15 to April 21. Looking again at his old
home, he found other objections, more fulminations. "We live and
survive in very different ways. Repression comes in different forms;
it can be family, a government, even a priest," Mr. Kuo says. Which
reminds him: "This is what really (annoys) me about Hong Kong, the
downward violence, the lateral violence."
"The downtrodden mimic the ways of the oppressor;
that’s nothing new. Mr. Kuo jabs his cigarette in the ashtray. The way
the British colonizers treated local Chinese is the way the Hong
Kongers now treat their Filipina domestic workers. Which is the same
way they (oppress) the Hakkas and how the Indians and the Pakistanis
are right up there on the list. "It’s the new middle class, the
Cantonese started as immigrants three generations ago, they came as
service workers and now they are passing on that oppression."
"Of this peculiar split in Hong Kong’s personality,
Mr. Kuo likes to tell a story. Recently, signing books at a Hong Kong
bookshop, as authors do, the flow of customers was less than thin.
Kuo’s eyes glint. "A Chinese gentleman came in, wearing a Rolex, a
tailored suit, holding a briefcase." The man eyed the books, Mr. Kuo
relates, he flipped through the pages and sadly shook his head.
"American. No culture. Two hundred years. Too young." The visitor
sighed. "Not like us British."
"For readers who demand steadiness, China remains a
thread in his writing. Mr. Kuo’s new novel, "Long River," which he
hopes the American Book Award will help push, took six years of
research. It created six feet of files, mostly on the science of
hydraulics, for the protagonist is involved with the Three Gorges Dam.
It took the author another three years to determine how to tell the
story. Once he stumbled on the voice and the idea of a doppelganger,
he bashed the novel out in four and a half months.
"In the breathless,
roller-coaster ride of Mr. Kuo's words, the weak-stomached must hang
on for dear life and the braver ones will grin in glee, then revel in
the sudden stillness of his poetic moments and read them greedily
again and again. It is this excitement that won Alex Kuo the
prestigious American Book Award."
Asian Wall Street Journal
May 24, 2002
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