Chiew Siah Tei's novel: Little Hut of Leeping Fishes

Chiew Siah Tei’s novel: Little Hut of Leaping Fishes

I read the early versions of this novel’s first chapters in 2003, when tutor of Chiew Siah Tei in the Creative Writing Department of Glasgow University. Until then my knowledge of Chinese culture came from willow pattern plates, fine porcelain I had seen, scroll paintings reproduced in books, Arthur Walley’s translations of a Chinese classical poem anthology and his abbreviated version of the comic Monkey epic. These, with travellers’ anecdotes and The Red Lantern film, had left me with an impression of a huge, ancient civilisation too complex for an outsider to understand. In this conclusion I was surely like most Europeans and Americans.

Even in its early state Chiew Siah Tei’s work was a wonderful account of Chinese culture – wonderful because it dramatised a strange society in convincing and (what is essential for a good work of fiction) entertaining detail. This opinion was shared by my colleague in the Creative Writing Department, the poet-dramatist Liz Lochhead. An occasional misuse of metaphor and idiom, caused by the author learning English in Malaysia, was a flaw Liz and I saw would be easily corrected. The chapters I read described birth, childhood and domestic politics in a large house laid out like a miniature Chinese city. An intelligent, kind-hearted boy was contrasted with a brutally selfish brother by another wife of his (supposed) father, a drunken opium-addicted sot. Everyone is dominated by a superstitious though cunning grandfather, the landlord and ruler of several rural villages.

At first I thought this story was happening in the kind of past mistakenly called timeless – some historic fictions do suggest past times were untouched by historical change. Chiew Siah Tei told me I was wrong: her hero’s life would show this culture being altered by collision with Europeans, perhaps even Americans. I then saw there were clues to this in what I had read: the extended family’s prosperity is temporarily boosted by a shift to poppy farming, the source of opium that the Chinese government banned in 1836, since its abuse was undermining the Mandarin bureaucracy that gave China unity and independence. That ban swiftly led to invasion by European and U.S.A. under a British general. The invaders were defending free trade and Christianity, and cruelly destroyed Chinese unity and independence until the Maoist revolution cruelly restored it a century later. Since the U.S.A. government is now slightly in debt to former Communist mandarins who have accommodated capitalism, Chiew Siah Tei’s novel shows how a large part of the modern world developed.

I am delighted to learn that she is still working on it – not many good books are begun and finished in one year. I am glad she has found in Jenny Brown a good agent to promote this novel. I am sure that any body that gives her money to complete it will be promoting good literature in and out of Scotland.

Yours truly, Alasdair Gray