The Black Box

During the week of Sydney Writers’ Festival, I visited a school whose year 11 students were studying four of the short stories from my collection, Australia Day. This is an extract of the talk I gave them, in which I discuss short stories, writing, and the importance of diversity in literature.

 

When I was in year eleven I was living in Hong Kong. I was doing my GCSEs at an English school. Unlike many of the expat students, who were British, I had a Chinese father. Every Sunday I visited my Chinese grandparents in a place called Tai Koo Shing. I ate peanuts and watched Chinese soap operas on their couch. But I didn’t feel Chinese. I didn’t speak Cantonese and I didn’t look Chinese. And then when I was nineteen I came to Australia to study medicine at Melbourne Uni. But, while I had been born in Australia and I held an Australian passport, I didn’t feel Australian. People constantly asked me where I came from. Italians thought I was Italian. Greeks though I was Greek. Everybody asked me why I spoke with a British accent. When I told friends in Hong Kong I was going to Australia to study they warned me that Australia was a racist country. At the time, more people in Hong Kong knew who Pauline Hanson was than John Howard. Admittedly I was a little worried. When I arrived I couldn’t believe people lived in houses with just a flimsy fence to protect them from the outside world. I was used to living in an apartment with bars on the windows and a security guard at the front door. I didn’t really fit into this place. I was an outsider. But if you take away anything from this talk today, I want it to be that sometimes the very thing that stops you from fitting in when you’re in year eleven is actually the thing that will make you stand out, in the best possible way, in the years after year eleven. For me, it was the perspective of being an outsider that helped me to write stories. Short stories about the country that would eventually become my home.

Laurie Moore said a short story is a love affair, while a novel is a marriage. Stephen King described a short story as being like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. Daphne Du Maurier said women want love to be a novel, while men want love to be a short story.

Short stories, it would seem, are having a moment. In 2017 the second most read article in the New Yorker was a short story called Cat Person. In an era when many of us are time poor and suffer from short attention spans, short stories are a perfect fit. But they are also an acquired taste.

If you are used to reading novels, you may find short stories unnerving, possibly even dissatisfying. If you want neat conclusions and certainty, you will be deeply disappointed. Short stories demand work from the reader. You can’t be lazy. You have to think. But if you are up to the task, I promise you, you will be rewarded in spades.

George Saunders, one of the short story masters of our time, says a story is like a black box. You lock the reader inside the box for a moment and during that moment they glimpse something, a truth, that leaves them forever changed. It’s just a glimpse and it may be so fleeting that they don’t fully appreciate how the’ve changed until much later. It may take them hours or even days of thinking about the story afterwards to understand the truth that they observed inside the box.

Like most living things, a story begins with a seed. In my story Australia Day, the seed was the relationship between my Chinese father and my Australian mother, in my story Fracture, the seed was a newspaper article about a neurosurgeon who was stabbed by his disgruntled patient, in my story A Good and Pleasant Thing the seed was imagining what it would be like for my non-English speaking grandmother to migrate to Australia.  We all have these moments in our lives. Moments that make us stop and wake up a little. Moments that make us angry or sad or extremely curious about something. Writing a story is, I guess, a little like making a baby—it’s the sowing of the seed that’s the fun, easy bit, it’s everything that happens afterwards that’s difficult.

Initially, when the story is just an idea in your head, it’s perfect. Like a baby before it’s born, the possibilities are infinite. You imagine you are going to write something fresh and edgy and revolutionary. The next Cat Person in the New Yorker perhaps. But then you write it. Suddenly your baby is born and it’s not quite like you imagined it would be. Perhaps it doesn’t have the colour eyes you were expecting, perhaps it doesn’t have the right colour hair. Perhaps you were hoping it would look like you and it looks more like your mother-in-law.

Either way there is a huge gap between what you were hoping your story would be and what your story actually is.  So you rewrite and you rewrite and you rewrite. You take out all but the very best adverbs. You make sure that if your characters are feeling something, you don’t tell the reader what they are feeling, you give your reader clues so they can work it out for themself.

Lots of readers, especially lovers of the traditional novel, find short stories frustrating. They want to know what happens “in the end”. But remember: short stories, by nature of their brevity, and their genre, aim to be true to life. They are, as George Saunders said, glimpses of meaningful moments in people’s lives. And life is unpredictable. We don’t know how life is going to turn out. None of you siting here in the audience right now know what you’re going to do when you finish school. You have aims and goals and ideas about what you want to do, but you don’t know how it’s actually going to turn out “in the end”. This is because your life will continue to be marked by little cumulative moments that will change you as a person and change the trajectory of your life. It may be an unexpected friendship, it may be a near death experience, it may be the loss of a loved one, or it may be something very small, something you don’t even realise the significance of at the time—something somebody says to you in passing, one day, something hurtful or kind or clever. This is what short stories are about. These moments. I feel very fortunate to work as a GP because my working life is full of such moments. I am constantly meeting new people who teach me new things about the world we live in.

When I started writing short stories I never dreamed that I would one day write a collection but after ten years of writing, I found that I had gathered enough stories to create a manuscript. And when I put them together in this way, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were recurrent themes. The famous American writer, James Baldwin, said that “every writer only has one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”

Without being conscious of it, I had populated my stories with a cast of diverse characters. This was not a deliberate, pre-meditated act. I was simply writing about the people around me, in particular the type of patients I was seeing in my work at hospitals and at my clinic in the western suburbs of Melbourne. But I’ve since discovered that what I was doing was somewhat unusual.

The Australian comedian Nazeem Hussein once said: “if you ever wake up in hospital and there is not one brown or Asian doctor in that hospital, you should probably get the hell out of there. Coz, you’re not actually in a hospital, you’re just on the set of a mediocre but well loved Australian TV series.”

And this is not only true of Australian TV, it could be said of Australian films and even Australian literature.

In 2016 we had a national census and the results surprised many people. It informed us that almost half of the population in Australia were either born overseas or have at least one parent who was born overseas. Now some of you may be thinking “So what?” Why do we need to watch TV and films that reflect our contemporary society? Why do we need books with a diversity of characters and experiences? Well I want you all to think about your favourite book. It could be your favourite book from childhood or your favourite book now. Chances are that in that book there is a character who you relate to in some way. You see you in them. It may not be in the colour of their skin. It may not be in their religious background. It may be in how they act. Perhaps they are a computer geek and you are a computer geek. Perhaps they are a champion footy player and you’re a champion footy player. These connections with characters are important. Now imagine if you had never read a book or seen a film with a person that looked like you. Imagine if everything in popular culture reflected a world that was different to you.

I remember when The Family Law, a sitcom about a Chinese-Australian family first ran on SBS. I was excited. And I was surprised by how excited I was. Because it was the first show I’d seen on Australian television with a Chinese-Australian family front and centre. Perhaps some of you have had similar experiences.

But there is an even more important reason for diversity in literature. And that is another favourite obsession of mine. Empathy. The act of seeing the world from another person’s point of view. Malorie Blackman is a famous British children’s author and she claims that “reading is an exercise in empathy”. The research supports her. Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Toronto, conducted a study in 2006 that linked reading fiction to better performance on empathy and social acumen tests. In his words, “When we read about other people, we can imagine ourselves into their position and we can imagine what it’s like being that person. That enables us to better understand people, better cooperate with them.”

There is something magical about becoming immersed in a book or a film or binge-watching a TV series on Netflix. For those few precious hours we are not ourselves anymore, we are in the head of somebody else. And it is freeing. And exciting. And exhilarating. Sometimes it is disturbing. Most importantly, it is essential for us to be able to make sense of the world. But, and it’s a big but, if we only ever see one type of character or group of people in books and film and TV then we have a problem. It means we will have truckloads of empathy and understanding and openness to that one particular group of people, but very little empathy for anyone else. And this, in my opinion—much more than simply seeing oneself reflected in art—is the most important reason for diversity in literature.

These are exciting times. A time when a movie like Get Out and a TV show like Master of None are getting recognition. A time when the shortlist for the Stella prize has Indigenous, Indonesian, Sri Lankan and Iranian books on it. And because we are all still getting used to it and because it all feels a little weird and strange and different, a lot of people get their knickers in a twist about it. They talk about “diversity” reads, something they feel they should do rather than something they want to do. They say it’s political correctness gone mad. But in response, I return to my first point about stories, in particular literary short stories, needing to be true to life. Look around you. Look at the people around you. If your stories don’t reflect the environment and the school and the suburb you live in then you’re just not being truthful. And while fiction is not about facts, it is all about being truthful. And as Nazeem Hussein put it so eloquently, if you wake up and something doesn’t look right, then you had better get the hell out of there.