Queer Literature in the Sinosphere (Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2024-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Shi Guoying’s tragic outsider

The first story that concerns us is entitled ‘The Story of Mark’ by Shi Guoying, born 1965 in Shanghai. Having worked for 文匯報 (Wenhui bao, Wenhui Daily) in Shanghai, Shi arrived in Sydney in 1989 and began working at 自立快報 (Zili kuaibao, The Independence Daily), and at the time of the publication of ‘The Story of Mark’ in 1998 was the chairwoman of the NSW Chinese Writers’ Association. She is perhaps best known for her 1994 article ‘同澳洲西人结婚幸福吗?’ (‘Tong Aozhou Xiren jiehun xingfu ma?’; ‘Are marriages with white Australians happy?’),18 which generated criticism in the Chinese-language press, was covered by Australian Anglophone outlets, and provoked a conversation about Chinese masculinity that spread beyond Australia’s shores. Shi’s frank discussion of sexuality is a hallmark of her work, even if her fiction has received little secondary treatment. Four stories by Shi appear in the 1998 collection 她們沒有愛情 (Tamen meiyou aiqing; They Have No Love) which collected the work of nine Sydney Sinophone women authors, including ‘The Story of Mark’. Lily Xiao Hong Lee, in her foreword to the collection, highlighted the story as being in her view ‘the deepest and most sympathetic of Westerners’ in the volume, with ‘no sign of “occidentalism” at all’.19

The story begins with the male narrator, a male university student from China, who has been brought by a white Australian friend Joan to the dilapidated flat where Mark is ‘slouched on a fading red velvet couch, watching a television set that looked like it had been picked up off the street’.20 There is some description of the apartment, which is in a general state of decay. Key information about Mark reaches us in the following way:

My gaze fell upon Mark again, he was now talking with Joan about the Nobel laureate Patrick White, who had recently died. That was when I suddenly remembered that this big and tall man, whose every motion bespoke authority, was also a homosexual. In the half-year since I had arrived from China I had met more than a few homosexuals on the streets of Sydney or even at friends’ parties, but I had never met a homosexual like Mark who didn’t look like a homosexual.

Citing Patrick White places Mark at the literary and educated end of Sydney society, as does his association with authority and the fact that we are also told that Mark is more erudite and well-spoken than the average Australian. Mark assists not only the narrator but also Joan, a presumably white Australian classmate of the narrator, with editing their papers for advanced degrees at the University of Sydney. Mark also plays bridge and owns 5,000 books on the subject, a collection which, being constantly short of money, he is trying to sell so that he can travel to Europe. Formerly active in the Australian Labor Party, he counts among the close friends of his youth boys who have gone on to become, respectively, a federal MP and the opposition leader in the New South Wales parliament.21

He had been a young man of bright prospects.

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