Echoes by Shu-Ling Chua
Echoes (2020) is the debut collection of personal essays from Melbourne-based writer Shu-Ling Chua. A meld of recounts, songs, photographs and excerpts from films, Echoes takes the reader on a capricious journey through memory. It is a nimble collection, divided into three essays, that can be devoured as well as savoured – and they merit rereading, for the dazzling poetry and images that they contain.
The first section of the petite collection, ‘(Im)material Inheritances,’ is perhaps the most luminous of the three, exploring the dress, make up and body decoration of Chua, her mother and her grandmother (Ah Ma). This essay discusses the various ways women throughout her family’s history have adorned themselves, exploring both internal and external gazes.
“Who’s this sexy lady?” Chua begins, before being later ‘shocked to learn she was my grandmother.’
‘She wears a short-sleeved white shirt tucked into high-waisted shorts. Her smile is enigmatic, framed by a puff of curls. I note the lighting, her careful grip on the boat’s rim, her elegant bent leg.’
Chua focuses on how women of migrant/diaspora backgrounds, and particularly strong women in her family, live with the permanency of uncertainty; the liminal not-quite-this-not-quite-that-feeling. She invites the reader to see them in this fragile moment, and imagine how they might feel or look. Interestingly, there is often no grand narrative arc to Chua’s essays, but an invitation to ‘feel your way through’ personal landscapes of beauty and loss, revealing the preciousness of memory and relationships.
The essay goes on to describe and visually document some of the dresses that Chua has worn to various dinners and balls, comparing them to the legacies of garments and jewellery of her matriarchs. Proverbs in Cantonese are recited to show the cultural importance of language in the way we dress and adorn ourselves. A phrase, ‘baan leng,’ in Cantonese is said to mean ‘to beautify,’ ‘to dress up’ and ‘to disguise oneself.’ Chua, with her intimate style, is able to show how generations of women in her family, herself included, have used adornment to seek: ‘not glamour but what it signifies: confidence, poise, beauty, acceptance, power, access, love.’
Throughout the collection, Chua’s unflinching recourse to ‘earnest’ language is an admission of the ways she has been taught that ‘to be appreciated is to be admired is to be adored.’ She takes a complex and heart-rending issue – such as when she may have fallen vulnerable to an eating disorder – and draws out the beauty in self-awareness and fragility. For too long, women’s bodies and voices (especially those of migrant backgrounds) have been diminished.
The second essay in the collection, the titular piece ‘Echoes’ is a sonic personal history: a love letter to Chua’s favourite songs and music videos. Interspersed with passages from the film Crazy Rich Asians, Cantonese songs she listened to with her mother, and English and Japanese records from her grandfather, this essay explores how music might be ‘a form of escapism’ and ‘the rhythm… a sense of yearning.’ As Chua concludes the essay, which details the songs of her childhood, teens and early adulthood, she reflects on the role of nostalgia in her taste in music. With an ambiguity that is distinctly her own, she writes: ‘perhaps the nostalgia was imagined, perhaps not.’
The final essay, ‘To Fish for the Moon,’ explores rituals of cleaning, ablutions and domesticity between Chua and her forebears. Chua explores her family’s migration to Australia from Malaysia and even before then; the moon and the ocean being two elusive metaphors for the rootedness and stability Chua perhaps struggles to find. The title of the essay is a saying from Chinese culture that, in Cantonese, means ‘to make impractical or vain efforts,’ and she explores the struggles she has had in locating and visiting her ‘homeland.’ The geographical curves she traces between these places of ancestral origin and the haunts of her own youth shimmer in the reader’s mind:
‘When I lived in Canberra, I would often spend afternoons by Lake Burley Griffin, watching the sequin sparks glint upon its surface, little eddies never to be repeated. I wrote on my blog: I forget everything when I watch the ripples and light upon the water. All I feel is the sun and breeze.’
Here, one feels, she is reminding us of the immutability of memory and the difficulty of belonging for children of migrants – something that I, second-generation on my dad’s side, appreciate. As her words smolder into the end of the passage, ‘I remember other evenings, driving along Parkes Way as the sun hits the water at just the right angle. Everything shone gold,’ we are reminded that being the child of a diaspora can give you a uniquely beautiful and expansive perspective on the world, as much as it can also cause doubt and provoke questioning.
At the end of the collection, Chua leaves us in a state of curiosity and inspiration. A belle-lettres of thoughts, images and personal stories, Echoes will not fail to impress and delight.
Leila Lois is a woman of Kurdish and Celtic heritage. Her Kurdish ancestors fled oppression in Iraq and her parents moved from Wales to Aotearoa soon after she was born. In her poems, Leila explores a personal sense of origin that, like the ocean, binds several landscapes and times. She has been published in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada by Southerly, LiteLitOne, Honey Literary Journal, Right Now, Delving Into Dance, Djed Press and more.