Behind the Moon by Hsu-Ming Teo
372 pages, Soho Press. $13
Reviewed by Mark Dundas Wood
1.18.07
As chapter epigraphs for her second novel, Behind the Moon, the Malaysian-born Australian novelist Hsu-Ming Teo uses quotations from Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu, a famous eighteenth-century Vietnamese epic poem. While the book’s title sounds as though it might have been lifted from that poem as well, it instead comes from a modern, Western source: the 1939 American film The Wizard of Oz. When Judy Garland’s Dorothy is about to break into the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” she speaks to her dog, Toto, about a place where there isn’t any trouble, “far, far away. Behind the moon. Beyond the rain.”
The characters in Teo’s novel have similar longings: for a magical realm with a Technicolor landscape, and also for a place called home where, although things are black and white, no other place can quite compare.
Tien Ho—a young refugee from Vietnam whose father was an African-American soldier—identifies most strongly with that pigtailed Middle-American orphan who travels along the Yellow Brick Road. Tien sets out in the late 1980s on a seemingly ceaseless journey to discover her national, ethnic, and personal identity. There is plenty to sort out along the way. Is Tien Black, White or Asian? Australian, Vietnamese or American? And what does it mean to claim an identity? Tien eventually teams up with two other “multicultural misfits” in her adopted hometown of Strathfield, New South Wales: a Chinese-Australian boy named Justin Cheong, who streaks his hair blond and idolizes Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan; and an awkward Anglo-Australian boy called Nigel “Gibbo” Gibson who desperately wants to be Asian.
The three children form a close bond. But as they stumble through adolescence, the triangle eventually weakens. Things have become complicated: Tien wants a romantic life with Justin—or at least she thinks she does. And Justin, whose identity-quest has a sexual as well as a cultural and ethnic dimension, finds himself infatuated with Gibbo. The three friends drift apart for a time. When they regroup as adults—at a dinner that commemorates the death of Princess Diana in 1997—things deteriorate quickly and severely. Irreparable damage seems to have been done to the bonds linking the formerly fearsome threesome.
The first few chapters of the book recall the easy-to-navigate stuff of young- adult fiction, and certainly the book will appeal to many adolescent readers. But Teo’s narrator is a sly and unpredictable storyteller who entices readers of all ages to hike along intricate trails of the narrative, which often shift to reveal startling vistas.
For instance, we’ll be in a chapter that follows the thoughts of one of the central figures—Tien or Justin or Gibbo. Suddenly, the narrative will shift to a different point of view, perhaps to that of a seemingly minor character. And so, we prepare ourselves for ongoing omniscient narration, only to be caught up short when information is kept secret from us or withheld for later revelation. We never, for example, learn the details of Justin’s expulsion from a prestigious private school. The crisis seems to have had something to do with the boy’s emerging homosexuality. But, just as Justin’s father, Tek, cannot bring himself to mention the scandalous incident, the narrator purposely skirts it too. Although the event was obviously a defining moment in Justin’s young life, the narrator allows the character to keep the memory of it locked in a compartment we readers simply don’t have access to.
It surprises us too when a character that seems at first to be subordinate to the story, such as Tien’s mother Ho Ly-Linh, emerges as something greater. Linh is one of Teo’s best and most complex creations. Initially she’s described as a woman who’s not “given to self-reflection.” Gradually, though, we get glimpses into the inner life of this smart, self-sacrificing, unbearably lonely soul. Mid-novel, we’re given two long chapters in which we learn of Linh’s life in Vietnam: her unhappy first marriage, the sorry fate of her first-born daughter, her love affair with Tien’s American father, her time in a reeducation camp, and her harrowing escape from her war-ravaged homeland on a sinking, pirate-damaged boat. It’s gratifying when Teo lifts the story out of Australian suburbia. The book in these chapters takes on an epic dimension.
In the remaining parts of the story, Linh, like her daughter and her daughter’s friends before her, takes tentative steps down a road that branches one way toward a sparkling Emerald City and the other toward a familiar though sepia-toned backyard. Linh taps her wellsprings of common sense and kindness to deflect the advances of a troubled, lovesick Gibbo. She flirts with a new Western identity that she finds both alarming and tempting. She considers, for instance, different ways of looking at parent-child relationships:
In a culture where there was no automatic respect and deference towards the elderly, adult children met their parents on equal ground. The rudeness and impatience could be heart-stumbling, but the loss of authority was offset by the lure of intimacy. Equality held out the possibility of friendship with your children.
A workable balance between assimilation and individuation, if it comes at all, doesn’t arrive on the fast track, as most of Teo’s characters come to recognize. But anyone who has longed to fit in or to stand out—who has considered shedding a skin, changing a name, rejecting or reclaiming a family legacy—will find much that is familiar and admirable in Behind the Moon.