Hsu-Ming Teo’s debut novel, the Vogel award-winning Love and Vertigo (2000) had as its main themes displacement, dysfunction and family, and her second novel Behind the Moon, picks up these threads again in order to explore the lives and loves of three families; the Cheongs, Gibsons and Hos. Teo places her characters on the fringe of inner-western Sydney, a region where the writer herself grew up and lives still. She has described it as a place of ‘endless fascination’ due in most part to its multicultural hybridity and middle-class suburban mundanity: ‘its complete lack of ‘cool’ and unfashionable ‘westieness’; the tragicomic dramas of my neighbours, and the quiet tales of heroic Cold War survivors and postcolonial migrants’.
The novel’s title is taken from the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy asks Toto if there might be ‘some place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. Not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away—behind the moon—beyond the rain’. It is an early signpost of the quiet desperation, confusion and frustration the protagonists will experience and dream of escaping throughout the novel. The story is framed by two ‘tragedies’; the Strathfield Plaza massacre which took place on Saturday, 17th August 1991, resulting in the deaths of seven people and the wounding of six others and the funeral of Princess Diana on Saturday, 6 September 1997. These events sets the tone for what is to come as the three main protagonists face their own small suburban tragedies in an attempt to negotiate their teenage years, painful rites of passage into adulthood and the burdens of parental expectation. Justin Cheong is the adored only child of his Singaporean-Chinese parents, Tien Ho, who lives with indifferent relatives, is the daughter of an absent Vietnamese mother and an African-American soldier she has never met and Nigel “Gibbo” Gibson is a walking contradiction in terms—at least as far as his father is concerned—a ‘true blue’ Australian boy who dislikes sports.
Teo has created an almost impossibly hybrid threesome (Tien for example is the daughter of a Chinese-Vietnamese mother and a half African-American, half-Cajun father, and the granddaughter of a Francophile Vietnamese intellectual) who form a high-school friendship based on their outsider status, but it works because in doing so she challenges stereotyping and avoids appropriation. Relationships in their myriad forms are at the heart of the story; mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, mateships, platonic and not so platonic love between friends and obsessive love and hate. It is a novel about the powerful ties of friendship, love and history as the publishers suggest, but it is also a story about what threatens those bonds. Cultural borders between immigrant and ‘Australian’ culture and between different Asian communities are examined alongside heterosexual, homosexual, gender and generational divisions.
Food is appears frequently throughout the novel and highlights the characters cross-cultural relations; Justin declares himself a ‘Rice Queen’ who attempts to buy into white multiculturalism through relationships with white men—known as a potatoes among the gay Asian community—searching for someone who was ‘a closet rice eater’ and finding himself rejected and vilified. Other characters frequently come together over meals and there are several nods to the cultural importance of food. Gibbo crosses a border by successfully learning to cook Chinese food, Tien is encouraged to carry ‘home-made Mace’ in the form of crushed chillies by her Aunties and Gillian (Gibbo’s mother) makes a faux pas by taking curry to the ‘Dead Diana Dinner’ on the assumption that her hosts would be making ‘something Asian’—only to discover they are serving roast beef and Yorkshire puddings.
The friendship which holds together Justin, Nigel and Tien deteriorates over the years—aided in part by misplaced affections and resulting betrayals— until their mothers decide to hold a ‘Dead Diana Dinner’ on the stated premise of watching the funeral on TV and the barely disguised intention of bringing the three friends back together again. The explosive events that follow are unexpected, painful and ultimately life changing for all three families and the novel ends with the characters ‘no longer living on the fraying fringes of a difficult and hostile world; they are at the stable centre of the universe and life is simply the way it should be’. Despite its message of redemption through familial, platonic and romantic love, Behind the Moon is not cloying or formulaic because its characters are not reducible to their ethnicity, sexuality, gender or occupation; they demonstrate a workable ‘multiculturalism’ based on connection rather than culture.
Rachel Slater is a freelance writer and reviewer and is currently working on a PhD in contemporary women’s literature in the School of EMSAH at the University of Queensland.