In pre-Revolution China, it was common for corpses to be returned to the place of their births, sometimes undertaking journeys of thousands of miles. Banished writer Liao Yiwu described in his 2008 non-fiction work The Corpse Walker how this was done, often by two men taking turns to carry the corpse on their backs.
In his debut novel, Steve MinOn translates this custom to modern-day Australia. When main protagonist Stephen Bolin dies in Brisbane he leaves a note for his sisters, telling them to carry him 1000 miles north to his birthplace of Innisfail, not on their backs but suspended between two bamboo poles. Like the author, the central character has a surname anglicised by pushing two Chinese names together into one word. He also shares the author’s first name.
When the sisters fail to carry out Stephen’s wishes, he rises in the morgue and becomes a mobile, sentient corpse or jiāngshī, a kind of vampire, and sets off on the journey by himself. In alternate chapters, MinOn entertainingly details his progress.
There are powerfully creepy details. The jiāngshī is able to bend at right angles from the waist and also display the “ugly reverse of a forward bend”. When he talks, his mouth does not move. Now and again, to keep going and achieve his end, it is necessary for him to suck the life from people he meets. The toe-tag affixed to the body in the morgue flaps along with him.
Always, he is possessed by an ache to return to Innisfail, even as mortification sets in. At one point, a “pikelet-sized piece of skin was hanging loose, just under his left eye”. Worms and parasites arrive, accompanied by clouds of flies. On a farm, a dog eats two of his fingers but there’s no pain or blood, just “the pale ends of his intermediate phalanges, separated from the distal brothers at the cartilage”.
Other chapters give biographies, not only of Stephen’s life as a child and gay man, but also of his Scottish-Chinese family. His relationship with his father Willy is difficult, not only because of Stephen’s sexuality but also their opposing politics. In 1989, Willy votes for One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. Despite his Chinese ancestry, he is worried about Australia being “swamped by Asians”. This conviction and surprisingly common dynamic arises from the fact that Willy is descended from “gold-rush Chinese”, as distinct from immigrants who arrived a century or more later.
The family’s founding ancestor was Pan Bo Lin. He also spent time in New Zealand, as evidenced by his Ballarat crop, which features valuable plants from our country, as well as from Polynesia and America. Later in life, Pan Bo Lin is an opium addict, ostracised by the family. As a boy, Willy’s father watches the old man “through the louvres … In the streetlight he could see mosquitoes buzzing around the old man’s ears”.
In varying decades, MinOn delves into both sides of the family’s history. The first intermarriage encounters the expected racism and prejudice, and the subsequent Eurasian children endure cruel treatment from their white Australian schoolmates. There is a family tree at the front of the book which proves useful.
First Name Second Name won an emerging writer award in last year’s Queensland Literary Awards. If the main story for our times is that of racial identity, this novel sets new parameters. MinOn writes fluidly and vividly of character, history and landscape. His keen intelligence and humanity work through even the most gothic elements of this inventive antipodean vampire tale.
First Name Second Name, by Steve MinOn (UQP, $37.99), is out now.
