Essays

To closely examine a writing process is to make writing seem possible where it often seems impossible. The impossibility of writing is the impossibility of the apartment I live in, that I am writing these words in, part of a building that was decades ago conceived, designed, constructed. I cannot think of this building as anything but inevitable, whereas this analogy, as I write it, seems unstable, weak. I deleted and rewrote it several times, unsure of its quality. But as you read this paragraph, secured on the published page, even if you agree that it leaves something to be desired, you will still read it as if it had been sealed with lacquer, my hesitations smoothed away.

Every generation is the last to experience certain phenomena; in the case of my generation, these include five cent lollies at the school tuckshop, petrol prices below a dollar a litre, and quite possibly, the wonders and annoyances of physically delivered junk mail. The term ‘junk mail’ is now perhaps better associated with unwanted emails.

On the internet, another name for confession is over-sharing, and it has become synonymous with how we use social media platforms. People can’t get a hold of me over text, but they can just read my tweets: it’s all there, every beat of my mental state.

‘How did I get here, exactly? I rang my father from the red phone box on the footpath outside my grandmother’s, praying that she wouldn’t spring me inside my emergency-coloured beacon. She doesn’t, because down inside the house below street level Grandmother Margaret is also ringing my father, but from the landline.

‘Three days later my father arrives to ferry me back to live in Canvastown, Marlborough. I know I am about to fall off the grid. The grid, as I know it, comprises a circle of girlfriends from relatively stable middle-class homes, my A-student niche, my weekend prowls, life as my grandmother’s last daughter. Despite my scarlet phone call, I feel I have no real say in the abrupt termination of these things.’

There is no single solution to the climate crisis. But neither is there an inevitable outcome. Both assumptions are forms of magical thinking that obscure much more complicated realities. Coming decades are going to be unimaginably difficult, and as societies and cultures struggle to transform themselves some will succeed better than others. There is no question there will be loss, and pain, and fear, or that there will be mistakes and defeats as well as successes. But fixating on collapse, and assuming the story can have only one ending elides not just the possibility of future change, but also the change that is already taking place. We need libraries and lifeboats, but we also need to recognise that history keeps happening, and that in the middle of transformative change and upheaval it is often difficult to see what lies on the other side.

Generally, Filipinos are very superstitious. Dad gets creeped out anytime I wear something second-hand. ‘What if you’re wearing a dead person’s clothes?’ he asks. He prefers to live in new homes, as he believes old ones are haunted by the ghosts of previous residents. He scolded me as a child for cutting my nails at night because it brings bad luck and he warned me not to sleep with wet hair in case I woke up blind.

In this pocket universe, time is unwavering and inescapable. The paper is printed daily, the waste collectors drive round neighbourhood streets picking up rubbish weekly, and trains are patiently waiting to deliver their passengers from one end of the line to the other at every given moment.

For the daily commuter, rituals such as staring aimlessly out the window at soccer fields and storm-laden clouds will no longer define the way travel is experienced once trains go underground. I will miss glancing at the contours of passing suburbs to gauge the time remaining before my next stop. Many times, they have triggered a mental note about what to cook for dinner that night based on a restaurant I happen to notice at Blacktown station. I will no longer be able to note the additions of bright pot plants to newly renovated apartments, or the development of large tracts of empty vegetation into housing lots.

‘Is the year 2020 a propitious time to be reading the untimely Eileen Chang? To some, Chang’s refusal of the moralism attaching to a more committed witnessing of history will always make her work appear trifling, “so much froth” riding atop the “vast oceanic swells” of modern history (to borrow from her own stock of images). And certainly at a time when Hong Kong has become a flashpoint for Chinese nationalism, stories such as “Love in a Fallen City” and “Lust, Caution” might seem a little jarring. By the same token, however, Chang’s translocalism – her work’s inability to accommodate the prevailing myths of and monuments to the nation – can only be salutary in light of the Chinese state’s recent push towards linguistic standardization and cultural homogenization. But it is perhaps with respect to our intimate lives that Chang’s work continues to resonate most strongly.’

The archive shows that Anderson enjoyed both very limited editorial intervention into Tirra Lirra by the River and suffered from the over-reach of her publisher. In each case the manuscripts and letters reveal comments made by reviewers and critics emphasising the significance of Anderson’s archival record. The archives speak loudly about the power of editing and publishing practices both as a spark and a wet blanket.