Hsu-Ming Teo: Love and Vertigo

(Allen and Unwin)

$24.95

Review: Helene Wong*

Immigration is an act of sacrifice on the part of your parents that you can never atone for. Buried mid-paragraph more than halfway through Love and Vertigo, that statement could be easily missed. In fact, it points to the subtext of the novel. Sacrifice is a theme underpinning all the main characters - sacrifice of self, independence, future hopes, identity. Immigration, with its dislocation and regrets, simply exacerbates it.

With her parents, Pandora and Jonah, and brother, Sonny, 8-year-old Grace Tay moves from Malaysia to Sydney in 1978 to escape being persecuted for being Chinese. Years later, when Pandora dies in Singapore, Grace returns to the peninsula with her father and brother and uncovers her parents' pasts.

What emerges is a story that links three generations in a constant filial struggle against parental expectation. Boys, traditionally favoured over girls, are no less victims of manipulation in this regard. Most succumb; that is the first act of sacrifice.

The second is leaving one's homeland. Even if it is also escaping, it doesn't make the loneliness or the not fitting in or the school bullying any easier.

Adrift in Sydney, Pandora shops, herds her family off to the Pentecostals in search of a substitute community; Jonah reverts, becoming the Patriarch; the children, who regard themselves as Australian, simmer with resentment as the cycle of harsh parenting repeats itself.

Hsu-Ming Teo is Malaysian-born and an immigrant to Australia. Her novel may be fiction, but it has a specificity and quality of insight that come from close observation if not personal experience. It won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1999, and it is easy to see why. Despite an occasional attack of rampant adjectives, Teo's writing is evocative mainly through its directness, vividly conjuring images, actions and feelings without need of descriptive embellishments. It is also insidious in engaging our empathy, seducing us into the guilty pleasure of cheering on a particularly naughty act of revenge.

Love and Vertigo could read like a tale of unremitting woe and family dysfunction, but its value lies in its mordant, unblinking look inside the minds of first-generation immigrants who often can't or won't articulate their confusions and conflicts out loud. And it's not all misery. The ending is one of acceptance that we are shaped by our pasts, and while this is not a justification for bad behaviour, neither is it a judgment.

* Helene Wong is an Auckland writer and film critic.