5 Questions with Mirandi Riwoe
Mirandi Riwoe is the author of the novella The Fish Girl, which won Seizure’s Viva la Novella V and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Queensland Literary Award’s UQ Fiction Prize, and Stone Sky Gold Mountain. Her work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Review and Best Summer Stories.
Mirandi has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies and lives in Brisbane.
(Photograph: Claudia Baxter)
No.1
Many of your novels deal with some aspect of life in the 19th century. What draws you to this period in particular, be it through your historical or crime fiction?
As much as I enjoy reading historical fiction, I never dreamt that I would one day be a historical writer. I was definitely scared off by the amount of research involved and the level of knowledge that’s necessary. The first novel I completed (unpublished) was a crime story set in contemporary Indonesia, and my short fiction is always set in the present day.
It was only with my second novel that I had to delve into the Victorian period—I wanted to write of a female protagonist who could question current themes relating to sexual empowerment, so I created Heloise, a Eurasian courtesan in the late 1800s. In order to write the novel, I researched the Asian community of Victorian London and the idea of the ‘sinister Oriental’. This exploration into the Chinese inhabitants of England in the 1800s led me to wonder about the earlier Chinese inhabitants of Australia, resulting in my work on Stone Sky Gold Mountain.
Also, one of the characters in my crime novel is a Eurasian woman from Makassar, and as part of my research I read some fiction and non-fiction about the colonial period in Asia. This led me to a Somerset Maugham short story in which he mentions a ‘Malay trollop’, and in response I wrote The Fish Girl. This story is set in the 1920s, and it was probably at this stage that I realised I enjoy writing historical fiction. I like to explore in what way some things have changed over time and in what way they have not changed sufficiently, especially within feminist or cultural contexts. I like to write back against established beliefs or generalisations depicted in existing fiction or historical texts, such as that of the ‘sinister Oriental’ or the ‘wanton’ Asian woman.
No.2
In both The Fish Girl and Stone Sky Gold Mountain, you depict characters who get caught up in an internal struggle as they both reject yet assimilate to the hostile worlds they find themselves in. What do you hope to express through these perspectives?
I think there are two things I hope to express through my characters’ internal struggles. First, their reactions might be a reflection of my own experiences as an Eurasian person who grew up in Australia in the 1970s and 80s—feeling the necessity to assimilate to a predominantly western society, of going with the flow, of nimbly sidestepping awkward revelations of cultural or racial difference. I feel that the emotional and mental weight of these differences and how western society reacts to and perceives these differences—in terms of skin colour, dress, food and so forth—can leave their mark. These marks can be indelible or unacknowledged. So I like to explore these things through my fiction.
Second, my characters’ internal struggle can also be seen as a representation of some sort of injustice, usually against a woman or person of colour. I don’t think it’s useful for a character in a historical work to think or behave in a prescient manner, but I would argue that there is sufficient evidence that a number of women and people of colour did question the social mores and discrimination of the time. So, as a writer, I try to bring these past and ongoing social injustices to the fore through my characters.
No.3
When it comes to historical fiction, a commonly discussed theme is the relationship between research and storytelling. This can be a polarising factor for those who like to demand “accuracy” when referring to historical events, which I find dubious as history can be suppressed, or biased towards those who have conquered and won. How do you balance these tensions in your work?
In Stone Sky Gold Mountain, I took primary source material from European Australians in the Palmer River area during the gold rush, and skewed their accounts so that their stories are shown through the eyes of my Chinese characters.
For example, at the very beginning of the book, a local warden comes into the Chinese camp to arrest diggers without a digging license. This is a reference to Warden Hill’s diary of his time in the area, which includes a gleeful account of how the troopers would gather up several Chinese men by their queues (plaits) and lead them away, and the description of a chain he had made especially for confining Chinese diggers. But I took Warden Hill’s accounts and told them from the point of view of Ying, her brother Lai Yue, and all the other Chinese diggers they were working with. An event once portrayed gleefully becomes something quite dreadful.
Of course, I needed to create a narrative to bind these accounts together, so I imagined a story for Ying, Lai Yue and Meriem. Although their stories are inspired by things I read, they are for the most part fictional as much as any novel is fictional. Maytown existed and so did the thousands of Chinese who sifted for gold along the Palmer River. Although it feels a little cheeky to make up their stories, I also felt that because there were just so many Chinese people there in the 1870s, anything I have made up may be close to the truth.
Also, I totally agree that we have to remember who has filtered this ‘history’ or stories through to us. We need to consider their motivations, biases and belief systems. I try to read through the material with fresh eyes—as a present-day, Asian female writer.
No.4
Who do you consider your literary influences?
I have always loved reading and have always wanted to be a writer. But I think perhaps, when I was a teenager and young woman, it was in reading Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston that I realised there was a place in popular western culture for stories about the Asian experience, something which had been pretty much absent up to that point. I realise that some Asian readers may find these writers problematic but their work opened up possibilities for me.
I like novels that say something, such as in work by Margaret Atwood or Kamila Shamsie. Maxine Beneba Clarke’s books really made me aware of what I wanted to write and how I could write it. I read her work at just the right moment in my writing career. Although maybe it would have been better if I’d read her even earlier!
I enjoy books by storytellers such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Eka Kurniawan. I love a flamboyant, rich story. And, from an early age, Nancy Drew novels and murder mysteries by writers such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers drew me into crime fiction and writing.
No.5
What advice would you give to an emerging writer of colour interested in pursuing the art of historical fiction?
I would advise emerging writers of historical fiction to question whatever fiction or non-fiction you might read from the past. If you can, translate or read from translated works to get the other side of the story, as opposed to only what you can read in western texts.
Immerse yourself in the period you want to write of and bide your time before you begin to write. Read what you want to write, and support journals and publishers who do work to nurture culturally and linguistically diverse writers and readers.
Find out more
Buy a copy of Stone Sky Gold Mountain direct from UQP or from all good independent bookstores. Don’t know which ones will deliver to you? Check out this very good bookshop map by Alan Vaarwerk.