To Sit In An Uncertainty
Eric Jiang on Jessica Au
If travel dislodges us from our usual strictures, what might we then become? If we go together, who might we then become to each other? The by-products of travel are innumerable—new discoveries, sensations, energies, stories to tell. In Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow (2022), the narrator returns to Japan, bringing her mother, who has never visited. The novel follows the details of their trip from beginning to end—what they eat, which artworks they see, the temples they visit. But what the narrator desires lies beyond a meticulous itinerary—it’s something that cannot be planned.
The expectation for a transformation isn't explicit but hangs in the air between mother and daughter. Perhaps that expectation is not articulable—perhaps attempting to articulate it would be a mistake. The novel begins in media res, the narrator having just flown into Tokyo. A few details are offered: the two no longer live in the same city—the narrator is most likely in her thirties. Some span of time has passed, and now they meet up in a city neither of them live in. What follows is a freewheeling, discomforting, but oddly hopeful experience. Au’s narrator has seemingly initiated the trip to create a closeness that might not occur otherwise, and we spend much if not all of the novel feeling the distance already lies between them, and the narrator’s desire to close that gap, at once gentle and impossible to ignore. Au’s narrator says: “I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons I could not yet name.”
Earlier this year, I go with my family to a city my parents studied at over thirty years ago. My brother and I have never visited, my parents’ last visit was over five years ago. Unlike the narrator in Cold Enough For Snow the reasons for travel are clear to me, “to feel close”, even if the specific mechanics of achieving that are not. Could being in close proximity with them while they’re in close proximity to their past do something that couldn’t be done otherwise? As in Au’s novel, there exists an asymmetry of who has visited the place before and who hasn’t (in this case, my parents and the narrator are returning to a certain place). An imbalance shapes the procession of the trip, where it feels like the power structures of childhood are flipped. In both cases, the concrete expectations aren’t necessarily articulated to parties involved. For me, it seems futile—how could my brother and I possibly feel close to what our parents felt back then? How is it possible to overcome the gap between how they feel now? The gap between desire and reality persisted for me then, and persists in the novel, as Au creates such a space in a multitude of unassuming, powerful ways.
Travel writing, and the experience of travel writing, often feels dedicated to sensory overload, but Au's style is spare and makes the metaphor feel so over. Her descriptions are cool and collected—attentive to the detail of objects, how they appear, and not much else. While Au uses similes, she always uses the same structure, a subclause connected to a subclause by a “like”, almost rote. There even fewer metaphors—no evocative transformations of language—so things stubbornly remain what they are. Instead of conveying feeling on the level of the phrase or the line, Au conveys a broader feeling of tone at the level of the paragraph, often ending her initial sections with a finely tuned observation of something which is not as it appears, something ever so slightly off:
It left a fine layer of water on the ground, which was not asphalt, but a series of small, square tiles, if you cared enough to notice. (1)
It looked like liquid, like a blue pond, but when you tiled the bowl to the side, it never moved. (15)
Getting closer, I saw that the light came not from a screen, as I had thought, ... another thing I had failed to notice. (23)
The effect is gentle yet cumulative, creating a feeling of offness, built over several pages. Each observation is unassuming, but further drives us into an inescapable, total feeling we can quite pinpoint the cause of. It's also subtle enough that the clearness of the prose conveys an illusion of objectivity, but one soon notices the narrator is consumed by, cannot look away from, these minor details of offness. What draws the narrator to such details? Perhaps the mismatch of expectation and reality, where even the concrete world cannot be trusted and gives way to slippages—that the simplest of expectations inevitably diverge from a static truth. While travelling with my family, a feeling of things never being quite what they should be permeates my stay. The air is much thinner—I’m continually catching my breath. The streets leap from opulence to squalor with little warning. My brother and I organise to go on a tour in a distant suburb, but we arrive ten minutes late at the starting point. My brother messages a friend who is part of the tour, who says they are in the park. We head to the park; they are not there. They message they are at the markets. So we head to the markets, and they are not there. This happens on every stop in the tour. We go to another tour another day.
It's a memory that has a playfulness, despite the stress, suspended in a constant freefall of failing, of an almost-but-not-quite. In the novel, a similar destabilisation seems the norm, where the offness of the concrete world feels like a precursor to another offness, one of a more significant kind. If the concrete has no responsibility to remain fixed, so the narrator’s observations are associative and unbounded. When the narrator and her mother pass a playground, this induces a pages-long reflection on the narrator’s childhood relationship with her mother.
In trying to answer a question to her mother about reflecting on art, she tells another long story about her adolescence. In these digressions, she arrives at thoughts that could be quite meaningful, but Au isn’t necessarily interested in building an argument or creating a cohesive narrative thrust. Such recurring motifs makes the novel feel like a humming assemblage of frequencies. The novel is shapeless, but precisely so. Au wants us to sit in that space, and to experience a different kind of reading pleasure.
Maybe it’s good, I said, [...] maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy. (11)
I had the vague thought [...] that the best thing was to be desired, even if you did not desire, even if you did not much like the person who desired you. (66)
I remembered thinking, as we ate, how such happiness could come from such simple things. (74)
These endings are rarely if ever developed, and the narrator quickly moves on. Thoughts are thoughts—what matters isn’t hunting down an outcome, but being situated in a space that allows these thoughts to occur and pass in the first place. The element of travel dislodges the narrator from the structures of her normal schedules, further allowing for a space where all ideas feel more in reach, and there is more time to grasp them, turn them over, and let them go.
The desire for and inability to attain transformation permeates the novel, and the gap in the way they communicate and attempt to meet each other’s needs is a faint yet pervasive arc. The narrator makes an offer regarding her thoughts about an exhibit that her mother can’t quite reciprocate, and the roles are reversed a few scenes later, where the narrator cannot even humour her mother’s ideas on fate and the soul. Au’s characters illustrate that one can’t engage with another purely within the bounds of your world. In some situations, one can’t just ask to be seen—despite all the hubbub about connection to culture and our parents, you can’t always pass down a recipe or reclaim a ritual to better know someone.
Instead of directly articulating what the narrator might want from her mother, she instead elliptically tries to create the conditions for a transformation through the malleable space of travel, moving. Sometimes it’s necessary to sit in the uncertainty of a car ride (also a non-home space), one that might be yield new information or might simply be a car ride: to sit in tensions unspoken or slippages finally felt, even just a little bit. Travel feels like a condition that might make things not previously possible, possible. For some ambiguity to be made tangible, to know one’s mother as much as one can observe the physical world, and, as the title suggests, create some condition for things felt but unplaceable—to finally crystallise.
The narrator soon shifts into a different mode, where she recounts stories and memories of her family. These chunks feel like the substance of the novel, and they too have an offness about them, where the boundary of memory and truth is slippery. Au writes these stories without a clear ending, immediately taking us into the present moment without warning.
Au’s use of third person and lack of quotation marks ensures a retelling filtered through the narrator's consciousness, a transposing of another's voice into their own understanding, not necessarily subduing the voice of another but suggesting they share some kind of psychological space. It feels like a way for the narrator to feel closer her family (whose stories she recounts), not through a shared experience (as she and her mother are experiencing on their trip) but through the sharing of the telling of that experience: storytelling becomes a way to feel close. Sharing an experience, or expecting it to feel shared, feels paradoxically less effective. Amidst the constant movement of travel, the narrator locates herself through telling these stories. In turn, the narrator relays stories about her own past, the mother's and her sisters:
I thought about how vaguely familiar this scene was to me ... but strangely so, because it was not my childhood, but my mother's childhood that I was thinking of, and from another country at that ... It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated.
This feels kind of magical, a memory transposition that connects her to her mother's experience somehow, and yet it's something that goes by uncommunicated, a kind of transference. Right after this, there's another moment of unfinishedness: the mother is unable to finish her food, so her daughter does so for her, while noting that the ceramic of the bowl looks like liquid, ‘like a blue pond’, yet doesn't move. A tangible transference, and an intangible one.
Before our trip, my brother and I clung onto our parent's stories. Storytelling is one of the few things Dad gets really animated about—along with scoring points on credit cards, or nature documentaries. When I was younger, and still now, connecting to the strangeness and excitement of these Chinese teenagers fresh out of the cultural revolution into Mexico City was a vital way to feel close to my parents. The trip promised some kind of access point into their lives beyond storytelling and memory, an experience not solely refracted through their style and their speech but suddenly tangible—to be looking at the same thing.
The narrator takes her mother to museums and galleries, where the narrator feels completely absorbed, and her mother largely indifferent. Their differences in approaching and reflecting on art feels crucial to understanding the gap between them. The narrator describes how her perception of art, and the meaning-making that results from that, informs her worldview. She describes a gallery trip with her ex-boyfriend:
At first, my boyfriend and I drifted past the works together, which he admired and called beautiful, though I had a feeling he did not know exactly why ... It was as if we were inspecting a row of pearls, which of course were beautiful by their very nature, so that simply to say so meant close to nothing. (68)
To the narrator at this time, to articulate one's relationship to art is a summit of communication and meaning. Every moment needs to relate to some idea of the self, and in doing so, transforms the basic facts of a life into purpose, something transcendental. In a similar way I had asked this of my parents, to articulate their relationship to place, their stories, beyond their facts into something of their life's arc and purpose, and their replies languished in things that felt ordinary, that didn't tickle some part of why I had asked. And yet, our relationship to art can also feel like a crutch, and in the novel is one that obfuscates the clarity of her relationship with her mother. When asked a question about her profession, the narrator replies:
I said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, rather as we saw it. (96)
Everything is mediated through the experience and readings of art and its systems, to the point where it obscures potential connection. Writing is a form of exploration, and makes meanings as much as conversation does—the need to mythologise what we experience into narratives about ourselves, narratives about our relationship to art. As the narrator notes:
Back then, I had wanted every moment to count for something; I had become addicted to the tearing of my thoughts ... If nothing seemed to be working towards this effect, I grew impatient, bored. Much later, I realised how insufferable this was: the need to make every moment pointed, to read meaning into everything. (29-30)
I don't think I think this now—but back then this mythology building of the parental relationship felt vital—of how what they experienced permeates my skin and into my immediate future. Yet when this approach fails, what’s left? Even in writing this, perhaps I'm angling for some kind discovery. Can't something just be? The past tense of the above paragraph is important, as the narrator seems in the process of ridding the desire of speech freighted with art-speak as way to make them feel ‘real’ or meaningful. The easing of this expectation now, and the space given to her mother just to experience the art, is a kind of permission to not have to explain oneself, feels like a form of care. In one of her stories, the narrator explains her developing relationship to care, especially in relation to herself:
Back then, I took everything seriously. I studied hard because I genuinely believed it would serve a higher purpose, and I liked the idea of living according to a certain strictness or method. (62)
Maybe the thing at hand itself may not be ‘important’ but is instead rendered important by the way that attention, commitment, and care transform it. Despite the feeling of shapelessness to the novel, Au contours it slightly enough that the ending feels like an ending: as the novel closes, the trip is coming to an end.
I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them. (89)
Perhaps it's okay for some things just to be—what was insufficient before is sufficient now. Small acts of care and listening are enough, without the pressure of signifying something else. Even this idea feels unaffected, not presented as a revelation—that would be buying into the idea of the trip becoming some grander myth. Instead, the narrator tosses it off as another detail, flattening the hierarchy of what matters most. It's not an easy answer to swallow. Nothing is unlocked, there is no revelatory breakthrough—just additional information. Au’s resistance to mythmaking draws attention to the details of holding someone in our presence without attempting to transform them into objects of our understanding and frameworks of ‘meaningfulness’. To not narrativise is to not objectify, and creates an equality, a sharedness, a care that wouldn’t be possible if one is telling another’s story, or attempting to fit them into one’s own.
On one of our last days, my parents and I visit an apartment complex where they had both lived, though in separate flats. The buildings all have the name of South- or Central American countries, and as we wander around, they try to locate the block that my Mum lived in. I ask her how she feels being here, and she just says “strange”. Because how else can someone really express how forty years of time and space and memory during a fifteen-minute stroll?
We walk to where Dad used to live, which is over a wall, so he extends his 360 camera pole over to take a video. Walking around the complex with them, it feels impossible to understand how they were feeling, but it feels like a gift to witness them, to be in the same space, observing, sharing in a moment that maybe even they can't quite comprehend. It feels like a kind of holding, a kind of care. While I have the eternal impulse to locate my parents through mythologising their past lives, a response that Au’s narrator feels well-acquainted to, it becomes clear that this method is entirely ineffective for our parents. We reach for the other in completely different planes of existence, but come to realise that small acts of mundane care that defy mythologising may be the most direct and meaningful ways to experience each other, in a kind of holding which has always been enough.
Later at night, in the kitchen, I come across Dad watching the footage. He says he's not fond of goodbyes, and there's no point of holding onto things in the past. So, I ask him why he took the video in the first place, and he laughs it off, and that's all there is to it.
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Eric Jiang is a writer/director based in Sydney. Their poetry appears in Liminal, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, and more, and they recently participated in Critics Campus, a film criticism program facilitated by Melbourne International Film Festival. In August, they showed their first full-length play, Rhomboid.