A review of Andrew Kwong’s One Bright Moon
By Devika Brendon
Andrew Kwong’s voice in One Bright Moon, is both rational and compassionate, and the fusion of the two enables and generates restorative harmony. Reading this memoir is a healing experience. I’m sure that writing it must have been cathartic for the writer, but rarely have I read a life story that has given me not only admiration for the author but hope for myself, as a fellow human being, as his reader.
He refers to being at times as ‘befuddled as Hamlet’, but through this unnerving disequilibrium comes a sharp awareness of stabilizing factors that he could reach for, and wisdom he could internalize and utilise: “Education. Education. Education. Third Aunt’s words rang out loud in our rented room in Diamond Hill that evening”.
I expected a harrowing story, given the stark facts of his early life. But I received instead a direct access to human resilience, based on a luminous realism which intuitively appreciates the phases of life, and envisions everyday events in a philosophical way. The writer has the moral strength to call complex things by the true names of what they are, and to testify to an individual’s ability to survive and approach the opportunity of relocation and the generosity of strangers with gratitude.
As a boy, leaving his family, he was given some great advice by his father:
“… No matter where you go from now, you will have no more fear of hunger. Your hands will make a living for you. Work hard. For the energy in you is endless. The world is yours to enjoy and experience… Challenges are there to test our strength and to bring out our best qualities. They are not there to stop us fulfilling our dreams”.
Andrew Kwong’s writing style perfectly fits the subject matter: it resolves and recalibrates paradoxes. Powerful emotions are expertly juxtaposed, repeatedly held by strength of will in counterpoint to stout facts. The physical details of texture, of travel distance, of the tide, and of the morning light he describes are an objective correlative to the emotions they convey:
“The town’s buses ran on diesel now, and were slightly faster than the old ones, but my parents had told me it was still a six hour trip with many stops along the way… Mama had no more tears to shed, but I knew she was crying inside, her joy and sadness intertwined. Baba held my hands in his. I could feel his hardened hands and healing wounds. His white Model Worker T-shirt gleamed in the morning light, making me proud of my father, the so-called high intellectual who’d become an assistant pot repairer”.
The phrase ‘so-called’ here tells us a lot about the boy’s understanding that his father’s true character was not what it was being framed as, by the powers that be in that context. The slogans and denunciations did not align with the spirit and character of the man.
In a mythical sense, the young boy on his hero’s journey has the wisdom to know who his mentors are, and to respect the wisdom they offer him, to assess its value and be guided by it:
“As meticulously as she ran her household, she examined the lines on my palms. She then felt the flesh and every bone in my hands from one side to the other, from one finger to the next. She looked serious. Then she said, “ It’s going to be a long road, and you’ll only be able to get there if you work consistently. It will take time… Persevere”.
He enables his own growth and progress, from survival to fulfillment, by seeing and appreciating the value of what he experiences in the present, the cumulative, segmented sentence structure shaping what a contrast it is with the regimented, systematic oppression of his past experiences:
“It was a wonderful feeling to go to school every day. I didn’t have to smash rocks, break up tiles and bricks to make gravel, search for waste metal, stamp out pests, or hunt for food to ease my hunger. There were no political studies to attend, no slogans to shout, no comrades to impress. I wasn’t made to suffer the indignity of being regularly criticized as the son of a counter-revolutionary and grandson of a bankrupted capitalist. And I wasn’t forced to watch public sentencings and horrifying executions. At last, I could leave all my nightmares behind and concentrate on my studies and my future”.
There is no self-pity in this narrative. And no victimhood or sense of being hard done by. He always felt he had a choice, as his ancestor did in the opening section of the story, to choose differently and re-evaluate and rename events and incidents that tradition or fear-based superstition would identify as negative or ‘unlucky’. He (as Maxine Hong Kingston said of her protagonist in ‘The Woman Warrior’) enlarged his mind to accept paradoxes. This is basic survivalism for an optimist in a world of disruption, but it is essential for an immigrant. In the current world, where immigrant people who express the need for change in their new country are often told to ‘go home’, it would be easy to feel vulnerable, between worlds.
His father was simultaneously a good and talented, dedicated man and also a man designated a traitor by his country. This irony is a painful one, but the writer’s judicious use of balanced syntax and juxtaposition controls the sense of injustice which resonates in the paradox.
Andrew Kwong himself was both a displaced person, and a person whose sense of home from a young age was in himself. His identity was not defined only by his race, ethnicity or cultural heritage. He was able to understand the context in which events occurred. He strengthened himself to embrace the positive experiences of his new country, as a human being on a journey of growth.
The Bible verse he copies out is indicative of his attitude:
“‘For I know the plans for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good, and not for disaster, to give you hope, and a future”. A future, and a hope. What more did I want?’”
This hope is not just a transient feeling. It is an attitude, in which the querent co-creates his future through the conscious choices to be open, where a bitter or overwhelmed person would be disconnected and closed off.
We see this knowledge of his ability to choose his responses in his appreciation of the people of rural Australia:
“It was a brown town with brown vegetation all around, from cracked lawns to exhausted gum trees. People looked to the sky, searching for clouds that might bring them rain, their eyes showing hope, but were usually disappointed at the end of the day… I have always felt for and admired such brave and resilient country folks… I tried to emulate their pioneering spirit”.
We see it in the way he measures his money:
“Each haircut cost fifty cents – the cost of ten Wagon Wheel chocolate biscuits… After paying my second-term tuition and boarding fees, I had only ten dollars, or twenty haircuts’ worth, in my Commonwealth Bank student account… I knew how hard Baba and Ping were working to pay my school fees, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask for pocket money”.
We see it in the way his socio-political opinion of the American presence in Hong Kong and the parochial, anti-American conditioning he had received did not prevent him from appreciating the positive conduct of the Americans he actually encountered:
“I was surprised to hear they also listened to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley, and talked about the Top 40 hit songs, just as we did at La Salle College. It was so different from what I had been told in Shiqi: that they were nasty and ugly, with big crooked noses and evil eyes. Sometimes I said hello, seizing an opportunity to practise my English. And they would say “Hi”, and smile.”
This is a marvellous memoir, and we see in it a man who has made his path straight, through the ebbs and flows, and the phases and cycles of a challenging destiny. He had from an early age a high degree of awareness, and he had the strength to make his underlying thoughts and feelings conscious, so he did not call it fate. He made his own good fortune. Good on him.
Devika Brendon is a teacher, writer, editor and reviewer. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in anthologies and literary journals in India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Africa and Italy, including Quadrant, Back Story, Other Terrain, MargASIA and Time Of The Poet Republic. Devika is the Senior Content Editor of the literary journal, New Ceylon Writing. Her opinion pieces are published in Ceylon Today, where she is a Columnist, in The Island, and The Sunday Observer. Devika’s literary reviews appear in The Sunday Times, The Sunday Island (Sri Lanka) and in Rochford Street Review (Australia) and JCLA – The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (India).
Image: Harper Collins