Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews The Red Pearl by Beth Yahp
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'Australian, Malaysian-born writer Beth Yahp’s short story collection The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017) navigates between different locations and time periods. It is resolutely transnational and transhistorical in nature. At times, the collection veers towards the metaphysical and abstract. Yahp also experiments with different forms, styles, modes and genres of writing. The title story draws its suggestive force from what a specialist in Asian Australian fiction, Tseen Khoo, had defined as “Oriental grunge” in her analysis of Lillian Ng’s novel Swallowing Clouds. As often in Asian Australian women’s writing, the “sexotic” is deployed as a strategic (al)lure. The cultural politics of the collection’s cover page is relevant in this matter. A young Orientalised woman appears dressed in a crimson cheongsam, looking passive, her lips closed, with the top of her face cropped out from the cover frame. In so doing the Orient comes to be marketed and packaged as a desired object of fantasy deprived of the basic attributes of subjecthood, such as the power to think and reflect, as well as to see and develop a critical worldview, or speak of its own volition. “The Red Pearl” is a love tale between a sailor and a dancer met at the Shanghai Bar. Located in an unnamed Asian port city (most likely Singapore), the story bears “the promise of anonymity, abandonment, delirium, dream,” (Yahp 43) as well as poetic grace. Counter to what might be expected from the book cover, the lover clearly has an agency and power of her own, as proven by the fact that “when she agrees to dance, the sailor lies mesmerised.” (44)' (Introduction)

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Mascara Literary Review no. 23 March 2019 15995849 2019 periodical issue

    There has been quite a hiatus since our last issue of Mascara. While changes in our editorial staff may have contributed, primarily this reflects the trauma that comes from being targeted for our literary activism. In regressive times, the naming of ‘whiteness’ or ‘class’ is acutely threatening to the perceived entitlements and fatigued legacies of privilege. But it has also been a time of change, of dissent and solidarity for the values we cherish: equality, endurance, cultural respect. (Michelle D’Souza, Editorial introduction)

    2019
Last amended 2 Jul 2019 07:49:14
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