'‘He looked down at his watch and saw that the long hand was overlapping the short, pointing towards twelve. The old year had passed and the new year had begun. He was swept by a feeling of loss and attachment to a past that was no longer there: If I were in China now, I would be …’
'A father and son muse on the value of fame and fortune and the path of chu jia or receding from the world by becoming a monk. On Christmas Eve a lonely immigrant travels from his deserted outer suburb to the city in search of life. Spouses navigate their adult son’s need to ‘rebrand’ himself with an English name. Between Shanghai and Montreal, a Chinese student and a Canadian man who has fallen in love with him exchange correspondence. Haunted by the sounds of piano and violin and the long-lost friend who returns only to him in dreams a man confronts the past. Can we ever really trust a car salesperson or those friends who say we must catch up soon but never do?
'Ouyang Yu’s first collection of stories in English is both assured and tender and at times surprisingly funny. It includes stories set in China and Australia that revel in the truth and candour of lived experience and the joys and constraints of language. In The White Cockatoo Flowers Ouyang Yu deftly peels back the layers on what it means to move from one culture to another, and what it means to be a writer, a husband, a parent and a stranger on foreign and familiar ground.' (Publication summary)
'A less-commonly discussed aspect of the process of immigration and assimilation is the fact it makes you feel like a massive loser. In Ouyang Yu’s The White Cockatoo Flowers—his first collection of stories in English—this feeling is explicated with blunt vulnerability and comic aplomb. His glum protagonists largely consist of Chinese immigrants living in Melbourne who make a miserly living off fiction and poetry. They endure a relentless series of tiny humiliations due to mystifying language gaps, racial discrimination, and the futile desire to separate themselves from other Chinese people, who they’ve either left behind or are struggling alongside. These embarrassments are fleshy, sometimes scatological: in two separate stories, the protagonists try in vain to have a satisfying restaurant meal, which either results in explosive diarrhoea or ‘a solitary hour of furious sweating’. Ouyang’s authorial voice is self-deprecating, yet finds arch humour in this mundane suffering.'(Introduction)
''The White Cockatoo Flowers; Stories' is the first collection of stories published by Chinese-Australian author Ouyang Yu in English.'
Ouyang Yu in Conversation
Alice Pung
(interviewer),
2024
28331843
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'In this episode, a conversation with Ouyang Yu, author, translator, academic, and renowned poet.
'Ouyang Yu’s first collection of stories in English, The White Cockatoo Flowers, is both assured and tender and at times surprisingly funny. It includes stories set in China and Australia that revel in the truth and candour of lived experience and the joys and constraints of language. In this book Ouyang Yu deftly peels back the layers on what it means to move from one culture to another, and what it means to be a writer, a husband, a parent and a stranger on foreign and familiar ground.' (Introduction)
'The story of modern Australia is one of migration, adaptation and an ongoing struggle over the idea of an “Australian identity”. The characters in award-winning poet and novelist Ouyang Yu’s short story collection, The White Cockatoo Flowers: Stories, embody these complexities, most prominently through an exploration of the intricacies of language, translation and cultural expectation.' (Introduction)
'Provocateur, DIY punk and your friendly neighbourhood poet-uncle, Ouyang Yu is a transgressor whose faith lies only in the hardest vices (poetry, disappointment).' (Introduction)
''The White Cockatoo Flowers; Stories' is the first collection of stories published by Chinese-Australian author Ouyang Yu in English.'
Ouyang Yu in Conversation
Alice Pung
(interviewer),
2024
28331843
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'In this episode, a conversation with Ouyang Yu, author, translator, academic, and renowned poet.
'Ouyang Yu’s first collection of stories in English, The White Cockatoo Flowers, is both assured and tender and at times surprisingly funny. It includes stories set in China and Australia that revel in the truth and candour of lived experience and the joys and constraints of language. In this book Ouyang Yu deftly peels back the layers on what it means to move from one culture to another, and what it means to be a writer, a husband, a parent and a stranger on foreign and familiar ground.' (Introduction)
