Reviewed by James Halford

One year at the Melbourne Writers Festival literary provocateur Tom Cho distributed a parody program. The guest list? “Barry, Ethel, Publishers, Token Ethnic Writer A, Token Young Writer.” A description of the emerging writers’ panel followed: “They’re young. They’re hip. They’re even writers. Grunge drugs sex risk-taking behaviour those young scally wags youth of today no respect for their elders.” Having thus antagonised his seniors, perhaps a hostile reception to his debut short story collection was to be expected. David Messers of the Sydney Morning Herald, slammed the book for using “modernist gimmickry that had lost both its shock value and intellectual allure long before the end of last century” (31). The author struck back against his “unadventurous” reviewer online, suggesting Messers was guilty of pigeonholing ethnic writers (Cho is Chinese-Australian). This clash, I’d argue, reflects a broader aesthetic divide between Ozlit’s baby boomer gatekeepers and that of the young scallywags who’d like to replace them.

One major distinction between writers of Cho’s age group and those of their parents’ generation is the way they relate to popular culture. Look Who’s Morphing explores Gen X/Y’s ambivalent relationship with the cultural legacy of the '80s. Beatles-and-Stones-adoring Boomers habitually yearn for the decade that made them, but nostalgia for the era of Gordan Gecko economics and bouffant hairdos is rarely so simple. Only a dose of heavy irony can make the excess and ugliness of the eighties lovable, and this is exactly what the eighteen stories in this collection provide.

Opener “Dirty Dancing” rewrites the classic '80s coming-of-age flick with a 34-year-old Chinese-Australian short story writer named Tom Cho as protagonist. After a transformative holiday fling with his dance instructor, he can no longer accept his parents calling him “baby.” By telling them, “nobody puts baby in the corner” and inviting them to join him in “a big raunchy dance number,” Cho finally forces his parents to accept him as an adult (8). In this piece, pop playfulness defeats conservatism. But across the collection, intergenerational conflict is not so easily overcome. The protagonist continually struggles to connect with older relatives, saying, “I am not that close to Auntie Wei” (17) and “Uncle Wang and I do not have any long and personal conversations” (38).   

Perhaps the fictional Cho has no time for family bonding because he’s busy fantasising about cameos in The Sound of Music, Dr Phil, and The Bodyguard. His self-insertion into these pop texts disrupts classic heterosexual Anglo narratives, and asks readers to re-examine their own identification with popular culture. To note that Cho is particularly sharp when dissecting the special East Asian affection for western kitch, is not to typecast him as an ethnic writer, or to suggest he confine himself to this material. More often, his stories involve fantastic transformations—becoming a cyborg, a Ford Bronco 4x4, a fifty-five metre tall cock-rock guitarist—with the theme of migration as metamorphosis a subtle presence in the background.

Above all, these stories are interested in the forces that shape contemporary selfhood. Cho may occasionally resort to “gimmickry” as Messers suggests, but he is certainly not a modernist. Gone is the concern with interiority, the struggle to forge identity through opposition to both tradition and mass culture. Like figures in an Andy Warhol silkscreen his characters are all surface, gleefully surrendering any stable sense of self to the seductive play of images. “Aren’t we all composites of various entities in our lives, family members, friends, lovers, certain people we watch on TV?” (48). Only in the anthology’s best piece, the prose poem “Chinese Whispers,” do we glimpse the great darkness of the century past outside the realm of simulation and appearances. Here Cho juxtaposes a racist American pop song “Nagasaki” from 1928 with the dropping of the atom bomb, reminding us pop culture has long been one of empire’s most effective weapons.

Mostly though, the collection is playful and ironic in tone. While these qualities are effective in Cho’s satirical Writer’s Festival program, they don’t necessarily hold us over a 180-page work of prose fiction. As a result, the weaker stories sometimes feel like a live reading of poststructuralist literary theory leavened with celebrity impersonations and ribald asides. For this Gen Y reader, however, LWM is finally redeemed by Cho’s daring and inventive use of language. His mimicry of pop culture’s debased patois makes a dialect familiar to all us of strange once more, revealing it as the true twenty-first century lingua franca. If older writers want to know where fiction is going they best become fluent in this language. If young writers want their elders’ respect they will have to do something even more difficult—learn to escape it. Cho’s mock MWF program and the Messers review can be read online at http://www.tomcho.com/

Look Who’s Morphing
(2009)