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Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Owlish.

Dorothy Tse (author), Natascha Bruce (translator), Owlish, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. 224 pgs.

Defying our expectations of time and space, Dorothy Tse’s debut novel Owlish, translated into English by Natasha Bruce, offers the reader a surreal unsettling tale revolving around Professor Q and his infatuation with a ballerina doll, drawn from the recent changes in Hong Kong. Told through an unreliable third-person narrative and steeped in magical realism, Tse’s cautionary tale refracts a repressive society where survival is not far from betrayal, desires continue to exist but can only be camouflaged.

Despite having a seemingly perfect wife, Maria, Professor Q is mesmerised by the “swanlike ballerina in a white tutu”, Aliss, whom he receives from the magician as a present, and the ballerina doll becomes his secret, kept well hidden from Maria. We are made aware of an inexplicable sense of nostalgia Professor Q harbours, coming from Nevers and trying to remember but cannot quite articulate what he remembers, as he catches a glimpse of the city on his Nevers mountain trails with Maria:

… he would see the city skyscrapers transformed into innocent children’s building blocks and, once again, the enduring beauty of it all would take his breath away. At the same time, thought would well up, unbidden, along the concealed paths linking Green Moss district to the city, paths used many years ago to smuggle newcomers from the inland.

Fragmentary and oscillating between different realities or incidents, the reader is not given a linear story to interpret. We cannot easily “summarise” who Professor Q is, and instead we are offered a cryptic language aimed at self-preservation:

In his reflection, he was a free man, a bachelor, a foreigner sojourning alone in the city, idly debating where to head to next. Behind him, someone threw down dice, setting each individual die spinning in unison; when they settled, their numbers would be revealed, like answers from an oracle.

As if to help us understand Professor Q’s obsession with Aliss, it is revealed that Q, when he was younger, kept his distance from his schoolmates, and that those schooldays were also a challenge for the boy in choosing what to remember or forget. The difficulty to speak up, and one’s uncertainty in relying on the textbooks for truth, no doubt rings a bell for those who are familiar with the recent changing education system in Hong Kong:

Q was forbidden to roam the streets with other boys his age. He was supposed to stay inside and study. But when he brought home report cards, his father refused even to look up from whatever book he was reading, commenting simply: “Best to forget what you learn at school.” Besides, the boy “would speak one language in class, only to come home and be forced to speak another”.

One of the most striking scenes in the book must be the spectacle when Professor Q is supposed to reach into a goodie bag onstage. To his alarm, he feels something “alive” and soon realises that the body in the bag “was his own body, and that an unknown hand had crashed in from outside and was now wrenching him open, invading his deepest, most secret parts”.

Throughout the book, language becomes a contentious site, and everything becomes a desperate metaphor to embody one’s longing to reach out and be understood without footnotes. For example, we are told that Q and Maria would often practise Valerian in the library, on benches and strolls around the campus, and that Q is intrigued, listening to Maria’s “mellifluous Valerian as she told him the story of her life”, and how she assumes the language via “a lifetime of radio listening”. Later, Q is completely taken by surprise when he witnesses how Aliss starts talking to him in Valerian too, and wonders for a moment if this means that the doll is “malfunctioning”.

At the same time, the society captured in Owlish is one where language, speaking and listening are rituals with a twist. Despite what he sees, Professor Q is “told”—along with countless others—the news about a patriotic parade instead of streets full of people, and Professor Q “tossed the paper in the bin as soon as he finished, delighted to think that nothing had actually happened”, except that he “kept seeing grass-green shadows lurking in the periphery of his vision”. As a result, he resolved to stay indoors with the ballerina doll, an escapist act.

At the end of the novel, it becomes evident that no character is simply one thing. We are told that the priority in this dystopian urban space is to find an in-between space in the present, as one remains hopeful of a better future:

To be Owlish is to be a creature somewhere between a mammal and a bird. To be an Owlish is to be a bird that can’t fly, at least not at the moment…For now, that’s what it must do to survive. But who knows what will happen next?

In other words, it is possible that Professor Q and Owlish are the same person, and that what they say is unreliable, a mere disguise of their genuine feelings or aspirations. The students on the campus are also not merely a contextual but vital element in the society. Professor Q’s acquiescence or obliviousness about the Vanguard regime’s measures is the only way for him to get his promotion and tenure. In a city like Nevers that is no longer as it was, or so repressed that “the enemy was hard to identify”, one is no longer certain where to share their genuine feelings or emotions. Nevertheless, the fact that even Professor Q, Maria, and the ballerina doll have not altogether forgotten everything, and can still feel and speak, suggests that hope is still something with feathers, and that “dreaming allows us to transcend the bounds of reality, to fortify ourselves, to become as strong as machines”.

How to cite: Wong, Jennifer. “Hope Is Still Something With Feathers: Dorothy Tse’s Owlish.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 28 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/28/dorothy-tse-owlish.

Jennifer Wong was born and grew up in Hong Kong. She is the author of Letters Home (Nine Arches Press) and Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). She has a PhD in creative writing from Oxford Brookes University and currently lives in the UK. [Jennifer Wong and chajournal.blog.]

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