“Moving on metaphorical silk roads of intellectual trade”: Chinese encounters in Gail Jones’s writing

In 2008, Australian fiction writer and essayist Gail Jones spent four months in Shanghai as a guest of the Chinese and Shanghai Writers Associations. During this time, two of her earlier novels were published in Chinese. Although a non-sinologist, Jones has shown an interest in China, and more generally in Asianness, from her childhood onwards, which she spent on the outskirts of Broome, a small town whose majority population was Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Filipino and Aboriginal. Consequently, as she claims in her essay “‘I am Chinese’: Of Bodies and Walls, Of Boundaries and their Dissolution” (2016), in which she critically assesses her own writing – “not to suggest equal status or literary parity, of course, but because tropes of perspective, walls, and bodies are a remarkably beguiling connection between writers and artists looking from the outside to China” (Jones 2016, 87) –, she “saw and experienced the deep appeal of an Asian-indigenous multiculture” (Jones 2016, 88), and her fiction “tends to narrate cross-cultural encounters, often thematising ignorance or cultural misunderstanding”. Engaging with her sinophile fiction (Five Bells, “Touching Tiananmen”) and non-fiction (“‘I am Chinese’: Of Bodies and Walls, Of Boundaries and their Dissolution”), my paper will investigate how, both metaphorically and metadiscursively, Jones crafts Chinese aesthetics in an Australian space and cultivates cross-cultural encounters between characters and readers alike, as “the task of writers and scholars is […] to address the gaps, to mount tiny incursions, to find those narratives that heaven cannot quite cover over” (Jones 2016, 91). Works Cited Jones, Gail. 2000. “Touching Tiananmen,” The House of Breathing: Stories by Gail Jones. New York: George Braziller. Pp. 130-139. Jones, Gail. 2011. Five Bells. London: Vintage. Jones, Gail. 2016. “‘I am Chinese’: Of Bodies and Walls, Of Boundaries and their Dissolution,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 16(2): 80-108