It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit together to make a new whole”. He spends his days making sculptures from broken pottery; the shards of his life.
During a warm winter’s day, Daniel steps outside to find that the longan tree in his garden has fallen during a storm. The tree was an heirloom of sorts – a family emblem of home and belonging for generations before him.
Mirandi Riwoe’s A Short History of Longans is not, in the straightforward sense, Daniel’s story. Indeed, as the title suggests, it’s a multigenerational story of how the longan tree got to be here, at this particular point in time. The book opens with a fictional biography: Ah Yang, a Chinese Australian bushranger, active in Queanbeyan in the 1850s. The family that branches out from under him ends with Daniel. So what of the centuries between? How is Ah Yang connected to Daniel, and to the longan tree?
As the longan dies, an immensely complex network of relationships and stories is uncovered. The roots that have carried Daniel here begin to show.
As with much of Riwoe’s previous work, including her Stella prize-shortlisted and Queensland Literary award-winning novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain, A Short History of Longans is historical fiction, though some sections reach into a near future. It’s told primarily from the perspectives of four characters across 200 years: Daniel in 2049; his aunt Wendy, suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s in the early 2000s; his great-aunt Ruby, a Chinese Australian film actor struggling to break into 1950s Hollywood; and his great-great-great-grandmother Maria, the unlikely matriarch, whose story stretches from the 1850s into the mid-20th century. There’s a particular focus on Chinese Australian experiences across time, and the nuances of race, gender and immigration are explored as each member of the family negotiates belonging and assimilation in different ways.
Initially, the book appears as though it will unfold in four seasonal movements – winter with Daniel, autumn with Wendy, summer with Ruby, spring with Maria. But then the structure begins to unfurl, loosen and accelerate. In the 1900s, minor characters step briefly into focus before disappearing again; marriages, children and relationships accumulate until the family tree – at first a static diagram – seems to become a living organism. Though these characters inhabit different times and places, we soon begin to see how they are formed by the same inheritances and how each of them, in turn, shapes the next.
Many of Riwoe’s characters are in their mid to late life and still undergoing transformation. It’s refreshing to encounter a novel so centrally interested in the ever-changing lives of older people, and so resistant to an arc of youthful self-discovery. As Wendy forgets her own life, she feels “the narrowing fragments of time bearing down upon her”. “Where does the time go?” she asks herself. We begin to see that there are some things – shame, regret, unhappiness – that she is actively choosing to leave behind.
The novel is concerned with memory and storytelling; what we cannot remember, and what we try to forget. Though they work hard at “burying the hard facts around the grey matter”, it becomes clear that every member of the family is carrying their own pain, and shame that should never have been theirs to carry. “The shame you speak of is counterfeit, my darling,” Maria tells her granddaughter. “Something manufactured by the mean and unimaginative.”
It’s in the exploration of intergeneration memory that this work particularly excels. Gabor Maté writes of family histories of trauma as “stories within stories, receding in time”. Riwoe maps this transmission with a sensitivity that brought me to tears several times.
A Short History of Longans is almost 300 pages, but I finished it in a single sitting. Riwoe’s densely descriptive prose makes for lovely reading. Even when her sentences occasionally verge on excessively long and stylised, her command of language and image are undeniable. Some segments feel simplified – Ruby’s experiences as an Oriental expert and actor, for example – but Riwoe’s ability to inhabit the minds of her characters makes even these moments entertaining.
There is a profound sense of connection and continuity at the centre of this work. But there’s also deep pain, loneliness and misunderstanding. Perhaps the great tragedy is that these things must necessarily sit side by side.
Like Daniel’s sculptures, A Short History of Longans is assembled from fragments; memories that cross time and space, each with its own sharp edges. In bringing them together, Riwoe creates a family portrait that makes two centuries of imagined history feel as though it has been lived.
A Short History of Longans by Mirandi Riwoe is published by UQP ($34.99) in Australia
