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May 28, 2023

Dorothy Tse’s “Owlish” Reviewed

By Katy Waldman “The professor had his arms around Aliss’s waist, and imagined

By Katy Waldman

"The professor had his arms around Aliss's waist, and imagined himself a prince from a fairy tale." Already, the reader is peeking anxiously through her fingers. Abort! Abort! Literature is littered with the bodies of would-be lovers who gallop off the edge of reality. Don Quixote, the ur-fantasist, "spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset," until "his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind." Two centuries later, Emma Bovary died of overexposure to romances, having fancied herself "the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every drama, the vague she of every volume of poetry." And now, in "Owlish," a new work of fiction by Dorothy Tse, a lonely middle-aged professor named Q falls in love with Aliss, a life-size mechanical ballerina. He forgets that his princess is just a toy and that he is just a "hack teacher." In thrall to an inanimate object, he feels freer than he ever has.

Tse, who lives in Hong Kong and writes in Chinese, is an accomplished author of short fiction. "Owlish," her début novel, has been translated into a playful and sinuous English by Natascha Bruce. The book, which took shape during the city's pro-democracy protests in 2019 and 2020, features two thinly veiled Hong Kongs. They lie on top of each other, and both go by the name Nevers. Great Britain is Valeria; the authoritarian Vanguard Republic, which rules over inland Ksana, stands in for the People's Republic of China. In the first Nevers, Q , a scholar of Valerian, writes research proposals, applies for superfluous funding, and tends to routine paperwork. He and his wife, Maria, a government bureaucrat, own an apartment in an "orderly and narrow" neighborhood, where all construction is "meticulously calculated."

The first Nevers is a place of hierarchy and compression, of breakneck development and brutal yet submerged competition for status. Blue-eyed foreigners patronize the fine-dining establishments left over from colonial days, and second-generation Ksanese immigrants look down on newer arrivals. Pinched storefronts and dark, mazy alleys abut a vision of urban modernity, all skyscrapers and glass. With his respectable post, his becoming spouse, and his "flat most people couldn't even dream of being able to afford," Q has carved out a foothold in the city's vertiginous slope. But it is a precarious one. Untenured at fifty, he seems to lack his own profession's codes of advancement. He comes from somewhere else—the couple's friends wonder where, noting that his complexion almost appears to shift with the light—and there are hints of harrowing run-ins with military police. Q , who has a "pounding heart rate" and "sorrowful creases in his forehead," is a man under pressure; he is tentative, resentful, ready to explode.

The second Nevers is a shadow zone, a dream world behind or beneath the first. "Dangerous" but "full of unknown potential," it hosts Q's fecund—and unabashedly filthy—fantasy life. Tse's prose curls around Q like a vine, dropping him in landscapes that are equal parts Bosch and Freud, lush and deranged. Imagine an after-hours cut of Disney's "Fantasia"; Alexander Portnoy on acid; a Losing Your Virginity theme park brought to you by Mephistopheles. Here the professor crosses a waterfall that sounds like a woman crying out in pleasure, encounters "a livid red nipple" the size of a wide-screen TV, and ogles preposterous foliage: "A magenta banana flower protruded from a cluster of bananas, the blossom pendulous and plump, like a cheerful penis." Tse gives exaggerated form to Q's fears as well as to his frustrated urges. In the second Nevers, mechanical tigers gnaw on the viscera of mechanical soldiers, and "men with guns at their waists" snarl "with their big, gaping mouths."

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At the beginning of "Owlish," Q hides a collection of female dolls in a secret cabinet in his study. He brings them out only while Maria is at work; otherwise he keeps his fantasies safely locked away. Once Q acquires Aliss, that changes. He installs her in an abandoned church, which he visits for hours on end, brushing her hair, arranging her limbs, and draping her in the latest fashions. She is his co-star in the "folk tale full of lust and passion" playing out in his head. (Rocinante makes a cameo as a "snow-white rocking horse with a flowing golden mane," which the sweethearts bestride in the nude.) With the encouragement of a mysterious friend named Owlish, Q recites poetry to Aliss and expounds on "great philosophical and academic debates, seeking to express his views on love, time, consciousness, desire, existence, and as yet unnamed new fields of thought." Tse describes Aliss with characteristic slyness: "Her pouting rosebud lips were always so contented," and "her glimmering eyes, their colour shifting like the sea, communicated to him the message: Yes, I get it. I completely understand." As the book continues, Q's sleeping and waking hours blur, and Tse's writing grows increasingly surreal. When Aliss comes to life (or the professor dreams that she does), her awakening has the rustle of inevitability.

Meanwhile, demonstrations are spreading across the city. Activists in Nevers protest the "groundless disqualification of an election candidate" and the modifying of history textbooks. One student even climbs a clock tower. But Q is insensible to the angry signs on the cafeteria walls and the bulletin boards outside the library. He hardly notices when just three students show up to his hundred-person lecture course. "The world around him," Tse writes, "seemed to vanish into his blind spot."

Q is not the only resident of Nevers whose sight is compromised:

Every year, the smog grew thicker. You could tell by simply extending a hand, with no need for any official government report, but this was an age in which you couldn't trust what was right in front of you. Newspapers and televisions maintained there was no smog in Nevers, or else that there had always been smog in Nevers, and that these were two sides of the same truth. And no matter which side a person chose to believe, the important thing was that the pollution could not possibly have blown in from inland Ksana.

The smog in Nevers engulfs the skyscrapers and the hand in front of one's face—and perhaps also the student protests, which never appear in the news.

Within the mist and the government mystification around the mist hangs a question: Is "Owlish," which riffs on the perennial theme of runaway imagination, also a political allegory? For years, Q's life has felt curiously faint and dreamlike. Strange lacunae interrupt his memories, most jarringly when Q interacts with university officials or law enforcement. It is as though the book, with its ellipses and obstructed messages, were depicting the reality-warping effects of an uncanny, constraining force—a force like state censorship. The half-encrypted aspect of Tse's place-names, as if she had hastily crossed out "Hong Kong" and written in "Nevers," adds to an aura of dissident literature, of samizdat.

Amid all this, Q rebels by doubling down on fantasy. Aliss, he believes, has liberated his desires, imagination, and intellect. He grows his hair out and stops spending time at the university. He treats Aliss like a status symbol, whisking her onto helicopters and the balconies of luxury hotels. He hires a chauffeur to ferry the two of them around town in a minivan with tinted windows. "To hell with his university superiors!" he thinks. "To hell with his wife and her old, lowbrow friends! Fuck them all!"

But how free is he, really? Like Emma Bovary, he has escaped the prison of repression only to fall victim to his own mind. In his head, he is unbounded, a mythical figure, but from the outside Q resembles a "discarded toy," full of "rusted gears" and "blocked-up pipes." His dream woman, stranded between the organic and the mechanical, reflects his incomplete humanity—how he struggles to distinguish between freedom and ownership, how he can no longer conceive of what it would mean to be real.

Yet "Owlish" is not only a story about Professor Q. As the plot progresses, Tse turns her attention to Maria and, especially, to Aliss. Some chapters unfold from Aliss's perspective, inviting us to identify with her. The doll wonders about her own nature: "She touched her cheek. . . . Soft and not ice-cold, but not exactly warm either." After finding a copy of the "Kama Sutra," she quickly outstrips Q in the art of lovemaking—the student has become the master. She also falls into fellowship with the pro-democracy activists. (In Tse's hands, this convergence is sensuous and romantic, a "warm current" passing through hard flesh.) When their van steers into a protest march, Q pounds on the partition and shouts at the driver to flee. Aliss, more receptive to the flowing, nocturnal lessons of the second Nevers, likens the protesters to "black water droplets . . . leading to another secret, expectant city, waiting to bloom wide open like a flower."

This political and civic unfurling parallels Aliss's own awakening. Tse's interest in machines becoming people brings her back to the circumstances that turn people into machines. At the novel's outset, state censorship, economic precariousness, and class stratification have transformed Q into a "flesh-and-blood mannequin." He rebels, but in a limited way, shrinking back from his students and refusing solidarity with their protest movement. His vision of freedom remains private and acquisitive, whereas Tse suggests that real freedom—political, imaginative, and erotic—does not subjugate others; real freedom is democratic, a public and collective project. Aliss comes to embody this ideal, and with it the most hopeful and the most human parts of Q. "She looked nothing like a doll," he thinks, as their tryst draws to a close. "She was him"—pulled up from the depths of the looking glass, less a mistress than a twin. But, by the time Q realizes that he and Aliss are doubles, it's too late. He will never see himself again. ♦