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Original Face

Tim Cribb

review of the week

Original Face

by Nicholas Jose

Giramondo, $185

Hong Kong property investors will know that the geographic centre of Sydney is now about 14km as the crow flies from the city's famed harbour, and drifting in a south-westerly direction.

For many of its 4.7 million inhabitants, though, Sydney's heartland is an alien place. It's in a state of constant cultural flux as new arrivals displace the old - Italians and Greeks in the 1950s and 1960s, Lebanese and Vietnamese in the 1970s and 1980s, mainland Chinese after Tiananmen Square in 1989.

It's among these Chinese that Nicholas Jose finds the plot of what is, on the surface, a clever and satisfying crime thriller. A man is skinned alive, his corpse found amid the flies at an outlying refuse tip on a hot summer's morning.

The trail leads deep into the Chinese community that sprang up after Bob Hawke, prime minister at the time of Tiananmen, gave passports to 40,000 mainland Chinese then in the country, with thousands more following. It was an emotional response. Australia's Chinese are predominantly Cantonese who have little regard for their Putonghua-speaking cousins.

Language barriers and immigrant invisibility were soon exploited by those who found human trafficking more lucrative than drugs. Also exploited was the emotionalism about the restraint on pro-democracy activism, leading to manipulation and corruption of immigration officials.

Jose moves comfortably among Sydney's Chinese, with two well-regarded China-themed novels to his credit: The Rose Crossing (1994) and The Red Thread (2000). He worked in Shanghai and Beijing from 1986 to 1990, meeting many artists, writers and dissidents, and was the cultural attache at the Australian Embassy during the events of 1989. He has translated essays and poems.

It's this considerable experience that allows Jose to take Original Face to a higher level than merely well-plotted thriller.

The central character is taxi driver Lewis Lin, who takes the Buddhist approach of living in the present and facing problems as they come, rather than dreaming of the future or brooding about the past. Buddhism is one of Jose's threads, most obviously manifested in the character of Zhou Huang, whom police identify as the faceless corpse.

In Jose's telling, there's a well-conceived homoeroticism about Zhou, an area he's explored in his previous works.

Jasmine Guo Lihua, a practitioner of Chinese medicine on an expired visa, and dissipated Oscar-winning cinematographer Bernie Mittel, provide the heterosexual relief and the prospect of mutual redemption. Jose's acupuncture scene skewers the psyche of the Australian male with nerve-point precision.

Less convincing is Ah Mo, charismatic former violin great whose insidious Chinese Democracy League has connections with mainland money and some rather nasty former PLA in Hangzhou.

He is, from the outset, identified as the bad guy, grown fat and rich on illegal immigrants. His character lacks the depth of motivation to be convincing, although Jose's grimly low-key account of the skinned-alive murder is masterful.

For the white Australians, Jose introduces Sergeant 'Ginger' Rogers and Constable Shelley Swert, representative of the old and new, and embodying an ideal of easy-going mutual respect that seems so much under threat these days from rapacious greed and ignorant bigotry. Not all Australians are stupid racists, Jose seems to be saying, just some.

Original Face takes its title from a Zen koan - what was your original face, before your mother and father? At a time where one's real face is often deeply hidden, this smartly packaged story peels back Sydney's face to reveal one of struggling optimism.

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