Review: Backwaters

How do you write the truth about someone you’ve never met? Or even the truth about yourself? This is the question that Emma Ling Sidnam deals with up front, in the opening words of her debut novel Backwaters:

‘I’ve chosen to fictionalise Ken’s story, because the truth isn’t concrete. All I have is Ken’s diary, Ken’s feelings. I have to fill in everything else …  Grandpa reads sections of what I’ve written and gently tells me that my grasp of China is filtered through my ‘modern Western upbringing’. He reminds me that whatever I write will be my story of Ken’s life, rather than an accurate retelling of it.’

In Backwaters the main protagonist Laura – who, like Sidnam, is a 4th generation Chinese New Zealander - navigates the familiar and unsettling tides of trying to find herself in her twenties. In doing so she opens up the life stories of her parents and her grandparents. She also tries to get into the skin of an ancestor she hasn’t met, her great great grandfather Kaineng/Ken who emigrated from China as a market gardener.

Sidnam’s a rising star on the Aotearoa literary scene, a multi hyphenate, multi genre artist. A performance poet with multiple National Slam Poetry awards, she wrote an environmental musical while still in Year 13, speaks multiple languages and has recently been named the 2023 recipient of the Surrey Hotel Writers’ Residency Award. Backwaters was published as the result of her winning the 2022 Michael Gifkins Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript.

Like many first novels, Backwaters feels as if it slices very close to personal truths – non-fiction wrapped and teased in layers of fiction - but Sidnam employs deft skill and assurance as well as lightness of touch. This is a warm read, full of characters who are flawed and loveable in their humanity. I found myself rooting for Kaineng and Laura as well as Laura’s wise, quietly suffering grandfather.

Sidnam has constructed a carefully layered narrative, showing us her vision of a family as an unfolding series of boxes, each generational layer adding insight, yet also complexity.  Like the slyly wrapped gifts the family give each other, the coverings may conceal the shape of the contents - yet love always throws light on the truth. It made me ponder how we are so different to the people we’re related to and yet so unexpectedly alike.

‘I know it’s hard but a family is worth fighting for… they’re the only ones who can never leave you.’

As a Chinese New Zealander myself, I consumed this book luxuriating in the stabs of recognition, the feeling of being seen.  Who hasn’t tried to work out a complicated love life and fended off weird demands from bosses while trying to understand their family?  Who hasn’t endured the expectations of outsiders who want to be “educated” on diversity and ask intrusive questions without a glimmer of self-awareness? I may have shouted with joy while reading the passage where three Asian women cooperate to fend off a racist at a dinner party. (Racist micro aggressions happen often - ask any friend of colour - but having someone else in the room brave enough to collaborate with happens mostly in fiction.)

It also makes me wonder how many times Sidnam, as a writer of “diversity” (that dreaded D-word) would have encountered subtle pressure from writing mentors to write about racism, overbearing (grand)parents, migrant hangups - those topics that when I was starting to write, I was told “readers want to hear about.” Actually, she delivers - but on her terms. And to an audience more like herself than the “traditional” target audience for fiction (white, middle class, educated). The themes of self-empowerment and finding family are universal, though, - and the finesse of the writing will bring great pleasure. Every now and then there are filmic phrases that suddenly, startlingly, bring the scene to life:

‘One evening, when the light hit the ground in streaks of peach…’

Backwaters is also a love letter to my hometown, Auckland. Sidnam evokes rites of passage familiar to anyone who grew up here: heart to hearts at the top of Mt Eden, city coffee haunts, light falling onto trees at Auckland Art Gallery.  Sidnam also takes us to Southern China in the early 1900s. She shows us the quiet hope of Laura’s ancestors (and the ancestors of many Chinese New Zealanders) and their bravery in facing the unknown. Here too, in the shape of Kaineng, is the pain of being unseen by family - and of the gradual realisation that belonging can be found elsewhere.

Where Sidnam’s writing most resonated with me are her musings on the complicated shifts in how we identify ourselves, to others and to ourselves.  Laura often moves back in time to recall events that shaped her:

‘She’s from here,’ he would say, and everyone would accept it. Part of me resented the fact that people believed him over me, that he was essentially the one labelling me, but another part of me felt relieved. I didn’t have to defend myself or explain that I was born here.

And so it came to be that, at primary school, I wasn’t Chinese. I was just Laura, and I loved it. It was like my ethnicity didn’t even exist. Instead, I was known for being competitive in PE, good at the recorder, confident in the pool.’

There are stories we construct about each other and for each other. There are stories which come under pressure when the people we love question our reality. There are stories which if we choose to live them and believe in them, they become true. Backwaters is full of characters struggling to find the confidence to claim their stories.

But this isn’t the type of novel that allows a character to brood and leaves us hanging. There are endings and - I won’t spoil it for you – but they are warm and satisfying. Backwaters is a book you can safely take on holiday with you.

Reviewed by Renee Liang