Chiew-Siah Tei, a member of Scottish PEN, is a Malaysian born writer. Her first collection of prose, It's Snowing (Chinese) was published in 1998. This was followed by a collection of arts and film reviews in 2000, Secrets and Lies (Chinese). She has won awards for her Chinese prose, including the Hua Zong International Chinese Fiction Award and the National Prose Writing Competition. In 2002, she enrolled on the PhD in Creative Writing and Film Studies at Glasgow University. Her play Three Thousand Troubled Threads was staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005. Her first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes (Picador, 2008), was long-listed for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007 and short-listed for the 2008 Best Scottish Fiction Prize.
An Island in a Sea of Snow
My appointment as Jessie Kesson Writer-in-residence, a position created in honour of the Inverness-born author (1916-94), at the Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre commenced on 1 March. The car that picked me up from Inverness Train Station stopped at the top of where the driveway was supposed to be, now covered in knee-deep snow. In fact, snow was all I could see.
‘There,’ the Centre Director, Hamish MacDonald, gestured.
I peered at the direction indicated. Moniack Mhor was a tiny island in a sea of white: alone, secluded, seemingly fragile. I felt a sudden pang in my chest – wasn’t it how she must have felt, Jessie Kesson, during those days after leaving the orphanage at sixteen, her ambition of writing ‘poetry as great as Shakespeare’s’ smothered by the adults’ plans for her to work instead at a farm? And later when she wandered from one job to another, with abundance of adolescent frustrations in her, not being understood, unable to make choices? She was a lone island in the middle of emptiness.
I dug further into Jessie’s world. A childhood of deprivation and negligence which ended with admission to an orphanage was reflected in her first book, The White Bird Passes. Her fate didn’t seem to improve much as time progressed. Isobel Murray’s biography of the prolific writer describes a woman who married at twenty ‘to the first man who asked her’ and with that ‘her normal youthful freedom was dramatically curtailed.’ I read out from Another Time, Another Place the author’s unhappiness following the end of her liberty that came with marriage. The protagonist, a young woman ‘had thought she could go anywhere. Go everywhere, do anything. Do everything… It’s all different now. Being married, I mean.’ That summed up the fates of the women of her generation – they were merely the belongings of their men.
The residency required me to visit schools and talk to students about Jessie and her work. On March 8th, the International Women’s Day, I discussed at length with a higher class Another Time, Another Place, about a woman feeling trapped in a remote village in the northeast of Scotland, seemingly a prisoner of a life decided by the men around her. Youthful voices of the twenty-first century expressed their indignation for the women of a century ago, represented by the unnamed ‘young woman’ in the story. ‘Time has changed; today we can be independent, we can make choices.’ A young girl said confidently.
A few days later, I journeyed southwards to attend a conference. As the train sliced through the snow-carpeted land, I imagined Jessie, her pen firmly held in her hand, poking the layer of chill ice cocooning her. I thought of the paths trudged by other women writers from far or recent past, from Kate Chopin to Muriel Spark, of their juggling between writing and responsibilities for family and children, of the independent women characters they created which very much represented the authors’ spirit, of the decisions and the sacrifices they had to make, yet still not being understood. For the hardship they experienced, for the quality of the work they produced in such circumstances, these writers and their writings should be celebrated more widely, but reality often appears otherwise. For instance, it is inexplicable that a person (Jessie) who contributed about ninety radio plays is not mentioned in any major books on the history of British broadcasting.
More efforts need to be made to highlight and recognise the achievements of women writers. At the conference entitled China Inside Out, joint-organised by Scottish PEN and the Confucius Institute for Scotland in celebration of Chinese women writers in exile, I found out for the first time works by Meiling Jin, a Caribbean Chinese woman. And if not for the residency appointment, I would probably never have learned of Jessie Kesson, nor would the school children I visited over the four weeks. I hope for more institutions to follow in the footsteps of Scottish PEN and Moniack Mhor, giving women writers their rightful place on the literary map.
Chiew-Siah Tei
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