To describe Emma Ling Sidnam's Backwaters as the journey of a fourth-generation Chinese New Zealander to discover her identity is to underestimate the book's rich complexity.

To praise it as a story that will attract readers of this or that author with Asian ancestry is to narrow its scope, limiting its universal appeal and reducing its value to a piece of “ethnic work”.

Like the first-person protagonist Laura, we have all asked ourselves the question: “Where are we from?” But, unlike Laura, only some of us have been asked the question: “Where are you really from?”

If this question gets thrust upon you simply because of how you look, even though you were born and have lived here all your life – it really makes you wonder about your existence.

Unless you can find the answer that satisfies your heart and soul, you will never rest. For identity is much more than how others identify you – it is also how you define yourself.

In Backwaters, Laura embarks on a journey to find an answer that will give her peace. Her sense of being neither here nor there – that she is not enough to own and belong to either space – prompts her to explore the nature and significance of her heritage.

“I just want to fit in,” Laura admits. “And be accepted as a New Zealander and not asked where are you from? everywhere I went.”

Yet, even a DNA test cannot give her a definite answer, because any specific label, like “Chinese” or “New Zealander”, is ambivalent and open to a myriad of interpretations. “It tells me naught about who I am as a person, except that I am a mix of things and my history is ambiguous, and I already know that.”

While working on a project about the Chinese New Zealander experience, Laura comes across a diary supposedly written by her great-great-grandfather, Ken, one of the earliest Chinese settlers in Aotearoa who worked as a market gardener during the gold rush days.

The more she gets to know about the sojourner – the man who felt like a foreigner in his home country and then built a home of his own in a foreign land – the better she understands that life is what you choose it to be, a self-made and self-sustained mixture of disappearance and discovery, fulfilling and forgetting, fact and fiction, memory and reality, and giving and forgiving.

In Laura's words: “All the stories that got me here... they play back in my head like a sped-up film. These stories might be the backdrop to my life, but they don't determine who I become next.” Instead of internalising what others see in her and then defining herself accordingly, she recognises the need to see herself as who she wants to be.

Winner of the 2022 Michael Gifkins Prize, Backwaters is all about the bittersweet search for belonging. It shows us a way to find confidence and courage to claim our own stories.

Note: This book review is scheduled to be published by Ranges Trader Star Mail in Melbourne, Australia, on April 2, 2024.

Backwaters is a debut novel from New Zealand poet Emma Ling Sidnam.

We meet Laura whose great great grandfather emigrated from China in the 19th century and settled in New Zealand. Four generations later Laura struggles with people asking where she is from since she regards herself totally as a New Zealander. When she is asked to write some of her family history for publication she begins her research and gradually acknowledges feelings and acceptances that she did not have before.

If this sounds as though it may be heavy reading it is definitely not. Laura's history is intriguing and it is told with warmth and humour. Sidnam writes beautiful prose which comes from the heart.

A nicely written story about Laura, a young writer who is tired of being asked ‘where are you from?’ even though she is a fourth generation New Zealander. Her grandfather’s grandfather came to NZ in the 1870s and worked as a market gardener. It’s a story about family, family history and identity. An enjoyable read.

4.5★s
Backwaters is the first novel by award-winning New Zealand poet and author, Emma Ling Sidnam. Even though her maternal great, great grandfather emigrated from a Guangdong village in China to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth Century, and her father is Singapore Chinese, writer Laura Long Stephens doesn’t feel Chinese. She really hates it when people ask her where she’s from. “Here!”

Then, her boss at the Auckland Art Gallery asks her for Chinese New Zealand stories for an anthology about minority cultures in New Zealand. Of course, she doesn’t have any: “Does my family history count as a Chinese New Zealand story? Even if it does, am I Chinese enough to write these stories?”

But a visit with Benjamin Long, her maternal grandfather, gets her thinking about it: maybe she could write about him? While he rejects the notion that he had any sort of interesting life, he does suggest that his grandfather’s life might make worthwhile subject matter.

Her great, great grandfather’s journal is a real find. It’s all in Mandarin, but Grandpa is ready to sit down and translate for her. And so she writes Kaineng’s story, or at least, her interpretation of it. Grandpa’s OK with that. It describes their ancestor’s youth, his emigration, at which time Kaineng becomes Ken, his work in New Zealand, his return to Guangdong to find a wife. Kaineng was a poet and story teller so his writing is interesting, beautiful, moving.

As Laura works on her Chinese New Zealand story, she can’t help thinking more about her own ethnicity. Her younger sister’s remarks regularly criticise her attitude, and their mother’s history adds impetus to her attempts to understand and accept her Chineseness.

In her burgeoning private relationship with her white work colleague, Henry, she finds herself challenged: “maybe it’s not super healthy for you to be self-analysing all the time. You might feel better if you focused your energy outwards a bit,” he tells her, and “what do you hope will change after all of this? When you have more answers— if there even are answers?”

She is surprised to find herself attending an Asian arts Collective, and realises she has more in common with these people than she first realised. She comes to admit “I’ve been so internally racist my whole life.” Finally, on a short research trip to Hong Kong, she connects with someone whose heritage experience is so close to her own, that empathy, and emotional and intimate connection can occur without explanation.

At last, she realises “I want to be proud of my roots. My sister is. But I hate being seen for my ethnicity… At first I resented having to write these stories just because of my heritage. But now it feels like a privilege to have stories that people want to hear.”

Laura’s narrative is interspersed with her fictional version of Ken’s story in fifteen parts, and two fictional versions of her mother’s conception. While this novel may resonate with people of Asian heritage, Ling Sidnam’s talent with words, descriptions and plot ensure that this is not a prerequisite for enjoying this beautifully written debut.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Text Publishing.