Empty spaces

... the artists who invented xieyi painting were scholar-amateurs, and they were not interested in depicting the physical likeness of things. They left large areas of the paper blank because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence.

Pik-Shuen Fung, Ghost Forest

In her first novel, Ghost Forest (2021), Pik-Shuen Fung gives us the literary version of the xieyi painting she describes. Absence is as important as presence. Even the title suggests this idea. There's a forest there, but you can't see it.

Hers is minimalist writing with short chapters, sometimes just a few sentences long. Lots of empty space. The reader can fill in the blanks. Reading it is almost like reading poetry.

Like the author herself, the narrator was born in Hong Kong, moving to Vancouver with her family as a little girl just before Hong Kong was turned over to the Chinese. Yet her father stays behind to work in Hong Kong, and she, her mother and younger sister usually see him just once a year. Her father is, for the most part, an empty space.

Most of the novel takes place after she reaches her adulthood and her father is dying of cancer. She has always had an uneasy relationship with her stern, unsmiling father. She doesn't miss him when he's gone, yet she cries whenever they must part. Now that he is dying she begins to build a relationship with him, even to the point of telling him she loves him and hearing him say "I love you" back. Such exchanges are rare in Chinese families, we are told.

Yet there is not enough time, and the novel's last pages are full of regrets and white space. Earlier Pik-Sheun defines the Chinese phrase lik bat chung sam. "It means, what your heart wants but you can't do. It is an uncomfortable feeling. It's the feeling of wanting to do something and not being able to." And those final pages describe that feeling very well.