XI - Playing Madame Mao (2000)

Summary

In Playing Madame Mao (2000), Lau Siew Mei through effective exploitation of the convention of multiple narrators is able to explore fully the concept of freedom of speech. This is because

The language used by characters in the novel, how they speak, is verbally and semantically autonomous; each character' speech possesses its own belief system, … thus it may also refract authorial intentions and consequently may to a certain degree constitute a second language for the author.

(Bakhtin 1981, p. 315)

Thus the multiplicity of voices enables the author to express the underlying theme of the narrative. According to the writer, “central to Playing Madame Mao is the question of what freedom of speech means to human society. What are the effects of censorship and self-censorship upon the inner lives of people living in a country where they are prevalent?” (Quayum 2002, p. 446). Lau Siew Mei emigrated to Australia in 1994 and her novel, published in Australia, uses a mode of presentation which imposes an aesthetic distance from the obliquely political message buried in a phantasmagoric representation of life in Singapore. The main plot of the novel deals with the so called Marxist incident of 1987 when a group of Catholic Church workers was arrested for conspiring to incite resistance against the state of Singapore. The writer uses this incident to dramatize the effects of censorship an

the lack of freedom of speech in a society.

The blurb by Nicholas Jose states that the novel is “a phantasmagoric representation of the life in a world of mirrors, where a woman' memoir of her existence is projected through flashes of this myth and history”. The effective exploitation of this mode is possible as the characters, Tang the scholar, Roxanne the journalist, Chiang Ching the scriptwriter and third person narrator, all speak in the same register as they come from the educated, upper middle-class, where English has become the language of thought and feeling in Singapore. This allows the writer to make rapid changes of scene where one point of view blends into another. The voice of Madame Mao is in vernacular transcription and it is through the role play of Chiang Ching the actress and scriptwriter, that her voice is heard.