Sanity at the mercy of language: Interpreting the “nonsense” of a Chinese miner in Australia

ABSTRACT

Written in an interlanguage of English and Chinese, Jong Ah Siug’s autobiography “The Case” (1872) is rich in ambiguity; this makes it urgently in need of interpretation. Tried unfairly and detained in a lunatic asylum, Jong wrote “The Case” to narrate the cause, process, and aftermath of a fight to prove his innocence, yet unknowingly he introduced another case with the use of highly individualized language: does his “nonsense” imply that he was of unsound mind? This article will analyze “The Case”, first to deduce what Jong’s case really is, what it tells us about Australian colonial culture, and how medical knowledge was powerfully channeled in the colony. Secondly it will examine the case of “The Case”: how the text is accepted by contemporary critics, translators, and psychiatrists, why they are prone to regard the narrator as mad, and what part language plays in the construction of Jong’s insanity.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• interlanguage
• colonization
• madness
• Jong Ah Siug
• “The Case”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jong uses “we” for the conjunction “and”. This sentence can be translated as “Some men and women ridiculed me and told lies about me. Next April, when people met me they would laugh at and gossip about me.”

2. Note that “my no freedom man what for” was translated as “I had no freedom why should I live?” But it might mean “Why wouldn’t they let me do what I wanted?”

3. Shen understood “my little language” as Jong’s describing his disability in English (2001, 27). So did Farrell, “Jong refers to his English use as ‘my little language,’ a phrase used by Jonathan Swift” (2015, 70). This may not be the case. From the perspective of Chinese, “my little language” could mean “I’m a man of few words.” The parallel between “2 girl name Salannd Jinny, crankey my nonsense, looksee my quiet” (1872, 47) and “my case girl crankey my, my little language” (49) also supports this interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences [23CWW016].

Notes on contributors

Xu Mao

Xu Mao is lecturer in the School of Health Humanities, Peking University. His research interests include comparative literature and world literature, life-writing, narrative medicine, narrative ethics and disability studies. His most recent publication is “On Metabiography” in the Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies (November, 2023). He was a columnist for World Culture magazine and published nearly 40 profiles for its “People” column. He was a winner of a National Scholarship from China in 2019. Now he is teaching courses about world autobiography, world biography, disability studies, cultural history of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and British and American culture.