Dry Milk

by Huo Yan, Duncan M. Campbell (Translator)

John Lee is a lonely and increasingly misanthropic Chinese migrant who has lived in Auckland for thirty years, running a second-hand junk shop while maintaining a relationship of disdain with his disabled wife. When he becomes infatuated with a young international student who lodges in their house, and puts his life savings behind a scheme to export powdered milk to China, the dubious balance with which he has held his life together comes apart, and feelings of alienation and humiliation begin to spiral out of control.

John Lee is a work of fiction that gives a perspective on Antipodean culture unlike any other, told from the point of view of an immigrant alienated from his new home, both its New Zealand and Chinese communities. Huo’s novella is a stark portrait of social isolation, and of the experience of the emigrants that left China in the period after the Cultural Revolution. Capturing the voice of China’s post-1980s literary generation, the book is written with an obsessive intensity that echoes Patricia Highsmith, Elias Canetti and the short novels of Elena Ferrante.

Genres: Fiction, China, Novella

67 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[ns510reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

“He drove to the airport and waited at the arrivals gate. A stream of Chinese faces came through the gate, and for a moment he almost forgot where he was. Thirty years ago, he thought, it was a rare thing to see another yellow face in New Zealand.”
- from Dry Milk written by Huo Yan, translated by Duncan M Campbell.

Woa, short but punchy. You know it’s a good one when you’re left in a daze wondering about what you just read, and feeling admiring of and curious about the author at the same time! I was intrigued when I came across this one, a translated work set in Auckland - not something I’ve come across before. I was not left disappointed!

Dry Milk is about John Lee, a less than likeable misanthrope who once was a librarian in China during the Cultural Revolution where countless works of literature were destroyed. He migrates from New Zealand to China through desperate measures. This drive says a lot about him and the person he then becomes over his thirty years spent in New Zealand, though this isn’t completely free of the influence of external forces; nature vs nurture and all that. I’m always in awe of writers who can write so much in so few, especially when it’s done subtly. The ones where when you’re done, little details come jumping out and you’re left realising just how rich and layered the story you’ve read is.

This was published in July 2019 by @giramondopublishing and was first written in 2013 when the author received a fellowship to stay in NZ on the condition that she writes a story set here. It’s fascinating to read her version of what migrant life in Auckland might look like from a more mainland China-centric perspective of NZ. Auckland comes off as staid and less exciting to contemporary China. It’s at least a reminder that it’s not always all milk and honey as it’s promoted to be, that these lands may not necessarily be better than the one you left behind. I thought it was also clever of her to tie in a specific issue that links China and NZ as a source of tension; preying on the desire for ‘pure’ infant formula in the wake of the melamine food safety scandal in 2008.

An excellent novella that skilfully plays on your sympathies and allegiances the more you get to know the characters. For its length, it manages to effectively paint a portrait of the impact on those who lived through China’s Cultural Revolution, offers a glimpse into what it can take to remake your life as a migrant in distant New Zealand, what it can cost you, that the grass isn’t always greener. And still more! There’s a lot to discuss here and I think I want to read it again at some stage so I‘m going to need to get my own copy of this! That ending has not left my mind 🙀 Do let me know if you’ve read this, I would love to hear your thoughts!

[Ashley Xu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can’t tell if i liked this book or not??? Like on one hand i couldn’t put it down and it was a short breezy read but also it was so uncomfortable to read because the main character is racist, misogynistic, ableist, creepy, gross 🤮🤮🤮????? Literally from the first page i was like wtf wtf wtf ew wtf… But also i can’t stop thinking about the powerful (or fked up) ending… i guess this says more about how i prefer reading things affirming my views rather than the writing LOL

and john lee having a 2nd hand shop and working there for so long made me think about my family in auckland and how 大姨 was the first one to open a bottle shop and in the same shopping strip, 三姨 had a fish and chips shop and i used to spend so much time running between the two shops hmm

[Calzean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Auckland is a multicultural city with a growing Chinese population. This novella tells of John Lee a Chinese immigrant who was able to migrate to New Zealand 30 years previously. He runs a second hand/antique shop which is slowly losing business. His wife is disabled and is unnamed. A young girl becomes a house lodger and he is smitten. He is talked into a new business opportunity.
It's a terse story of being an outsider, of the perils of growing old and lonely and on violence against women. The story bubbles along until the ending which is there to shock the reader.

[Theresa Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came upon this novella, Dry Milk, via this review over at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog, which piqued my interest. In addition to Lisa’s commentary, there was something about the description and cover which drew me in, and also, I’d never before read a Chinese translation, and this was written by a young Chinese woman too, which intrigued me further. There’s a lot packed into this slim book and I was gripped from the beginning through to the end, absorbing it all within the one day. Huo Yan writes with a style that is at once easy to slip along with. We’re in the one perspective for the entire novella, but through telling dialogue and minute observational scene setting, we glean so much more about John Lee and his life.

John Lee is a migrant from Beijing, living in Auckland for the last 30 years. When the novella opens, he is celebrating 30 years to the day of living in New Zealand. A former librarian who watched over the destruction of books during the Cultural Revolution, he came to New Zealand via dubious means. He volunteered to marry a woman – she has no name, is only ever referred throughout as ‘the woman’ – who had been left mentally disabled after being exposed to gas as an infant whilst her parents committed suicide. Foisted onto relatives, when it is discovered she has distant kin in New Zealand, plans are set in motion to send her there. John Lee decides this is just the ticket: marry her and get a visa to New Zealand out of it. He doesn’t care about her disability, and he only finds out after marrying her that she has been repeatedly raped. Not to be deterred, he adds one more rape to the poor woman’s tally on their wedding night. So, thirty years on, living in Auckland, we meet John Lee. He’s a miserly old man, alternating between indifference and cruelty towards his wife. He is beyond cheap, running an antiques/second hand dealership, shopping only right before closing so he can buy his fresh food after it’s been marked down. He seasons his food with condiments fished out of the rubbish decades earlier from when he first moved into his house – they belonged to the previous owner. John Lee lives an emotionally isolated existence. He interacts with other Chinese locals, but only on the surface, never forming any true friendships. He is racist towards Maori New Zealanders and seems to have nothing but thinly veiled disdain for Westerners. He is a man adrift: unable to return to China and uneasy in New Zealand.

Two things happen to John Lee in tandem to upset the quiet order and heavy screen of privacy he has cultivated. He lets a young Chinese woman into his house as a boarder and he accepts a business proposal to export dry milk from New Zealand into China. Apparently this is a booming line of business, with Chinese consumers not trusting the quality and hygiene of local products. So, it seems like a legit deal. John Lee becomes obsessed with his new boarder, acting in particularly creepy and strange ways as time goes on. He’s not really paying attention to what’s going on right under his own nose. He fails to question coincidence and we can see the writing on the wall long before he does. It was really interesting to experience John Lee as a character. Huo Yan has created a man who is both victim and perpetrator. We are repelled by him, disgusted, horrified even; yet, he is an old man who is being swindled out of thirty years of savings. He witnessed atrocities during the Cultural Revolution and was forced into participating in acts that went against his nature. I’ve rarely felt such a contrasting force of push and pull regarding a character. I despised him, yet I wanted to warn him. As he descends further into his obsession, we have to bear witness to some shocking scenes. For me, these seemed to sharply draw into focus John Lee’s ability to dehumanise those who were around him. A legacy of his experiences during the Cultural Revolution, perhaps. As an aside, we also bear witness to an undercurrent of racism towards Chinese people in Auckland. An associate of John Lee is beaten to death by his Western son-in-law whilst attempting to defend his daughter against the violence raining down on her from her husband. There are other instances mentioned, encounters and gossip passed, that all point to an intolerance prevalent that is contrary to public image.

At the end of this novella, we see an aged Chinese woman, who has been abused and misused, dismissed and discarded, for her entire life, rise up in the defence of a younger Chinese woman. The power of this ending moved me greatly, particularly taken within the context of this novella being written by a young Chinese woman, a member of the generation once removed from the Cultural Revolution, born during the decades of China’s one child policy – that which prized boys and discarded girls. A very powerful ending, indeed.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Born in 1987 and based in Beijing, Huo Yan is a writer of novels, short stories, screenplays and criticism. She has a PhD in Contemporary Literature, and in 2013 she held a residency in New Zealand, where one of the conditions of the award was that she had to write a story in a Kiwi setting. Dry Milk is the result, and it's a very interesting novella indeed.
It's the story of John Lee, a character who twists a reader's sympathies one way and another until the final macabre conclusion. A librarian forced to preside over the destruction of Chinese literature during the Cultural Revolution, he cynically marries a woman who offers him a means of escape. She, always named merely as 'the woman' in the story, is intellectually disabled as a result of her parents' suicide: she was the sole survivor when they gassed themselves and the Chinese authorities are only too glad to be rid of her when they find that she has distant relations in New Zealand.
Over thirty years Lee makes a life for himself as a trader in second-hand goods in Auckland. It is a charmless life: he is brutal to his docile wife, and treats her with disdain. He is an outsider amongst both the Kiwi and local Chinese, and cares for nothing except making money.
Into the emptiness of this life come two new characters: a beautiful shy young student who boards with him, and an entrepreneur who wants him to invest in the booming export market for powdered milk. (Both New Zealand and Australia export powdered milk to China where consumers don't trust the safety of the locally produced product). Lee forms a really creepy attachment to Jiang Xiaoyu, eavesdropping on her every movement through the walls, fondling her underwear in her absence and doping his wife so that she becomes an even more ghostly presence in the house. At the same time as the reader is confronted by this repulsive behaviour, Ye Xiaosheng's investment scheme seems more and more dubious: Lee hands over his life savings on trust, and then is asked for more. The reader recognises these warning signs, but Lee does not. He is too preoccupied by his obsession with the girl.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/08/04/d...

[Carolyn DeCarlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a tricky book to unpack. The characters (particularly John Lee) were loathsome. The close 3rd person narration in Dry Milk focuses on Lee, and I'd call him an unreliable narrator. He is racist, a rapist, and harbours sexual fantasies about his young tenant. He's absolutely irredeemable, but I found myself unable to stop reading. I couldn't stand his attitudes toward Pasifika people, or his own wife, who he married for NZ citizenship despite her brain damage, and who he mistreats with absolute unaffected callousness. I found the character of Jiang Xiaoyu really fascinating, watching her duplicity and what she's willing to put up with in order to scam Lee. Some things I'd like to mention that were particularly funny or sinister I'm afraid would be spoilers, so I'll just say I think Huo Yan has a very dark sense of humor that comes out really well in this book. Dry Milk isn't for the faint of heart, but I do feel it's a quick read, and is well written. I felt a little like there might have been a nod to The Great Gatsby in here, both with the unreliable narration and this passage:

"The green of the lawn stretched all the way to the foot of the mountain. In the distance the flashing lights of Auckland's Sky Tower were suspended in space... John Lee stared at the far-off lights. Reflected in his eyes, their various colours merged into a single red tone."

It's not often that I pick out a passage to copy out on Goodreads. A fellow book club member came into the shop today, and said she felt like she'd never really encountered these characters before in literature, and I have to say on first impression I have to agree. Representation for Chinese-New Zealanders, even of the murderous variety.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I made a mistake with this book and not one I’m usually guilty of: I cast the protagonist. As soon as I started reading the image that came into my mind was that of Sang-il Kim (played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) in the Canadian sitcom Kim’s Convenience. The Kims are a Korean family who own a grocery store in Toronto whereas John Lee in Dry Milk is Chinese and runs a dilapidated second-hand goods shop (SEA DRAGON ANTIQUE STORE) in Auckland but the main thing they have in common is what we Scots would refer to as a “canniness” when it comes to money:

John Lee took as long as he could over paying, as if to slow down the speed with which the money left his pocket. He took three twenty-dollar notes from his calf-leather wallet: three waterproof notes that made no sound as they were being counted. Then, with a dull crash, he emptied out his loose change on the checkout counter. With the checkout girl, he counted the coins one by one until they reached the required amount.

That’s not the only thing. Both characters, although having lived for many years in their new lands (they’re both in their fifties), have still not completely assimilated into the culture and even take some pride in the fact but they do not like to be looked down on by their fellow immigrants. They’re also a little naïve, a little too trusting veering towards the gullible. When John Lee gets the opportunity to invest in a milk powder business, well, you just know it’s going to end badly. This isn’t much of a spoiler because, despite the book’s title, the whole dry milk thing isn’t the main theme of the book.

Lee lives with “the woman” as he refers to her. She’s his wife whom they met in China; in fact it was because he agreed to marry her he was able to emigrate. Of course there was a catch: she was simple. The deal was if he agreed to marry her he could leave the country although he was warned never to return. Their relationship is an odd one. At times, mostly in fact, he’s quite tender towards her even if he doesn’t like to publicise the fact they’re married and sometimes even pretends she’s his sister but there’s a dark side to him that you never see in Sang-il Kim. For example:

The night before they had departed China, as John Lee had helped her pack, he had discovered that the woman owned a violin, all the strings of which had snapped and hung loose from the body of the instrument. The varnish on the finger positions was worn through, evidence of many hours of painstaking practice.

The woman wanted to bring the violin with her to New Zealand, but John Lee had not allowed it, taking it from her grasp and throwing it into a corner. He was determined that she be done with music.

This is where I struggled because I couldn’t picture nice Mr Kim acting the way John Lee does on occasion. Not, of course, the author’s fault. I’m just saying.

The real story concerns Jiang Xiaoyu, a girl who shelters in Lee’s shop one day during a rainstorm:

He would never forget their first meeting. She was sitting in his shop, her clothes soaked through, trembling like a wounded animal, biting down on her lips so tightly that they began to bleed. She warmed up a little only when John Lee gave her his coat.

They run into each other again and during their third encounter Lee learns she’s looking for a place to stay so he offers her one of his rooms which doesn’t come across as that odd since he’s been in the habit of letting out rooms to students. The problem is, like Aschenbach in Mann’s Death in Venice, Lee becomes obsessed by the girl. Even though he never lays a finger on her he can think of nothing else. Not a good time to have to make major decisions concerning one’s life’s savings then. And, again, I just couldn’t see nice Mr Kim doing anything like this.

The book’s ending makes total sense although it’s not the ending I was expecting. All the clues were there but, of course, how do you know what’s going to be important later in the book? Again, not a criticism. This is a novel where nothing much happens and it’s easy to think nothing at all is happening but it’s like milk in a pan: for the first few minutes what do you have bar a few bubbles round the edge of the pan, some steam and that familiar, slightly sickly smell? Then you turn your back for a second and it boils over. John Lee has been quietly simmering for thirty years:

Something deep within him that had come back to life was slowly dying once more. The blood in his veins began to dry up, and the intervals between the beats of his heart lengthened, but each beat now seemed to strike at his chest with the force of a hammer intent on shattering it.

A book to read with a little care and a far more disturbing read than I was expecting.

[Elie · Rating 3 out of 5]

made me viscerally angry omg

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in one day - it is a short read, but it is also compelling. Despite its brevity, it has a lot to offer readers: the impact of the Chinese cultural revolution, the difficulty of establishing a new life abroad, the perils of obsession, and the hazards of growing old.

Dry Milk is about John Lee, a migrant from Beijing who has lived in Auckland for three decades. I disliked the main character, but I appreciated the skillful writing of Huo Yan (and Duncan M. Campbell who translated). An extremely clear voice is formed in the opening pages that holds true throughout the novel. John Lee is unashamably arrogant, miserly, racist, and misogynist, and there is an ugly cadence to the way he thinks and acts.

John Lee treats the customers in his antiques shop, the Pacifika people in his community, other members in his Chinese community, and his wife (who is disabled and named only as 'the woman') all with open and cruel distain. Yet, at the same time, he is alienated from both his Chinese and New Zealand communities. It has been difficult for him to fit in, but he initially tried to assimilate. The growing Chinese population has meant greater continuity with his life in China, but he also doesn't fit in with the new Chinese migrants either. Any shame or discontent he feels about this he converts into arrogance, which limits our sympathies. He thinks he is better than the other Chinese in his community because they are permanent residents while he is a citizen.

Although the novel reads with a distinctly masculine and misanthropic voice, this distinctness does not limit the narrative, nor the reader's ability to be surpised. The novel reaches a dramatic conclusion, which is in equal part horrible and satisfying. It demonstrates the comeuppance of certain types of bitterness, entitlement, and violence toward women, giving agency to characters for whom it has been denied throughout the rest of the novel by our narrator.

Ultimately, this novel was not quite the migrant experience I thought I was setting out to read - it was much darker and sadder, and focused more on one individual than I'd anticipated. I'm not entirely sure I enjoyed the reading experience, but that relates more to my tendency this year to read affirming novels, rather than the ability of the writer. I'd recommend Dry Milk to anyone wanting a different kind of New Zealand fiction experience, or to someone who enjoys delving into the intracies of a disinct mind for the duration of a novel.

[LadyDisdain · Rating 3 out of 5]

The terse, clinical prose of this story fits the protagonist's character down to a 'T.' Everything is very matter of fact, but underneath the surface there's the hint of restrained violence and rage that has been unleashed in the past and might be unleashed again. It's a very short novel, and a prolonged character study really. I can't say that I enjoyed it, exactly - it's not something that I would reread for pleasure. But it is a story that you can appreciate for the craft that went into it, and for the the themes of immigration, racism, and misogyny it deals with.

[Genevieve Poppe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not enjoy reading this book because of the way it left me feeling: like everyone is horrible and the future of humanity is doomed because people are awful. However, the fact that a novella under 100 pages long could contain the prose to make me feel so much in such a short time is a testament to the writing. It was clear and effortless to read, with depth of characters, developed backstory, and a clear environment. The writing was excellent, but the story terrible.

[Ranjana · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very captivating novella written simply that picks up momentum and delivers a good ending.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dark story with a disturbing but reasonable ending.

[Tama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Up until the ending I was expecting to give the book four stars. I don't think the ending is cheap it just feels too conclusive for this otherwise vague character portrait. The length is 4 star ideal for this story and the way it is told.

I started reading it entering an emotionally heavy week and couldn't pick it back up after first read as the protagonist is a hateful irredeemable (unless through the lens of circumstance) man. I needed as many good thoughts as I could get.

It’s a severe portrait. A balded, cap wearing; plain on the outside, lecherous on the inside; vengeful, depraved, local (“Your local” etc.)

[Ann Tonks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this short novel about a Chinese immigrant to New Zealand fascinating on a range of levels. The live of an outsider. How he got out of China. His relationships. His frustrations. All written in a cool, effective way.