What Would Knowing Change?

Tracey Lien’s All That’s Left Unsaid begins with an ending: a funeral. There’s a blown-up picture of model high school student Denny Tran’s beaming face next to a glossy closed casket. His older sister Ky, their parents Yen and Hanh, and a handful of relatives and teachers return to the family home for the wake, with the rest of the Cabramatta Vietnamese community glaringly absent. As Ky’s third-person narration tells us outright in the opening chapter, Denny suffered a ‘bad death – the kind caused by terrible luck, where children or gangs or heroin were involved’. Their mother has made too many hand-rolled buns, fuelled by her grief and insistence that there will be enough mouths to receive them. But buns outnumber mourners: the community is ‘too spooked’ to pay their respects. 

Absence is a recurring motif throughout the novel, which like Rachel Cusk’s Outline, takes shape through what’s not there. But in Outline, Cusk’s ‘reverse kind of exposition’ gives us a sense of the main character through her descriptions of people she encounters, whereas in All That’s Left Unsaid, absence drives the plot. At the narrative core of Lien’s novel is a lack of witnesses and open discussion about the events surrounding Denny’s death. There’s not even a coroner’s report. Despite seventeen people being present that unlucky evening at the Lucky 8, everyone claims to have seen nothing. This reticence to testify is reflected in the title: what’s left unsaid. Talking to her boss at the Herald Sun, Ky, a plucky journalist, is indignant: 

Even Ky’s family appear to be turning away from details too hard to bear. The on-duty constable tells Ky her parents refused an autopsy: ‘[I]t seems like your family wants to be in the dark.’ They seem to feel some things are best left unspoken, a sentiment all too familiar to those from migrant families (and here, I raise my hand). It is this lack of testimony that propels Ky, the novel’s main character, into action and drives the narrative forward. After tracking down Constable Edwards, she convinces him to give her the list of people present the night of her brother’s death. She seeks out their stories. A hero’s ‘quest’ for the truth. It’s classic murder mystery material, but Lien’s approach to writing fiction is by no means pedestrian. 

The format reflects Lien’s own authorial process; fictional Ky’s journalistic quest for the truth mirrors the research undertaken by real-life Lien to write her novel. All That’s Left Unsaid began as an idea while Lien was completing an MFA at the University of Kansas. She sought first-person testimonies of what it was like to live in Cabramatta during the heroin epidemic in the 1990s. Born to Vietnamese refugee parents and raised in the Cabramatta/Fairfield area, she was only eight years old in 1996, the year in which her novel is set. She draws partly on her unreliable memories of that period, partly on extensive research. Admitting that she had ‘no first-hand experience with the violence or familial circumstances depicted in the book’, she instead ‘relied heavily on news clippings, interviews, and research papers authored by anthropologists and epidemiologists who’d focused on Cabramatta in the 1990s’. Elsewhere, Lien said she ‘tracked down’ ethnographic researchers, and asked them for memories, unpublished research, and introductions to their interviewees. In an interview for Shondaland, she said her goal was to tell an ‘emotionally honest story’. In short, there is a journalistic drive behind the writing – an attempt to uncover and convey stories imbued with truth. 

I’ve been thinking about this novel a lot lately – and its deployment of fiction to convey testimony. To what extent does the main character of Ky function as an authorial stand-in? How does a fictional protagonist’s quest for truth mirror the author’s narrative project of All That’s Left Unsaid? Does Lien’s process provide insight into how writers of fiction can use interviews, or testimony, to drive their work? 

I’m going to give this process a term: ‘testimonial technique’. I think this better describes a fiction-writing methodology that draws on interviews, even though the resultant work is not strictly classified as ‘testimonial literature’ – even broadly defined. The crucial point of difference between works written using testimonial technique and works of testimonial literature is that the former are not presented as first-person accounts with minimal intervention. 

In testimonial literature, texts typically try to centre traditionally marginalised perspectives in their own voice – or in the case of polyphonic testimonies of different accounts of the same events – multiple voices, such as Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer. At the time, Alexievich was praised by critics such as David L Ulin for ‘giving voice to the voiceless, exposing not only stories we wouldn’t hear but individuals as well’. In contemporary criticism, the notion that writers can truly ‘give voice’ to marginalised perspectives has been heavily scrutinised. As critics like Dr Malaka Shwaikh have remarked: ‘[H]ow can one give something the recipient already has?’ Or as Arundhati Roy has more bluntly stated, underscoring the inherent structural power dynamics at play: ‘[T]here’s really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.’ But if writers don’t give voice to their interview subjects, how else are we to account for the ways first-person accounts trickle into the stories they tell? 

Testimony and its lack is at the heart of the plot of All That’s Left Unsaid: Ky seeks out eyewitnesses, one by one, starting with ten-year-old Lulu, who was eating dinner at the restaurant with her parents, and ending with Minnie, Ky’s estranged childhood best friend. Each conversation with a would-be witness leads Ky closer to the truth. This, despite everyone initially trying their best to not cooperate, including Lulu’s father who actually runs from her, hands over his ears. Including Denny’s high school teacher, Sharon Faulkner, who lies to police on behalf of another student (Eddie Ho) about his whereabouts at the time of Denny’s death. Including Denny’s classmate Kevin, who accepts an early offer from the University of Western Australia, as if trying to escape. 

Other characters echo a similar sentiment: Yen tells her daughter emphatically, ‘nothing can bring [Denny] back’. Flora, the wedding singer at Lucky 8, asks, ‘What would knowing change?’ Every witness seems to view the act of divulging, of retelling, as frightening and to be avoided. But peeling back the layers of lives lived in 1990s Cabramatta is something worth doing, according to Lien. In doing so, she rejects the idea that the Vietnamese community is a monolith. The switching between multiple points of view is deliberately designed to unravel different characters’ stories, providing snapshots of their backgrounds and histories. 

Every witness divulges a piece of information – about themselves, about Denny – that inches Ky closer to the truth. But it is Flora who gives Ky the final piece of crucial information for her investigation. She divulges to Ky – testifies – that her nephew Thien was there, and details how things unfolded. It’s a major turning point for both characters. Although Flora doesn’t join the dots for Ky by explicitly stating that Thien delivered the fatal blow, she confirms he was there that night. Lien underscores the significance of Flora’s testimony by ending Flora’s disclosure with her vomiting: 

Flora’s body is ‘revolting’ after the act of testifying because she’s effectively implicating her nephew against her own will. With this scene, Lien seems to be answering the question many of her characters ask: what would knowing change? Testifying gives insight, but for the one being interviewed, it is a difficult, expunging act. Ultimately, it is cathartic for Flora, perhaps because – not in spite of – these difficulties.  

Characters ‘bearing witness’ to stories are also affected. Ky’s exhaustion during her investigative work is clear; Lien writes that she ‘never felt so tired’. By describing Ky’s fatigue, one intuits that Lien may be commentating on what she feels in her position as an author, using Ky as a vehicle to describe the vicarious emotions that come from bearing witness to stories, particularly traumatic ones. Reading testimonies, listening to stories of people who lived through the Cabramatta heroin epidemic, and learning of all the lives lost or unravelled would have had a cumulative exhaustive effect. Even Ky’s profession sets her in parallel with Lien and her authorial investigative work. As a cadet journalist, Ky is determined at uncovering truth in her day job. She repeatedly describes her working style in a soldier-like fashion: ‘willing’, dutifully pursuing stories for the Herald Sun, even going to ‘any death knock assigned’. Before writing All That’s Left Unsaid, Lien worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. As it happens, the main character of her debut work of fiction is engaged in an investigative act similar to the investigation Lien herself undertakes as an author. In this sense, the testimonial technique is baked into the novel. 

It’s not just the correspondences between Ky and Lien that hint at testimonial technique in All That’s Left Unsaid. The insights Lien gained from her research come to the fore in different ways. Of course, some parts of the novel have their root in family anecdotes. (A description of the early removal of teenager Eddie Ho’s wisdom teeth is based, Lien says, on a real-life story from her uncle.) But the novel’s key plot point comes from a real crime Lien read about in a newspaper clipping – which occurred at a fashion show involving two rival gangs in Cabramatta, and where none of the two hundred people present came forward to testify. All two hundred people claimed to be in the bathroom.  

In a Sydney Morning Herald interview, Lien says of the ethnographic work she consulted: 

This ‘slippery slope’ is perhaps best exemplified by the path taken by Minnie, Ky’s childhood best friend. Her inclusion is another example of the novel’s polyphonic quality, which I’d argue is part of Lien’s testimonial technique. She offers a consistent counter voice to Ky’s narrativising, repeatedly interjecting in chapters otherwise written from Ky’s perspective. She says things Ky does not allow herself to say (‘Feels good to be bad, eh’); eggs Ky on to investigate Denny’s death (‘Because they’ll just write us off as troubled FOBs with FOB troubles! Because if we can’t speak up when one of our own is beaten to death, then what the fuck is wrong with us?’); articulates things Ky doesn’t allow herself to feel (‘Like what if your silly, narrow, keep-quiet-and-be-polite path […] leads nowhere?’). Minnie comes through during difficult interactions for Ky, just as she protected Ky in childhood. The voice is persistent: 

Only as Minnie’s connections to Thien become more apparent, more than halfway through the novel, do we learn why the two friends had a falling out. Minnie was beguiled by a group of ‘naughty’ older high school drop-outs (with Thien as gang leader) in Ky’s absence during the holidays. Lien paints Minnie as a strong, fiercely intelligent girl with a violent father who fell in with the wrong crowd because she was seeking connection – a move that had devastating consequences not just for Minnie, but for Ky. When Ky finally confronts Minnie, they exchange barbs, with sharp back-and-forth dialogue, similar to the way Minnie’s ‘voice’ interjects in Ky’s point of view throughout. Minnie reminds Ky of Thien’s past, articulating the difference between direct experience of trauma and inherited legacy of familial trauma: 

Highlighting Ky’s distance from the trauma of migration functions as a way for Lien to talk about the discomfort felt by writers in similar positions when writing about such experiences. It’s a self-directed calling-out of difference. Lien, remember, is the daughter of refugees too. In the same scene, Ky and Minnie finally discuss what was left unsaid in their childhood: Minnie’s abuse at the hands of her dad, and how Ky never asked her about it. This again underscores Ky’s difference from Minnie. One wonders whether Minnie is meant to function as a sort-of ‘second guessing’ of Lien’s authorial process; ultimately, she appears to be a voice of reason, articulating what remains unsaid to Ky. ‘You wanted to pretend like we had the exact same problems and the exact same parents and the exact same options,’ Minnie tells her. ‘You never wanted to be uncomfortable. You never even tried to understand what was going on.’ In a sense, all these years later, Ky finally is trying to understand her community – and Lien is, too. 

Family is also part of that community. What happens when writers, drawing on testimonial technique, try to inhabit the perspective of their immigrant parents? Lien is wary of caricaturing immigrant parents, evident in Ky’s own admission that she finds it easier to ‘imagine her [mother] as a caricature, as an immigrant Cabramatta parent whose only desire was for her children to become doctors and lawyers (or ideally both), whose only means of expressing love to them was through cooking their meals, washing their clothes, and criticising them into being better people’. Early in the novel, Lien appears to be setting Ky up as an insider with authority to comment on her family: 

And yet, the image we develop of Ky’s parents is filtered through her perspective and complex relationship with them. Throughout the novel, Ky’s father Hanh Tran is described as overly sentimental, watching Paris By Night repeatedly, despite his wife’s protests, searching for the taste of his childhood pho and drinking excessively; details true and yet opaque, missing some inner reality that is inaccessible to his children. In the ninth chapter, written from Hanh’s perspective, several passages feel like projections of what an immigrant daughter imagines a father might feel: 

Through the complexity of trying to render the emotional truth of one’s parents, Lien asks whether there are core differences between giving voice to family testimony and non-family testimony. When witnessing family testimony, are there too many unspoken wishes, projections and hopes belonging to oneself that muddy the waters? The final chapter is from Denny’s perspective after he has died; again, there are echoes of absence. Denny’s ghost sits with Ky and their mother, many years later, as they visit Denny at the temple. In one passage, Denny wants to tell his sister that ‘sometimes you can’t just be good. Sometimes you have to fight – and it’s not fair, and it’s not right, but what other choice do we have?’  

Is this what a dead Denny would think – or is this wishful thinking from Ky (Lien)? But perhaps it doesn’t matter if it’s wishful. It’s a missive, a directive from the dead, unheard by the protagonist of the story but vocalised to the reader. It’s the kind of ending that neatly wraps up a story. An ending that perhaps hints at Lien’s emotional truth through her process of witnessing; a desire for agency, moral action and hope.  

It’s impossible for one novel to accurately capture a community. Lien herself admits this: ‘inevitably there will be readers who don’t see their Cabramatta reflected in the novel.’ But Lien has told one version that gets at the heart of some of these stories in a deeply empathetic way, drawing on first-person accounts to influence character and form. Of course, testimonial technique is just one prism through which to view Lien’s process. But what readers are left with is not what’s said – she doesn’t need to give voice to the teenagers of 1990s Cabramatta. She says enough between the lines of her narrative to give space to what some of their experiences might have felt like. And miraculously, she does this in the format of a literary mystery that mirrors the author’s process – one that leaves us with more questions than answers.