Peripathetic. Would you like to change that to peripatetic? My laptop wants to know. It’s highlighting the title in a squiggle of blue, indicating its incorrect spelling. But no, Cher Tan meant for it to be so. From the start, Peripathetic is a play on words. Peripatetic: travelling from place to place, in particular working or based in various places for relatively short periods. Peripathetic: Tan’s own odyssey through those very times of displacement, journeying through the crust of her 20s with haphazard abandon, in the digitised boon of the early 2000s, moving through Singapore, Adelaide and Melbourne at a syrupy pace.
Peripathetic is a modern day tome for Asian-Australians; just like the book, I bemoan the fact that there’s cumulatively very little holding me to this nation. Factored into checkboxes and scrolls of paper to take on a flight home, this muck of representation is one that neither Tan or I signed up for. Like her, I am a counterfeit Australian with a little blue book. She too is from a mega-city but runs bare through the spectrum of options that will allow her to stay here, in the opportune land where those with notched up ideas of academia and work are swiftly brought down several pegs, because such progressions will always be nonlinear for us.Â
In Peripathetic, Tan isn’t growing up, as much as she is exhibiting growing pains to an audience all too familiar with the emotional convoys of which she speaks. Over nine essays, she’s talking to us, but also to the void. She documents the migration to MySpace as a consciously phony metalhead. She’s making fusion brunch in Melbourne before the café shutters, like so many others, in its 19th lockdown.
Our self-surveillance has bubbled to a boiling point and Tan exhibits an appropriate amount of confoundment in our participation of that farce. It’s less situated in conformity than it is in projection, turning over ideas of self-made hustling and intellectual property with the despondency that is refracted in so many of us.
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In Peripathetic, Tan is a sharpshooter, putting into words thoughts that had previously only rattled in my head. She is a stylist and the effect of her experimentation on text is a mishmash of HTML coding, bracketed run-ons and hyperlinks that lead to nowhere. You may have to strain a little to read it, but you may already have the answer: this page doesn’t exist. Except maybe in Tan’s mind, it does, by the virtue of being alive at the same time of and in revolt of our screen culture.
Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging, Cher Tan
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
ISBN: 9781742237992
Format: paperback
Pages: 240pp
Price: $34.99
Publication Date: May 2024
