Review of: The English Class by Ouyang Yu

Several years ago, I was fortunate to see prolific Chinese/Australian poet Ouyang Yu reading and discussing some of his poems at Flinders University. Although at the time, I was far from being a snickering teenager, one poem in particular struck me: ‘Looking for cunt’. The poem, unlike what the powerfully blunt title suggested, was about Yu’s earnest quest to find through an electronic dictionary what the word ‘cunt’ means. The startling honesty and inherently comic premise made this poem vividly memorable. I was hoping that Yu’s novel The English Class would contain the same elements that made the poem in question unforgettable, but it was not to be.