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izarre world is the White Rabbit, manifested as ‘a Vietnamese girl got up as an American
Playboy bunny. She wore the required tights and rabbit’s ears and tail, but her face seemed
full of woe: an ambiguous lure for the American troops. Woeful parodies of American
pleasures’ (HW, 195-96).
5.9. Conclusion
The most striking thing about the looking-glass images in these novels may very well be
not that they are so exotic and ‘Other’, but that they are somehow, deep-down familiar.
Almost every major centre of human activity in the world has its To Du Street, its confusing
and enticing passages to otherworlds, its mix of beauty, ugliness, and the macabre. This
strange and unpredictable familiarity of that which at first glance seems purely exotic is the
foundation for the looking-glass metaphor. Though she is discussing Asian writing in
Australia, and thereby looking at this question from the other side, Elizabeth Kingsmill sums
up succinctly the paradoxical nature of the boundary between interacting cultures in terms of
the looking-glass. ‘Like a reflective surface, it may seem at once both alluring and impassable;
may seem to reveal unfamiliar worlds, that, in a sudden shift of light, are shown to be
reflections of our own’ (Kingsmill, 220). It is truly an inward search for self when Australians
look outwards for the ‘Other’ in Asia. Opening the doors and passing into the ‘Otherworld’—
partly a realm of enlightenment, partly a nonsensically backwards Wonderland, partly a sinister
and totalitarian technocracy—in order to know the self, however, is, as will be discussed in the
following chapters, a strange and dangerous act.
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