That is the fourth in a sequence of brief critiques on up to date Southeast Asian fiction. There might be spoilers. As at all times, I’m glad to have had the possibility to develop these ideas as a part of a course, so my scholar can be given credit score.
Earlier evaluation:
- Temporary Critiques of Fashionable SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The nice restoration
- Brief critiques of Fashionable SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, rebellion
- Temporary Critiques of Fashionable SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, collectively
Tash Oh, We, the survivors
The issue with writing a evaluation of Tash Aw’s newest novel We, the survivors is that I’m biased, as a result of plain incontrovertible fact that I discover the topic itself fascinating. It covers a lot in such a tightly written e book: Kuala Lumpur, inequality within the midst of modernisation, ethnicity and language, the mechanics of unlawful economies, migration and citizenship. It’s the truest e book I’ve learn to this point this semester. Each character, each scenario, each place, I can image it in my thoughts. The truth that the novel describes a very life like tragedy and the arduous lives surrounding it makes its realism notably vital for individuals who know Malaysia. I believe that if you do not know Malaysia in any respect, you’ll nonetheless discover one thing to like about this e book.
SPOILERS FROM THE JUMP: It is a story a couple of man named Ah Hock, who grew up tough within the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, who murders a Bangladeshi man who trades within the unlawful migrant staff who’re so essential to the functioning of contemporary Malaysia’s financial system. This introduction to the e book is sharp and sudden, however it’s on the coronary heart of the plot, and Aw fantastically captures the stark fashionable lifetime of poor Malaysians dwelling in and round KL. As a reader, you be taught early on that Ah Hock is a convicted assassin, however you be taught the story of the crime—and of Ah Hock—over the course of the novel.
The themes that Aw covers are central to up to date Malaysian society and politics. A central theme is poverty: Ah Hock grows up in a damaged dwelling with a hardworking mom struggling to place meals on the desk. She and Ah Hock work on a small piece of land of their village within the Klang Valley to make it productive sufficient to feed them and convey some farmed fish to market. Ah Hock additionally spends a while in KL, promoting capsules and a few meth with Ah Keong, who he is aware of from the village. The place Ah Hock is modest, Ah Keong is boastful: Ah Hock doesn’t take nicely to metropolis life, however Ah Keong kinds himself as a gangster businessman, and he’s fast to anger and makes use of bodily violence to get his manner.* Ah Hock works different, extra respectable jobs—at an outside fish restaurant, on a fish farm—and he even marries a striving younger girl named Jenny along with her personal goals of wealth and prosperity.
However Ah Hock by no means will get forward. His mom dies younger of a preventable most cancers. His marriage to Jenny is sad (she will get drawn into an Amway-like rip-off) and so they drift aside. Ah Hock works tirelessly, to little avail. Ah Keong is in the end a harmful power in his life, bringing him alternative but in addition hazard. Finally, it’s Ah Keong’s plan to seek out Ah Hock some unlawful immigrants to help Ah Hock’s work crew that results in the homicide that drives the plot.
And but, what jumped out at me all through the novel was Ah Hock’s insistence that he had a selection. This creates an fascinating pressure. On the one hand, the e book describes social programs which are hard-bound. Poverty is poverty. The highly effective will take what they’ll and the weak will endure. The jungle and the ocean will take again the land. And but, at key moments – within the first particular person, because the e book is written – Ah Hock wonders about his decisions. What he may have finished, the setbacks he may have taken. Close to the novel’s dramatic climax, it’s due to this fact very poignant to learn this passage:
One other central theme within the e book is the advanced interaction between race, ethnicity, citizenship and sophistication. In the usual Peninsular Malay ethnicity scheme, there are Malays, Chinese language, Indians and others. Malays had been traditionally marginalized in the course of the interval of early capitalist improvement underneath colonialism, resulting in a hierarchical ethnic system at independence, with the common materials prosperity of Malay society lagging behind that of the Indians and particularly the Chinese language. That is the story.**
IN We, the survivors, the primary characters are Chinese language and they’re poor. They flip to petty crime to get forward. They promote and take medicine, they work soiled and harmful jobs exterior, and they’re exploited by a enterprise class that’s each Malay and Chinese language. Their workforce makes KL work. It thus inverts the usual narrative.
However there may be one other layer to this story, which is post-independence immigration. From the very first time I set foot in Malaysia, I keep in mind the open secret behind unlawful labor immigration. I noticed it at midnight corners of Bukit Bintang, within the vans on the federal freeway, i mom stalls in Shah Alam, within the palm oil plantations of Sabah. These staff come to Malaysia to seek out work and to flee oppression: they’re Bangladeshi, Nepali, Rohingya, Indonesian.*** The e book describes so clearly how this unlawful financial system works. Every thing is totally life like and plausible.
There are additionally at varied factors descriptions of black Africans dwelling in Malaysia. This one caught with me:
Once more, this sounds completely proper to me. I can think about it with no downside in any respect.
As a lot as it is a story of poverty and inequality, it is usually a narrative of migration and citizenship. Ah Hock’s father migrates to Singapore and disappears. Unlawful migrant labor fuels the financial system. A lot is determined by the power to get papers, which establishes a authorized proper to work, however which additionally establishes an individual as a authorized and legible right-holder. They will command greater wages and might name the police (though, because the Nigerians show, there isn’t any assure {that a} racialized Different might be protected). These with out papers are weak, which is why they’re low cost.
The generality with which characters deal with the determined lives of unlawful staff is putting. They’re merely to be consumed, and this comes throughout explicitly. A Malaysian viewers would possibly observe the extra incontrovertible fact that most of the migrants are Muslim and the absence of pan-religious solidarity within the face of the bounds of citizenship and the calls for of capitalist improvement. Finally, Ah Hock’s homicide of the Bangladeshi fixer brings this dwelling to us.
There may be way more to take pleasure in on this e book. With out spoiling all of it, I’ll point out that an essential minor character is a younger Malaysian PhD candidate writing a thesis overseas who has returned dwelling to do his area analysis – which incorporates interviewing Ah Hock . She embodies the whole lot cosmopolitan and fashionable: she would not eat carbs (so no rice or crackers, LOL), she finds the grocery retailer impossibly soiled, she’s paralyzed by the injustice she sees, she’s embarrassed for Ah Hock when he would not know she’s in a same-sex relationship, and so forth. She is a superb foil for Ah Hock and for any Western reader.
However in the long run, We, the survivors is only a nicely written novel. This is a e book by a author who is aware of what he is doing, and it is clear from the primary web page that you just’re in for a tough however rewarding account of contemporary Malaysia.
NOTES
* I could not assist however keep in mind Jason (Ah Loong). Basketthe poor however earnest Chinese language boy from Ipoh, caught in an online of petty crime to make ends meet.
** The fact is extra difficult than that. Someday I’ll end a e book describing that actuality…
*** I am unable to rely the variety of occasions a Malaysian acquaintance again within the 2000s advised me about city crime in KL, solely to make clear that the issue wasn’t Malaysians, it was Indonesians. Decolonize to.