For some time now, Tash Aw has wanted to write a long, epic novel about a Chinese immigrant family that spans 80 to 100 years. When he thinks of such Asian stories, great authors known for huge tomes about a particular period and place spring to mind, among them Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry.
Aw used to really admire those kinds of books and aspired to be like their writers. At this point of time, he finds that scale does not suit him. “That’s not the writer I am. Even as a reader, I don’t have the stamina or taste for a 900-page book anymore.” Besides, there is something “quite hypermasculine” about such works, he thinks.
“It’s quite macho to say, ‘I’ve understood history over the last 100 years’. It’s a very top-down understanding because you’re looking at a group of people, a whole country, the way history functioned and its effect on them over a long period of time. You really need to have a certain degree of arrogance to think you understand how history works over that amount of time. I don’t think I have that.”
At Nanyang Technological University, where he taught for several years, a student said she was writing a historical novel set in 1989, the year he took his SPM exam! “If we see just 20 years ago as history, this changes what we consider a historical epic. So, in some ways, history is the present. I was always struck by William Faulkner’s words in Requiem for a Nun: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”
Aw’s ruminations on the threads that join then and now lead up to how he got the idea for The South, his sixth and just-released book, and the first of a quartet.
The South follows Jay, his parents and two older sisters south to the farm left to them by grandpa, who has died. The property is rundown as drought and disease have wreaked havoc on fields and trees. What manager Fong gathers is barely enough to keep the farm afloat, let alone pay for repairs. Yet, his father Jack sends him out to work the land daily.
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Under the scorching sun, 16-year-old Jay is drawn to Fong’s son Chuan, who cannot wait to leave and find work in town. As the boys discover each other — they are different in every way but one — old regrets overcome the adults, who drift apart. Meanwhile, the carefree girls look to the future, excited by its promise of freedom. As each person struggles with his/her own issues, a global financial crisis closes in around them.
Eschewing the linear approach, the book trudges back and forth across different time frames and space as the story unfolds.
“I think in the modern day, we appreciate time and history in a much more fragmented, fractured, episodic way,” Aw says. “I wanted to write an epic that reflected this, which means breaking it down into four different novels, written at intervals, that allow the characters to be radically different with each book. I think that is the way we are.
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“The difference between being age 17 and 25, or 25 and 40, is huge. At 55, you may be contemplating life in a very different way. I feel somehow it’s more truthful to write something that reflects how people and countries change radically.”
The South also homes in on reinventing the self, motivated by aspirations of a new identity and a brighter tomorrow, especially for migrants in a strange country. Recurring themes crop up, among them land ownership and exhausting agrarian routines.
Do these mirror Aw’s immigrant family’s beginnings in the country in the 1920s? “I think it particularly reflects people who live in a country like Malaysia, where there are rights attached to the land. And the idea, of which we might not be aware, of ownership and belonging.”
Similarly, previous works — including the novels We, the Survivors; Five Star Billionaire; The Harmony Silk Factory; and Map of the Invisible World; as well as Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family — explore themes of identity, belonging, personal struggles and societal shifts.
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In We, the Survivors (2019), a murderer recounts to a journalist the chain of events that led him to kill a foreign worker. It focuses on class, education and how those born poor are usually trapped, with no way of escaping the fate destiny has in store for them. Strangers on a Pier, a memoir, tells how the author’s grandfathers set sail for Malaya in the 1920s to escape poverty in mainland China, and how they adapted, put down roots and made new lives for themselves here.
Written in the form of a long letter to his late grandmother, Aw, who alternates between living in Paris and Kuala Lumpur, includes his experience of studying in Britain in the 1990s — he read law at Cambridge and the University of Warwick — as well as encounters that prompt him to think about his origins, roots and identity. The book won the Los Angeles Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose in 2016.
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Five Star Billionaire centres on five characters out to seek their fortune in bustling Shanghai, bringing with them hopes and dreams that gleam as brightly as the “showpiece” of the New China. It was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
The Harmony Silk Factory, which marked Aw’s authorial debut two decades ago, won the Whitbread Award for First Novel and also made the Man Booker 2005 long list. Set in 1930-40s Malaya, it centres on textile merchant Johnny Lim, who is a hero to many in his town, but not his son Jasper, who sees him as a fraudster whose factory is a front for illegal businesses.
Map of the Invisible World, released in 2010, is about two boys abandoned by their mother as children. When soldiers arrest Karl, who had raised Adam, the 16-year-old sets out to find him. Place, symbolic of identity and belonging, plays an important role in this book set in 1960s Indonesia, when Sukarno was bent on purging his country of its colonial past.
Aw, born in Taipei because his parents worked there for a few years, admits to being a slow writer. With The South in stores, he wants to complete the second book, still untitled, as fast as possible. He is halfway through it and has not set any deadlines for himself but thinks writers have to challenge themselves to keep going. The plan is to have the same characters reappear in the subsequent works, with the focus shifting to different family members over time.
“I have to think of them as completely fictitious characters and allow them to be who they want to be. This is the excitement of writing a novel in four instalments: Time gaps between the books will allow me to think about how they have grown as people. A lot of it is about what we have taken on from our parents and how we deal with it ourselves.”
Jay is trying hard to deal with the expectations placed upon him, primarily by Jack, who views him as bad in sports and at school. He is considered weak, slightly effeminate and directionless. “Notions of masculinity are problematic at this stage in Jay’s life and he’s trying to work it out. We don’t know if he’s going to succeed fully, or what he’s going to be like at 40.”
For now, the youngster is the driving force behind The South and the books that will follow. “It is really also about how the individual survives out there, how we anticipate time and evolve within the society we live in,” Aw says.
“Jay and Chuan are only 17 and 19. What I wanted to do was situate their love affair within the family. Their relationship is everything to them; the same with their quest for identity. In that context, the characters are trying to escape what they have been. They want to be someone different and are already projecting themselves into the future. But some of them are incapable of doing so.”
The book is not just about love, the author adds. “It’s a question of what the love represents to their identity, which at their age is all-encompassing. They don’t realise that within their family, no one actually cares. The mother is having a breakdown and existential regrets about her marriage. The father is losing his job and Jay’s sisters are trying to form their own lives.”
Over the course of the quartet, readers will also see how the symbolic value of land changes for different people and, hopefully, begin to reflect on what they have inherited, which is not always attached to property. “Inheritance is also what you pick up from your parents in terms of sadness, joy, anger, resilience, the way you deal with bitterness, adversity and resentment.”
So, what have Aw’s parents passed down to him?
“Not any financial stuff as I don’t come from that kind of family. My book is maybe a way of helping myself figure out what I have inherited. It’s taken me a long time to realise it is resilience in the face of adversity.
“In many ways, I was Jay, I was all those things. Also, you don’t think about it. In Malaysia, basically, we don’t have a political system that is kind to everyone in the same way. So, you need to know how to negotiate this. And it might not be as simple as surviving straightforward discrimination.
“It might be as simple, or complicated and complex as [noticing] how poor people survive around you. I come from a rural family and every time I go back to such areas in the country, I see how people of whatever race are still hugely discriminated against. They don’t have the same opportunities. If you come from a poor Chinese family in Kuala Terengganu, you don’t really have a chance. You know you have to be exceptional, meaning you have to be some genius. Someone like [Kelantan-born, New York-based designer] Zang Toi. There’s only one of him.”
Resilience has helped Aw claim his space as a writer and defend it. “Publishing is very different now from what it was 20 years ago. It’s still not easy for an Asian to [do so] the way I do in the West. You’re always having to negotiate all kinds of things, to resist all kinds of pressures to conform to what other people think Asian writers should be. You’re having to resist the subject matters they want you to write or speak about them in a certain way.
“All this I learned to navigate from an early age, without thinking about it. If you come from a small town in Malaysia and move to Kuala Lumpur, you have to, without even knowing it, adapt and be resourceful.”
Aw thinks he might be happiest when writing. But he has to reckon with publishing. “You’re made to believe they’re part of the same machinery but they’re not.”
Writing offers the private space for reflection, self-revelation and artistic creation. “When you’re done with your job, you hand over the ‘fruit’ to the publisher and a new, separate process of capitalism takes over.”
He also finds speaking about writing kind of tautological because it is essentially a solitary, private pursuit. Book promotions are complicated, he adds, especially after spending months working in isolation or among writing friends. “Suddenly you’re talking to marketing managers, journalists and audiences of several hundred. These occupy two very different parts of the writer’s brain.”
If one is very lucky, he could be celebrated by newspapers, get positive reviews and win prizes. “But that doesn’t change who you are. You have to write about what you believe in to challenge yourself and your readers to think about the world they live in. This is the writer’s function.”
Focusing on the work and ignoring the noise of people saying one’s work is good or bad requires resilience, the ultimate skill which ensures longevity. “The success or failure long-term of a writer is down almost entirely to that and how much you can fight to create and maintain your artistic space. It’s difficult.”
That said, Aw is grateful he still has a career in this “very tough and ruthless business. I’m happy to be here, happy that all my books are still in print”. Looking back to when his first book rolled out, he reminisces, “It feels like no time ago and a long time ago. Which is why I think the self has this quality of a meditation on time.”
