~ We, the Survivors. By Tash Aw ~
We, The Survivors, is Tash Aw’s fourth novel, and his most accomplished by far. This work of fiction comes very close to being a little masterpiece. Its writing voice is assured, fluent, extremely convincing in its authenticity, and deceptively simple. A marvellously wrought piece of storytelling which although is set in Malaysia, depicts the story of uneven globalisation far more universally.
Ah Hock is our protagonist, a Hokkien man, third-generation Malaysian. The book is framed by Ah Hock being interviewed in the present by sociology doctorate student, Su-Min, whose life (upper middle class, student in the US, a lesbian) – although she a fellow Malaysian – is so far removed from Ah Hock’s reality that she is nearly an alien to him. The bulk of the book is formed by Ah Hock’s narration in interview to Su-Min about his past, reminiscing about and reliving his childhood, working life, and relationships, leading up to his murder of a migrant worker. These narrations are interspersed with short passages set in the present day, exchanges with Su-Min.
The contextual details are incredibly convincing, rooted in the Malaysian landscape, Malaysian consciousness, Malaysian slang and syntax. It is a particularly Chinese Malaysianness, and at that, a Hokkien-Chinese Malaysianness, of the working class variety. It is extremely true to type, and beautifully translated or transliterated into English text. This novel incorporates in the most natural way – as normal Malaysian speech does – Malay, Cantonese, Hokkien words, sprinkled in liberally along with the Malaysianised English and its distinctive speech rhythms and cadences. Tash Aw has fine honed his narrative skills in this novel impressively. He manages his material with a light but deft, sure touch, sketching thumbnail outlines which nevertheless convey a wealth of form and detail.
In Ah Hock’s voice:
I was born in Bagan Sungai Yu, not in Kuala Selangor town as all the court documents said. The two places are separated by a sharp curve in the Selangor river, and that small distance – forty, fifty feet in places, sometimes felt like an ocean between two continents. These days, with the bridges and good tarmac roads, people think of them as just one place: Kuala Selangor. I get the papers and read articles about new seafood restaurants built on jetties over the water, I see pictures of day-trippers from KL enjoying Sunday lunch, and I think: That’s not Kuala Selangor, that’s my village. But that’s the way things go: the big swallow up the small, everything becomes part of something else. It’s just funny to think that when I was a child, even at primary school, we had to take the ferry over to town, or cycle miles to get around the bend in the river, ad when we got to the other side, it felt so busy and important that I thought I was in Tokyo or New York. That map that you’re looking at on your phone, it can’t show you the real distance between our side of the river and town on the other.
p22
This passage exemplifies some of the key themes of the novel – the drastic changes for Malaysia and places like Malaysia over a single generation, or at most two, and the impacts on its communities and individuals, the distance between the have and have-nots, which in physical terms is cheek by jowl, and in actual terms, light years apart. The poignancy of the last line brings home how modern technology and facts and stats often cannot perceive the reality and complexity spaces, lives, conditions, realities; particularly those of the most dispossessed. Distance – and access – indeed cannot be merely measured in numbers.
Ah Hock takes on many jobs, doing coolie work of carrying sacks, being a waiter, a farm hand, a builder, a foreman, farmer on his own lands long ago before his lands were destroyed in floods, amongst other forms of employment. As a largely uneducated man, he takes what he can get. He writes of his short stumpy legs and his physical predilection for physical hard labour, but along with this ability to endure, he also discusses with candour and understanding why so many cannot endure these conditions, and endlessly:
…all the nonsense they said about money. Migrant wages are degrading, they humiliate the soul. They didn’t understand that it wasn’t the pay that destroyed the spirits of these men and women, it was the work – the way it broke their bodies before they could even contemplate the question of salaries. The way it turned them from children to withered old creatures in the space of a few years. Anyone can work with their body like that for a year, two years, maybe even more. But when those years stretch out before you like the sea on a calm hot day, waveless, with no change or variety – when that kind of life becomes your only future, that’s when you flee. Even if someone pays you ten thousand a month, your body won’t accept it. Your mind tells you to say, to earn money for your kids back home, your old parents who need help. But your body says: Run.
p44=45
Aw’s depiction of the migrant condition is damning, indicting no single agent, but a globalised system, a colonial legacy, and a set of power imbalances, that have enabled man to do this to man. His protagonist, Ah Hock is juxtaposed to his ‘friend’, Keong, who rebels against the system, tries to play the system, turns to the underworld and to the illegal. The two boys – and then men – have a uneasy but close relationship, beautifully depicted by Aw. This novel avoids clichés and telling – it shows, it shows some more, and then it shows even more, gently conveying the most unpalatable in a masterfully constructed reading experience.
This novel is being celebrated globally, as well it should. It is a triumph, a hugely understated but all the more powerfully compelling tale of quiet desperation, of dispossession, of dire exploitation from multiple sources with apparent impunity, of systemic injustice and imposition, of the struggle for a better life. And for all its universality, it is thrillingly, immediately, resonantly Malaysian.
It is an utter joy to know there are two Malaysian authors today, delivering at the highest level of international literary fiction – Tan Twan Eng, and now Tash Aw.
With all honesty that gave me goosebumps. How everything might seem a bit slow and still on the outside but how much it ruined people and families in reality. But more importantly, depicts the unreliable nature of depending on western economies. How developing countries/economies take a gamble when setting up their businesses. How the fruit of their labour might thrive or come to a complete halt depending on the mood of western markets. Deeply reminiscent of old colonial structures of power.
“I felt a twinge in my knee joints, and then in my shoulders. The memory of work. My body recalling its years of hard physical labour, as it did from from time to time when I watched workers toiling over a job. Even now, I can be having noodles at a street stall, and if I see someone lifting sacks of concrete, or taking a pickaxe to some cement, my arms and legs want to perform the same actions, even though I know would be incapable of carrying them out…Our bodies- every fibre of every muscle, every tiny nerve- they remember what our minds forget” (p.260)
The way Hock would speak to the reader, it made me feel very sad. That his conditions are real. That his actions or the murder, could be seen as a result of his conditions. The way he murdered Muhammad Ashadul..almost as if he was working on the land that he shared with his mother.. or linked to his body’s relationship with harsh physical labour…because it was all he ever knew..and the pressure he was under. “A battle to finish a job before it finishes you..A battle for shade and time” (p260). That those conditions were all linked to a larger global picture that keeps these horrible structures in place..heartbreaking really.