Over the years, I have followed the development of Tash Aw’s oeuvre, enjoying a lot of his writing but also sometimes persevering with others which I was only lukewarm towards, perhaps because he is a Malaysian writer (living in London) and one of the few working in English of an international literary standard. I did love one of his novels which I found exceptional – We, The Survivors, and have been hoping for another like it ever since. The South is not quite like We, The Survivors, but it is riveting in its way, capturing those textures of Malaysian life and surroundings in a nebulous but resonantly authentic way.
Very simple in plot, it is about the dysfunctional Lim family who take an end of year break from Kuala Lumpur to go south to a farm land they have inherited. The family consists of Jack Lim, his wife Sui who is much younger than he is, and the three children, our protagonist Jay, 16, the youngest, and his two elder sisters; Lina who is in university, and Yin the middle child, already 20. Jack Lim is supposedly a very bright man, or so he and Sui think. Sui was Jack’s student once, and although she seems to have fallen out of love with him now, she still has some loyalty towards him. Jack has just been ‘voluntarily retired’ from his job teaching in a college, though he has not told his children this yet. He is reputedly a strict and good teacher, but a deeply unpopular one too. He seems to be a rather unpopular man everywhere, in his own family too.
They come supposedly for a holiday to the family farm, run by Fong, Jack’s half brother. It is a failing farm, where the fruit trees no longer bear fruit and need to be dug up and thrown away. Fong seems to have been running the farm unsuccessfully for 40 years. Fong’s mother was a mistress, not a wife, he fully understands.
“No one had to explain these terms to him, the difference in status. He knew which position his mother occupied simply by observing the negatives – what she omitted from the story, instead of what she told him. […] Fong was always struck by the silence surrounding the rest of his father’s life, when he was not with them – which was most of the time. His mother made no attempt to fill in the gaps or conure a fantastic story of his absence…” (p138)
Fong and Jack have an uneasy relationship, but Sui and Fong have a much stronger and easier bond of friendship.
Fong has a son, Chuan, a little older than Jay, and whom Jay immediately takes to. Chuan has a motorbike, works in a 7 Eleven, stays out overnight when he wishes, is independent and mobile, and seems quite remarkable to Jay. Chuan at first treats Jay as a kid, but soon treats him as the lover they become. The relationship is quite a tender one, for all its surface brusqueness. The 3 siblings and their cousin begin to explore the country life, each in their own ways, finding some space for autonomy, drifting away from their parents – or ‘The Parents’, as Lina calls them, with studied detachment – and the dysfunctional family becomes even more dysfunctional in this unfamiliar but familiar place of the farm. At first they fragment and are solitary, but gradually, the cousins begin to bond, spend time together, enjoy each other’s company.
Chuan dreams of getting away from country life, small town life, getting away to Singapore where he can earn much more money, maybe even educate himself properly. But Chuan is not as free as Lina, who is looking forward to graduating, starting her done graphic design business, moving to live in other countries. Chaun knows he cannot leave his father on his own, and therefore, in a way, is also bound to the farm and that land,
“His life was circumscribed by his father’s, he knew that” (p231)
Yin, seemingly the sweetest, most docile, most domesticated one, has a secret boyfriend, secret because he is Malay. She dreams of further defying her parents, also again in secret, by studying pharmacy as they wish, but training in yoga without them knowing.
The story is a simple one, hardly a plot even, just describing the long hot days and how the Lim family fill in their time. There are flashbacks of course, filling in the past, providing context, letting the reader appreciate each character more fully. For all its meandering pace and seeming to go nowhere and get nowhere, the novel is crafted well, and holds the reader’s attention without needing to unfold in a linear manner. The descriptions of place and environment, the sensations and exchanges, the people and landscapes, are recognisably Malaysian, though rendered in a language which makes the descriptions come across almost as translations, as exotic.
Noticing land bulldozed for construction and then left half finished, Lina protests that Malaysia has the most ancient jungles in the world, older than Amazon, but Chuan does not share her outrage,
“What’s the point of fighting if the fight is already over? No one cares about us. We’re a small country, we’re not Brazil. The world wants brand-name causes. The Amazon is a brand. We’re not sexy. We’re invisible” (p178)
Such passages capture very articulately the sense many Malaysians – or at least Malaysians of a certain era – would have felt, of being at the margins, of being peripheral to the world’s concerns, of never seeing ourselves reflected in central issues. The story was always about someone else, some place else. Perhaps that is the charm of a novel like The South, which privileges the middle-class Malaysian experience in this century, makes the ordinary the heroes, even if they may find themselves blinking in the unfamiliar limelight.
Beneath the seemingly unsentimental and prosaic surface exchanges, Aw hints at much which remains unsaid but not unfelt. His insinuations and silences reverberate in the novel, part of his craft, and quite effective at rendering a particular set of experiences in a language which was never designed to show case them. A very understated novel, with surprising power despite its quiet, contained storyline, a novel that does not require sensationalism or explosive content to disquiet. Quite a masterful piece of work, in fact, that has learnt to tell much less plot, in order that much more gets communicated in the process. It may yet be the best Tash Aw has ever written to date.
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