Southeast Asia II

MALAYSIA

Malaysia is a multiethnic nation in which a quarter of the population is of Chinese descent and which also has a significant Indian (mainly Tamil) minority. While Malay is the official language, English is widely spoken, and there also are numerous outlets for authors writing in Chinese and Indian languages. As with the writing from other countries in the region, fiction by authors who write in English and have spent significant time abroad dominates what is available to English-speaking readers outside Malaysia. Very little has been translated from the other widely spoken languages.

English author Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) spent several years in the 1950s in Southeast Asia and wrote three books that form The Malayan Trilogy (1956–1959), now published together as The Long Day Wanes. The character of Victor Crabbe links the three novels. Like Burgess, Crabbe was a teacher in the Federation of Malaya (as it was then called) in the transitional years leading up to independence in 1957. In describing Crabbe’s confrontations with all the contesting ethnic, religious, and colonial groups, as well as the guerrilla movement, Burgess captures the messy jumble out of which the current Malaysian state arose, in a work that has still not been superseded as a fictional account of that time and those events. Burgess became a fluent Malay speaker, and his trilogy is particularly noteworthy for its familiarity with local conditions.

Recent English-language novels by authors with Malaysian backgrounds include Tash Aw’s (b. 1971) The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) and Tan Twan Eng’s (b. 1972) The Gift of Rain (2007) and The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). The Japanese occupation of Malaysia during World War II figures prominently in these novels, and the suspense revolves around the characters’ many betrayals. Both authors put the Malaysian countryside to good use, as the relatively isolated settings of the novels are both paradisiacal and treacherous.

Preeta Samarasan’s (b. 1976) Evening Is the Whole Day (2008) revolves around an Indian family in Malaysia, the Rajasekharans. Beginning with the ostracism of a maid, the novel is a compelling story of how much identity—and the possibility of self-fulfillment—is based on one’s place in a community, ranging from the family unit to an (adopted) nation. With its focus on the domestic and on the Indian community, Evening Is the Whole Day offers only a splintered view of Malaysia, but despite the stylistic excesses of Samarasan’s lush writing, the novel conveys the complexities arising from Malaysia’s ethnic and political mix.

K. S. Maniam’s (b. 1942) fiction also explores the Indian experience in Malaysia. The autobiographical coming-of-age novel about the Tamil boy Ravi, The Return (1981), is another story of displacement and takes place during the time of independence. Here it is English culture and the English language that the boy sees as an escape but that also reinforces his sense of alienation from his own culture. In the novel In a Far Country (1993), the narrator’s midlife crisis results from his feeling that he is not truly part of modern Malaysia. Though a successful businessman, Rajan is still trying to find his place in this Malay- and Islam-dominated environment. In one of the best novels of the nation’s multiethnic conditions, the narrator reflects on his past and the Indian experience in Malaysia in general.

SINGAPORE

The city-state of Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, declared its independence from British rule in 1963 and became a part of Malaysia. This short-lived union ended in 1965 when Singapore became an independent state. Although its main ethnic groups are the same as those in Malaysia, Singapore’s population is predominantly of Chinese origin, with Malays constituting less than 15 percent of the population and those of Indian origin less than 10 percent. Malay is recognized as the national language, but English, (Mandarin) Chinese, and Tamil also are official languages and widely used.

Rapid modernization and economic growth in this small, concentrated area have changed the country dramatically. American author Paul Theroux (b. 1941) taught in Singapore from 1968 to 1971, and the world he describes in Saint Jack (1973) already is ancient history. Taking place during the Vietnam War, with its American protagonist, Jack Flowers, working as a pimp, the novel presents an older image of the city that the government did not like, and the 1979 Peter Bogdanovich film version was long banned in Singapore.

Goh Poh Seng’s (1936–2010) If We Dream Too Long (1972) is considered the first truly Singaporean novel. Set in the late 1960s, its protagonist, Kwang Meng, has just graduated from school and works as a clerk. Like Singapore itself, he is uncertain of his future. Although he has some aspirations, his circumstances make it unlikely that he can escape his father’s fate of laboring at a tedious, unrewarding job for his entire life. The novel thus suggests both the limits and the possibilities facing the nation and this first generation of citizens.

Gopal Baratham’s (1935–2002) novels explicitly address Singapore’s authoritarian government. In A Candle or the Sun (1991), the protagonist, Hernie Perera, begins as a successful store manager and would-be writer whose world is thrown into increasing turmoil. His mistress is a member of a clandestine Christian group that questions the government’s absolute control and the limits placed on free speech. Perera agrees to pass on information about the group to the government but eventually also helps his mistress and the group’s leader escape and winds up being arrested. Very loosely based on the events that culminated in the 1987 arrests of more than a dozen people in a so-called Marxist plot, no Singaporean publisher was willing to publish the book, even though it was eventually made available there. The more sensational Moonrise, Sunset (1996) begins dramatically—How Kum Menon wakes up on a park bench to find his fiancée murdered in his arms—and uses the conventions of the mystery novel and a colorful cast of characters to present an engaging picture of Singapore’s dark sides.

Catherine Lim’s (b. 1942) larger body of work includes a variety of popular novels with a regional setting. The most notorious is The Bondmaid (1995), which she self-published because its sexual content scared off local publishers. Lim is more concerned with personal dynamics than social or political commentary in this story of a girl sold into what amounts to slavery in 1950s Singapore. Other works, like The Teardrop Story Woman (1997), set in 1950s Malaya, and a novel about contemporary Singapore, Following the Wrong God Home (2001), also focus on passion and romance but provide more of a local flavor. Lim uses differing cultural expectations, social conditions in the region, and even superstition in fashioning her novels, but much of her writing verges on the melodramatic.

Hwee Hwee Tan’s (b. 1974) Generation X novels, Foreign Bodies (1997) and Mammon Inc. (2001), feature young adults and the clash of cultures in an increasingly globalized world. Foreign Bodies is about Mei, a young Singaporean lawyer to whom Andy, an English expat friend of her childhood friend Eugene, turns when he is arrested for allegedly running an illegal betting operation. In the brief time they have to prove his innocence, these three characters must come to terms with the considerable baggage of their own pasts and beliefs. Each character narrates part of the story, creating three very different perspectives. Tan adopts a very hip tone throughout the pop reference–filled narrative but manages to weave in a number of weighty moral issues as well. The central character in Mammon Inc., Chiah Deng, is torn between academic pursuits—the study of Christian mysticism—and a remunerative job with a giant multinational, Mammon. The position she is offered at the corporate subsidiary, Mammon CorpS, is that of Adapter, helping clients adjust to and blend into foreign conditions. To get the job, she has to transform herself, her sister, and her flat mate. If the lessons are a bit obvious, Tan’s comic touch makes for an enjoyable but not entirely lightweight work.

KEEP IN MIND

•   Malaysian-born Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue (2004) is set around the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942. The novel features the family of the protagonist, Claude Lim, which is Chinese but has become completely Anglicized.

•   Philip Jeyaretnam’s (b. 1964) satire is called Raffles Place Ragtime (1988).

PHILIPPINES

Filipino (which is essentially Tagalog) and English are the official languages of the Philippines, but many others are widely spoken. Spain was the major colonial power in the region until the Spanish-American War, after which the Philippines were ceded to the United States. Even so, Spanish was widely spoken well into the twentieth century, and the first great Filipino author, José Rizal (1861–1896), wrote in Spanish his now classic novel Noli Me Tángere (1887, numerous English translations, most recently 2006; previously published in English as An Eagle Flight, 1900, The Social Cancer, 1912, and The Lost Eden, 1961). English-language fiction is currently thriving, albeit on a small scale, and few of these novels and story collections are distributed outside the Philippines.

F. Sionil José (b. 1924) is the leading modern Filipino author. His five-volume Rosales saga (1962–1984) covers almost a century of Philippine history, beginning before the Spanish-American War and leading to the early 1970s and the student uprisings against the Marcos regime. Somewhat confusingly, the American edition of the five books of the Rosales saga is published in three volumes, in which the books are arranged in the chronological order of the action, rather than in the original order in which they were written. The Samsons (2000), for example, consists of the first book, The Pretenders (1962) and the fourth, Mass (1979).

Much of this family saga examines the exploitation and oppression suffered by Filipinos during this period. The tensions between landowners and peasants are explored in the largely rural setting of the first volumes, but class differentiations become blurred in later generations. In The Pretenders, Tony Samson escapes his peasant roots and earns a doctorate from Harvard, but the compromises he has to make when he is seduced into becoming part of the nation’s elite are too great for him to bear. Throughout the five books, José reveals the cost, both in individual terms and for the country as a whole, of the corruption and greed of the ruling class. While offering some hope that this legacy can be surmounted, the Rosales saga is a strong indictment of the abuse of power by the wealthy in the Philippines during this time. José addresses questions of justice and how to affect change throughout the series, but violence is still the most frequent last resort in these novels filled with tragedy. The scope of the Rosales books make them a compelling national saga, and they serve as a good introduction to the Philippines.

Jose Dalisay’s (b. 1954) Killing Time in a Warm Place (1992) describes growing up in the Philippines under the Marcos regime and martial law in the 1970s. It is narrated by Noel Bulaong, and as his positions include both opposing and working within the system, the novel gives a good sense of that period of Philippine history. Soledad’s Sister (2008; published in the United States together with Killing Time in a Warm Place as In Flight: Two Novels of the Philippines, 2011) opens with the arrival of a casket from Saudi Arabia containing a dead woman, one of the many Filipinos who have gone to the Gulf to work as a domestic servant. Misidentifications of the corpse lead to a number of people getting involved in seeing to it that the body is returned to the rightful family, but the woman’s odyssey continues to be complicated. Dalisay mixes stories of the woman with those of her sister, and the policeman who helps transport the coffin to create an intriguing montage of contemporary Filipino fates, enlivened by the vivid urban backdrop.

A United States resident since the mid-1950s, Linda Ty-Casper (b. 1931) has written many works of historical fiction covering the major periods of Philippine history. Several of her novels take place during the time of the Marcos regime (1965–1986), but her trilogy of the Philippine struggle for independence against the Spanish and then the Americans at the end of the nineteenth century is noteworthy also. These three novels, The Three-Cornered Sun (1979), Ten Thousand Seeds (1987), and The Stranded Whale (2002), take place during the brief period when self-determination seemed possible in the Philippines. Ty-Casper describes the armed struggle in the Philippines itself and emphasizes foreign perceptions and reactions, using characters such as an American couple who come to the Philippines on their honeymoon in Ten Thousand Seeds. Her novel DreamEden (1996) covers the rough transition to democracy that began with the “People Power” revolution of 1986 and the removal of Ferdinand Marcos from power. Ty-Casper’s painstaking presentation of history in her novels is admirable, but it often overwhelms her fictional lining.

Miguel Syjuco’s (b. 1976) exuberant Ilustrado (2010) is a storybook first novel by an author with literary aspirations in regard to both its success—it won the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize—and the text itself. Featuring two writers—the fictional Crispin Salvador, presented as one of the grand old men of Filipino letters, and a young man writing his biography named Miguel Syjuco—Ilustrado is an ambitious work that relies greatly on pastiche. Both Salvador and the fictional Syjuco are scions of the politically engaged elite in the Philippines, and both disappoint their families by not going into politics (and by going abroad). Syjuco amusingly shows, and comments on, many aspects of Filipino society and politics through these characters. The novel begins with Crispin Salvador found dead in the Hudson River, and the mystery surrounding his death, including the question of whether it was suicide or murder and a missing manuscript that he had been working on for years, also add suspense to the story.

KEEP IN MIND

•   The novels and stories of Nick Joaquin (1917–2004) are noteworthy.

•   Alfred A. Yuson’s (b. 1945) The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café (1988) is a funny metafictional novel.

•   Much of the fiction of Filipino-American authors Paulino Lim Jr.(b. 1935), Jessica Hagedorn (b. 1949), and Han Ong (b. 1968) is informed by Filipino history and culture.

INDONESIA

While there are hundreds of regional languages spoken in the world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesian is the country’s official and most widely understood language. Despite a potentially large audience, the number of locally published novels was, until recently, very small, and very few have been translated into English.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925–2006) is the towering figure in modern Indonesian literature. His major work, the Buru Quartet, is named after the island on which Toer conceived these stories and where he was held as a political prisoner until 1979. Initially forbidden to write while incarcerated, he related the stories orally to other prisoners. Eventually he was allowed to write them down, and the first volume of the quartet was released in Indonesia in 1980. Shortly thereafter, however, the first and second volumes were banned by the Suharto regime, and little of Toer’s work has been officially available in Indonesia until recently.

The Buru Quartet begins with This Earth of Mankind (1980, English 1982), which introduces the central character, the Javanese youth Minke. It begins at the end of the nineteenth century, when Minke is the only native student at an elite Dutch colonialist school. Minke is from an aristocratic family and moves comfortably within different ethnic and social circles. He falls in love with Annelies, the daughter of a Dutchman and his Javanese concubine. Minke and Annelies marry, but it is not a legal union according to prevailing Dutch law, leading to a heartbreaking ending. Despite being well educated by the colonizers, Minke comes to see that his status remains that of a second-class citizen. With its appealing protagonist, strong female characters—the beautiful Annelies, her remarkable mother, and Minke’s own mother—and its dramatic story arc, This Earth of Mankind is a wonderful novel. In the later volumes, after his youthful idealism has been shattered, Minke learns more about his own culture and becomes more politically aware and active. While these are also very good novels, they are not as engaging as This Earth of Mankind.

Y. B. Mangunwijaya’s (1929–1999) Durga/Umayi (1991, English 2004) is a fascinating take on more recent Indonesian history. The novel’s female protagonist goes by a number of names, reflecting Indonesia’s rapid transformation after it became independent following World War II. The title of the novel refers to the wife of the Hindu deity, Siva: as Umayi she is a beautiful woman, but she is also cursed with a monstrous and destructive second form, Durga. Mangunwijaya finds this duality throughout modern Indonesian society. With its runaway sentences, rapid shifts, and multiple identities, Durga/Umayi is a challenging but exhilarating short novel.

Eka Kurniawan (b. 1975) explores recent Indonesian history in novels that are, in turn, shocking, poignant, and amusing. He often uses elements of magical realism. Beauty Is a Wound (2002, English 2015) begins with the main character, a prostitute, rising from the dead after more than two decades. The story of two families, Man Tiger (2004, English 2015) also features a character who is half-human, half-tiger.

After three decades in office, Suharto resigned the presidency in 1998, allowing for more democracy and less censorship in Indonesia, as well as the growth of publishing. Light romances—called sastra wangi (fragrant literature)—often written by young women, have been especially popular and have had some success abroad, especially in Malaysia. The best selling of these, Ayu Utami’s (b. 1968) Saman (1998, English 2005), is one of the more ambitious examples of the genre. It opens in an exotic setting—New York’s Central Park—but the heart of the novel concerns social justice in Indonesia. The title character, Saman, is a priest who becomes involved in the cause of farmers whose land is being expropriated. Utami shows how the modern abuses of the state hardly differ from those of the Dutch colonialists, and her novel contains several female characters who test the possibilities and limits of personal freedom in modern Indonesia. The novel’s explicitness is hardly shocking by Western standards—one of the women manages to cling to her virginity even while she has an affair with a married man—but was previously unheard of in Indonesian fiction. With its different narrative voices as well as cuts back and forth in time—and a concluding section that is composed of a lengthy e-mail exchange—Saman was also groundbreaking in its style and presentation.

Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, and Habiburrahman el-Shirazy’s (b. 1976) best-selling Ayat-Ayat Cinta (The Verses of Love; 2004, English forthcoming), which was also made into a very popular movie in 2008, is essentially a romance novel that adheres closely to Islamic principles. Set in Egypt, the Indonesian protagonist, Fahri, is a student at the center of Islamic scholarship, Al-Azhar University. The novel nevertheless is very much the product of a more open Indonesian culture; no Arab author seems yet to have found a way of balancing pulp romance and religious conformity in a similarly appealing fashion.

KEEP IN MIND

•   Andrea Hirata‘s (b. 1967) best-selling The Rainbow Troops (2005, English 2009, revised 2013) is the first in an autobiographical quartet. It is a charming, if simple, novel about childhood in rural Indonesia.