By Maya Jaggi
If the American dream of the 21st-century has relocated to China, Shanghai is today’s New York. That, at least, is the vibrant impression created by Tash Aw’s third novel, set in a frenetic megacity of 20mn people, where fortunes are made and lost with vertiginous speed against the highrise Pudong skyline. “When you’re in Shanghai, you feel an energy so blinding that you get swept up,” Aw says. “It’s only when you leave that it feels unreal.”
Five Star Billionaire, just published by Fourth Estate, takes stock of the Chinese dream in a snakes-and-ladders universe of opportunity and ruin, through the eyes of Chinese Malaysians — from tycoons to factory girls — variously drawn to try their luck in the new China. For Aw, whose own ancestors made the reverse journey out of southern China to Malaya, and who moved to England as a student in the early 1990s, this novel is about the people he grew up with, and is his “most personal” book.
His 2005 debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, set in 1940s British Malaya on the brink of Japanese invasion, won the Costa (Whitbread) first novel award and a Commonwealth Writers prize. It reached a slew of longlists, including the Man Booker and the International Impac Dublin prize, and has been translated into more than 20 languages.
The Indonesian setting of his second novel, Map of the Invisible World, published four years later, marked Aw, now 41, as part of a rising generation of southeast Asian-born writers who are remapping the region with little heed to national frontiers.
Aw, who has a kinship with Tan Twan Eng, author of the Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists, casts one eye on the past in a place whose full-throttle growth leaves scant time for the backward glance. “I’m not naturally nostalgic for a cosy, bygone era,” he says, “but a lot of my work is concerned with what we give up in the march forwards.”
He lives alone in a basement flat near Old Street in east London, with a tiny garden in which he grows bamboo and banana palms. Bashful about being there for 12 years, he murmurs: “There’s a lack of momentum”. He visits Asia “several times a year”, and can reel off the merits of its cities, and street food from Bali to Penang.
Compared with Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta, he says, “Shanghai is the only big city where you can go for a stroll. It’s slower and very seductive, with real soul and romance.” A Malaysian national, and now teaching in Singapore for part of the year, he launched his new novel in the city-state last month, and in Malaysia, both of which he sees as “home territory”.
Twenty years before, he says, “people of my generation would gravitate towards the great cities of the West,” but he began travelling to China a decade ago because he “was struck that more and more people seeking a better life abroad seemed to be heading to China”.
He was “blown away by Shanghai”. Like the New York of a century ago, the city “gives foreigners the illusion that they can come from any background and make a mark — and a fortune”.
The novel was sparked by some “weird coincidences”, he says. “I kept bumping into people who knew people who knew me from childhood. I’d hear Malaysian accents across a restaurant, then actively search them out.” Glancing connections emerge between five main characters, including a “philanthropist” who writes self-help books, and a spa receptionist who devours them. There is a pop idol who disgraced himself in a brawl, a political radical turned businesswoman and a real estate dealer who burns out, his own desires subordinate to crushing family duty. As Aw sees it, “his secure place comes at a price. One sees that a lot in Asia.”
The chapter headings, such as Move to Where the Money Is, borrow from Chengyu — Chinese idioms in which parental advice is couched — that have been hijacked to serve a ruthless self-advancement.
He read over people’s shoulders on the Shanghai Metro. “Eight out of 10 bestsellers in Asian bookshops are self-help books. They’ve adopted the worst American excesses and run with them.” That may be most evident in advice to women on “How to snare a rich husband”. He laments the “culture of ‘remaindered women’, who are still single after the age of 26 — which is every woman I know in Shanghai. They have the outward trappings of modern, feminist success, but their lives are geared to despairingly searching for a husband. It’s atavistic.”
In a novel of missed connections, characters can prove as fake as the handbags in Shanghai’s markets. “People are incredibly lonely in this huge city, twice the size of London,” Aw says. “They’re swept up by the tide of energy and forget what they’re looking for. The don’t just want money or a business deal, but something deeper: respect, intimacy, the need to be recognised as an individual.”
Two writer’s residencies in Shanghai between 2009 and 2011 helped him shed some prejudices, on Internet censorship, for example: “People think the Chinese must live in total ignorance, but Chinese my age are so skilled, they have access to everything they want. There are blogs and Twitter — but in Chinese, so most people don’t read them. I saw more freedom of speech in Shanghai than I see in Singapore or Thailand.”
China “exists on so many levels. The official level is incredibly chauvinist, and the patriarchal system drives me nuts — it reminds me of my upbringing. But when you get past that it’s like any other Asian city: there’s a colour, vitality, local and regional identities.”
Growing up during the cultural revolution, he lived in a block where the average age was over 70. “But even though they’ve been through such a lot, I was the recipient of so many acts of kindness every day.”
His understanding has another source. “I have first cousins from a branch that didn’t make it out of rural Malaysia, from a horrible little village. My parents were lucky — they went to college and moved to Kuala Lumpur, so I had a suburban childhood. To them, China represents opportunity. When I see it through their eyes, it’s a marvellous thing.”
He was born in 1971 in Taipei, to Malaysian parents working in the Taiwanese capital. His father was an electrical engineer, and his mother a quantity surveyor. By the time he came back to Malaysia when he was two, he felt like an outsider. He grew up in ethnic Chinese neighbourhoods.
His parents were from “very poor backgrounds”, their families part of the large-scale migration from China to Malaya from the 19th century to the 1930s. Aw, who grew up speaking Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese and English, regrets that he never learned his father’s Hainanese dialect, a “magical, warm, rich and unusual language. It wasn’t considered an educated dialect so he didn’t speak to us in it.” Nor did he know his mother’s Hokkien dialect, so he found it hard to communicate with his cousins, which reinforced his sense of being an outsider.
All his grandparents lived “deep in the heart of the Malaysian jungle”, in the Kinta valley, the setting for his first novel. He recalls “terrifying and exciting” school holidays in his maternal grandmother’s house on the banks of a “big muddy river” — where his uncle still lives. “Big extended Chinese families can be warm and enveloping, not just ghastly structures. But the house was very rudimentary, with monitor lizards eating shit off the outside toilets, and rats in the rooms. I found it hard to deal with.”
During World War II, the area had been a support base for Chinese communist guerrilla resistance to the Japanese occupation of 1942-45. “So they targeted entire villages for brutal treatment by the Japanese army. I’m not sure if my maternal grandfather was tortured, but I know that behind the silence there were untold stories.”
While, to his own generation, “Japan meant cool, electronic gadgets,” his parents grew up with “anti-Japanese sentiment in their blood”.
“The wave of nationalism was strange,” Aw recalls. “The street names were changed to Malaysian ones, but the middle classes were still speaking to each other in English. It’s the most politically neutral language.”
In his ambitions as a writer, Aw had “zero role models. My parents encouraged reading, but to pass exams.” He came to Cambridge to study law in 1991. Writing his first novel, he worked as an auction-house porter and a Chinese-language tutor, before the need for money drove him into a solicitor’s firm for four years.
He quit in 2002 to enrol at the University of East Anglia’s creative writing school (“very cutthroat”) and sold his debut by the end of the academic year. Though keen on Conrad, he found much writing about his native region, from Anthony Burgess to JG Farrell, “unsatisfactory — it didn’t speak to me.” Somerset Maugham was “invariably writing about white people — except for coolies or servants, who were slightly shifty.” Though he admires the Malaysian writer KS Maniam, he felt, along with Tan, that “we had to reinvent the southeast Asian novel”. His narratives circle events, viewing the same scenes through different eyes — reflecting his quarrel with “how history is rewritten in a country like Malaysia. A lot of modern Asian narratives seek refuge in homogeneity. But we know it doesn’t exist.”
He grew up with TV dramas and music from the giant neighbour, Indonesia. Map of the Invisible World is a tale of two separated orphans during President Sukarno’s “year of living dangerously”, a time of anti-communist purges.
Countries are “absurdly retreating into the security of borders,” he says, “but coming from a small country, you can’t help but see Malaysia’s place in a wider world.” That vision may chime with a growing readership in Asia’s burgeoning leisured classes, with the new-found time to look back. For Aw, dislocation from the past “invariably means you’re not going to know where your future lies.” — Guardian News & Media
Tash Aw ... finds the security of borders ‘absurd.’
