Language, Shame and Betrayal – Tash Aw in conversation

00:00:00: Welcome to Berlin Review Audio.

00:00:09: This episode features acclaimed novelist and essayist Tash Orr in conversation with Berlin

00:00:14: Review publisher Tobias Haberkorn.

00:00:17: It was recorded on November 30, 2024 at the DRD Galerie in Berlin as part of the event

00:00:23: Solidarity Capture Treason.

00:00:26: The discussion explores themes prevalent in Tash's writing, such as shame, class, language

00:00:32: and migration, weaving together personal memories from Malaysia with reflections on transnational

00:00:37: identity, queerness and the complexities of social mobility.

00:00:41: We will also hear an early draft of Tash's forthcoming essay titled Traders, which will

00:00:47: be published in the fourth reader of Berlin Review, coming out in early July 2025.

00:00:52: A big thank you to the DRD Galerie and now enjoy the talk.

00:00:57: Yes, and now Tash, how are you?

00:00:59: Very well.

00:01:00: Thank you Tobias.

00:01:01: And thank you everyone for coming.

00:01:03: I know Saturday night in Berlin there's so much going on, so it's really nice that you've

00:01:07: chosen to come here for at least part of the evening.

00:01:09: Actually, my question, how are you, was a bit of an inside joke, because we just had a conversation

00:01:15: on how bizarre this question is from a transcultural point of view.

00:01:20: Absolutely.

00:01:21: And you responded in the way that deflected it, so that you don't know how I'm actually

00:01:25: feeling the British way.

00:01:28: This is part of your biography.

00:01:29: You were born in Taipei, actually, in Taiwan, moved back to the place where your parents

00:01:35: grew up in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur as a two-year-old, I've read.

00:01:41: But your grandparents, I think, were immigrants to Malaysia from China.

00:01:50: And this is also an important part of your writing.

00:01:54: So Tash is a novelist.

00:01:55: His first novel came out in 2005, I think, won him directly a few awards and got him

00:02:02: on the Booker Prize nomination.

00:02:04: And it's a historical novel set in the 1940s in Malaysia.

00:02:08: And I believe it's modeled on your grandfather, the shopkeeper.

00:02:12: Exactly, yes.

00:02:13: Okay, so it's a great book.

00:02:14: It's translated also into German and many other languages.

00:02:18: And after that, you published four more novels, three more novels and a memoir.

00:02:23: And a memoir that's Strangers on a Peer.

00:02:27: And by the way, the German translation has been, this has been published first in 2016

00:02:33: in an extended version then in 2021.

00:02:36: And the German translation is just out at Luchte Handverlag.

00:02:40: The topic of tonight's talk, Capture Solidarity and Treason, the part that was mostly inspired

00:02:46: by you, and a conversation we had like six months ago, is on treason because you have

00:02:52: a few things to say or a few points to make about what's up with treason, let's say in

00:02:57: the landscape of identities that we all navigate and that are so much in the focus of cultural

00:03:03: production as well.

00:03:05: And I think to get it going, you have prepared, so you're writing and that's a really great

00:03:11: news.

00:03:12: For us, you're writing a text for a Berlin review.

00:03:14: It's in the making and you're going to read a passage from the beginning of this upcoming

00:03:20: essay.

00:03:21: Yeah, exactly.

00:03:22: Okay.

00:03:23: I think you're right.

00:03:24: I'm just going to read a passage along essay that I'm writing for the Berlin review on

00:03:28: the theme of treachery and what it is to be a traitor without really even doing anything.

00:03:34: We have come to believe that truth and knowledge of the self are inseparable, that each is a necessary

00:03:39: condition for the other to exist, and together they produce the means for us to live harmoniously

00:03:45: with others.

00:03:46: But what of the opposite is true, that knowing who you are requires you to be deceitful and

00:03:52: that this very deceit is a prerequisite for living within your society.

00:03:56: We are on a bus, my mother and I, speaking about something banal, what we need to buy

00:04:02: at the market, how to organize our day, that sort of thing.

00:04:06: It's one of those months when money is tight, my father is away trying to find work, and

00:04:12: at home my mother is tense and uncommunicative, stretched thin by having to do the housework

00:04:18: and raise the children on her own.

00:04:21: This is not unusual.

00:04:22: We have grown accustomed to periods like this when a veil of stress settles silently over

00:04:27: the household.

00:04:29: My mother is troubled, describing a list of things we need to buy, calculating how much

00:04:35: each item will cost.

00:04:37: She is speaking to me in Hokkien, our southern Chinese dialect inherited from her parents

00:04:43: and their parents before them.

00:04:46: Maybe she is a bit more agitated than usual because her voice is occasionally raised,

00:04:51: and as sometimes happens in these situations, I become self-conscious, even slightly embarrassed.

00:04:58: She asks me a question and I nod, preferring not to speak, because we are in a public space,

00:05:05: where the national language is Malay, and we know that to speak in our language is to

00:05:10: mark ourselves as different, and not just different, but dangerous.

00:05:16: I'm ten, twelve years old, I can't remember exactly, but old enough to realize what it

00:05:23: means to be born of an immigrant family.

00:05:27: On May the 13th, 1969, racial riots broke out in Malaysia, mainly in Kuala Lumpur,

00:05:32: the capital, following general elections when opposition parties, representing equality

00:05:37: for all ethnic groups in the country, made unexpected gains.

00:05:42: The pogrom that followed resulted in the murder of hundreds of ethnic Chinese Malaysians,

00:05:47: the culmination of more than two decades of anti-Chinese sentiment that stemmed from the

00:05:52: communist rebellion that lasted from the Second World War until after the country's independence

00:05:57: in 1959.

00:05:59: During those years, Chinese communist fighters led a guerrilla campaign against the British

00:06:04: colonial administration aimed at securing equal rights for ethnic Chinese Malaysians

00:06:10: born in the soon-to-be independent colony of Malaya, rights that did not and still do

00:06:16: not exist.

00:06:19: When the killings occurred on May 13th, 1969, my elder sister was just two years old.

00:06:25: My parents had just left the provinces to live in Kuala Lumpur at the time, and having

00:06:30: a small child made them acutely aware of the dangers of being Chinese.

00:06:35: By the time I was born, two years later, none of this was spoken about.

00:06:40: My parents wanted us to behave as though we were just the same as any other Malaysians.

00:06:45: We rarely spoke Chinese in public.

00:06:48: We never talked about our political beliefs beyond our closest friends or relatives.

00:06:54: But occasionally, like on this bus, in this moment with my mother who is stressed, we

00:06:59: slip up.

00:07:01: And what overcomes me is a feeling of shame, more than terror.

00:07:06: In public, we learn to hide who we are, to be, in effect, deceitful.

00:07:12: Everyone can see we are different, of course, but identity is more than just skin color.

00:07:16: It is how you declare yourself to the outside world.

00:07:19: You have to be constantly vigilant to maintain a lifelong declaration of fidelity to the

00:07:25: country you live in, to the idea of a nation.

00:07:28: And this means downplaying the most essential elements of who you are, as if you aren't

00:07:34: aware of them, language, ancestry, even your name.

00:07:39: I am not a teenager.

00:07:41: I have not even heard stories of communists and betrayals, and yet I feel like a traitor

00:07:47: just by speaking the language that I share with my parents.

00:07:50: It is an inherited shame, I will discover this later, but right now it feels that just

00:07:56: to be who I am, a Chinese, an immigrant, is to be somehow a traitor, and I don't want

00:08:03: to be that.

00:08:04: The language and culture in this case is Chinese, but it could be Turkish or Vietnamese or any

00:08:10: other immigrant language in any other country, in any period of time, and the sense of shame

00:08:17: and treachery will be the same.

00:08:20: Thanks.

00:08:27: Thank you, Tash.

00:08:28: So you're describing a situation where one of the basic elements of shame is the language

00:08:33: that you speak in public.

00:08:35: You grew up in a very multilingual setting.

00:08:38: Can you explain that a little bit to us?

00:08:40: Yeah, I mean, it's very simple.

00:08:42: I think in Europe people take the multilingual as a sign of cosmopolitanism, but for most

00:08:46: people, especially if you come from a slightly more working class background, as I do, it's

00:08:51: a question of survival.

00:08:52: So especially in a country like Malaysia where the national language is Malay, so everyone

00:08:56: speaks Malay.

00:08:57: At school we do all our studies in Malay, but if you come from a Chinese speaking background,

00:09:01: so an ethnic Chinese family like mine, your grandparents speak Chinese, I mean they arrived

00:09:05: from China, so that is their main language, and to communicate in any other way seems

00:09:11: very artificial.

00:09:12: They speak to us in Chinese and we respond likewise, it just, there's no other way to

00:09:18: speak to them.

00:09:19: If you want to keep some kind of intimacy with your family, that's what you have to do.

00:09:23: Outside of the household we spoke Malay, but also English is a second language because

00:09:28: Malaysia is an old British colony, and it also happens that English is the language of

00:09:32: the bourgeoisie, which is why I really wanted to be good at English, so that I could escape

00:09:37: my family circumstances and work in a language that's a bit more neutral.

00:09:41: And how is school, the teaching in school is done in both Malay and English?

00:09:45: No, it's entirely in Malay.

00:09:46: Okay.

00:09:47: Apart from English lessons.

00:09:48: Okay, but one of the things you're describing in Strangers on the Pier is how extremely

00:09:52: focused everyone in your schools and your high school was on going on to pursue higher

00:09:58: education in Singapore or in American elite universities or British universities.

00:10:03: So that is an impact of the, well, former empire, the British empire or the American

00:10:10: empire today, that to a certain extent we all, even in Europe or Germany, are feeling.

00:10:15: So English has a certain prestige.

00:10:17: So there's two things.

00:10:18: In Strangers on the Pier, what I describe in Strangers on the Pier is how half the people

00:10:22: or a proportion of people were very obsessed with escaping their backgrounds.

00:10:26: And so society was really divided into two, between those people who basically came from

00:10:31: middle class backgrounds and for whom education was possible.

00:10:35: They saw the value of education.

00:10:37: They had antecedents or they could have some kind of a model that showed them what education

00:10:42: could do for you.

00:10:43: And on the other hand, you had people who were left behind, whose parents worked in factories,

00:10:48: who worked in new college jobs, who didn't see the point of education.

00:10:52: So very quickly in a country like Malaysia where there's a lot of social mobility in

00:10:55: the 80s and 90s, you had the society separating.

00:11:00: So yes, one part of the school became very, became very sort of obsessed with the idea

00:11:06: of escaping their circumstances, and the other half just couldn't.

00:11:11: One of the points that we have in common is that we've both, you live in Paris currently.

00:11:15: Now you're on a fellowship for one year at the DIID, but you moved to Paris a couple

00:11:19: of years ago after studying in the UK and living a couple of years in London, right?

00:11:23: So I also lived a couple of years in a number of years in Paris, and we are both friends

00:11:28: and collaborators with Didier Ribon and Edouard Louis, who have written on class from the French

00:11:34: perspective, and they've very much been read also here, and many people rightly to a certain

00:11:40: extent transpose the situation they described from France to a general societal, let's say,

00:11:45: structure that we also have in Germany, what struck me about your descriptions of the question

00:11:50: of class, I mean, you have this element of being a Chinese immigrant.

00:11:55: That's a very important concept or, or a status that you describe.

00:11:58: And other than that, in terms of the class structure of society, for example, you, at

00:12:04: a certain point you say that you're from a country that has never developed a bourgeoisie.

00:12:10: So my impression actually of the social dynamics that you're describing is that it's such an

00:12:16: upwardly mobile and focused society.

00:12:21: Maybe that has to do with a sort of like very quick development from an agrarian society

00:12:26: up until the, I don't know, you tell me the 1950s and 60s to something much more technologicized

00:12:33: and highly capitalist today, so development that would have taken 150 years in Germany

00:12:38: happened in the space of 30 years there, or that's at least something I know about Korea,

00:12:43: which I've bought more knowledge about if that's comparable.

00:12:46: So that creates a class society regardless, but one where certain elements of, for example,

00:12:54: working class identity seem to be absent.

00:12:57: I think it's very important to make the point that it has never had a bourgeoisie until

00:13:01: now.

00:13:03: And so what you have is a rapid evolution of these societies, which comes from the huge

00:13:09: economic boom immediately after the end of colonialism.

00:13:12: So it's also important to realize that France and Germany do not have the same experience

00:13:18: of colonialism.

00:13:19: So in the 60s, when a lot of these Southeast Asian countries become independent, what you

00:13:23: have is a real freeing of the economy, and you have a freeing of a sense of social mobility.

00:13:28: But what happens when you have social mobility is also that you have very quickly a class

00:13:33: system.

00:13:34: So now in just one generation, you do have a class system that actually resembles very

00:13:37: closely what you have in an economic sense.

00:13:40: You don't have all the cultural snobbery yet.

00:13:43: But I'll give you an example.

00:13:45: So what I described in my book is the experience of going to school in Malaysia.

00:13:52: Because there were no private schools, there were only just one type of school, which were

00:13:57: very badly staffed government schools run by the government.

00:14:02: So if you wanted to send your children to school, everyone had to go to the same school.

00:14:05: So you had quite rich people at school with very normal people, with people who couldn't

00:14:14: read, and certainly whose parents couldn't read.

00:14:17: So this produces a certain dynamic.

00:14:19: The people I went to school with, who managed to get middle class jobs, now every single

00:14:28: one of them sends their child to a private school, where the language of communication

00:14:33: is English, and where they're studying about world history, they're studying all kinds

00:14:37: of things that we didn't have access to.

00:14:41: And so in a family like mine, which is basically split between, so I grew up half in the capital

00:14:47: and half in the countryside, what you have is people whose children are basically like

00:14:53: me with a university education, and therefore cannot communicate with the rest of their

00:15:00: families, not because we don't have the language, but we don't have the shared experiences

00:15:04: of life.

00:15:05: You know, I'm here doing a talk in Berlin, my first cousin is working in a factory in

00:15:09: small time Malaysia.

00:15:10: So when I see them, you know, in February for Chinese New Year, what are we going to

00:15:15: speak about in common, and these are people I grew up with, you know, I spent every single

00:15:21: school vacation with them, I spent months and months and months of my childhood with

00:15:25: them.

00:15:26: And when I see them now, there is nothing I can talk to them about.

00:15:30: Is that where treachery comes in, where you feel like a trader to your family or to the

00:15:37: class you grew up in?

00:15:38: Totally.

00:15:39: I feel like a class trader.

00:15:40: I have this even with my parents, I mean, I keep having these arguments with them because

00:15:44: I just, there is no, it creates a sense of frustration.

00:15:48: You know, one of the people I mentioned in my book is Alice Walker, you know, the great

00:15:51: American writer, who wrote a very powerful essay in which she called my father's country

00:15:57: is the poor, and how she describes the feeling of dislocation after just one semester at

00:16:03: college.

00:16:04: So she goes away to college, she comes back, and she finds that she can no longer communicate

00:16:09: with her father because he's illiterate, and he is clever, sensitive, funny man with whom

00:16:15: she has enjoyed closeness.

00:16:18: And suddenly she finds she doesn't have the means to communicate with him anymore.

00:16:23: And this is why so often I think of social mobility, and people always talk about the

00:16:30: great things about social mobility, of course, you know, there are great things, right?

00:16:34: I'd rather be here doing a talk in Berlin and working in a factory in small town Malaysia.

00:16:37: I mean, I don't want to romanticize the reverse, but what it does happen, and it's a very curious

00:16:43: thing that you see a lot of in immigrant families, which is that the parents want their children

00:16:49: to achieve a certain kind of life.

00:16:51: They want them to have an education, they want them to read books, they want them to

00:16:53: have a kind of middle class job.

00:16:56: That's a very interesting aspect, because I was thinking when I was reading about these

00:16:59: passages, clearly so, from the part of your parents, there was an expectation that you

00:17:04: would become, that you would grow to do other things than them in life, that you would have

00:17:10: a different life, that you would move away, et cetera.

00:17:13: And they were also pushing you to pursue higher studies, right?

00:17:17: Yeah, so they always hoped for me to have higher studies, to carry out higher studies.

00:17:23: But I'm not quite sure they realized what this would involve, or maybe they did.

00:17:29: And if they did, it makes the whole situation even more poignant, even a little sadder.

00:17:34: Yeah.

00:17:35: Because it means that everyone is colluding in this dynamic where the more the children

00:17:42: are able to achieve what the parents want them to achieve, the more distant they will

00:17:46: become.

00:17:47: But this is a difference to, again, the examples of Edouard, or of Didier, and of other class

00:17:54: narratives of which we've had quite a few in the last 10 years, also in Germany.

00:17:59: And to a certain extent, I would also confirm this from my own upbringing, is that as much

00:18:03: more it feels in Germany or in France, an expectation from parents that you will become

00:18:09: like them, even if, or maybe even especially so, if you are from a very modest or poor

00:18:15: background thinking about the books I mentioned.

00:18:17: So I'm wondering where this element of parents pushing their children to become something

00:18:25: else is coming from.

00:18:26: Is it something that has to do maybe with the post-colonial situation?

00:18:30: So a very young state, a very young society in the sense of its autonomy, does it have

00:18:35: to do with the immigrant background that runs in your family from two generations back?

00:18:41: I think it's to do with immigration.

00:18:42: I think it's to do with the experience of being an immigrant, of escaping something.

00:18:46: No one is an immigrant just for fun.

00:18:49: People are immigrants for a real reason.

00:18:51: Contrary to what the right-wing narrative is, no one leaves their country just for the

00:18:56: current thing they might have a slightly better job somewhere else.

00:18:59: No one goes through that pain, no one goes through that upheaval.

00:19:02: You do it because it's absolutely necessary.

00:19:04: And what that means is that you're already emotionally primed for great emotional upheaval.

00:19:10: You're already primed for the fact that your children, when they go to university, will

00:19:14: come back to you and actually feel that they are totally superior to you.

00:19:20: But that is actually what you want all the time.

00:19:22: You want to somehow that feeling that parents have, which even my own parents have, that

00:19:27: feeling of slight humiliation is already built into the experience.

00:19:31: And I don't think it's so dissimilar to the class experiences in Europe because either

00:19:35: sometimes when I speak to my father, and we talk about things, the fact that he doesn't

00:19:39: know certain things makes him embarrassed.

00:19:42: It makes him embarrassed to be talking about those things with me because he doesn't have

00:19:47: the knowledge.

00:19:48: So actually in that way, the experience of masculinity, the experiences of shame, all

00:19:51: those I think remain the same.

00:19:53: But I think the tolerance for it is somehow built into the experience of being an immigrant.

00:19:59: And that's why I think the passage I read, all those things that you have, the fact that

00:20:04: you speak to your children in one language and they reply to you in another, is a humiliating

00:20:08: thing in some respect.

00:20:10: It's basically saying to your parents, "Your language is not good enough.

00:20:12: Your language is embarrassing.

00:20:13: Your language is slightly shameful.

00:20:16: And I don't want this."

00:20:17: So all those things feed into the idea of being a sense of just simply being a traitor, I

00:20:22: think, is not too strong a word.

00:20:24: But would your parents then also see you as a traitor?

00:20:28: Because they were the ones that in the beginning were sort of like pushing you away and pushing

00:20:32: you up.

00:20:33: Yeah, pushing you up.

00:20:34: Because I don't think they knew what this would involve.

00:20:35: You know, when I forget how to address someone who is the second uncle of a cousin, these

00:20:42: are very important things to them.

00:20:44: They're not important to me anymore.

00:20:46: I mean, I once knew how to do this.

00:20:48: And I don't think people realize what it means to be so detached from children until

00:20:55: it happens.

00:20:57: And then it's too late.

00:20:59: So this detachment, I suppose in your case, happened when you went to the UK to study

00:21:06: at Cambridge University, right?

00:21:07: So you got a scholarship out of high school and then you went on to study English and

00:21:13: later law in the UK.

00:21:15: Yes.

00:21:16: I would say it started even earlier.

00:21:18: And I knew that I needed to.

00:21:20: I wanted to do something in my life.

00:21:22: I also think there are a lot of other factors.

00:21:24: You know, I think also sexuality has a role to play in this.

00:21:27: You know, if you're 12, 13, 14 and you know you're queer and you know that actually you

00:21:31: need to have space for yourself.

00:21:33: And the only, you know, I, I could.

00:21:35: I couldn't play any sports well enough to have a famous career elsewhere.

00:21:41: So the only way out for me was to be good at school and to read books.

00:21:48: And the problem with reading books is that it changes the way you think.

00:21:51: It changes the way you speak, it changes the way you see the world.

00:21:54: And so my separation from my family started very early.

00:21:57: My sister was exactly the same.

00:21:58: What is she doing today?

00:22:00: She's retired, but she's a lawyer.

00:22:03: And so the separation is very early.

00:22:05: I don't think it just automatically happens.

00:22:07: I think it occurs over a long period.

00:22:12: There's another aspect with regard to shame that I found quite compelling in your description

00:22:17: of your also in the passage that you read in the beginning.

00:22:20: It seems like you're coming from a post-traumatic society also, where trauma is repressed, where

00:22:29: anything from showing weakness is sort of like taboo.

00:22:34: You don't speak about emotions, et cetera.

00:22:36: And I have to say in a certain way this reminded me again of sort of like personal ethics of

00:22:43: my grandparents.

00:22:44: So in a way also the post-war, certainly German society is a post-war, post-genocide, and in

00:22:53: that sense also a post-traumatic society.

00:22:57: So can you see elements now that you've lived many years in Britain and then in France or

00:23:02: in Europe, you've come to know your way around a little bit.

00:23:06: Would you say there are points of comparison?

00:23:08: There are certainly similarities about the awkwardness, the unease, talking about turmoil

00:23:12: or conflict.

00:23:13: I mean, the difference is I think Germany was not, I don't think was a victim necessarily

00:23:19: in the war.

00:23:20: And I don't think Britain was necessarily a victim in the war and not even France.

00:23:24: Because I think most ethnic Chinese people fleeing massacre and I think they were really

00:23:29: the victim.

00:23:30: So actually the dynamic is slightly different when you don't want to talk about being a

00:23:33: victim.

00:23:34: It's different from just a general unease at being involved in conflict.

00:23:40: What my parents and grandparents didn't want to talk about was the specific experience of

00:23:44: having been persecuted, the specific experience of having been seen as people who were poor,

00:23:52: dirty, dangerous, treacherous to the country.

00:23:55: So all these things are very specific experiences.

00:23:58: So the fact that they didn't want that to exist in any way in our identity was I think

00:24:03: very interesting to me.

00:24:04: I mean, I find it now very interesting, but at the time I just felt this really bizarre

00:24:08: because obviously you'd look the way you look and it's very difficult when people tell

00:24:12: you, your parents are telling you, you're just the same as any other Malaysian.

00:24:15: I mean, you're just no difference between you and anyone else.

00:24:17: And then you go out on the street and people are telling you to go back to China.

00:24:20: I mean, when I was five or six years old, someone told me to go back to China.

00:24:22: I really literally did not know that they were talking to me.

00:24:27: I thought they were talking, they must have been a tourist.

00:24:29: You know how the child's mind invents things?

00:24:31: I thought they were talking to a tourist who just happened to be walking by and who missed

00:24:36: his plane to go back to Beijing or somewhere.

00:24:38: It's just when it happened several times, time after time, that I thought, okay, right,

00:24:44: they meet me.

00:24:45: And the way you think of yourself is so much influenced by the way other people think of

00:24:49: you, that your internal logic, your internal identity becomes inseparable from the logic

00:24:56: that is the external logic that is imposed upon you.

00:25:00: So I guess you speak also a lot about silence and all the things that have not been talked

00:25:05: about either in your family or maybe in the culture at large.

00:25:08: So I suppose getting to all these topics and investigating them and then being able to

00:25:14: write about your family in a not fictionalized, but memoir way must have been a process of

00:25:22: uncovering, having certain conversations you never had, initiating a lot of things, breaking

00:25:27: a lot of silences.

00:25:28: Can you talk a little bit about that?

00:25:29: How you went about going that and how much time it took you maybe to even start it?

00:25:34: It took years, I mean decades before I felt that I could speak to my parents in this way.

00:25:41: It was really until I was really some way into my writing career that I could then use my

00:25:47: books and my professional career as a kind of a mask to say.

00:25:52: Because interestingly, your first novel, which I've read last week, is very much about the

00:25:58: questions that you're already working on now, are already present there.

00:26:02: But it's also, maybe we shall say, published in 2005 and back then the literary world was

00:26:08: not as focused on the memoir genre as it is today.

00:26:12: But it's in a sort of romanced, fictionalized, tale-telling way that you tell the story of

00:26:19: your grandfather, right?

00:26:20: And also, I don't think I was ready to do it in terms of memoir.

00:26:23: I don't think I was ready to confront it with the directness and the honesty of a little

00:26:27: memoir.

00:26:29: So it took me a long time.

00:26:30: And I said, well, actually, this is not because I really want to know this, because I think

00:26:34: they would have felt very threatened.

00:26:37: I said it's for research, it's for books, and so that's where it made things easier.

00:26:41: But still, after many, many attempts, it was just impossible to get any answers from them.

00:26:48: And so really, I wrote this memoir thinking it's going to be like any other memoir.

00:26:53: I'm going to find these answers, and I'm going to have this beautifully shaped memoir that

00:26:58: starts with a problem and ends with all the problems being answered, and then we all cry

00:27:03: and we all have a hug, except it really didn't turn out that way.

00:27:06: They didn't give me anything.

00:27:07: They just couldn't, even when they said, OK, yes, we'll tell you.

00:27:11: Let's sit down at three o'clock this afternoon.

00:27:13: They couldn't speak.

00:27:14: They just, they were hampered, hamstrung by decades of not being able to say anything.

00:27:21: So the book is really about silence.

00:27:23: It's really about the inability of immigrant families to unpack all that they've lived

00:27:31: through because they are so programmed to keep it quiet.

00:27:36: So what they give you is only it's a highly edited, highly filtered version of what they

00:27:44: want you to hear.

00:27:45: So they retain all that is the most traumatic, is retained.

00:27:49: And that's why so many people from immigrant backgrounds feel very deracinated because

00:27:54: you don't have the celebration of the family history because there's nothing to celebrate

00:27:57: except pain, persecution, fleeing something, poverty.

00:28:02: So all those things, I can understand why people might want to hide this, but it still

00:28:08: leaves the next generation with a story that is really highly incomplete.

00:28:13: So the society that you encounter when you come to Europe is the British society, the

00:28:17: English society, and quite some funny passages and insightful passages on that in your book.

00:28:23: And one of them concerns specifically the topic of the family and of working through

00:28:29: one's upbringing, which is something that also white people do.

00:28:33: And there's this funny passage where you narrate a conversation you're having with an English

00:28:39: person and I'm reading a short passage from the book.

00:28:42: It was only recently with the help of therapy that she'd come to realize the obvious.

00:28:48: So you speak about this English woman.

00:28:51: Her father loved her too much, her mother didn't love her at all.

00:28:55: She was just now realizing, she said, that her mother had emotionally fucked her up.

00:29:02: So this is a sort of like cheerful bar conversation or whatever.

00:29:07: And just occasionally that woman says to the group, okay, my mother fucked me up and speaks

00:29:11: about something she has sort of like come to realize after therapy, et cetera.

00:29:18: And you describe how shocked you were, you and a Malaysian student friend who was at the

00:29:26: table and was extremely embarrassed about that openness of speaking about family.

00:29:33: And then your friend says to this English person, but it's your mom you're talking about.

00:29:39: So there's this sense of like, it reminded me I have to say about the commandment, honor

00:29:44: thy father and thy mother, which is an important element as well of your identity.

00:29:51: For us, it was just a question of the cultural difference, and I don't mean the cultural difference

00:29:55: in terms of East and West.

00:29:56: I mean the cultural difference in terms of long established families with a certain relationship

00:30:02: from one generation to another and others who come from immigrant families like us,

00:30:08: like ours, where basically the rupture between one generation to the next is so brutal that

00:30:12: our parents never talk about anything.

00:30:15: I grew up in a big Chinese family.

00:30:17: People are always arriving in the city to stay with us from the countryside.

00:30:21: And they would be distant cousins, distant aunts, uncles.

00:30:25: And so many of them would have what I now recognize to be mental health problems.

00:30:31: They would be crying in their rooms.

00:30:33: All the men in my father's side of the family were at some point in a psychiatric hospital,

00:30:38: at some point tried to kill themselves, some point several of them did kill themselves.

00:30:42: And this was never, ever talked about, ever.

00:30:45: Sometimes they were just referred to as in passing, like so and so is sick.

00:30:51: But no one ever talked about how this made them feel.

00:30:53: How much pain they had inherited from having had to leave China as a 10-year-old with no

00:31:01: money.

00:31:02: The pain of having been arrested because they were suspected to have been a communist for

00:31:07: no other reason than they were ethnically Chinese in the 50s and 60s.

00:31:12: And spent like 10 years in jail without recourse to the legal system.

00:31:16: So all these things happen all the time.

00:31:19: And if they were to tell me why they were sad, why they were sad because of something

00:31:23: that happened to their parents, they would have to tell me the reason behind it.

00:31:27: And the reason behind it was something they really did not want me to know.

00:31:32: They didn't want me to know those things because they didn't want me to feel in this new, rapidly

00:31:38: developing Malaysia of the 1980s.

00:31:40: They did not want me to know that I was in any way different from anyone else.

00:31:45: And regarding the experience of an immigrant, although you didn't know it as a child, you

00:31:49: were living as an immigrant in Malaysia, grew up like an immigrant.

00:31:53: And then you went on to Europe and you still are in a certain way.

00:31:56: I don't know, would you consider yourself an immigrant today or do you think that because

00:32:01: of your educational status, professional success, etc.

00:32:06: You have somehow grown out of that condition?

00:32:10: I mean, I'm still an immigrant.

00:32:11: I mean, there's no way.

00:32:12: But I think there's so many kinds of immigrants.

00:32:14: I mean, there are immigrants who arrive in the back of a lorry room with nothing.

00:32:19: And so obviously I'm not in that class of person.

00:32:21: So when people ask me what it feels to be an immigrant, I can't answer in Europe because

00:32:25: I have a particular, I'm a writer.

00:32:27: So that gives me a certain protection against certain realities.

00:32:31: But yeah, I can still certainly speak universally.

00:32:34: I think the most basic elements of being an immigrant, which are that you're really constantly

00:32:40: trying to have, trying to reconstruct an identity for yourself, you're always having to adjust

00:32:46: to the outside world.

00:32:47: And part of this comes from the fact that your family has been through a lot in order

00:32:54: for you to be where you are.

00:32:56: And the position where you are now is considered by your family to be a place of stableness

00:33:02: and success and security.

00:33:05: But in fact, very often it's not that, you know, talking about the first contact I had

00:33:09: with Britain that I talk about in the book is when someone from a university was talking

00:33:15: about their family and their ancestors.

00:33:19: And they said they were very, very surprised that people had so little knowledge about

00:33:23: their ancestors.

00:33:24: Yeah.

00:33:25: And for example, he said, I'm always very surprised when people don't know the maiden

00:33:30: names of their four great grandmothers, which, and it was really striking to me that basically

00:33:38: the bourgeoisie basically is obsessed by his genealogy.

00:33:42: It's the people spend all their time drawing up family trees, aunt so-and-so, married uncle

00:33:47: so-and-so, and this came from the, they have, everyone has family trees.

00:33:50: Whereas in my family, there was nothing.

00:33:54: I didn't even know who my great grandparents were.

00:33:56: I've never mined their names.

00:33:58: I actually literally don't know who they were.

00:34:01: My parents don't know who their grandparents were.

00:34:03: They really have no idea.

00:34:06: And in terms of like generalizing your experience or trying to think about the category of the

00:34:11: immigrant in a multi-contextual way, because as you say, there are all sorts of ways of

00:34:17: being an immigrant and different cultures you originate from, et cetera.

00:34:21: What was your sense or was there, to ask more openly, a sense of solidarity that you developed

00:34:27: or felt between you and other immigrants in Britain, for example?

00:34:31: I mean, you know that these cultural solidarity, I mean, if you meet other Malaysians or Singaporeans,

00:34:37: then yeah, there's assumed familiarity.

00:34:39: But you know, if I went into a Turkish store, I didn't automatically assume that I knew

00:34:44: where the other person came from and what it took for them to get there.

00:34:48: And I think it's very dangerous, I think, to speak about the universal immigrant experience

00:34:54: in terms of what it's like to be an immigrant in Britain or Germany.

00:34:57: I think those differ.

00:35:00: But I think all those people would still have issues with parentage.

00:35:05: They would still have issues with communication, with language, with how they situate themselves

00:35:10: within their parents' culture, as opposed to their own, which is kind of a more hybrid

00:35:15: culture.

00:35:17: And what about your experiences then as a writer?

00:35:21: Do you speak about how strange it was for you after graduation when some people of your

00:35:26: university went on and had jobs at banks, at law firms, et cetera?

00:35:31: And there was a group of people who didn't know what to do, and they said, "Oh, I'm just

00:35:35: going to move to London and finish my novel."

00:35:37: To me, it just seemed to be the most bourgeois thing ever.

00:35:40: I mean, I couldn't imagine.

00:35:41: I had no idea.

00:35:42: I had no model for how that could happen.

00:35:45: And these people kind of, they knew things as if by heart that it was part of their being.

00:35:50: And it wasn't until later on that I realized that they had parents who are writers, or they

00:35:53: had parents who are university professors or journalists.

00:35:57: And so they knew what the system was.

00:35:59: But they would say things like that, and they would say things like, "First of all, they

00:36:02: would use nouns as verbs."

00:36:06: So they would say, "Oh, I'm going to summer in France."

00:36:11: The idea of, "Where are you summering?"

00:36:13: And to me, the idea of spending a whole block of time in any one place like that just seemed

00:36:18: to, I just spoke of an experience of life that I had never, ever been exposed to.

00:36:23: And the thought that someone might just be able to go to a place with all the connotations

00:36:29: of summer and finish a book, I just saw how the hell does that happen?

00:36:36: The idea of getting to the end of term and not working for me, because I had to work

00:36:40: to sort of earn my bills.

00:36:42: And so I had to figure all that out.

00:36:44: And in fact, you find out that actually there's other people in your position, so it's not

00:36:48: that difficult.

00:36:49: But it just, from my kind of background, it seems so remote and so foreign.

00:36:54: So you also actually got a degree in creative writing later on, and your literary career

00:37:00: starts then, let's say, in the early 2000s.

00:37:03: And there's a very funny passage from "Strangers on a Pier" that is also revealing about the

00:37:08: literary system and literary fashions, et cetera.

00:37:13: So when you attend, this is the situation, you've just graduated and you're trying to

00:37:18: become a writer, but you have no idea how to become one.

00:37:20: So you tell that you attend a workshop led by a well-known writer.

00:37:24: And I quote, "Here are some of the advice I scribbled down that day.

00:37:28: In a notebook, I'm soon going to consign to the recycling bin.

00:37:31: Never be direct or obvious.

00:37:33: No one is interested in misery, memoirs.

00:37:35: If you have to write about trauma, try being a bleak.

00:37:39: Maybe use an animal narrator or an inanimate object like a chair."

00:37:46: So this was the advice that was given to you.

00:37:48: Yeah, it is unbelievable, but it's absolutely true.

00:37:52: And I think this is really true of the Anglo-American publishing scene.

00:37:56: And even the term "misery memoir" is so insulting and so reductive.

00:38:02: So if you talk about anything that's painful, anything that involves trauma or tragedy,

00:38:07: people say it's just a misery memoir, which means that vast amounts of literature is produced

00:38:14: about purely incredibly low stakes, emotional, very, very bourgeois situations, which to

00:38:22: me mean nothing.

00:38:23: And I can't help but feel that it's a way of excluding people from the literary canon.

00:38:28: It's a way of excluding, for example, a lot of immigrant writers, people who are writing

00:38:33: about things that are necessarily difficult, necessarily painful, and that if you want

00:38:38: to write them, I was literally told by someone that maybe you can use as a narrator.

00:38:45: This is really true.

00:38:46: A chair or a table, because this is for my first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, which

00:38:52: is a story about war and what people have to do to survive war.

00:38:57: Someone told me it's too direct, it's too confrontational.

00:38:59: Maybe instead of a person, you might want to use as a narrator the chair in the house

00:39:04: that witnesses everything that happens.

00:39:07: I thought, who's going to fuck about a chair?

00:39:11: I don't care about the chair.

00:39:12: What I care about is people, but it just so happens.

00:39:15: But don't you think the literary world has evolved quite a lot since then?

00:39:20: I think it has evolved a little bit, and I really don't think it has evolved a lot.

00:39:24: I think if you look at the majority of books that are published today, they're still incredibly

00:39:29: boring bourgeois books.

00:39:31: I feel this, I say this in all sincerity.

00:39:36: I think most books published today, the overwhelming majority of books, are still about people

00:39:41: facing existential difficulties in a middle-class setting.

00:39:45: Yes.

00:39:46: I mean, there's absolutely the majority of books.

00:39:49: Yes, I agree in what concerns the really mainstream and big market.

00:39:54: I'll give you another example.

00:39:55: When my last novel came out, We The Survivors, it's based on someone like my cousin who was

00:40:01: never very good at school, who was always in and out of trouble with the police, worked

00:40:06: in a factory.

00:40:07: He got a succession of really bad jobs and got into trouble.

00:40:09: Anyway, it's about the life of a very humble Malaysian Chinese man who then he has a series

00:40:17: of jobs to try and make ends meet.

00:40:19: When I did the interviews in Britain and in America, almost every single journalist said

00:40:26: to me they found it incredible, so, so interesting because it's the first novel they've ever

00:40:32: read where people go to work, where people actually find themselves in a work setting.

00:40:38: And that made me think, actually, this is true.

00:40:40: In most novels, no one actually even goes to a middle-class job.

00:40:45: They don't go to a bank.

00:40:46: They don't go to an accounting firm.

00:40:48: They certainly don't go to a fish farm, which is where he works most of the time.

00:40:52: They don't work in a crappy restaurant, which is where my character does, because writing

00:40:57: is produced by bourgeois people, generally for other bourgeois people.

00:41:01: So when you've come from outside the system, and of course, I now inhabit a very, very

00:41:05: bourgeois environment, I have become that person.

00:41:08: But all the people I'm surrounded with, all the people I grew up with, and all the people

00:41:11: about whom I write and for whom I write are still living those lives.

00:41:15: And it seems to me entirely normal to write for those people.

00:41:19: And it's not until I come up against a journalist who says, "Oh, it's so interesting.

00:41:23: People actually have jobs that I think, my gosh, you know, it's really, really interesting

00:41:27: that I had just how middle-class the literary world still is."

00:41:31: Okay.

00:41:32: Last question, then.

00:41:33: You don't feel that you're sort of like, as the writer with the personal background

00:41:38: you have and the story you have, et cetera, do you sometimes feel pushed, au contraire,

00:41:42: to what you just said, to a place where everything anyone always wants to hear from you is the

00:41:49: misery memoir?

00:41:50: No.

00:41:51: I think they're delighted when I don't write about misery.

00:41:53: You know, my publishers are, I mean, who I love, who I love, but if you're here, and

00:42:00: you can see the difference in reaction, my forthcoming novel, I mean, no one dies and

00:42:05: then no one gets sacked, no one has, and everyone's delighted, you know, it's just people falling

00:42:11: in love.

00:42:12: I really love it.

00:42:13: And it's true, I think, you know, I mean, the reason why when you asked me what I want

00:42:16: to talk about, I said I wanted to talk about being a traitor is I feel that almost no matter

00:42:20: what I do, I'm going to be seen to be letting down one side or the other.

00:42:24: Yes.

00:42:25: You know, even asking my parents about stories, it felt to me as if I was betraying them.

00:42:30: Writing that felt like a night of betrayal.

00:42:31: Why am I taking their story and making it public?

00:42:34: Yeah.

00:42:35: And yet it's something I feel I have to do.

00:42:37: Good.

00:42:38: I think that's a good place to end.

00:42:39: Thanks so much, Tesh all.

00:42:40: Thank you.

00:42:41: Thank you.

00:42:42: Thank you.

00:42:43: Thank you.

00:42:44: Thank you.

00:42:45: Thank you.

00:42:46: Thank you, guys.