Tash Aw: "The worst thing about some marriages is not that they break, but that they are condemned to survive"

BarcelonaAlthough We, the Survivors (Les Hores/Anagrama) is the first novel by Tash Aw (Taipei, 1971) that we can read in Catalan, the work of this author born in Taiwan, raised in Malaysia, and emigrated to the United Kingdom has had a remarkable international journey for two decades. With his debut, The Harmony Silk Factory (Harper, 2005; in Spanish at Salamandra, with the title La fábrica de sedas), he was already a Booker finalist, a merit he has repeated on two more occasions: with Five Star Billionaire (Fourth State, 2013) and also with We, the Survivors. Translated into more than twenty languages (in Catalan by Míriam Cano), Tash Aw explores in his novels the day-to-day life of the Malaysian working class. We, the Survivors narrates, with remarkable precision and subtlety, the sexual awakening of a 16-year-old boy in parallel with his parents' marital crisis and his relationship with his sisters.

We, the Survivors is set in the Malaysia of 1997. While young people sing the latest hit by Toni Braxton at karaoke, the country is witnessing a deep economic crisis and suffering an episode of extreme drought as a result of the El Niño weather phenomenon.

— My project as a writer is to record the changes that Malaysia has experienced over the last century. I do not want to do this from a global perspective, but rather by focusing on a very small group of people, which in the case of The South is a single family that I plan to follow throughout four novels. Things have changed a lot, in Southeast Asia, during this time. We came from war, then we lived through the end of colonialism, then we suffered a period of social chaos and finally a stage of very intense economic growth arrived. There are many transformations in a relatively short period of time, and my will is to explain them before they are forgotten.

Does his family still live in Kuala Lumpur?

— Yes. My sisters and I grew up between Kuala Lumpur and the countryside. Our parents had little time for us and sent us to our grandparents, who lived in rural areas. In Malaysia, living in the countryside is not a bourgeois gesture, unlike what happens in the United Kingdom. It means you are poor. Spending time in the countryside with my grandparents and other relatives made me feel like an outsider. Even though we didn't have much money in the city, I saw myself as privileged because I went to school, read books, and watched movies.

Although he studied law at Cambridge, he ended up dedicating himself to literature. Was it difficult for him to make his way?

— Without a doubt. When you come from a country like Malaysia, most people don't know what that implies. It has nothing to do with being a French author who is part of a long literary tradition. It's like coming from a void. Furthermore, since we have a colonial past, we haven't even been able to explain ourselves. Some of the first English and American editors who evaluated my literature didn't even know exactly where Malaysia was.

Their trajectory already exceeds two decades.

— Being able to continue writing seems like luck to me, especially considering that I always speak of a country that the world does not take into account. My family and the country where I grew up were, for years, my only universe. When I arrived in England, I realized that my country did not matter to anyone. With the books I have written, I have wanted to give the same space and the same literary dimension to characters who come from a reality, that of Malaysia, which is completely unknown. My vocation is not to explain it to foreigners, but to narrate it from within.

You have always written in English, haven't you?

— The perspective I give to my books is that of working-class literature. The English journalists who interviewed me for my previous novel, We, the survivors [2019], told me that it was the first time they had read a story that explained the day-to-day life of a worker at their job. In most books we know that the protagonists work, but we never see them working. I would like that to change, which is why in the novels I write, working life is so present.

In The South there are a few pages dedicated to the work done on the farm where Jay and his family spend the summer during which the book takes place.

— A few years before writing The South, which takes the form of a novel but draws on people I have known and transformed into fiction, I wrote a short memoir, Strangers on a pier [2016; in Spanish in Mutatis Mutandis, with the title Extraños en el muelle], with the intention that my parents would read it. Their first reaction was to get angry with me. "Why do you write that we were poor?", they asked me. I replied that it was true. It saddens me that my parents believe that people like them do not deserve to appear in books.

Jay's parents, Jack and Sui Ching, are going through a major moment of crisis in the novel.

— You are right. The worst thing about some marriages is not that they break, but that they are condemned to survive.

Jay, who is 16 years old, is about to discover desire and love. In The South various types of love are discussed: the one you feel for someone you are attracted to, the one shared between siblings, the one experienced with parents... Do you agree with this?

— It is a novel about what love implies. The first experience of love that we feel comes from our parents. If we have been lucky enough to receive love from our parents, we know that it is not an unconditional love. It carries expectations and demands. Parents tell you that they want you to be happy, but it is not quite like that. They want you to be happy, but in the way that they believe you should be.

If we translate this love to romantic relationships, in Jay's case there is a secret he hasn't told anyone: he is attracted to boys and that makes him feel ashamed. Do you think this shame has to do with the era in which he is growing up, with his family, or with his social environment?

— It has to do, above all, with the social environment. Any queer person realizes immediately that society is going in another direction and that it will be difficult for them to be accepted. When you turn 15 and you know you are queer, you remember the previous 15 years, in which you have been seeing and have been shown how boys should behave. Jay has been hearing for a long time that he is a sissy, that he is bad at sports, and that he is effeminate.

Jay, however, is lucky enough to meet Chuan. Both are attracted to each other. If the love of a marriage is doomed to perpetuate itself, a youthful love between two such different boys is likely to fall apart.

— For a queer person it is very difficult to find their way in life until they meet people from their community. They tend to be outsiders like them.

In his case, he left his country and settled in England, where he made a name for himself as a writer. For a few years now, he has swapped England for Paris. Has it been difficult for him to adapt to this new change?

— There is a very important book by the Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, La double absence [The Double Absence, 1999], where he explains how immigrants are incapable, on one hand, of integrating into the host country and, on the other, they also do not feel that they are fully part of the country they left. Several young academics have tried to reverse this idea by saying that the immigrant experience is one of double presence, because you can live in both spaces: the country of origin and the host country. In my case, from a very young age, I lived through experiences of exclusion regarding race, sexuality, and social class. I learned how I had to behave in each case, but at the same time, I felt like an outsider. That is why I would tell you that everywhere I go, I feel like an outsider who, at the same time, strives to find their concrete spaces and inhabit them fully.

Earlier you mentioned to me that your parents did not take your memoir well. The South feeds on real events and characters. How have they taken it?

— I suspect that they do not read me. But to preserve our relationship right now we do not need to. When we talk we always discuss the same topics: if it is hot, if it rains a lot, if the doctor's bill is expensive, if the price of vegetables has gone up. The books I write confirm the distance that exists between my parents and me. There is a painful and emotional essay by Alice Walker, My Father's Country is Poverty [1977], where she recalls the closeness with her father, who was illiterate, and how after the first semester at university an abyss opened up between them. Walker admits that she no longer knew how to communicate with him. They had lost the language they shared. This fact often occurs in the children of families who have migrated. The new generation feels from another place, while the previous one, the one that made the change of country, still tries to retain the bonds with the past.

He found a way to explain his family through fiction and in another language.

— And I will continue to do so. Through fiction, I can write completely honestly about my parents' marriage or about what Jay feels. In the best of cases, fiction allows you to change real-life details to end up being more real than life itself. Also, to cause you more pain.