For me, Malaysian novelist Tash Aw just gets better and better... I really enjoyed Five Star Billionaire, but We, the Survivors, which I've just finished listening to, is a notch up again.

Compassionately but unflinchingly, it chronicles the life of the struggler class. For this group, money is tight; space is limited; and opportunities are thin on the ground. Margins are lean, and there is no buffer anywhere. One fateful slip, and everything you have painfully striven for goes up in smoke.

It is the story of poor Malaysians, and the poor of other countries who come to Malaysia to work.

But it could be the story of many places. It represents the lives of millions of people for whom acute vulnerability is an everyday reality, and yet other millions who manage to get their foot on the ladder only to see their world come crashing down.

It's a book that invites you to empathize, to think: "What would I have done with this meagre hand?"

In fact, the subject matter developed from Tash Aw's observations of his own life and family:

"The story of my family is the story of modern Southeast Asia: in just one generation, we have managed to separate ourselves into two very distinct worlds. We are taught to believe that the lives we have are the lives we deserve, and that success is available to all. But the truth is that agency is only one part of the story, and only a small majority have truly benefited from thirty years of intense social mobility. Those cousins who remain trapped in tough jobs in the countryside are no less intelligent or hardworking than the people I know who work in investment banks in Kuala Lumpur, but their lives couldn’t be more different... Just as it is impossible to separate the two parts of my family -- the two parts of ME -- it is impossible to ignore the people being left behind in a rapidly globalizing world." 


(The photos in this post were taken in 2011 in Klang and Kuala Selangor, two of the areas where the novel's action is focused)





We, the Survivors is about (and is told by) Lee Hock Lye (Ah Hock). Right from the beginning we know he has killed someone, and has served time in prison because of that crime. The rest of the story traces the path that brought him to that point, exposing both the personal mistakes and the systemic failures that together led to an action he will never escape from.

Yes, he could have been more enterprising. Yes, he could have TOLD his boss when a major problem started to develop on the fish farm where he worked, rather than trying to cobble together a solution that looked ever-more risky. Yes, he could have been stronger in resisting the siren voice of the malevolent Keong.

But what could he have done against the climate change that wrecked his mother's farm, or against the Asian Financial Crisis that lost him his restaurant job in KL, or against the interdependence that yokes local livelihoods to the whims and passions of cultures half-way round the globe? What, nearer to home, could he have done to combat institutionalized racism, or to stave off the poverty that put him at the mercy of Keong in the first place?

But Ah Hock is not at all given to self-pity. As Lily Meyer puts it, "his mix of remorse, acceptance, and hope is profoundly moving".





The other theme of the book -- or rather the same theme but magnified, like the shadow cast by a wayang kulit puppet -- is the life of the immigrant.

We come into contact with the whole gamut of mobile people -- documented and undocumented; migrant workers and refugees; people who are working, people who are too sick to work, people who have absconded because they are simply too weak to carry on. And we hear about or cross paths with the middle men who facilitate (and profit from) every wretched stage of this mobility.

Ah Hock comments at one point that what migrant workers need, above anything else -- above better pay, and better rights, and better status -- is work that does not break their bodies. This reminded me of The Year of the Runaways, which was also striking in its presentation of strong young bodies gradually succumbing to the constant punishment of relentless, gruelling, manual labour.





The structure -- which cuts backwards and forwards in time -- is a little confusing as an audiobook. And I wondered about the way Tan Su-Min is portrayed. She is the counterpoint to Ah Hock. Now returned to Malaysia after gaining a postgraduate qualification at a US university, she is the one who is interviewing Ah Hock, and recording his story, and I felt we needed either more about her or less. She remains a bit of a caricature.

Something of a human relationship develops between interviewer and interviewee (she shops for him when she sees his health is suffering from poor nutrition; he pays the bribe to get her car released from the clutches of the Kuala Lumpur traffic cops...) but we never quite trust Su-Min. She has noble ideas (she takes part in anti-corruption demonstrations, and denounces her one-time partner's right-wing ideas) but as she listens to Ah Hock's story, she decides to turn it into a book, which does feel a bit exploitative. The last chapter narrates the book launch, where Ah Hock feels about as comfortable as one of his erstwhile tilapia out of water.

Lily Meyer wonders whether this interviewer role is actually necessary: "Often as I read, I found myself wondering why Su-Min was there. Maybe she serves as what the writer Zadie Smith has called 'scaffolding,' helping Aw build his story and ideas. Or maybe her presence is more insidious. Su-Min does not intend to assert power over Ah Hock, but she still does [by making money out his story]. By putting Su-Min in We, the Survivors, it's possible that Aw does the same."

Is Aw pillorying himself in the guise of the PC, liberal, well-meaning, but comfortably-off, cushioned, and ultimately oblivious Su-Min?

Ultimately, I'd agree with Anthony Cummins. This is "a brutally discomfiting tale of social inequality in Malaysia", but Aw's "achievement is to make a global story personal".

Aw's Ah Hock is infinitely believable, and at the end of the day, there is nothing quite so moving as the story of a human life.