I'm a big admirer of Tash Aw's writing.

This short work, which appeared very recently, is an expanded version of Aw's 2016 memoir (entitled The Face: Strangers on a Pier). As far as I can tell, the first part is the same, while the second part (Swee Ee or Eternity) is new.

The title is evocative. Strangers may become friends, but at the point where they're described as strangers, they are, well -- unknown, and therefore different, cut off from us. And piers speak of journeys. There's excitement, yes. But because human beings can only be in one place at once, there's also loss, longing, separation. People are going in different directions. No-one's journey is the same as anyone else's.

Essentially, Aw's memoir is an evocation of the gaps between us. Between generations, between classes, between cultures, between people who are aware of a migration in their family and people who aren't (the vast majority of us have ancestors who migrated at some point, remember...).

Put all these gaps together, and we are all strangers on a pier.


All the photos in this post are of places in Perak not that far from Pahit, where one half of Aw's family settled. This is Batu Gajah, 2012

The subtitle is Portrait of a Family. But as Aw reaches back two generations to his grandparents (no-one knows anything about the generation before that), he finds that the portrait is difficult to paint. Even his parents don't talk much about their past: "We do not admit weakness or sadness... Vulnerability is shameful, even taboo; ... poverty is the greatest frailty... Now that we are rich, we do not talk about the past; to study history is backward-looking, and we are only concerned with the future."

His father at one point interrupts his own "boring poor-people stories", sure that "they're not very interesting".



I recognize this from my own family. They weren't ashamed of the past exactly, but they were glad they had outgrown it, so what was the point of talking about it? My mother told me stories sometimes, and I wish I had paid more attention, because now they're just incoherent snippets in my head. But no-one really valued this stuff back then. 

Aw's father's childhood was one of deprivation, but he shows no resentment. Neither do other members of the family: "They are reconciled to society's lack of fairness -- its hierarchy, if you like -- because their stories are underpinned with a natural assumption that they will progress through its ranks... Like most migrants, my father and his Kelantanese clan have uncomplicated aspirations of education, work and upward mobility hardwired into their brains."

That could have been my father speaking. The only migration he undertook was from the Isle of Man to England and back. But he was similarly unsentimental about the past, contented with the present, and willing to leave the future to the next generation, whose path he worked hard to pave. He left school at 14, and learned a trade; he left the Island to look for work. Army service during the war was the only adult education he ever came by. His ambition was to see me getting a good job in a bank...

As I found when I read Beth Yahp's memoir, there are aspects that are very different in our experiences of growing up, because we did it in such different parts of the world, but there also many elements that are curiously familiar.

Aw, from his specifically Malaysian perspective, also reflects on how the idea of reinvention, along with a deterministic kind of modernization, is applied to national narratives.

Yet, whether personally or nationally, we do ourselves a huge disservice by glossing over the messiness of the journey to where we are now.



So, already we have a big divide -- the gulf between generations and their experience.

Add to that another gap -- the one that opens up as people follow different educational pathways. Bit by bit, the students in Aw's secondary school become aware of the differences that exist among them. They start to see how their paths are not just taking them in different directions, but are moving them at different speeds: "In just one year, we have divided, and subdivided ourselves, and it is class, not race, that has created this schism. In just one generation, we have created a society of hierarchy." (And think how this process will have been exacerbated during the pandemic, since the student's position in the socio-economic pyramid massively influences his/her experience of home-based learning.)

Those who are aware of these social distinctions instinctively learn, Aw says, to adjust their language to the different requirements of different classes, even within their own family. He does his best, for example, not to stand out when he goes to stay with his grandparents in their shophouse in Parit, Perak. But he is bothered by the sense that he is an imposter, "someone alien to his own family". He tries to use language that will fit in; he hides the books he is reading and the thoughts he is grappling with.

I recognize this too. Mine was the first generation in our family to set its sights on higher education, and I was a bookish kid. So I also felt different from my parents, especially my father, with his minimal experience of formal education. I also tried to use the kind of language that would fit in. It was my mother who always conspired to undo my aims, with her proud attempts to demonstrate that I was bright. Me, I just wanted to be inconspicuous...



The relatively recent experience of immigration also colours the world view of Aw's grandparents' generation (both grandfathers -- one Hokkien, one Hainanese -- came to Malaysia in the 1920s). He recounts one particularly poignant memory of a conversation between his mother and his grandfather in the latter's shop in Parit. His mother is talking about his sister's homesickness (she has won a high school scholarship to study in Singapore, finds herself among "the most driven teenagers in South East Asia", and has to work furiously just to keep up with the pack). His grandfather doesn't understand any of this. "He had come to Malaysia as a boy with nothing but the shirt on his back; he doesn't understand the meaning of homesickness... And then my grandfather says, simply: 'But we're immigrants.' As if that explained everything. As if hardship and homesickness and melancholy and longing would always be a normal part of our lives. As if we had no reasonable expectation for things to be different... I suddenly saw how I would never truly be able to communicate with him... The impossibility of any convergence between our respective positions became clear in that brief moment. He was an immigrant. I was a grandchild of an immigrant. We would never see the world in the same way."


Gopeng, 2018



The second part of the book recounts the story of Aw's grandmother, born "deep in the jungle" in a year no-one knows. She didn't share much of her story with Aw's mother. Addressing her in his mind, he surmises: "Already, you believed that your story was not important."

This grandma has had hardly anything in the way of formal education, but she's intelligent and quick to learn. She's not at liberty to marry the man she wants, because he's not rich enough to pay a compensatory dowry to the aunt with whom she lives. But marry someone she would have to: "That's how life was back then, you say. What to do? You laugh, and in that little moment of levity I sense how aware you were of your predicament. A young woman with a full life watching on as the world decided her fate for her."

Eventually, she is introduced to the author's grandfather (who already has two children from his late wife): "Among your qualities listed by the matchmaker, the principal one was that you were a strong worker... This refers to a physical as well as emotional resilience... but above all it presumes a natural aptitude for self-sacrifice... Whatever satisfaction you might experience will be derived precisely from this lack of personal joy; you have to find happiness in the absence of happiness... In time you'll find yourself saying of someone: she's had a hard life. It sounds like pity, but is intended as a compliment."

Aw's grandmother manages to transcend this courageous but drab stoicism. There is a lightness to her personality. She revolutionizes her husband's shop, and makes it thrive. She is protective towards him, trying not to let it show that she is brighter and warmer than he is.

It is his grandmother who encourages Aw to shrug off race-based taunts (Cina babi, balik Tongsan...): "In those moments, I knew that your denial of the insult was a form of protection; your silence was an expression of love."





Interleaved with these memories of his grandmother are Aw's own experiences of estrangement: at university in England, where he struggles to understand, yet also does instinctively understand, his fellow-students' carefully cultivated air of self-deprecation and nonchalance, or where he is taken aback by a companion's ruthless dissection of her relationship with her mother; or on holiday in France, where he watches people passionately taking part in a demonstration, convinced that "they could shape the country that belonged to them".

And, most movingly, on a bus in Singapore, where he watches a Filipina talk on the phone to her small child. It's a familiar scenario: "Stories of parents forced to leave their children in search of work were so much part of my consciousness that I never thought of them as unusual... The casual vagueness of these incidental tales ... speaks not only of the normality of separation, but of the pain that it produces, so deep that it can't be spoken of in any other way than perfunctorily." But witnessing that conversation in Singapore, he realizes something of what that generation must have felt when their parents left them, or when they left their children.

They explain it like this: "We did it so that you would never have to do the same."

So Aw realizes that for his family and others like them, "separation is an expression of love. Not just in the physical sense, but in the way we think. We want our children to have an education and a job, to experience life in the way we never could, knowing that everything they gain will make them more distant from us. Loving someone means separating yourself from them. The future is lived vicariously through their achievements: their lives must follow an upward trajectory. They must not fail. That is what social mobility means in Asia today."

A poignant, elegiac read, then. Full of pain, but also of wisdom and love and gratitude. I wish I could paint my family with the same elegance.