1.
Rani Manicka, 2003, The Rice Mother

This is a big, sprawling family saga. It starts with young Lakshmi's journey from Sri Lanka to Malaysia, accompanying her much older and much duller husband, who's been a little economical with the truth, it turns out, with regard to his social and economic position. It covers three generations, and the Japanese invasion.

There is definitely some truth to the accusation that it's overly complex, ambitious and overcoloured. Some of the plot resolutions are frankly garish (Dimple's husband, Luke, for example, is just too monstrous).

But as an aficionada of such entertainments, I was duly entertained.

I soaked up the "wonderful tapestry" of Ceylonese-Malaysian life: the lushness of the jungle, the harshness of women's lives, the persistent undercurrent of the supernatural, and the charms and frustrations of small-town Kuantan.





And I think I know something of the way one generation always seems to disappoint its predecessor, particularly if that preceding cohort forged its path through deprivation and adversity. Lakshmi is a wonderful portrait of an indomitable, endlessly resourceful woman. But how to follow that act? None of us can do it. We all live with the unspoken reproach: "After all that we gave you, from the little we had, is that all you can manage?" It's hard to live with. And that fundamental, insoluble conflict comes across very powerfully in The Rice Mother.

2.
Edited by Amir Hafizi, 2013, KL Noir: White



There has been, it seems, a bit of a revolution in Malaysian reading habits. Noir is in.

I had to try some of this stuff out, and started with the "White" volume in the KL Noir series (actually the second in the series of four). As the subtitle puts it, "Without shadows, there can be no light."

If you want a summary of the gist and flavour of the stories, this reviewer kindly obliges. This one, on the other hand, seems a little shocked.

I found it an interesting read, primarily because I live here.

Chow Kit, our nearby breakfast haunt, gets lots of mentions -- and not for its breakfasts.



Homelessness figures heavily. Vengeance crimes are big, usually committed (of course) by the person you would not suspect.

My favourite was Breadwinner, by Hadi M. Nor, which is very restrained by the standards of the rest of the anthology. Teenage son wakes up one night to find dad (supposedly "a driver for a bigshot" but obviously much more) has just committed a murder, and needs son's help to tidy it away. The story ends as it began: "Ayah was rarely present in our lives. But we have food on our plates. And that's all that matters."





3.
Rehman Rashid, 2016, Peninsula: A Story of Malaysia

The author says, "I live for stories", and already he has me hooked. Rehman Rashid's first book, A Malaysian Journey, was the first serious thing I ever read about Malaysia. I actually have a signed copy, though not dedicated to me. "For [someone else]," it says on the title page, "with fondness and respect, Rehman, 16/1/93". That was the year of its publication. It must only just have come out. I acquired it in a New Zealand second-hand book-shop, on my birthday in the year 2000, when I was just beginning to get interested in Southeast Asia.

At a time when I'm wondering about endings, I find Rashid's account of the end of his 30 years in journalism very poignant. "The story continued, of course. That's what true stories do. Regimes, careers, loves and lives end. Dreams, hopes and expectations too. Stories go on forever; they'd outlast eternity if they cold. I was glad I lived for them; nothing else was left."

I find that curiously liberating. Reminds me of some of the gems from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: "There's no such thing as an ending; just a place where you leave the story"; and "I thought, how many new lives can we have? Then I thought, as many as we like."

So the book does not purport to be an all-embracing history. It is a collection of stories. But there are many very penetrating chapters. I particularly like, for example, the analysis of eduction: "The four separate and autonomous strands of education in Malaya, Malay, Tamil, Chinese and English, emerged from the end of empire like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse". Another chapter deals with the "orang asal", and the "deep ambivalence [that] haunts the Malays over their native fellow citizens and Bumiputra". Yet others poignantly document the migrants in Malaysia, for whom "this country is paradise", or the complex "fourth constituency" ("an amalgamation of their antecedents and separate from them"), or the diaspora: "Even those who would never go back to Malaysia... would have in their hearts a place of that name, attached to their memories of childhood and youth". Possibly most controversial is his chapter on "vox pop", and "the loathing of the newly liberated online masses [which] had a most debilitating effect on governance".

In closing, this from a grudgingly sympathetic reviewer:

"Because we know so little of each other, it is incumbent on all of us to tell our own stories, so that we may know and understand each other better, so that the world knows and understands us better, and leave no gaps for those with an agenda to fill with their own interpretations of who we are, where we come from, and where we hope to go from here. And it's up to us to preserve these stories, too.

"Hence, even the extremist, garish voices calling for the supremacy of one group above the others must be heard, said Rehman. Their stories are also Malaysian ones and without the voices from the fringes, how are we to get the whole picture?"

The power of stories...