If the American dream of the 21st century has relocated to China, Shanghai is today’s New York. That, at least, is the vibrant impression created by Tash Aw‘s third novel, set in a frenetic megacity of 20 million people, where fortunes are made and lost with vertiginous speed against the highrise Pudong skyline. “When you’re in Shanghai, you feel an energy so blinding that you get swept up,” Aw says. “It’s only when you leave that it feels unreal.”
Five Star Billionaire
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Tash Aw
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Five Star Billionaire depicts the Chinese dream in a snakes-and-ladders universe of opportunity and ruin, through the eyes of Chinese Malaysians – from tycoons to factory girls – trying their luck in the new China. For Aw, whose own ancestors made the reverse journey out of southern China to Malaya, and who moved to England as a student in the early 1990s, this novel is about the people he grew up with, and is his “most personal” book.
His 2005 debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, set in 1940s British Malaya on the brink of Japanese invasion, won the Costa (Whitbread) first novel award and a Commonwealth Writers prize. It was on various longlists, including the Man Booker and the International Impac Dublin prize, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. The Indonesian setting of his second novel, Map of the Invisible World, published four years later, marked Aw, now 41, as part of a rising generation of south-east-Asian-born writers who are remapping the region with little heed to existing national frontiers. Aw, who has a kinship with Tan Twan Eng, author of the Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists, casts one eye on the past in a place whose full-throttle growth leaves scant time for the backward glance. “I’m not naturally nostalgic for a cosy, bygone era,” he says, “but a lot of my work is concerned with what we give up in the march forwards.”
He lives alone in a basement flat near Old Street in east London, with a tiny garden in which he grows bamboo and banana palms. Bashful about being there for 12 years, he murmurs: “There’s a lack of momentum.” He visits Asia “several times a year”, and can reel off the merits of its cities and street food from Bali to Penang. Compared with Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta, he says, “Shanghai is the only big city where you can go for a stroll. It’s slower and very seductive, with real soul and romance.” A Malaysian national, and now teaching in Singapore for part of the year, he launched his new novel in the city-state last month, and in Malaysia, both of which he sees as “home territory”.
Twenty years ago, he says, “people of my generation would gravitate towards the great cities of the west,” but he began travelling to China a decade ago because he “was struck that more and more people seeking a better life abroad seemed to be heading to China”. The new novel was sparked by some “weird coincidences”, he says. “I kept bumping into people who knew people who knew me from childhood. I’d hear Malaysian accents across a restaurant, then actively search them out.” Glancing connections emerge between five main characters, including a “philanthropist” who writes self-help books, and a spa receptionist who devours them. There is a pop idol who disgraced himself in a brawl, a political radical turned businesswoman and a real estate dealer who burns out, his own desires subordinate to crushing family duty. As Aw sees it, “his secure place comes at a price. One sees that a lot in Asia.”
The chapter headings, such as “Move to Where the Money Is”, borrow from Chengyu – Chinese idioms of parental advice – that have been hijacked within contemporary culture to serve a ruthless self-advancement. He read over people’s shoulders on the Shanghai Metro. “Eight out of 10 bestsellers in Asian bookshops are self-help books. They’ve adopted the worst American excesses and run with them.” That may be most evident in advice to women on “How to snare a rich husband”. He laments the “culture of ’remaindered women’, who are still single after the age of 26 – which is every woman I know in Shanghai. They have the outward trappings of modern, feminist success, but their lives are geared to despairingly searching for a husband. It’s atavistic.” In a novel of missed connections, characters can prove as fake as the handbags in Shanghai’s markets. “People are incredibly lonely in this huge city, twice the size of London,” Aw says. “They’re swept up by the tide of energy and forget what they’re looking for. The don’t just want money or a business deal, but something deeper.”
Two writer’s residencies in Shanghai between 2009 and 2011 helped him shed some prejudices, on internet censorship, for example: “People think the Chinese must live in total ignorance, but Chinese my age are so skilled, they have access to everything they want. There are blogs and Twitter – but in Chinese, so most people don’t read them. I saw more freedom of speech in Shanghai than I see in Singapore or Thailand.” China “exists on so many levels. The official level is incredibly chauvinist, and the patriarchal system drives me nuts – it reminds me of my upbringing. But when you get past that it’s like any other Asian city: there’s a colour, vitality, local and regional identities.”
When in Shanghai, he lived in a block where the average age was over 70, and people had endured China’s cultural revolution of 1966-76. “But even though they’ve been through such a lot, I was the recipient of so many acts of kindness every day.” His understanding has another source. “I have first cousins from a branch that didn’t make it out of rural Malaysia, from a horrible little village. My parents were lucky – they went to college and moved to Kuala Lumpur, so I had a suburban childhood. To them, China represents opportunity. When I see it through their eyes, it’s a marvellous thing.”
He was born in 1971 in Taipei, to Malaysian parents working in the Taiwanese capital. His father was an electrical engineer, and his mother a quantity surveyor. By the time he came back to Malaysia he already felt like an outsider. He grew up in ethnic Chinese neighbourhoods. His parents were from “very poor backgrounds”, their families part of the large-scale migration from China to Malaya from the 19th century to the 1930s. Aw, who grew up speaking Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese and English, regrets that he never learned his father’s Hainanese dialect, a “magical, warm, rich and unsual language. It wasn’t considered an educated dialect so he didn’t speak to us in it.” Nor did he know his mother’s Hokkien dialect, so he found it hard to communicate with his cousins, which reinforced his sense of being an outsider.
All his grandparents lived “deep in the heart of the Malaysian jungle”, in the Kinta valley, the setting for his first novel. He recalls “terrifying and exciting” school holidays in his grandmother’s house on the banks of a “big muddy river”, where his uncle still lives. “Big extended Chinese families can be warm and enveloping, not just ghastly structures. But the house was rudimentary, with monitor lizards eating shit off the outside toilets, and rats in the rooms.” During the second world war, the area had been a support base for Chinese communist guerrilla resistance to the Japanese occupation of 1942-45. “So entire villages were singled out for brutal treatment by the Japanese army. I’m not sure if my maternal grandfather was tortured, but I know that behind the silence there were untold stories.”
While, to his own generation, “Japan meant cool, electronic gadgets,” his parents grew up with ”anti-Japanese sentiment in their blood”. That animosity might have been behind their perverse choice of a Ford Cortina when Malaysia’s prime minister Mahathir Mohamad launched his “Buy British Last” campaign in 1981, and urged the country to look east towards Japan. “The wave of nationalism was strange,” Aw recalls. “The street names were changed to Malaysian ones, but the middle classes were still speaking to each other in English.”
In the late 1970s and 80s, “we were distracted because we were all getting richer. I was only a teenager, but I knew something was not right; that we should be thinking more about where we came from and who we were. Who are the indigenous people, the bumiputra or ‘sons of the earth’? There have been immigrant Chinese families in Malaysia for 200 years. Where do they fit, if not as part of the fabric of the country?”
One cost of what Aw terms “this crazy march forward” was the “gleeful destruction of old buildings in the name of anti-colonialism. It’s only now, when we’re settled and affluent, that we think: ‘Oh my God, what did we do?’ Old mansions have been replaced by giant, soulless shopping malls.”
In his ambitions as a writer, Aw had ”zero role models. My parents encouraged reading, but to pass exams.” He came to Cambridge to study law in 1991. Writing his first novel, he worked as an auction-house porter and a Chinese-language tutor, before the need for money drove him into a law firm for four years. He quit in 2002 to enrol at the University of East Anglia’s creative writing school (“very cutthroat”) and sold his debut novel by the end of the academic year. Though keen on Conrad, he found much writing about his native region, from Anthony Burgess to JG Farrell, “unsatisfactory – it didn’t speak to me”. Somerset Maugham was “invariably writing about white people – except for coolies or servants, who were slightly shifty”. Though he admires the Malaysian writer KS Maniam, he felt, along with Tan, that “we had to reinvent the south-east Asian novel”. His narratives circle events, viewing the same scenes through different eyes – reflecting his quarrel with “how history is rewritten in a country like Malaysia. A lot of modern Asian narratives seek refuge in homogeneity. But we know it doesn’t exist.”
He grew up with TV dramas and music from the giant neighbour, Indonesia. Map of the Invisible World is a tale of two separated orphans during President Sukarno‘s “year of living dangerously”, a time of anti-communist purges. The two countries, Aw says, are spoken of as brothers, united by a common language and religion. “We were supposed to bond against the Zionist-supporting Singapore, with its pork-eating Chinese population. But people forget Malaysia was Sukarno’s arch enemy”, during Konfrontasi – Indonesia’s undeclared war against Malaysia. Aw’s impulse was the “sense of losing our past. My parents’ generation lived through it, but mine had no idea.”
Countries are “absurdly retreating into the security of borders”, he says, “but coming from a small country, you can’t help but see Malaysia’s place in a wider world”. That vision may chime with a growing readership in Asia’s burgeoning leisured classes, with the new-found time to look back. For Aw, dislocation from the past “invariably means you’re not going to know where your future lies”.
Tash Aw: a life in writing
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