Tash Aw On Starting An Epic Novel Quartet

Twenty years into his life as a published novelist, Tash Aw is considering the creative freedom that comes with surrendering control: of allowing himself to write without fully understanding how a novel will eventually take shape, what its characters’ trajectories will look like, what they’re thinking and feeling. We are talking about The South, the first in a planned quartet of novels exploring the lives of the Lim family; Aw is halfway through writing the second instalment, which, he tells me, is “not going to plan, but going well”.

Ambiguity and suggestiveness have been present in his previous four novels – 2005’s The Harmony Silk Factory, which won the Whitbread prize for a debut novel and was longlisted for the Booker; Map of the Invisible World (2009); Five Star Billionaire (2013); and 2019’s We, the Survivors – but now his impatience with fiction that declares itself too certain of its material, of the realities and contours of the lives it depicts, seems palpable.

The South, he tells me from Kuala Lumpur, where he grew up and still visits regularly from his home in Paris, was originally conceived as an 800-page epic. “That was the whole driving force behind the novel. And then I realised that, actually, I don’t have the stamina or the desire or the interest to read a book like that any more, and so as a writer, it felt slightly artificial to me to want to force myself through such a project. There’s something very hyper-masculine about writing a book like that.”

He’s not just talking about the number of pages, but of the claims of narrative authority implicit in much panoramic fiction. “You’re looking at a group of people living through a certain time, a certain period, and assuming that you understand everything that’s gone on in that period; that you understand how those people have survived those historical forces. And in fact, you haven’t. What I wanted to do was to reverse this kind of top-down understanding of what an epic novel is and build it from the bottom up.”

And as we talk about the writers who have influenced him – James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras, Toni Morrison and, among contemporary writers, Édouard Louis and Rachel Cusk – it’s apparent that Aw is interested in the kind of fictional space that doesn’t have rigid precedents and defined parameters; that can attempt a form of radical indeterminacy.

Consequently, The South, which is set in rural Malaysia over the course of a few weeks in 1997, barely mentions what is going on outside the Lim family’s visit to the farm that once belonged to the Lim children’s recently dead grandparents, and which is now in a state of disrepair and financial precarity. “It’s the year of the Asian financial crisis,” Aw explains, “which was much worse, much more violent, much more sudden and widespread than the global financial crisis that happened 11 or 12 years later. People were losing their jobs and banks were running out of money. There’s a sense of incredible anxiety, but within this, there is one family just trying to get on with their lives.”

The novel switches between characters, time frames and first- and third-person narration, but at its centre is 16-year-old Jay. He is conscious of the fissures in his parents’ marriage and of his older sisters’ passage into adulthood and independence, but more concentrated on a growing awareness of his own sexuality, which finds expression in a secret love affair with Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager. “Jay is a substitute for me,” Aw says. “I’m trying to recreate how I understood life at that point, and the answer is that I didn’t. So the whole subversion of the epic form is very important to me. Because I don’t think people think of their lives in terms of a continuous or coherent narrative. I think we experience life in a very fragmented way.”

For Aw, that sense of fragmentation had several determining factors. Both his grandfathers had left southern China in the 1920s for the Malay Peninsula, in flight from the political instability and widespread famine that marked, as Aw wrote in his memoir Strangers on a Pier, “the fresh ruins of a thousand years of Imperial rule”. They were from different regions and spoke different languages, and both relied on the networks of family, friends and acquaintances who had made the journey before them. But as Aw grew up, the details of this immense undertaking of departure and resettlement were shrouded in silence. When questioned by his son, his father dismissed them as “boring poor-people stories” – perhaps because he didn’t want them to overshadow the family’s new, prosperous, free life.

But it is also more complicated than the mere wish for a fresh start. Key to understanding the mental landscape of post-colonialism, Aw tells me, is grasping the role of shame. After Malaysia gained independence from British rule in 1957, he argues, the country’s development was driven by “a shame that functioned at so many different levels. On the deepest and least articulated level, it’s the shame at a certain powerlessness and not being in control of your own narrative, which is why you have wholesale reinventions happening in the 70s and 80s. And this occurs on a national level as well as an individual level. You have the renaming of all the streets in the city. You have people creating narratives for themselves, and a lot of that is an immediate response to poverty. And what you have also is rampant development: the economic development particularly in urban centres in south-east Asia is a response to the shame of having been colonised. So the easiest way to overturn that shame and recapture a sense of belonging and a sense of power and propriety is to be rich.”

The painful result of that rapid, dizzying redrawing of society is an increased gap between rich and poor, even, as Aw points out, within single families, “which is, I think, the real tragedy for a lot of Asian families. What do you do when suddenly families separate from each other, and are forced to confront a whole branch still living in the countryside, in a house that is crumbling, without an education, without really any future. What are you supposed to do with this physical reminder of your kin that is visibly being left behind? That’s something that I and many, many other people grew up with.”

He also grew up with the racism that was directed towards the Malaysian Chinese. “Before I even knew what it was to be gay, I knew what it was to be Chinese, and I knew what it was to be hated because you were Chinese,” he says. This trifecta of experiences – a family tending towards silence, antipathy towards the Chinese, and an emerging sense of his queerness – led to an ability to pass beneath the radar, to become invisible in potentially hostile situations. But ultimately, he believes, the danger of decentring yourself is self-erasure.

“This is one of the things I write about in Strangers on a Pier: how resistant my parents and most people of their generation are to being written about, because that means being in some way visible. Because they don’t want to be seen as exceptional in any way, they contribute to their absence in literature. And that was why I found it very dispiriting when I was growing up and thinking, why – even in the literature of Malaysia – are ethnic minorities invisible? Why are Chinese people invisible when actually they’re everywhere in real life?”

Migration has been crucial to Aw’s life and to his work; he left Kuala Lumpur to become a student at Cambridge, Warwick and finally on the creative writing MA course at the University of East Anglia. After living in London, he made his home in Paris where he enjoys the stability that comes from the controlled rents of “a slightly socialist city”. This year, though, he is living in Berlin as a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) artists-in-Berlin programme, which has previously hosted writers including WH Auden and Susan Sontag, the film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky and artists such as Nan Goldin and Marina Abramović.

He is aware that living a life of contrasts is crucial to his work, exposing him to different literary structures and practices: “For me, not being in one place – spending time in Malaysia, spending time in Britain, spending time in France – is important because it means I’m not allowed to fall into a quagmire of comfortable notions of what is good writing.”

Now in Berlin, he must continue with volume two of his quartet, which will see Jay in Britain and “having a gay life, which makes him inhabit his body in a more real sense, but which runs contrary to his instinct to be invisible”. When we started talking, he told me that part of the enticement of the project was not even knowing whether he’d be able to complete it; by the end of our conversation, I feel sure that he will.