Southeast Asian Literature: 2013

Thursday 28 March 2013

Buddhist text's true author identified as Thai woman | Samanthi Dissanayake

Khunying Yai Damrongthammasan was
wealthy and extremely devout

A little-known Thai woman has been identified by researchers as the most likely author of an important Buddhist treatise, previously attributed to a high-profile monk.

Thammanuthamma-patipatti is a set of dialogues, supposedly between two prominent Thai monks last century.

It had been attributed to one of them - Venerable Luang Pu Mun Bhuridatta.

But scholars believe it was really by a female devotee, making her one of the first Thai women to write such a text.

Printed in five parts between 1932-1934, initially without a named author, Thammanuthamma-patipatti (Practice in perfect conformity with the Dhamma) is viewed in Thailand as a valuable and profound Buddhist text which deals with Buddhism's different stages of awakening.

Dr Martin Seeger from the University of Leeds believes he has traced the authorship of the text to one Khunying Yai Damrongthammasan - a wealthy and extremely devout woman who developed an impressive knowledge of Buddhist scriptures during her lifetime.

The Price We Paid: The Troubled History of Cambodian Literature

Cambodian literature is something of a unique creation, born from a tragic national history and a culture of oral storytelling. Vincent Wood explores the history of Cambodia's literature and the struggles faced by Khmer writers in the twentieth century.

“Historically, only a small portion of Cambodia’s population is literate and so large parts of the storytelling traditions of the country are oral and based in local folklore. These stories are heavily influenced by the predominant religions of Buddhism and Hinduism and also reflect the cultural influence of nearby India. The oldest such example is the Reamker, a Cambodian version of the Indian epic Ramayana that is staged theatrically with dance alongside the verses.For most of Cambodia's history, written literature was, for the most part, restricted to the royal courts or Buddhist monasteries of the country.

In 1863 Cambodia became a protectorate of France, bringing new literary attitudes and technologies to the country; by 1908 the first book in Khmer was printed in Pnom Penh. This allowed a new flowering of Cambodian literature and by 1954 the Khmer Writers’ Association had been set up in order to promote writing, as well as introduce new themes and direction to literature.”

Monday 18 March 2013

An audience with Tan Twan Eng, winner of this year's Man Asian Literary Prize | Kate Whitehead

“Tan Twan Eng knows all there is to know about Japanese gardens, can tell you all about Boer war postmarks, and he's even something of an expert on tattoos. It all went into his second novel, The Garden of the Evening Mists, which last week won the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize. Not that the Malaysian lawyer turned author has much of a green thumb. In fact, he admits to having absolutely no interest in gardening. "One of the reasons it took so long to write the book was because I was very reluctant to write about gardening. I kept trying to think of ways to circumvent it."

But there was no way around it - the garden is central to the novel. It's a character in its own right, he says. And all the time he was trying to avoid writing about it, gardens were seeping into his life. "My friends in Cape Town constantly talk about their gardens or some flower, or they go to the west coast because the flowers are in bloom and you can see fields of them. So listening to them, I suppose I was influenced."

What was a KL city boy doing in Cape Town? It all started in 2004 when he decided to take what he calls a "gap year". But it was anything but a year of lolling around. He was an intellectual property specialist in a prestigious law firm but he was losing interest in the law and wanted an excuse to get away for a little while. His exit ticket was a master's degree at Cape Town University.”

The unfinished Maria | Gilda Cordero-Fernando

MARIA was patterned after Tingting’s daughter Liaa Cojuangco,
when she was a teenager. The artist had a crush on her and
clipped her photos from newspapers. Art by Antonio Mahilum

“Mariang Alimango is one of several Cinderella-type stories in Philippine literature. In the 1990s I wanted to make it into an illustrated children’s book in two languages, the Filipino part by Virgilio S. Almario, who has since become National Artist, and the English part by me.

I engaged a relatively unknown representational painter named Antonio Mahilum to do the illustrations, since I had seen his fantastic craftsmanship in a brochure. What he lacked in imagination, I thought cockily, I’d supply. The paintings were to be in oil, about 2 ½ x 2 ½ ft size canvases.

It had never been specified that Maria’s family was poor. Since GCF Books then was working on a “Philippine Ancestral Houses” book, I thought I’d give Maria a beautiful dwelling like the one we had photographed in Bustos, Bulacan.

Then I got more ambitious. I thought the book should also serve as a children’s primer on old houses. It would be useful also as a model for adult artists, who drew such awful bahay-na-bato as I often saw in weekend magazines.

Every object in Maria’s house was to be authentic to the period. Since Maria was treated like a servant, she had to be in the kitchen most of the time, so that, too, would be meticulously equipped.”

Future of Filipino ‘komiks’ still not within reach of ordinary readers

The team behind “The Lam-Ang Experiment”: (From left) Michael Layug, Eugene Cruz,
Michael Co, Mac Ballesteros, and Michael Magpantay. Photo by August Dela Cruz

“The people of CreaM (Creative Media and Film Society of the Philippines) have created a comic book that could virtually spell the future of Philippine “komiks.”

The breakthrough was not exactly met with fanfare, though. A 56-second video clip showing frames from the graphic novel, titled “The Lam-Ang Experiment,” was posted on YouTube in January 2012 and has, so far, gotten only 1,796 views. CreaM then launched the three-volume book set on May 26 at the Summer Komikon comic convention in Pasig City, with comic book fans and collectors in attendance.

The quality of the illustrations are said to be world-class, matching the graphic novels from the United States and Japan in terms of color, paper, and artwork.

But mainstream society has not picked up on the “Lam-Ang Experiment” just yet. Not even if those responsible for its existence is a team of all-Filipino artists and head writer, the story is purely Filipino in origin, and the book produced entirely in the Philippines.”

Sunday 17 March 2013

Filipina Maid of Cotton writes A Ballad of Stone and Wind” | Edu Jarque

“Anna Maria “Bambi” Lammoglia Harper was born to write Agueda: A Ballad of Stone and Wind, the historical novel that traces the turbulent transitional era of Philippine history, from 1898 to 1935, as seen through a young girl’s life and the events that shaped both her and her country.

The 251-page narrative believably re-imagines the past of the decadent colonial Manila of our grandparents and great-grandparents, of its people grappling with changes brought about by a new master.

Agueda, despite the cruel hardships of her life, possesses enough intelligence and adaptability, like all conquered people, not just to survive but to triumph. It is easy to become attached to the whimsical child of the opening chapters and to feel sympathy and even empathy with her as an adult caught in the world where Filipinos were second-class citizens and women mere chattels.

It opens with a Manila that had Intramuros at its center and Binondo its commercial hub. While it romanticizes the city with a pristine Pasig River and seeks to continue to mythologize Intramuros, the story, nevertheless, depicts the hypocrisy, decadence and corruption of a dying era.

Bambi, as the author is also known, is a student of history and tradition, heritage and custom, arts and culture and more important, a Filipino who has intense passion for all these. Manila lives in her veins.”

What's Next for Man Asian Winner Tan Twan Eng? (Video)

“Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng was awarded the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize for his novel 'The Garden of Evening Mists.' He spoke earlier with the WSJ's Brittany Hite about the book, set during the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Malaya, and what he is planning next.”

From: The Wall Street Journal

Articles on Tan Twan Eng on this site

Tash Aw: a life in writing | Maya Jaggi

❝We were distracted because we were all getting richer. I was only a teenager, but I knew something was not right.❞ — Tash Aw [on life in Malaysia in the late 70s and 80s]

“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 depicts the Chinese dream in a snakes-and-ladders universe of opportunity and ruin, through the eyes of Chinese Malaysians â from tycoons to factory girls â 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."”

“From Singapore, Alvin Pang proved that even poetry written in the cultural mash-up language…” [quote]

Alvin Pang (1972—), Singaporean poet

❝From Singapore, Alvin Pang proved that even poetry written in the cultural mash-up language of Singlish (Malay, Chinese and sing-song English) had immense verve and humour.❞ — David Robinson and Susan Mansfield in The Scotsman

Friday 15 March 2013

Tan Twan Eng wins Man Asian prize | The Guardian

“The Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng has won the 2012 Man Asian prize with his novel, The Garden of Evening Mists.

His novel, which was shortlisted for last year's Booker prize, was hailed by the chair of judges Maya Jaggi for its "stylistic poise and probing intelligence".

"Taking its aesthetic cues from the artful deceptions of Japanese landscape gardening," she said, "it opens up a startling perspective on converging histories, using the feints and twists of fiction to explore its themes of personal and national honour; love and atonement; memory and forgetting; and the disturbing co-existence of cultural refinement and barbarism."”

Thursday 14 March 2013

How former Burmese political prisoner Win Tin survived 20 years in jail

“How do you survive two decades in jail, most of it spent in solitary confinement, and still stay sane?

Somehow, former Burmese political prisoner Win Tin achieved just that. Now 83 years old, his body is frail and his heart is weak, but he seems to have lost none of the mental sharpness and wit that made him such a formidable foe of Burma’s military junta for decades. During a two-hour meeting last month, he spoke engagingly and with humor about his experiences in prison and his views about the direction in which the country was headed.

Win Tin made his living through words. He was one of Burma’s leading journalists, and an author and poet to boot. In 1988, after a series of pro-democracy protests were violently suppressed by the military regime, he helped Aung San Suu Kyi found a new political party, the National League for Democracy. The following year, he was locked away in prison. The military feared his ability to communicate so much that they largely kept him in solitary confinement, and even denied him pen, paper and reading matter. Often, the cells next door were kept vacant, he said, so he could not pass messages to his fellow prisoners.”

Monday 11 March 2013

Turning Pramoedya's This Earth of Mankind into a movie | RadioNational — ABC (audio)

“Film maker Riri Riza has taken on the challenge of getting the work of one of Indonesia's most controversial writers made into film. Pramoedya Ananta Toer was jailed for 14 years without charge during the Suharto regime and spent 11 of those years on Indonesia's infamous Buru Island prison. While he was there he wrote four historical novels called the Buru Quartet, which were later smuggled out and became bestsellers. Riri Riza plans to make the first book in the Buru quartet, This Earth of Mankind, into a film which tells an epic love story of nation building.”

Articles on Indonesian literature on this site

Unlocking Indonesia Through An Exploration of Its Literature | C.W. Watson

Visitors attending the Indonesia Book Fair 2011 in Senayan, South Jakarta. With
so much Indonesian literature being translated, it has become increasingly easy for
expatriates to learn more about their adopted country. (JG Photo/Yudhi Sukma Wijaya)

“Reading novels is an excellent way of getting to know something about a country when one is newly arrived, doesn’t know much about it, and is going to be spending some time there. Certainly this was my experience coming to Indonesia for the first time some decades ago.

Only at that time I was hampered by the fact that there were few novels — only ones by Mochtar Lubis as far as I’m aware — that had been translated into English or any other foreign language which I could read.

I had to learn Indonesian first before I could start reading the literature and it took me a year of hard work before I could comfortably read fiction.

But the hard work paid off, and I plunged into all the novels and short stories that I could lay my hands on (not always easy to obtain at that time) and found myself entering a new world, one which bore an ambivalent relationship to the one that I had learned about over a year of personal experience, bemused observation and animated conversation with friends and mentors about recent history and the place of religion and culture in Indonesian society.

One of the reasons for the ambivalence was that in fact there had been very few novels published between 1962 and 1972, so there was nothing describing contemporary events. What I was reading then, constituted the reflections, mediated through the fiction of writers from the period before 1962, a historical period of about 50 years, since it was only around 1910 that novels and fiction began to circulate widely in densely populated areas in the archipelago.

Storytelling, Indonesian Literature and a Lost Soul | Tika Y. Sukarna

“In Indonesia, literary works as they were introduced in our school system is a list that we were never given the time to read but only to know how to answer correctly on multiple choice and fill in the dots exams. Nobody reads them, not even the Bahasa Indonesia teacher whose job was to dictate to us the names of who was forced to marry whom, what eventual disease caused their ultimate doom, in what year it was written, by which class of author and in what era.

A nation originating from a people known for the depth and richness of our art and cultural heritage, I find this systematic pruning of our stories paradoxical. It is as if we had been maliciously robbed, our souls exorcised, we have become just remnants, empty shells of the great people we once were. A people who once braved and navigated the oceans even before Marco Polo or Columbus, who had the tenacity and insight to gather layer upon layer of perfectly chiseled stone slabs that made our Candi Borobudur, who carefully weaved the golden and silvery threads in our Kain Tapis, spun the melody of water and birds into our Kecapi Suling, and infused the souls of the unseen into the majestic chime of our bronze Gamelans.”

Sunday 10 March 2013

A love that binds nations

“The mural in the calm hall of Bangkok's Wat Somanas Rajavaravihara shows a couple whose shining traditional-Siamese royal garments add to the painting's golden flow, brightening the temple premises - even though they sit in a cavern. The handsome man smiles in pleasure as he speaks to the beautiful young woman. Yet she draws her arm from his reach, lowering her face to hide a shy smile of her own.

The scene is from "Inao and Bussaba in the Cave", part of the lyrics that King Rama II wrote for his classical royal dance-drama "Inao". It's been called one of the most beautiful poems in Thai literature, and in fact its rhythm inspired the elegant dance movements and dazzling music of the play.

The story of Inao, the handsome Prince of Kurepan, and Bussaba, his beautiful fiancee from Daha, has been told and retold for centuries throughout old Malaya, which today covers Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia.

It has varied somewhat and gone by different names depending on the location, but most Thais know it from high-school literature, or they're heard the proverbs it fostered. The most famous is "People criticise you for what they do themselves", referring to Inao chastising other men for making war to win the heart of Bussaba and then turning around and doing precisely the same thing.”

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw – review | Aminatta Forna | The Guardian

“Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire opens with a bang, not a whimper. Four Malaysians are trying to make it in Shanghai, the new capital of the eastern world – but when we meet them, each of their lives is in freefall. There's Phoebe, the ambitious young Malaysian village girl who passes herself off as Chinese and has arrived in Shanghai on the broken promise of a job and a new life. There's Gary, a "Taiwanese" pop star who finds his fall from grace in a Shanghai bar endlessly replayed on YouTube and is reduced to singing in shopping malls. There's Yinghui, a steely and successful businesswoman whose friends tell her that to really succeed in Shanghai, she needs a man. And, finally, there's Justin, the lonely businessman adopted into a wealthy Malaysian family, who has lost his way while his family have lost their fortune. He and Yinghui knew each other in an earlier life and their reconnection is one of the fine threads that link the characters in this book. Though how many of those threads are held by the fifth character, Walter Chao – the mysterious "I" and author of the bestselling self-help manual Five Star Billionaire – remains to be seen.

Shanghai values are the values of a new age. Nobody wants to change the world – they only want to get out of it what they can, whatever it takes. With her "good fake" designer bags, stolen ID and forged early life in Guangdong, Phoebe's transformation is the most extreme. Before Gary became a Taiwanese pop star, he was just a poor kid from rural Malaysia with a bullying stepfather. Yinghui's drive masks a shameful family secret and a broken heart that has never quite healed. In Shanghai you can be whoever you want to be.”

Saturday 9 March 2013

Tan Twan Eng at the Festival of Literature (video)

Interview with Tan Twan Eng, the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature 2013, Dubai

Thursday 7 March 2013

How kari ayam and rice saved Tash Aw in rural Malaysia…

“When I was passing through Bangkok recently, a friend took me to dinner at a fashionable restaurant, nestled at the end of a narrow soi behind a nondescript business hotel. We ate a dazzling array of traditionally prepared, farm-to-table dishes in a room that was painted black and gold; the music was a funky mix of Thai disco from the 1970s. But somewhere between the ginger martinis and the amuse-bouche of shredded river fish infused with rice liquor, I began to feel—as I quite often do in smart restaurants—a longing for one simple dish, as if my palate wasn’t up to the task of discerning the myriad flavours on offer. Then the waiter delivered a bowl of old-fashioned chicken curry, ready to be spooned over a heap of steamed rice. Instantly, I felt grounded.

From the age of six to 16, I spent all my school holidays with my grandparents, who lived on the banks of a great muddy river in the heart of Malaysia. Their village was only 120 miles from Kuala Lumpur, where I grew up, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the construction of the highways that now cut through the jungle, the drive there from the city took more than six hours; it felt as if we were going to another country. Indeed, in some ways, it was a foreign land. I had the ways and appearance of a kid who lived in the capital: Western-style clothes, decent English, a burgeoning interest in computer games. I didn’t speak the same dialect as my cousins and the other children in the village, so we communicated in a weird patois of Malay, English and at least two Chinese dialects, which made me feel hugely dislocated. I didn’t have any of my cousins’ rural skills; I didn’t know how to hunt for catfish or set traps for birds; I hated the bats that lived in the rafters of the timber house. At times, these holidays felt like a prison sentence.”

Wednesday 6 March 2013

“What are you doing in Malaysia?” See Tshiung Han

Tash Aw, reading an extract from his latest novel, Five Star Billionaire

“The readings usually take place in front of Hamir Soib’s Tak ada beza, a 4-panel painting of pigs walking on their hind legs. This time, the readings took place in another part of Seksan Gallery, in front of a series of mixed-media works by students from Universiti Teknologi MARA. Reading@Seksan’s 9th anniversary was last month, but this month’s event is bigger.

Why? Tash Aw is reading. His first novel, Harmony Silk Factory, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel. Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the book is “unputdownable.” He is in Malaysia promoting his new book. He is a Big Deal.

The first reader is Ksatriya. Amir Muhammad introduces him as the “next Cecil Rajendra,” no doubt because of the Penang connection. Ksatriya is based in Gelugor, near George Town, and he organizes an monthly open mic at China House, a restaurant in George Town itself. Like Cecil Rajendra, Ksatriya is a poet.”

Malaysian science fiction and fantasy in English | Zen Cho

“Following a Twitter exchange I drew up a list of all the Malaysian SFF writers in English I knew of. Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Joyce Ch’ng asked me to post it, so here it is. It is by no means comprehensive, and I welcome suggestions for additions.

Also, super a lot of links, so give me a shout if any of them are broken ya.”

Monday 4 March 2013

Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction

“The University of the Philippines Press has launched The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005–2010, a selection of some of the best short stories from the first five years of the nationally- and internationally-acclaimed annual anthology series, Philippine Speculative Fiction.

PhilSpecFic, as it is affectionately referred to, is the centerpiece of one of the most important movements in contemporary Filipino literature, nurturing and encouraging Philippine authors to ply their craft in the realms of fantasy, horror, science fiction, magic realism, folklore, alternate history, and other related “nonrealist” genres and subgenres.”

Literary networking PENMAN By Butch Dalisay (The Philippine Star)

Novelist Tony Enriquez, playwright Steven Fernandez, and fictionist
Tim Montes enjoy a laugh at the inaugural Taboan in 2009.

“At the recent Taboan Philippine Writers Festival held in Dumaguete last month, I sat on a panel devoted to the topic of “Literary Networking,” which deals with how writers come into contact with one another and with other people in the profession publishers, editors, agents, and, of course, readers, teachers, and critics to improve and to promote their writing.

In my column two weeks ago, I noted how writing can be one of the loneliest if not most thankless endeavors anyone can undertake, especially in a country where writing is considered to be little more than a hobby. Networking helps reduce that sense of isolation and creates communities of writers and other literary professionals who are all looking for that same one thing: the next great read. So today I’m going to list down some of the most effective ways of literary networking, hoping that our writers, especially the young ones, can avail themselves of these venues to extend their reach.”

Sunday 3 March 2013

NCCA's Taboan 2013: Writing politics, rites and icons in Dumaguete

TABOAN Lifetime Achievement awardees

“In the tales of Scheherazade, a company of merchants and travelers set sail in the seven seas, voyaging from isle to isle, trading goods in the marketplace of cities. They would be received in magnificent halls and seated with nobles and sheikhs to conduct more trading—exchanging stories of marvels and adventures.

The Taboan Writers Festival was established to serve as a marketplace for creative and critical interface between writers, readers and the local communities. Since 2009, the festival has journeyed from region to region, supplemented with satellite activities across the archipelago.

A flagship project of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ (NCCA) Philippine Arts Festival (PAF), Taboan 2013 was held on Feb. 7-9 in Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental.”

Diplomacy through poetry | Khairani Barokka

Gulf Between Australia and Indonesia a Lot Narrower When We Take a Stanza

“Late last year at a Canberra cafe I led an improvised poetry workshop. In the spirit of creative writing, I asked five Indonesians to each shout out a word they associated with Australia. Out came “barren,” “desert,” “barbecue,” “kangaroo” and “Corby.” In contrast, the five words Australians chose to depict Indonesia were: “spicy,” “steamy,” “islands,” “intricate” and “batik.”

Keep in mind this was not your everyday Australian setting. It was a gathering organized by Australian National University’s School of Music Poets and Australian Poetry, titled “Meet Your Neighbors,” where academics and writers discussed all things poetic beneath sarongs that hung across the Biginelli Espresso Cafe.

Doesn’t it make you wonder what words others would use to describe the country across the water, if you asked a random assortment of warung-goers in Semarang or pub-goers in Sydney?”

Friday 1 March 2013

Interview: Tash Aw | Charlotte Middlehurst

“Tash Aw is persevering with a bad Skype connection from his flat in Singapore. His pixelated face is rhapsodising about Shanghai, where his latest novel Five Star Billionaire is set. It’s been four years since his last book, which failed to conquer international prize lists despite being tipped for a Nobel. As Malaysia’s only internationally renowned novelist right now, the anticipation surrounding his latest work is palpable. He dodges any talk of expectation, however, preferring to focus on the city instead.

‘There’s something about [Shanghai’s] chaotic energy that I find really exciting,’ he says in a perfect, clipped English accent. ‘I couldn’t wait to come back. For one you can’t walk in KL, Singapore is not easy, Beijing is impossible; and Bangkok, Jakarta are not places you can go for a stroll,’ he says, casually betraying his peripatetic lifestyle.

Released this July, Five Star Billionaire was conceived during Aw’s literary residency at Glamour in 2009. It charts the journeys of five Malaysian migrants who come to Shanghai in search of fame and fortune. Upon arrival they are engulfed by their dizzying new home, yet against the odds their paths converge, forcing a realisation that what they really want may have existed at home all along.”

Five Star Billionaire on this site.

Five Star Billionaire: Tash Aw on the human cost of China’s growth | Metro (UK)

«Novelist Tash Aw asks what price China is paying as it races to the top of
the world’s economic league table (Picture: Danny Allison) »

“China is racing to the top of the economic pile but, asks Tash Aw in his new novel, Five Star Billionaire, at what human cost?”

“Damaging though the social effects of rampant capitalism and breakneck urbanisation were in Europe back in the Victorian age, they did fuel perhaps the greatest literature of the day in providing the backdrop to the novels of Dickens and Zola. Now the focus of capital and commerce has shifted to south-east Asia, and nowhere has been more emblematic of the boom that has transformed China over the past two decades than Shanghai.

With its skyscrapers festooning along the horizon, it is the setting for Tash Aw’s novel of the baleful and alienating effects of the bright lights of the big city. There is a definite sense within its pages of a sprawling society of extremes to echo those 19th-century authors.”

Thursday 28 February 2013

Book Review – Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw | Isabel Costello

“I’m struggling to think of more than two books I’ve read set in China and I suspect they’re the same two everyone else has read: Wild Swans (1991) by Jung Chang and Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) by Arthur Golden, both historical masterpieces, international bestsellers and published a good while ago. So much about China has changed since then including global perceptions – it’s opened up considerably and far more Westerners have travelled there, but to me it was still a huge and incomprehensible place I knew very little about. Last autumn I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of Five Star Billionaire precisely because it’s contemporary and forward-looking. Its bluntly unromantic portrayal of life in Shanghai taps into an unprecedented level of interest, curiosity and even fear of what China is and will become – I didn’t hesitate to include it in my Fiction Hot Picks 2013.

Tash Aw’s literary credentials are impressive and likely to be further enhanced by the release of this high-profile third novel. No doubt his cosmopolitan background has played a part: born in Taipei, China, to Malaysian parents he was brought up in Malaysia, moved to England to study law at Cambridge and now lives in London. The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) won The Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Prize for First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year. A second novel, Map of the Invisible World followed in 2010.

Five Star Billionaire charts the fate of five economic migrants of Chinese Malaysian origin as they pursue their ambitions in Shanghai (already the world’s largest city with a population of ca. 23 million and predicted to reach 30 million by 2020). Phoebe is young, naive and materialistic, hooked on self-help books one of which is the Five Star Billionaire of the title. Gary is a popstar who has fatally tarnished his image at the height of his fame. Yinghui is a businesswoman who has sacrificed a lot to get where she is; Walter is a bigshot entrepreneur who’s not what he seems and Justin is a property magnate whose professional and personal life are in ruins.”

Tuesday 26 February 2013

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw – review | Adam Mars-Jones | The Guardian

Tash Aw's tale of five migrant workers carving out lives in a modernising Shanghai is the stuff of a hit TV miniseries

“Shanghai, a city ‘with a heart as deep and unknown
as the forests of the Amazon’.” Photograph: Alamy

“At one point in Tash Aw's fine new novel about what people call "the new China" a young woman is trying to photograph herself on her mobile phone in a park in Guangzhou, hoping to enliven her internet dating profile with an image that doesn't make her look like an immigrant factory worker (which she is). An old man who sells tickets for the rowing boats on the lake offers to take the picture for her. He looks uncertainly at her phone. She wonders if he understands how to work it. Then he says: "This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school." This is the world of the book, where traditional societies seem to have leapfrogged their way into a modernity without signposts, where the past isn't solid enough to build on but too substantial to be ignored.

The five main characters, three men and two women, all come to Shanghai (by some definitions the world's largest city) from Malaysia, though their backgrounds range from old money to rural deprivation. As a title, Five Star Billionaire is close to brash, and the book's storyline could persuasively be pitched to a producer in search of a blockbuster miniseries, but the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing – with elements of frustrating evasion – rather than propulsive. Tash Aw doesn't exactly kill plot momentum or the emotional impact of the situations he creates, but he certainly keeps them in check. Narrative hints are often indirect, like clues in a detective story, as when a passing reference to a character having written an article deploring the architecture of Gaudí suggests that a conversation almost a hundred pages earlier wasn't in fact spontaneous.

It's possible to reach the book's final stretch without being sure that this is a story of revenge. If it is, then revenge is being eaten very cold indeed, from the chiller cabinet if not the freezer.”

Review: Five Star Billionaire, By Tash Aw: The loneliness of five long-distance foreigners | The Independent

Shanghai Skyline

Shanghai Skyline (Photo credit: Keith Marshall)

“If the authorities in Shanghai ever want to ask a prize-winning writer to pen poetic phrases to attract visitors and investors to China's (and the world's) largest city, they would do best not to call Tash Aw. For this, his third novel, paints a dark picture of an endless metropolis to which many come to seek their fortunes but instead risk losing, or at the least deadening, their souls.

Like his first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2005) and his second, Map of the Invisible World, Five Star Billionaire is connected to Malaysia, where Aw grew up. And he is unmatched at evoking the smells and sounds of the land and cityscapes, the figures of speech and shifting cultural mores of that finger-like peninsula that pokes into the South China Sea; a warm, wonderful land, but one where many fortunes were made too quickly and which discarded much of its history carelessly in the rush to develop.”

Monday 25 February 2013

Kris Aquino as Massacre Queen and other 1990s Philippine inside jokes in Linmark’s new novel, Leche

“The winner of the Mr. Pogi Hawaii 1991 finds the opportunity to visit the Filipino communities in the United States mainland.

But Vincent “Vince” de los Reyes, the first runner-up and an honors graduate of University of Hawaii in Manoa, gets to visit the Philippines for a week, including a live interview with Kris Aquino.

De los Reyes’ return to his homeland after 13 years takes place in 1991, when the country is beset with power blackouts, the specter of the return of Marcos, and the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo after 600 years.

“Leche” is Vince’s account of his stay in the Philippines at that time, complete with tourist tips, snippets from a book (“Decolonization for Beginners: A Filipino Glossary,” written by his UH teacher Bonifacio Dumpit), his bangungot journal and vintage postcards bought from National Bookworm.

The novel “Leche” (355 pages, published by Coffee House Press) is by Filipino-American R. Zamora Linmark, who holds a dual citizenship. It is a fitting follow-up to “Rolling the R’s,” his 1997 novel about the young Vince, his siblings and classmates as they adapt to Hawaii after living in a town in the North. Now Vince has gone out of the closet and supposedly wizened up to the world. But not Manila, as Vince’s misadventures will show us in the novel.”

Saturday 23 February 2013

High five for Ninotchka Rosca's new novel Gang of Five | Joel David

“Assertive, impatient with detractors, firm in her convictions, unsparingly self-critical, she would nevertheless surprise everyone with a graciousness that could only come from a first-hand familiarity with people-oriented service – from gestures as casual as sharing pictures (of her home, or her past) that made her happy, to helping an infirm neighbor abandoned by everyone else, to offering assistance to anyone devastated by natural calamity.

My “Gang of 5” copy will never leave my personal book shelf, mainly because of the author’s signature affixed to a handwritten quotation from Conrad Aiken – and also because of the text, “Limited Edition,” affixed above the title.

In an exchange, Rosca said that the book will be available to a general readership by mid-year, and however one cuts the argument, it would be a major loss for readers of Philippine literature if it weren’t.

For this, out of all the several anthologies of English-language Pinoy short fiction ever put out, will satisfactorily serve as the all-purpose single-volume introduction to local writing that anyone will ever need.

None of the five pieces is less than inspired, each one represents a writing challenge distinct from the rest, and everything builds up to the larger anticipation of greater pleasures awaiting in the output of other Filipino authors – final proof of Rosca’s generosity of spirit in honoring her colleagues by providing evidence of how equal they are, as she is, to the challenge of literary excellence.”

Andrea Hirata's The Rainbow Troops

“WHEN it comes to learning about Indonesia from fiction, most Australian readers won't have gone much further than Christopher Koch's 1978 novel, The Year of Living Dangerously. It is a wonderful and important book, but part of its point is that it presents an outsider's view. The Rainbow Troops, written in Indonesian and first published in 2005, is very much the view from inside: it's an autobiographical novel in which Andrea Hirata recalls his childhood on the island of Belitong, where he attended the village school.

The Rainbow Troops has become a cult novel in its own country and is the first Indonesian novel to find its way into the international general fiction market. Hirata has written three sequels, and in 2008 the first novel was made into an award-winning film.

The troops in question are the 10 children - ''Belitong-Malays from the poorest community on the island'' - who attend Muhammadiyah Elementary School: ''It, too, was the poorest, the poorest village school in Belitong.'' They are taught by the dedicated but ageing Pak Harfan and his offsider, Bu Mus, a 15-year-old girl on her first day of teaching. From this day, which is when the story starts, the school is in constant danger of being closed down, and is always being compared unfavourably with the prosperous school run by the company that owns the island's tin mines.”

Poetry Day in Vietnam: focus on youth

“The year’s most-anticipated poetry festival takes place at the Temple of Literature in Ha Noi this weekend, when the 11th National Poetry Day coincides as usual with first full-moon of the year with the theme Tuoi Tre Voi To Quoc (Youth and Nation).

Visitors at last year's Poetry Day

“This year, youth will be the main focus of the poetry festival,” said Huu Thinh, chairman of the Viet Nam Writers Association, organiser of the festival. “This is a chance to honour the creativity of youth and encourage their enthusiasm.”

In addition to the participation of poetry clubs from Ha Noi and surrounding areas, this year’s event will also include the participation of students from 11 colleges and universities in Ha Noi and the northern province of Thai Nguyen, including Ha Noi Culture College, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, the University of Technology, and Thai Nguyen University.””

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