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By Kee Thuan Chye.  Penang takes pride in having produced an endless string of intellectuals. But when it comes to good fictional writing – a genre that expresses not only literary maturity but also philosophical profundity – we certainly come out short. Why is this so? Is it a question of language, post-colonial lack of confidence, or cultural superficiality? The late Lee Kok Liang is still the best we have had.
WHY has Penang not produced a writer of note for more than two decades? The last Penangite who could be considered of literary standing was Lee Kok Liang. He died in 1992, not long after bringing out his last major work, Death of a Ceremony and Other Short Stories. Since then, who have we got?
This question came to me while I was judging the Commonwealth Writers Prize earlier this year. This annual competition comes in two categories – Best Book and Best First Book. In the former category, among the entries were novels by the likes of Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey (who has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Booker Prize twice), Thomas Keneally (famous for Schindler’s Ark, which became the Steven Spielberg movie, Schindler’s List) and David Malouf. It was eventually won by Albert Wendt, the veteran Samoan New Zealander writer, for his novel The Adventures of Vela. We gave it the prize for its bold and irreverent story-telling and its innovative blend of Samoan cultural resources and Western narrative elements to present an epic that affirms the interconnectedness among human beings.
Malaysia had one entry – Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World, set in the tumultuous period of ’60s Indonesia, the time of living dangerously. I found it one of the most annoying novels I’ve read in a long time. Apart from the plot being contrived and predictable and the characters appearing more imagined than real, the novel exposes a writer who is out of touch with the reality he is supposedly depicting. Margaret, the American female protagonist, appears like a Hollywood character as she bumbles along to help an Indonesian orphan named Adam find his Dutch adopted father, who has been arrested by President Sukarno’s soldiers. The side-story of Johan, Adam’s brother who got adopted by a rich family living in Kuala Lumpur, leads nowhere and the scenes he appears in are reminiscent of that ’70s TV series we used to laugh at, Drama Minggu Ini. The novel seems written with film rights in mind, but its less-than-scintillating narrative and anti-climactic resolution would probably bore a studio executive. For the Commonwealth Writers Prize, we decided not to even shortlist it.
Tash Aw is actually based in the United Kingdom but he is lionised in Malaysia. The fact that he is based in the West and published there helps to hype up his appeal here. That many Malaysians tend to give high regard to Western recognition of our overseas talents is a sad symptom of our cultural cringe. It makes us overlook the lack of quality inherent in the works themselves, and also the fact that one of the key ingredients of these émigrés’ success is their propensity, conscious or otherwise, to exoticise their writing with local colour and culture that a Westerner might find unfamiliar and therefore charming.
Tan Twan Eng is another Malaysian writer based abroad – in South Africa. In fact, he originally hailed from Penang. And in his novel The Gift of Rain, he uses Penang as the main setting for his chronicle of war and love during the Japanese Occupation.
 It was entered for the Commonwealth Writers Prize a couple of years ago in the category of Best First Book, and it didn’t make the shortlist either. I can see why. The Commonwealth Writers Prize celebrates literary writing; The Gift of Rain is a potboiler in the popular fiction mould. Parts of it are unabashedly melodramatic and dripping with romantic sentimentality. A clear example is having the protagonist, Philip Hutton, saved from execution at the last minute. That’s not so bad if you consider that last-minute rescues are de rigueur in melodramas. What spoils it is that the twist is highly flawed and makes a mockery of the very idea of honour which Tan had so painstakingly developed before that moment. It’s so poor an authorial decision that you wonder if it was motivated by the desire for sensationalist effect; more so because it is totally devoid of a sense of irony.
This is a real shame because it diminishes the potential power of the novel, borne out sharply by the conflict between loyalty to family and loyalty to friendship, and the conflict between ninjo (personal desire) and giri (duty), a popular theme of Japanese drama. Indeed, the novel, with its instances of suicide and characters of considerable intensity, would give any bunraku play a run for its money. I find it strange, however, that Tan fights shy of openly acknowledging the homo-erotic relationship between Philip Hutton and his sensei, Endo-san. It’s obvious that there’s more than just male hetero friendship between them – from the way they touch and declare their love for each other – but Tan holds them back firmly in the closet. As a result, he resorts to oblique references, like the description of a sword training session between the two that reads like a torrid sexual act: “He attacked me again and again, pressing into me, sinking into me with such intensity, as though he wanted to imprint a part of him in me… My sword received his force with equal hunger and I opened myself up to him as clouds open to the sun.” Really cheesy! And disingenuous.
Tan, however, is quite adept at weaving a story, and his language is pretty sound – although he tends to overembellish it. Lines like “I felt a sense of time stretching back, curving beyond sight like the shoreline of an immense bay” (my italics) and “the past … gradually being worn away by the years as a pebble halted on a riverbed is eroded by the passage of water” taste like overdone steak.
He seems to have skewed the novel towards the Western medium he is mainly writing for, so his protagonist is half-English. He exhibits marketing savvy in knowing what ingredients to throw into his fictional pot – the East-West blend; fight scenes reminiscent of those of the kung-fu genre but using instead aikijutsu, the Japanese martial art; the theme of reincarnation, which, however, comes across as a dodgy proposition; an invented story about the Lost Emperor of the Manchu Dynasty, who supposedly was to have been the one before Henry Puyi, the subject of Bertolucci’s film, The Last Emperor; the exotic backdrops of Penang, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur; and the exotic elements of Chinese and Japanese culture.
In the last two instances, Tan’s effort is painfully self-conscious and, again, overdone. Every chance he gets, he sneaks in a cultural morsel or travel-guide tidbit, regardless of its relevance to the narrative. Hence, you get expositions on the Hungry Ghosts Festival, the life of eunuchs in the Forbidden City, Nyonya cuisine, Chinese weddings and so on and so forth. A lot of it is actually redundant, and often produces the effect of weakening the narrative tension.
Tan differs from Wendt in his cultural resourcing. The cultural traditions of Wendt’s Samoan heritage are integral to his novel and inform its structure. Tan exploits his own for surface adornment. It is selling exotica to find favour with Western readers. It is a practice that is demeaning, somewhat akin to harlotry.
 Give me instead the guileless literary fiction of Lee Kok Liang anytime. Lee never wrote to delight and sell. He wrote to express his sense of what life is about and his observations of fellow humans. In his novella Flowers in the Sky, he wrote with Buddhist sensibilities without trivialising Buddhist beliefs, unlike what Tan does with his ridiculous foray into reincarnation in The Gift of Rain. Aspects of Lee’s world-view are also articulated in his other collection of short stories, The Mutes in the Sun, and his first novel, London Does Not Belong to Me, which was published posthumously in 2003, thanks to the efforts of two Australian academics who salvaged it from Lee’s archives.
His stories remain gems, told with a genuine voice. For me, Lee Kok Liang still remains the best writer of fiction Penang has ever produced. No one has yet come close. Tan could, in due course – if he seriously pursues the art of the novel. But he would have to cut a new path and write material that is not merely clever; rise above market considerations; and cease to feed on the bits of whatever little culture he knows and regurgitate it for foreign consumption. Perhaps he should write a novel about Malaysia with totally Malaysian characters. I would love to see him succeed then. _ Kee Thuan Chye is an actor, playwright, stage director, journalist and author. ** Reproduced with permission. This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of the Penang Economic Monthly. This 11-year old magazine published by the Socio-economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI) is being overhauled and commercialised. This endeavour is in response to the growing insight among Penangites and Penang lovers that the downward trend in the state's fortunes cannot be succesfully reversed unless they themselves get seriously involved. The goal is to inspire positive action among readers towards attaining a "Penang Renaissance".
 For more information, please visit the Penang Economic Monthly site or contact the Socio-economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI) at 604-2283306.
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