BUT WE'RE IMMIGRANTS: MALAYSIAN CHINESE NOW STRANGERS AT THE COUNTRY'S DINNER TABLE?

Excerpted from the New Yorker.

‘All that is broken must remain in the past.’

We do not admit weakness or sadness. Romantic heartbreak, depression, existential doubts—those are topics of conversation that belong to different cultures and younger generations, educated people who know about Freud and psychotherapy and organic vegetables. Vulnerability is shameful, even taboo; and in the spectrum of human shortcomings, poverty is the greatest frailty. All that is broken must remain in the past.

The harnessing of the customary Asian characteristics of discretion and silence to suit a contemporary middle-class existence is what marks us as both traditional and truly modern inhabitants of Asia.

A Stranger at the Family Table

By Tash Aw

…[W]e are in my grandfather’s shop; he is writing numbers in a ledger and occasionally making small calculations on the abacus. I am arranging the coal-tar soap in neat rows on the shelves nearby, trying to appear uninterested in the conversation I’m overhearing.

My mother is dusting the glass tops of the cabinets with a feather duster, as she must have done all throughout her growing-up years; and she is telling my grandfather about my sister ringing the week before, in tears, from Singapore. She had won a valuable Singaporean government scholarship and was now living with a bunch of other fifteen-year-olds in a dorm nearly a two-hour bus ride from Raffles Girls’ School, where she was receiving the kind of education my parents had always wanted for her.

When we had visited the dorm, even my father, hardened as he was by a spartan childhood, had said, simply: It’s not very nice. Now she was homesick, lonely, studying crazy long hours just to keep pace with the most driven teenagers in Southeast Asia. Straight A’s every year or you lose your scholarship.

She wanted to come home. My grandfather makes a funny noise—something like a laugh, only it doesn’t sound at all jolly. He is unmoved by this, finds it ridiculous. He had come to Malaysia as a boy with nothing but the shirt on his back; he doesn’t understand the meaning of homesickness.

My mother tries to make him understand how my sister is feeling—it’s tough, she’s all on her own, the other girls are mean. And then my grandfather says, simply: “But we’re immigrants.” As if that explains everything. As if hardship and homesickness and melancholy and longing will always be a normal part of our lives.

As if we had no reasonable expectation for things to be different. In his easy acceptance of what he saw as his fate—just as my father had accepted his childhood—I suddenly saw how I would never truly be able to communicate with him, this kind, gentle man whose blood I had inherited, whose culture I had absorbed without question.

Not even when I was older, and had traveled and learned about the world and its joys and sadness, maybe even experienced a tiny bit of what he had in his lifetime. The impossibility of any convergence between our respective positions became clear in that brief moment. He was an immigrant. I was a grandchild of an immigrant. We would never see the world in the same way.

Born in Taipei, grew up in Perak and KL, fluent in hanyu, English and Malay, Tash Aw or Aw Ta-shi 歐大旭 (Ou Daxu in pinyin) is a Malaysian novelist. His books: The Harmony Silk Factory, 2005, Map of the Invisible World, 2009 and Five Star Billionaire, 2013. - https://shuzheng.wordpress.com