I am guilty to admit after living almost two years in Malaysia, that this is the first Malaysian novel that I’ve read. And now that I have a taste for it, I will be looking for more of these stories. I’ll also be the first to admit that if this wasn’t on the bargain bin, I wouldn’t have picked it up, and there were a bunch copies unsold in the MPH bookshop going for barely a dollar. So yes, I wasn’t expecting much but there is something about the title which drew me in, and the fact that it a Malaysian novel.
I always take the Goodreads rating with a grain of salt, because many books are overrated and had financial incentives so that a lot of the reviews and ratings are corrupted. It is rarer still to find a book with the rating of 3–3.5 but is actually rock solid. Literature when it comes down to it, is a matter of personal preference. Perhaps it is the fact that I am now living in Malaysia, and coming as an outsider that the book gave me insight of what life was like during the period of history in the Japanese occupation, or a little bit before. The region at that time was a wild west where the rule of law was optional.
Perhaps another Malaysian will look at this book differently, and maybe disagree here and there. But novels are not facts. Aw, after all, was born to Taiwanese parents and lived in Malaysia for most of his life. In some ways he is an outsider. And being an outsider myself, you tend to be more observant because you need to adapt and learn, and the logic of adaptation sticks with you so that you are forced to make connections that hasn’t been observed prior.
Harmony is divided into three parts. Each part is written from a perspective of a different character. All three revolves around a central character, Johnny Lim, who was a notorious name in the Kinta Valley and made his wealth after starting out as a farmboy. All three perspectives had something to add about Johnny, but also conflicting viewpoints depending on the nature of their relationship.
Jasper, his son, wrote about him as though he was an absolute terror, even though much of what he knew about his father is hearsay of the truth he found out later. He is embittered by his father’s memory and we see Johnny in this same notorious light as a man who was also a traitor to his country, an absolute go-getter to a fault. We see his windfall fortunes at the expense of others, often those who were very close to him. Johnny is absolute fucking slimebag.
The second point of view is from Johnny’s wife Snow, an extract of a stolen diary which describes the time just after her marriage with Johnny, and a trip to the islands in a chaperoned honeymoon, which became central to the events that follow later in the story. Ironically, we do not see Johnny much in this part — the story revolves around Snow’s relationships with others around her — Peter the vagabond, Frederic a self-important mine supervisor and the ambiguous Kunichika, the scholar who was to be the military attaché to the region. Johnny’s silent presence demeaned him, almost to the level of cuckoldry, ridiculed by others around him such as his in-laws and the Westerners, completely undermined because of his status.
The last part of the book is Peter, who used to be a friend of Johnny until that doomed trip to the islands. We see Johnny here as someone who was barely in control of his surroundings. It is in this last part of the book that we may find some sympathy to Johnny whose reputation was already tarnished from the beginning of the book. He is portrayed as someone who struggles to fit in, trying to learn new snippets of facts here and there from Peter about the ways of the West. In this last part Johnny seems lost, but at times his attempts to make the best of things is almost heroic. Was he the victim of circumstances, instead of its exploiter?
These three complementary but conflicting point of views really blend harmoniously in the story. For each and every one of these parts, the style is different. The first one reads as a first person narrator does, the second a diary and the last weaves in and out from the time Peter is an old cripple to the time that he first traveled to the Malay peninsula.
The colonial presence is heavy in the book. The way the English treated Johnny like crap is how many Malaysians (and other colonised countries) see themselves treated — unfairly, by somebody with bureaucratic power stuck in the middle of nowhere. Frederick and Peter are two contrasting characters, but their attitudes to the locals mirror are alike. Frederick has utter contempt for the locals, but Peter expects that the locals to be subservient and the fact that he makes up stories to the believing Johnny shows his lack of respect.
But there are other bits and pieces here that make it a truly Malaysian flavour, the assortment of bric-a-brac from the antique market — like the description of toddy, the local spirit and how it is brewed in an unsanitary manner, the sounds of cicadas in the forests, the lady selling the fruit in the streets, the kris belonging to a Malay warrior, Hang Jebat. But the dialogues, the mindset of the characters and their interactions say a lot about the Chinese Malay culture. We can see this in Johny’s in-laws and how people see their relationship from the outside, that Johnny is a worthy heir to the in-laws wealth, but we know that his in-laws see him as a good-for-nothing.
Malaysians, I found are avid readers and the reading communities often support local authors. But Malaysian novels are few and far between although there are more and more young authors jumping into the scene. If you go to independent booksellers which promote local writing, most of the writing will be in the short story format, which was how Aw started as a writer. I do feel like Malaysians need more stories like this, a meditation of the past and where it is now. Maybe the fault is mine that there are more Malaysian books like these and I haven’t got around to finding them. I struggle to name a single Malaysian author. Reading Malaysian literature was part of my reading resolutions this year, and reading books like these make me want to read more from the local talent.
