One Steamy Month Charged With Forbidden Longing
As a critic, I often come across international writers, even those who write in English, who are widely celebrated in their own countries while barely known in the United States. Tash Aw, a big deal in both his native Malaysia and his adopted home, England (where two of his novels were longlisted for Booker Prizes), is a prime example. I'm hoping that 'The South,' a gorgeous coming-of-age story, will broaden his appeal. It's a departure for Aw — more autobiographical and less political than his previous books — and a wonderfully inviting doorway into his work.
In the novel, Jay Lim, a Malaysian man, looks back on the sweltering school break in the 1990s that he spent on his family's dilapidated farm in south Malaysia with his two college-age sisters and their unhappily married parents. At the time, he was not quite 17, an outsider, gay but not out, chafing to be done with his miserable school in Kuala Lumpur and yet still utterly uncertain about his future.
Aw swims fluidly between multiple time periods and perspectives to capture what Jay realizes in retrospect was a life-changing month in the country. The narrative explores the mind-sets of three characters: Jay's mother, Sui Ching, whose sense of entrapment has reached a breaking point in her stifling marriage to Jack Lim, a testy, unpleasant math teacher who is particularly critical of his adrift son; Jack's half brother Fong, the son of their father's mistress, who struggles as the farm's manager and resents Jack's privileged position; and Jay, whose infatuation with his cousin, Fong's alluringly muscular and hip 19-year-old son, Chuan, opens up the possibility of happiness. Interspersed are Jay's later reflections on those intense, steamy weeks when he was initiated into Chuan's freewheeling world and only vaguely aware of the stresses among their parents.
The Lim family's trip south is set in motion by Jay's grandfather's surprising will, which left the farm, '20 hectares of scrubby jungle and farmland,' to Sui Ching, his daughter-in-law, rather than to either of his sons. The deep-seated familial resentments and inheritance drama aren't the only threats to the farm. By the time of Jay's visit, the fruit trees — tamarind, rambutan, papaya, star fruit and dragon fruit — are all moribund, ravaged by drought, climate change and lack of funds.
A family orchard slated for the ax inevitably evokes Chekhov, particularly 'Uncle Vanya' and 'The Cherry Orchard.' It's a fitting comparison: 'The South,' like Chekhov's plays, is a tale of dichotomies — a family divided between town and country, education and peasantry, sophistication and provinciality, north and south, ambition and stagnation.
Aw channels all five senses to lend an intense physicality to his novel, whether the powerful attraction between Jay and Chuan, or the melting, humid heat of the countryside air. We feel the clammy sweat of Chuan's body and the velvety softness of the murky, muddy pond water in which the boys cavort, hidden from everyone. We hear the loud pulse of techno at a karaoke dance bar they frequent in a nearby town, and watch Jay studying the ridges on Chuan's neck 'contracting and loosening; contracting, loosening' when he chugs a cold beer. We smell the 'chemical muskiness' of Chuan's cologne, which for years afterward will awaken in Jay 'the same frisson that he is experiencing now, that to him signifies possibility, the unfolding of an afternoon, an evening, a lifetime.'
The sensuality of the prose is just one of the pleasures of Aw's writing. With 'The South,' he has crafted a story of yearning for autonomy, escape, financial independence and excitement that is suffused with sexual longing and the ache of nostalgia. Jay, his sisters and Chuan are impatient to grow up and get on with life, while their elders are more intent on hanging on to what they have.
This book is less elaborately plotted than Aw's Booker Prize-nominated debut, 'The Harmony Silk Factory' (2005), and 'We, the Survivors' (2019), a grim portrait of prejudice and social inequity in Malaysia. Instead, 'The South' bears a stronger connection to his short, meditative memoir, 'The Face: Strangers on a Pier' (2016), which addresses the economic and class divide that education opened up in his family, separating members who struggled to thrive in remote villages from those who found greater success in cities.
'The South' is the first novel in a planned quartet. Will Aw be able to sustain the elegiac lushness in future installments? Will we find out where adult Jay has ended up, and what has become of Chuan? Will the family divisions widen into abysses? While I'm not convinced that 'The South' needs a sequel, I'll stay tuned. But for now, this shimmering, psychologically rich tale of first love and a family at a crossroads stands taller than those ill-fated tamarind trees.
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