BOOK REVIEW | Charting an invisible world

BOOK REVIEW | Trapped in a stifling automobile as it winds its way to the Malayan coast, Johnny Lim, the protagonist of Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, retorts at a remark made by a callous British colonial official. China, the official says haughtily, is being ruined by the Communists.

Johnny’s response is simple: the Communists aren’t the ones responsible. To his wife beside him, it feels like an accusation directed at all of them: the official, an English bohemian, a Japanese professor, and herself, the daughter of a rich Straits Chinese family.

Johnny is alone among them. He may be a rich man now, but his wealth does not disguise the fact that he was born a peasant. Johnny is still an outsider.

In all of Tash Aw’s Malaysian books, notions of race and class come to the fore, but it is only in his most recent works do these notions truly come into their own. In his memoir, The Face: Stranger on the Pier, Aw remarks on ...