Malaysian Literature in English

CHUAH GUAT ENG

• Chuah Guat Eng was born in Rembau, Negeri Sembilan in 1943. • She received her early education at Methodist Girls School, Klang and

Victoria Institution, Kuala Lumpur. • She read English Literature at University of Malaya Kuala Lumpur and

German Literature at Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich. • Most of her working life has been spent in the corporate world. • Echoes of Silence, first published in 1994, is her first novel. • Other published works are Tales from the Baram River (2001), a

collection of Sarawak folktales retold for children, and The Old House and Other Stories (2008), a collection of stories written and published in various publications and anthologies between 1992 and 2002.

• In 2008, she received her PhD from the National University of Malaysia (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia), Bangi for her thesis, From Conflict to Insight: A Zen-based Reading Procedure for the Analysis of Fiction.

• She works part-time as a corporate communications consultant and occasionally runs lecture courses at universities. She is currently working on her second novel.

CHUAH GUAT ENGExcerpted from Review by

Ted Dorall in New Straits Times, Saturday, 27th August 1994

• 'In March 1970, as a direct result of the May 1969 racial riots, I left Malaysia.'

• Thus begins the story of Lim Ai Lian, a Chinese Malaysian. • In Germany she meets and falls in love with Michael

Templeton, an Englishman born and brought up in the district of Ulu Banir, where his father, Jonathan Templeton, now a Malaysian citizen, owns a plantation.

• In late 1973, Ai Lian returns home to be with her sick and dying father.

• The following February she pays the Templetons a long delayed visit.

• On the day of her arrival a murder takes place and Ai Lian is soon involved in trying to find the murderer.

• In the process she finds herself learning about racial prejudice, truth and deception, guilt and innocence, womanhood, love, and the way past silences echo into the present.

A murder is committed in the fronded depths of a beautifully created spell of jungle and plantation somewhere off the beaten track in Malaysia called “Banir”.

Told in the first-person narrator

The heroine Lim Ai Lian tells that on January 15 of this year she learnt she "was the sole beneficiary and executive of Michael Templeton's will. …

Chapter One, dated "Summer 1971","In March 1970, as a direct result of the May 1969 racial riots, I left Malaysia."

In March 1970, as a direct result of the May 1969 racial riots, I left Malaysia. I had only one objective: to find a safe, orderly place to live in. A place where I could sink into obscurity and, as a tiny minority of one or at most two, never present a threat to anyone. I was eighteen years old.

Germany, when I first set eyes on the country, seemed to be that place. It was the beginning of spring and the snow was still on the ground…

Michael Templeton's father is a planter in Perak, Michael himself was born and grew up in Malaya, and the two lovers return home for the Christmas of 1973.

This is to be a novel of inter-racial love on home soil

• Ai Lian is visiting Michael on his father's estate. After an afternoon nap she has woken up for tea:

Suddenly a sharp explosion, followed shortly by another, startled me out of my sense of well-being. I sat up, and then lay back again as I remembered. Firecrackers. It was the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration… I got up. … Just then I heard the sound of someone running outside, right below my window, it seemed. Crossing the room, I pulled the curtains aside and looked out.

There was no one to be seen.

I must have nodded off again briefly, for when I heard the sound of the running feet -- again on the gravel path outside -- I woke with a start to find that it was past six-thirty. … I switched on the bedside lamp and walked across to draw the curtains. Then the firecrackers went off. This time three or four of them, and a lot louder, quite close to the house. But again, when I looked out, there was no one to be seen.

Strange, I thought, this repetition of sounds. Had I been dreaming?

And early the next morning the dead body of the absent guest is discovered in some belukar near the house, riddled with bullets.

Echoes of Silence settles down to being primarily a mystery story.

Then when a valuable diamond necklace owned by the victim is missing, Inspector Tajuddin suspects an impulsive or prepared burglar.

And then the necklace turns up suddenly in Ai Lian's hands.

Later in the novel she takes time to remember scenes of her life in Germany and with her family in Malaysia.

Time is spent on scenery and family backgrounds.

No one seems in a hurry to find the criminal.

And then, just after page 100, the investigation is closed, and the main characters move apart.

However, soon after, Ai Lian is staring in shock at the missing diamond necklace.

we have a flashback to the opening months of the Japanese invasion of Malaysia.

reconstructed by Michael as he narrates events in his parents' life before his birth.

It is read by Ai Lian this year to the events in 1974, we benefit from

knowledge of it.

in the process of finding the murderer, Ai Lian "finds herself, learning about racial prejudice, human relationships, right and wrong, truth and deception, guilt and innocence, womanhood, love and the way past silences echo in the present."

• the answer is, Yes. • All these themes are in this novel. • Quietly stated and firmly developed. • Ai Lian begins as the Europeanised Asian

wanting openness and truth in her relationships, impatient with her parents and other Malaysians for their reluctance to talk about their past.

• The mystery itself is a conspiracy of silence on the part of most of the characters.

But at the very end she has learnt the value of Asian silences, the greater lover there can be in not revealing the truth about the past.

"Love," one of the characters tells her, "has little to do with hankering for someone from afar. It has to do with doing, doing something for someone, even when it is an inconvenience."

The older characters in the novel have worked, suffered, and kept silence for each other; when Ai Lian decides to do the same she has finally come home.

The desperate departure of the first sentence has terminated in a triumphant return.

• The time shifts, from today to the Seventies, then to the Forties, and back again intermittently, have kept us constantly in three different but related worlds.

• The leisurely pace has allowed for the serious novel to develop with the mystery story.

• the quiet style has authentically, and seemingly effortlessly, described a variety of experiences -- life on a pig farm, in a small town, in a rubber planter's bungalow before the war and 30 years later.