A book which should probably be subtitled One Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese dude’s belief that Yu Dafu is still alive, explored in a fictitious setting. Because did Yu Dafu survive his likely assassination by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945 and then go on to continue writing on banana notes or tortoise shell backs or forced to a small Malaysian island to convert to Islam and never write Chinese characters again? Because that’s what the stories in this book are about. Pretty much all of them. Variations on the theme of Yu Dafu’s non-death.
What causes such an obsession to write and write stories about one thing? I know I write and write stories about bad mothers again and again because of my own insecurities. Maybe Kim Chew Ng imagines that he’s an illegitimate son of Yu Dafu, in some fashion, and writes these stories out of these fantasies. Maybe Kim Chew Ng has a whole other roster of stories not about Yu Dafu and these ones were collected together because of their thematic similarities? I don’t know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature to know for sure.
To be fair, it isn’t that I don’t know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature; I know nothing about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature. So the whole collection was sort of a surprise. I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be humourous. It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but the characters get themselves into ridiculous situations, like a researcher pretending to be a monkey while trapped on an island with a visually impaired Yu Dafu-esque figure in order to get closer to Yu Dafu without Yu Dafu realising it. Or characters getting themselves abducted by an elderly female pirate and her crew. Or a character being sexually aroused by turtle shells. It’s odd and entertaining, but still a bit distancing because of cultural barriers. Like I didn’t know what the May 4th Generation was, so sometimes I felt a bit lost. But usually just pleasantly lost, like wandering around a pretty, different city, with lots of wondrous stuff to look at. So it was pleasant, my first foray into a collection by an overseas Chinese from Malaysia now living in Taiwan.
In the last story, the only one that I was disappointed in, because it just stopped and I was confused by its abruptness, a character makes a video game to run through all the possibilities for an overseas Chinese coolie living in Malaysia/Singapore sixty, seventy, eighty-odd years ago. This book feels like that but for Yu Dafu. And so, now I know a lot more about Yu Dafu, and the possibilities that may have existed if he didn’t really die way back in 1945.
Slow Boat to China and Other Stories by Kim Chew Ng went on sale March 8, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.