The Not So Invisible World Now

I really like Tash Aw's 'The Harmony Silk Factory' that's set in British Malaya. Familiar scenes. His writing is evocative. The words focus on the senses of smell, touch and of course, imagination, bringing the past alive to readers today. His second book, 'Map of the Invisible World' is set in a region also familiar to us, or perhaps not, Indonesia and Malaysia of the 60s. Remember the era of our parents, and our grandparents who spoke English and Malay, and some dialects, but not Mandarin. The era when schools taught English and everyone else spoke dialects, and Malay.

She flicked through the pages. More protests in Europe against the imprisonment of Mandela. Sukarno condemns Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Abebe Bikila promises gold for Africa. Brezhnev to provide more aid for Indonesia. Drug use in Malaysia reaching epidemic proportions; Britain offers no help. Communists arrested in outlying islands. It all looked familiar to her - surely she had read it all this morning. 

She looked again at page 5. Below the article on communist arrests was a small picture. In the dim light at the back of the taxi, it was difficult to make out the already blurred photograph of twenty or so men in a police cell. But there was one face, paler than the others: a European.

A son's search for his adoptive father. A Malay-Indonesian boy's search for his Dutch-Indonesian artist father after the soldiers took the latter. The boy, Adam, has an older brother, Johan who has bee adopted by a Malaysian family, living far away from this world. There's an American anthropologist and university lecturer, Margaret, who stays in the book right through the end. This is Indonesia in 1964. Konfrontasi. Race riots. Prejudices. Stereotyping, no. Facts, plenty. Fiction, yes. But nothing is impossible during that time in history. Historical facts are down in books and museums, but we've little by way of oral archives, of what really happened on the ground, amidst the people, save for family tales, neighbors' stories.

They made Karl drink as much water as he could. Margaret boiled some rice porridge and made sure he ate two bowls of it. She remembered how, when she was a child in Bali - just before she met Karl - she had fallen ill with malaria, and her mother had fed her rice porridge. It was something all Asians ate when they were ill, her mother had said; the body can't deal with anything more when it is in distress. Margaret did not know why she remembered exactly how her mother had done this, and why she now had no hesitation in preparing this food for Karl. It was as though she had been doing it her whole life.

Malaysia and Indonesia at war. Communist insurgence. Lessons from the past. What have we learnt for today? Not the anti-colonialism bit. But the bit that's relevant to Singapore, the tiny little dot between these countries, the country that has sprung forth from disillusioned yet hopeful immigrants. Make no mistake, nothing much has really changed. The Singaporean identity isn't cast in stone. It's evolving, and will carry much influences from continued immigration of different peoples. We should be focusing on how to become a better people, together, and not how annoying one another can be. Com'mon, you don't like (let's not talk about love yet) each of your family and relatives, do you? But we still have to keep up with the semblance of harmony and well...the occasional show of unity.