By Cheow Thia Chan
Reviewed by Carlos Rojas
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2024)
Cheow Thia Chan, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. xviii + 298. ISBN: 9780231203395 (Paperback); ISBN: 9780231203388 (Hardcover); ISBN: 9780231555029 (E-book).
In 1831, Charles Darwin left England for a trip to South America that included a five-week stay in the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Darwin was struck by how these islands were home to numerous endemic species, many of which appeared to have adapted in response to the specific environmental pressures found in the Galápagos. It was these observations that provided the basis for Darwin’s theory of evolution, which seeks to explain processes of species differentiation not only in the Galápagos but throughout the world.
Meanwhile, in 1826, at nearly the same moment but half a world away, the British East India Company established a group of colonies in Penang, Malacca, and Singapore known as the Straits Settlements. These settlements were redesignated as the Crown Colonies in 1858, and they subsequently became British Malaya, the Federation of Malaysia, and ultimately the Republic of Malaysia. Just as the evolution of the flora and fauna of the Galápagos was shaped by the unique evolutionary pressures that characterized their isolated archipelago, the distinctive sociopolitical environment of former British Malaya—including British, Japanese, and Chinese imperial legacies, multiple waves of migration, a large indigenous population, and so forth—has similarly helped shape the distinctive configurations of what has come to be known as modern Malaysian Chinese (“Mahua” 馬華) literature.
In 2014, in his keynote address at a conference on Global Chinese literature at Harvard University, the Mahua literary scholar Ng Kim Chew (黃錦樹) offered the Galápagos archipelago as a model for reexamining the status of Mahua literature as an alternate way of understanding world literature. Cheow Thia Chan opens Malaysian Crossings with a reflection on the significance of Ng’s use of the Galápagos to anchor his vision of a “world republic of southern Chinese letters.” Although Ng did not specify why precisely he selected the Galápagos metaphor, Chan suggests that one reason may involve the significance of the Galápagos for Darwin’s theory of evolution. More specifically, Chan argues that the archipelago’s geographic isolation and biological diversity offer a useful prism for reflecting on Mahua literature’s distinctive body of literary and cultural production, together with its marginal position in relation to what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters.”
Malaysian Crossings offers detailed analyses of four different Mahua authors, but just as the study takes as its starting point the marginalized status of the entire field of Malaysian Chinese literature, each of these authors similarly occupies a marginal position in relation to the field of Mahua literature itself. In fact, none of the writers conforms to a model vision of a Mahua author: which is to say, an author who writes in Chinese but who lives and publishes in Malaya/Malaysia. Instead, Chan examines a collection of authors who include a Chinese-Malaysian author whose only novel was published in China; a China-born Eurasian author who wrote in English and French, but not in Chinese; a prominent author from China whose father was from Singapore, but who only visited Singapore for a short trip; and a Malaysian-Chinese author who relocated to Taiwan for college, where he became a naturalized citizen. Through analyses of works by these authors positioned at the margins of the category of Mahua literature, Chan offers an insightful analysis of how Mahua literature’s own position at the margins of a China-centered notion of Chinese literature or a Euro-American-centered notion of world literature helps to destabilize some of the assumptions on which the latter literary categories are grounded.
Chan’s first case study focuses on the 1936 Chinese-language novel Thick Smoke (濃煙), which was published in Shanghai but is set in British Malaya. Authored by Lin Cantian (林參天, 1904–1972), who taught in a Chinese-medium school in Malaya in the 1920s, this semi-autobiographical work similarly focuses on instructors from China who travel to Malaya to teach in Chinese-language schools. Chan notes that although the work is often identified as the first Mahua novel, it has not received as much contemporary attention as one might expect. Moreover, Chan observes that most of the novel’s commentaries tend to focus on the work’s “thematic issues and problematic characters,” whereas relatively few devote significant attention to the work’s distinctive use of language (43). Through detailed analyses of several lengthy passages from the novel, Chan traces how the work attempts to reflect the dissimilarities between different Chinese topolects while also seeking to “textualize local languages.” In particular, Chan demonstrates how Lin’s novel employs a variety of textual strategies to represent the multilingual environment in which the narrative is set—including the use of transliteration, foreign script, semantic parsing, and silent translation—and he suggests that this multipronged linguistic strategy reflects Lin’s own “bifurcated address of both Malayan and Chinese literary spaces” (50).
In the next chapter, Chan turns to the Eurasian author Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou (周光瑚, 1916/17–2012), better known by her Chinese penname, Han Suyin (韓素音/漢素音). Born in Henan Province, China, Han moved to Brussels for medical school, and later lived in both England and Switzerland. Best-known for her 1952 novel A Many-Splendoured Thing, a love story set in Hong Kong, Han was also well-known for her works set in China. Han travelled to Malaya and Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s, and she drew on these experiences in composing her 1956 novel And the Rain My Drink and its unfinished sequel, Freedom Shout Merdeka. These latter two works are the primary focus of Chan’s study, in which he argues that Han, in her writings about Southeast Asia, adopted a “bifocal approach” that focused simultaneously on local and global concerns (72). In his analysis, Chan demonstrates that, just as Lin Cantian used a hybridized form of Chinese to depict the multilingual setting in which his novel is set, Han Suyin similarly seeks to “vernacularize English as an acceptable literary language for depicting Malaya,” and specifically “incorporate[ing] locally inflected English . . . to reflect creolized linguistic habits” (73).
Chan’s third case study features Wang Anyi (王安憶, 1954-), who is now known primarily as a Shanghai author. Wang’s father, however, was originally from Singapore, and as an adult Wang became very interested in this Singaporean side of her family background. In the early 1990s Wang travelled to Singapore and peninsular Malaysia, and in 1993 she published a novella inspired by these trips, titled Sadness of the Pacific (傷心太平洋). Chan, however, notes that while Wang is one of contemporary China’s best-known authors, Sadness of the Pacific has nevertheless received relatively little critical attention to date—owing to the fact that readers from Singapore and Malaysia tend to view Wang as a mainland Chinese author, while for “readers outside of Southeast Asia her works about the region have been overshadowed by her more famous representation of settings in China, especially Shanghai” (118). Chan’s analysis of Wang’s work focuses on her use of language, and specifically her attempt to develop what Chan calls a “cosmopolitan Chinese literary vernacular,” referring to “an all-purpose form of written language unbeholden to any social or local constituency” (120). Chan argues that Wang’s use of this seemingly paradoxical cosmopolitan vernacular permits her to free herself “from provincial and national attachments, in order to reevaluate the perpetual association, disassociation, and reassociation of people, places, and languages” (ibid).
In his final case study, Chan turns to the Chinese-Malaysian author Li Yongping (李永平). Although Li grew up in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, in the northwestern corner of the island of Borneo, he subsequently relocated to Taiwan, where he eventually became a naturalized citizen. Many of Li’s literary works, however, continued to be set in his homeland of Borneo. In his analysis, Chan notes that although Li is often identified as a Mahua author, in practice he identifies not with the entirety of Malaysia but rather with “eastern Malaysia”—namely, the states of Sarawak and Sabah in northwestern Borneo, in contradistinction to “western Malaysia,” which is to say the Malaysian peninsula. Moreover, Chan notes that, in several of his works, Li does not focus solely on the Malaysian portion of Borneo, but also includes Indonesian portions in the southern two-thirds of the island. In his analysis, Chan focuses on Li’s two-volume novel Where the Great River Ends (大河盡頭, 2008, 2010), focusing on Li’s distinctive use of language in this work. Suggesting that Li employs a mode of “transcriptive heterolinguality,” Chan argues that this “heterolingualism is embedded in an overarching translational modality that entails Chinese language manifesting the coexistence of multiple languages in Borneo” (164-165).
In addition to his detailed analyses of works by Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, Chan’s “Coda” chapter returns to his dialogue with Ng Kim Chew, whose scholarship features prominently in Chan’s introduction. In addition to being a leading scholar of Mahua literature, Ng is also an influential Mahua author in his own right. Like Li Yongping, Ng relocated to Taiwan for college and subsequently became a naturalized Taiwan citizen. Although Ng is one of contemporary Mahua literature’s most prominent authors, Chan refers briefly to only one of his fictional works, “The Disappearance of M” (M 的失蹤), and instead offers extensive reflections on Ng’s academic writings on Mahua literature. Ng’s scholarship is in fact a touchstone to which Chan frequently returns throughout this volume: Ng’s discussion of the concepts of a minor literature and a “topolectal group” feature in Chan’s analysis of Lin Cantian’s Thick Smoke, Ng’s distinction between the parallel terms Zhongwen and Huawen (中文/華文 “written Chinese”) are incorporated into Chan’s discussion of Wang Anyi, and Ng’s concept of a literary Galápagos archipelago returns in his discussion of Li Yongping. Chan’s volume concludes with yet another dialogue with Ng, where he draws on Ng’s concept of “minor/ity literature” (少數文學) to return, once again, to Ng’s concept of Mahua literature as a literary Galápagos. Here, Chan suggests that Ng’s concept, with its emphasis on isolation and marginality, is the obverse complement of this volume’s master metaphor—“Malaysian crossings”—in that the two concepts “jointly illustrate how ostensibly peripheral authorial pursuits contribute to the collective of local singularities that invigorate the world-Chinese literary space” (203).
Carlos Rojas
Duke University