By SH Lim

With the republication of her novel, the first Malaysian female English-language novelist gets a once-over by SH Lim

Imagine ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’. The lights have stopped their insane flashing, the high-pitched anxiety-inducing music has settled to a steady anxiety-inducing drone. The host, Jalalludin Hassan, leans forward, holding a card just to the right of his face. Through his I’m-in-a-toothpaste-TVC-smile, he asks in Bahasa Malaysia, ‘For RM1,000, who wrote the novel ‘Echoes of Silence’?’ He reads out the options. The music drones on. Would you know to pick the right one? Or would you have to guess?

It’s a shame not more of us are familiar with Chuah Guat Eng’s imaginative writings. She has to date written a short play for the International AIDS Week 1996, Sarawak folktales for children, a collection of short stories entitled, ‘The Old House & Other Stories’ published in 2008, and a novel (republished this year).  According to Mohammad A Quayum, Professor of English at the International Islamic University Malaysia, this novel in 1994 makes Guat Eng ‘the first Malaysian female writer to have published a full-length novel in the English language’. In between all this creative writing, she reviewed books, she taught. Last year she earned her Ph.D., writing a dissertation on how to approach fiction.

In contrast to the blare of game-shows, quietness seems to be the trademark of Guat Eng’s collection of short stories. The click of the computer. The brush of a lace handkerchief against the skin. The ‘soft scrabbling noise and the small chirrup at the window’.  Her characters – especially the women – are thoughtful and composed. Thoughtful in their concern for others and thoughtful in that they reflect, ponder and slowly masticate what they take in with eyes and ears. And in the quiet of their own heads, they suture together the disparate snatches of information from their imperfect worlds. Though what they learn or guess at may be shocking and deplorable – the unspoken incest in the story ‘Seventh Uncle’ and ‘Two Pretty Men’, child abuse in ‘The Old House’, infidelity in ‘Almost the Worst Thing’ – they keep these discoveries close to their breasts. And as suddenly as these realizations rise to rage, sadness sways and smothers all. No confrontations. No noise.

This is Guat Eng’s created world. It captures a time when decorum dominates and surface serenity belies the boiling below. In the world of male-and-female relationships, her female characters’ lives revolve around the dinner table. They are housewives, leisured tai-tais, and even though one of her female characters is in the foreign service, not much of it informs her off-hours world. In this women’s world, public politics stop at the door. Even when there are hints of wrongs, crimes included, all is internalised and action dissipates. The middle-class protagonist in ‘The Day Andy Warhol Died’ is the mature, educated and cultured home-locked Aunty Bongsu. Though she holds up her end discussing ‘Four Quartets’, ‘History of the Nude’ and ‘The Apocalyptic in Modern Literature’ with a sophisticated physician, she has to wait for his invitation to go to India. She couldn’t initiate that journey herself.

Ai Lian suffers the same fate. The overseas-educated narrator of ‘Echoes of Silence’, though cognisant that ‘[in] March 1970, as a direct result of the May 1969 racial riots [she] left Malaysia’, and that ‘four years of using Malay as the medium of instruction in school caused such a breach in our understanding of [English]’, she seems a passive observer, responding, reacting to circumstances rather than as an actor and an initiator. When she suddenly realizes the young man she is talking to ‘was committing a mental rape of me, signalling to me that I was fair game for him because I was a white man’s girlfriend’, she concludes, ‘How can I marry Michael?’ She doesn’t vent her anger on that the grief-causing man.
Even when women are put at odds with one another, no one rises to confront. Regardless that one, unable to pay her electricity bill, is trying to recover a long-overdue loan from another or that one is aware that the other woman across from her is over-zealously punishing a child. In the first, when the subject of the loan is brought up and the borrower justifies her inability to repay because she has spent it on feng-shui counseling, the lender merely says, ‘It’s okay. What’s done is done.’ But then vents her anger at the absent Lillian Too-like soothsayer, saying ‘I just hope that woman is married to a brute who doesn’t give her any money to feed their ten, no, make that twelve, children!’ In the latter story, the narrator just walks away and stewing in her anger recalls her suppressed and almost forgotten promise as an abused child herself, ‘I shall never forget what has been done to me’.

Guat Eng’s fiction captures a cultural suppression that continues to hold true. Or as Ai Lian says, ‘I had only one objective: to find a safe, orderly, predictable 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.’ No threats. So no confrontations. No street protests.
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‘Echoes of Silence’ (RM45) and ‘The Old House and Other Stories’ (RM28) are published by Holograms Publishing.