Tag: malaysian author

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Lit Recap: Author event with Erica Eng

When Johor-born animator Erica Eng won an Eisner Award for her webcomic Fried Rice in 2020, she was 21 years old and still a college student. The semi-autobiographical, slice-of-life webcomic based on her experience of applying to an elite art school after secondary school was something she started as a personal project.

Erica submitted her webcomic to be considered for awards, and she won the Eisner and then a Ringo after. While it gave her exposure after that thanks to the numerous articles written about her, it wasn’t exactly a game-changer. She shopped around for an agent to represent her and get the book published but got rejected each time because she didn’t have a “track record” as a published writer and illustrator. She finally settled on self-publishing Fried Rice and promoting it herself, and that’s how we came to host her for an author event at Lit Books on 1 June, 2024.

Below are edited excerpts from the delightful conversation our co-founder Fong Min Hun had with her.

Why is it called Fried Rice? In the book, there’s actually no picture or mention of fried rice.
When I was writing it, I was still in college in Subang and I was really missing my family. I was thinking the vibe of the story that I want to tell is like this home-cooked meal—it makes you feel nostalgic. My mum’s favourite comfort food is fried rice and we’re always eating that at home. So, I created this Spotify playlist with all the songs that inspired me, and then I titled it Fried Rice, and it was just a placeholder title because it didn’t make sense—it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else except for me. But then I started posting the comic online in September, won the award in June the following year, and after that, I felt like the title kind of stuck. And then I kind of liked that it didn’t make a lot of sense either, so yeah, I kept it.

How autobiographical is it? What are the parallels between your life and Fried Rice?
I actually knew who the main character was gonna be before I started writing this book, and I started drawing her in my sketchbooks. I liked her design, but I didn’t have a story to put her in. At first, I was writing all sorts of things—she’s gonna go on a gap year, go on holiday and find herself. But it didn’t feel authentic because I never experienced that.

And then, I got rejected from art school, but at the same time, it was a really bittersweet experience for me because I was experiencing rejection, but my family was all around me. I wanted to write about that because it felt interesting to me. So, I took very specific experiences from my memories, like, finding out about the rejection email during Chinese New Year on my cousin’s laptop—that’s real—but I kind of rearranged the timeline of events to create a story arch that makes sense. But the main character is not me because I designed her and I thought about her before I knew what I was going to write about. I made the main character not myself because I could take as many liberties as I wanted to. So I can’t really say it’s all about me. I was taking experiences that I felt were useful narrative wise.

Tell us about the actual production of the webcomic itself. This is your first narrative-driven, long-form piece of work, yes?
Yeah. Before that, I was drawing and writing really short comics and posting them online. I was posting them on Instagram and on Twitter… I was like, man, I don’t want to write Tweets for the rest of my life. I want to write something long. I want to learn how to craft a story from start to finish. So this was an experiment to see whether I could do it.

Did you draw influences from other webcomics out there or graphic novels? What are some that have influenced or inspired you?
At that time, I was reading On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. The whole thing is online and you can read it for free. So for a college student, that’s like a gold mine… And then there’s This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki—I love the illustrations—and Portugal and Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa. I felt like, oh, someone’s telling a really interesting and experimental kind of story in comics and not using ink. I’ve only ever seen those Marvel comics drawn in ink all the time. I thought it was really interesting to see different art styles in comics.

Another one is Himawari House by Harmony Becker, but that came out after Fried Rice. That’s one of my favourite graphic novels ever.

Do you find scripting and writing more difficult than drawing and illustrating or the other way around?
Writing is 100% more difficult. The drawing part, well, it’s hard to come up with the compositions and the colours as well. But for me, that part is just getting it done, you know, churning out the drawings. But writing is when it could be anything so it feels really daunting.

There’s also the storytelling elements as well. Is this something that you were trained to do in school, or something that you just picked up yourself from reading other people’s work?
I learned film language in school, because I studied animation and also elements of acting and things like camera angles. I read a lot of screenplays and books about film language. So yeah, I would say that I learned about how to make comics from learning about films.

I loved Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, who did big movies like Gravity. But Roma was a really personal story to him from his childhood about a domestic helper that they had. And he had said that he wanted to make a movie like this for a long time and finally got the chance to. I didn’t want to be like 50 years old and then only get the courage to make something about a personal story that mattered to me. So that kind of inspired me to do Fried Rice.

How did you think about pacing? Was that something that you constantly had in your mind, or were you just happy to let it play out?
Yeah, I was thinking about pacing. I would read through the comic again and again, just to make sure that it felt right. The dialogue and everything had to sound good, and the pictures had to flow in a certain way. And I watched a lot of Eric Romero movies, which someone described as the experience of watching paint dry. So, it’s a bit slow. But I don’t know; it just felt nice. It felt like I was watching someone live their life in front of me, which was the kind of pacing that I wanted.

Fried Rice is available in-store and online here.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Yeoh Jo-Ann

Malaysian writer Yeoh Jo-Ann burst onto the local literary scene when her debut novel, Impractical Uses of Cake, won the Epigram Fiction Prize in 2018. Together with Honey Ahmad and Diana Yeong of Two Book Nerds Talking, we spoke with Jo-Ann about her book over a Facebook Live session at the height of the lockdowns in 2020.

This year, we finally met in-person at a recent in-store event celebrating the publication of her second book, Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions. The novel is about Lucky Lee who has everything—wealth, charm, good looks—but does little with it. He coasts through life and takes things for granted until his sister, Pearl, his only surviving family member, suddenly dies. As he struggles on without her, he begins to hear her cat talking to him.

Jo-Ann started writing Deplorable Conversations with Cats during the pandemic and worked on it during a three-month writer’s residency at the Kerouac Project in Orlando, Florida, US. She recalls, “I finished most of it but couldn’t end it. I didn’t know how… Then in January 2023, I somehow opened it up again. I read it and suddenly, it came to me. I knew how to end it and, within five days, the thing was done.”

She recounted this and more during the hour-long conversation with Lit Books’ co-founder Elaine Lau and our lovely audience on the evening of 27 April. The following are edited excerpts from the chat.

On where this novel comes from:
The book is about grief, but it’s also about sibling relationships and how difficult they are because they’re so complex. These are the people we grew up with, the people we know first, and the peers we know first. Your first betrayal and many other things was by a sibling, and they know you the way no one else does because they’re there right from the beginning.

I hadn’t really explored sibling relationships very much. When I talk to people about relationships, I find that I tend to have conversations about my relationship with my mother or whoever I’m dating at that time, stuff like that. But the sibling relationship tends to be something we don’t talk about very much, especially the strange, constantly shifting dynamic of someone who is a peer and yet not a peer, someone you didn’t choose. It’s that kind of encumbrance. But at the same time, if you need to be honest, it’s a sibling you can be completely honest with because they already know who you are.

So this is a book that explores grief and the many facets of it and how there are no right ways to grieve. It’s also about family and sibling relationships and how they can be beautiful and difficult and extremely frustrating. And somewhere in there is a talking cat because my mother is a cat woman of the first order, and I grew up having to play second fiddle to quite a few cats.

On grief and recognising how it changes a person:
We talk about how there are different ways to grieve and this is a thing that we all accept. I feel like we grapple less with how grief changes us and how we view the world and how we interact with people. When you think about dealing with grief, you think about coping mechanisms and things like that, but you don’t think about how grief really does change you. The process you go through when you’re dealing with loss and all of that, it affects you and it affects the people you interact with. That was what I was curious about also.

So in the novel, what I do try and grapple with is how Lucky is changed by losing his sister, grieving for her and not understanding exactly how to deal with it. It’s that kind of struggle that I was grappling with throughout the novel.

On creating the book’s main characters:
The main character of this novel is called Lucky Lee, right? He is handsome, he is rich, he is extremely privileged and therefore, a little unlikable. It’s not easy to identify with this rich man who has everything and doesn’t have to work. But I feel that grief is something that is not the privilege of the poor or rich. I wanted to explore having a character who was unlikable and yet you find yourself identifying with them somehow, even if I definitely didn’t want to.

On creating the wonderful cast of supporting characters:
The reason why the supporting cast for this one had to be so strong was because Lucky is really an irritating little thing. There are only so many ways that you can spell out that someone is irritating and irresponsible and hasn’t got ambition. What I did was to have the people around him communicate that through their experiences with him and the daily frustrations that they have to put up with because he is the man that he is. So it’s the effects of Lucky’s character that you see throughout the book, all the consequences of the actions that he hadn’t thought through or hadn’t bothered very much with or things that he was supposed to do but didn’t. You experience Lucky through them more than him doing things.

On how a talking cat came into the picture:
I’ve always wanted animals to be able to talk back to me, because I cannot resist speaking to animals when I see them.

I always wonder where cats go. Being from a household where I am a second-class citizen, I do wonder where the more superior beings go off to when they’re not at home terrorizing me. I often wondered if there was a parallel society of some sort. Do they congregate? What do they talk about? Do they talk about us? Is there a plot to overthrow mankind?

So, I guess that part of the book where the cat walks off and meets the Raja Kuching and all the cats help her and do things, that’s my imagination running a little wild.

On incorporating food into the narrative:
My experience in my family is that it’s easier to talk when your hands are occupied, when you’re eating or cooking, or when you’re preparing stuff like chopping chili padi—it’s easier to talk to your mother about things.

I think that’s what worked its way into the first novel and the second one, because I feel that it’s a vehicle for us when it comes to expressing ourselves. In the novel, what you’ll find is that a lot of the difficult conversations between Lucky and Pearl or when they’re fond of each other is when they’re helping each other out in the kitchen or fighting over something in the kitchen. But they spend a lot of their time in the kitchen doing things together, and that’s where all the family drama happens.

I am also very food motivated, like most cats. In order for me to sometimes write a chapter, I must know what I get to eat after I finish the chapter.

Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions is available in-store and online.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Vanessa Chan

Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan had always dabbled in writing fiction. But it took what she called a “millennial existential crisis” to propel her to pursue it seriously—she left her job in communications at Facebook and enrolled in a writing graduate programme in New York City.

What then started out as a short story assignment for class where Vanessa wrote about a teenage girl going through checkpoints during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II eventually turned into her debut novel, The Storm We Made, published in January 2024. The novel is about a housewife, Cecily, and how her decision to collaborate with the Japanese occupiers brought about political and personal devastation for the nation and her family, in particular her three children, Jujube, Abel, and Jasmine.  

Vanessa recalls the moment she had a novel in the making: “I got a handwritten note from my professor, and it said, ‘This is actually not a short story… This is actually something more. All the air left the room when I read it, and my breath caught in my throat. There’s something I want you to protect. I think this is an outline or your brain telling you that this might be the beginning of your life’s work.”

But Vanessa didn’t think she would write historical fiction. “I always thought I would write like a millennial angst novel about a girl doing millennial things. But then the pandemic happened. I experienced a series of personal griefs that made it hard for me to get up and get out of bed in the morning. And I needed something to get me out of bed, and so I started writing this book.”

We had the pleasure of hosting Vanessa in an author event at Lit Books on 16 March, 2024 where she spoke at length about the intricacies of her novel and writing life. The following are edited excerpts from the hour-long conversation she had with Lit Books co-founder, Elaine Lau and our wonderful audience.

What was the process like turning a short story into a full-length novel?
It was so hard. I had always written short stories before. Short stories are great; they work for my very rigid personality. There are a series of parameters, a timeframe, a limited number of characters. Your story has to end by a certain time.

Writing a novel is like wandering in metaphorical darkness in a forest, and you think you arrive at a lake or something but it’s a mirage. It’s not ended, and you keep wandering. You have to be open to getting somewhere, realizing that may or may not be it, and just continuing to write into the darkness until you reach something else. As a rigid person who loves structure, that was a nightmare. But you just have to write into the chaos and hope for the best, even if you’re like the most detailed outliner in the world. You’ll have to toss that outline aside at some point and be like, let’s start over and figure it out. That was weird for me.

I also chose to write two timelines and four points of views, which was not easy. It was ridiculous. I don’t know why I did.

Some of the stories in this book are from your grandmother. Can you tell us more about that?
My grandma inspired this book and some of the facts came from what she calls a memory book. It was a book where towards the later part of her life, where she was worrying that she was forgetting things, she would write down stories of her life, some of it during the war, some of it pre-war, and some of it post-war. That book was a really wonderful resource for me, both as a writer, but just as a person and a member of this family. I want to note that the book, she always told me, was written for public consumption.

So, some of the stories are from there, but a lot of the stories from this novel are from conversations I had with her growing up. When you don’t finish your food, my grandmother would be like, ‘You know, during the Japanese times, we had to mix in tapioca with our rice because we didn’t have enough to eat.’ There were stories like that, both the ugly and the good, and they just sort of got embedded in my mind. And when I was ready to write it, that’s kind of what came out.

Tell us about how you wrote the characters in this book, starting with the housewife, Cecily. What were you trying to convey with her story?
When I first started writing this book, Cecily didn’t exist. The novel was only about three sad children living through the war because that was what I knew. I knew about children living through the war. That was the experience my grandmother and her siblings had.

I started writing most of this during the pandemic. I was in New York City… And then my mother and my uncle passed away and I couldn’t even go home. I was just filled with grief and rage. I felt robbed of the ability to be with my family, to celebrate the people we loved who had died. And then I’d wake up every day to write about these sad children whose lives are just getting sadder. I needed to give myself a little bit of joy. I needed to give myself something with an element of the ridiculous.

And so, I decided to write about this slightly insane woman who gets to run about all of Kuala Lumpur being a spy. I only wrote her as a spy because I used to really like to watch spy dramas. I was just gonna throw it in there and we can always take it out if it doesn’t work out. I’m gonna give myself some agency via this woman who gets to be irresponsible, make mostly bad decisions, be really, really horny and just do stuff. And that’s what happened. I wrote this character and I guess she stuck because she has since become the central emotional core of the novel. The book has now become a family drama with touches of espionage thriller.

About her morally grey circumstances, I strongly believe that morality is a function of the circumstances we are in. I believe that we don’t know if our principles, our morality, all the things that we believe in will hold if we are faced with the threat of not being able to survive or to have to save our families. We can hope that it is. We can hope that our desire to be kind and wonderful and good does hold. But I don’t always think that is the case. And Cecily, I think, had the best of intentions.

One of the children, Abel, went through a truly harrowing experience in the labour camps. Was it difficult to write these horrific events? Can tell us how you approached Abel’s story arc?
Some of the anecdotes from Abel’s story—who has to live through the camp and who encounters people who cut themselves to use the blood to write and draw memories from the camp in order to make a record of it because they didn’t know if they were going to survive—anecdotes like that, Western audiences often assume are the fictions that I make up. But the truest part of the book is that section because that is a lot of what happened; that was what I was able to research. There’s a fair number of records available because there were a lot of European POWs in those camps.

It was emotional to write, to understand that the 1940s wasn’t that long ago, that people we know had been through something like that. I get asked a lot whether or not I should have made it a little bit less gory or a little bit less confronting. I don’t believe in gratuitous violence, but I believe in honesty.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
I want people to remember Cecily, Juju, Abel, and Jasmine’s stories, and that doesn’t mean I want people to remember every plot twist. I hope that audiences remember how they felt when they read the book, because like I said, a lot of our history doesn’t really have a place in the larger canon, and the only way for it to enter the larger canon is if people remember how they felt when they read books like mine, and they talk about it, keep it in the conversation, and remember that experience—because shared experiences make history.

Limited signed copies of The Storm We Made are available in-store and online.

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Lit Review: ‘Boys Don’t Fry’ by Kimberly Lee

by Elaine Lau

Malaysian lawyer-turned-children’s books author Kimberly Lee was just trying her luck. In late 2020, she submitted her picture book in a Twitter pitch contest called PitMad in hopes of attracting the attention of US book agents and editors.

But the mother of two boys wasn’t expecting much “save for learning from the whole experience”, she recalls over an email interview with Lit Books. Lee had written a picture book set in a Peranakan household about a boy named Jin who volunteers to be a kitchen hand for his grandmother who’s cooking a big Lunar New Year’s eve dinner. His aunts dismiss him because the kitchen is no place for boys, but his grandmother thinks otherwise.

“My pitch suddenly took off and the retweets and positive comments started flooding in,” says Lee, who is managing editor of parenting platform makchic.com. “This then led me to connect with my agent, who submitted my book to several publishing houses for consideration in early 2021. Very soon after, Boys Don’t Fry attracted attention and wound up being sold at auction to my wonderful editor at Macmillan’s FSG. It was a bit of a whirlwind, to be honest.”

Boys Don’t Fry came out in December 2023. The story, beautifully illustrated by Singaporean artist Charlene Chua, challenges gender norms and celebrates intergenerational relationships. The author tells us how this all came about in our Q&A.

Can you share with us your background, and how you got into writing children’s books?
Writing has always been my first love. As an only child (with an overly-active imagination), stories became my first friends — along with my wonderful mother, who brought me up on a steady diet of magical, made-up tales throughout my childhood.

My love for storytelling ultimately led me down the path as a lawyer, where I remained in litigation practice for several years and placed my dreams of becoming an author on the backburner. After starting my young family, I took a step back from practice. Somehow, I stumbled back into my love for writing amidst motherhood, endless pandemic-induced lockdowns and finding new purpose in this new season of my life.

Children’s books serve as such powerful mirrors and windows for our young. To play a part, however small, in shaping young minds and guiding them through their understanding of the world, is the greatest privilege. 

What was the impetus to write Boys Don’t Fry?
I’ve always had a deep love and respect for the wonderful food and family I grew up with and Boys Don’t Fry is the culmination of this. This book serves as a fond love letter to my Peranakan/Nyonya upbringing and was born from a desire to share and showcase this culture, its colours and its magnificent cuisine to a greater audience.

More importantly, at the heart of this story is a message about honouring the desire in every child’s heart to feel seen, valued and included.

Admittedly, great chefs run in my family — I was brought up on tales of how my great-grandmother’s dishes would practically bring grown men to rapturous tears — and my mum, aunts and other family members are continuing this same tradition. I love cooking as well, though there’s such a specific art and painstaking detail to Nyonya dishes… I still have much to learn!

Boys Don’t Fry is your second children’s book after What If?, which introduces children to the concepts of body boundaries and personal safety. Was it easier or more challenging to write a story versus a nonfiction book?
Both mediums present their own unique sets of strengths and challenges. Boys Don’t Fry was a story that contained some elements of my own personal experiences, so in a sense, that made it easier to communicate. That being said, my challenge was to present this subculture and the story’s intended message in a way that was universally understood.

As for What If?, this book is unique in that it contains both fictional and non-fictional elements. While it is rooted in non-fiction, there are still fictional and even, fantastical elements in the scenarios posed, which allow a young reader to think about their possible reaction to events that range from the silly to the more serious.

With the book’s discussion guide, my co-author Liyana Taff and I had to carefully ensure that the information contained was reflective of the research we undertook (our content was guided and informed by the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child, the Protective Behaviour Framework for personal safety and The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s (UK) PANTS rule), as well as the extensive consultations we had with experts such as Child Protection Officers, child psychiatrists, teachers and NGOs. So it was the research process, more than anything else, that was the most time-consuming (although ultimately, rewarding).

Tell us about the illustrator Charlene Chua and how she came to be on this project. What was the process like working with her to bring your story to life?
Charlene was a delight to work with — there was honestly no one else I could have imagined serving as the illustrator for Boys Don’t Fry. Charlene had left a comment in a tweet expressing her excitement about there being a book centred on Peranakan/Nyonya culture, and once I sold this manuscript, I knew immediately that I wanted her on board as the illustrator! Being from Singapore herself (and with a great-grandmother who was adopted into a Peranakan/Nyonya family), Charlene was familiar with the nuances of our Southeast Asian way of life and brought the book’s characters and setting to life in such a vivid and authentic way.

It was also such a fun process working with her on ensuring accuracy in the book’s illustrations — from finding references from old personal family photos, to taking videos from my visit to Melaka’s Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum to give her a “feel” of the space as inspiration for the book.

Are you working on your next children’s book? If yes, could you share what it would be about?
Yes! I’ve just announced my upcoming book, 100 Days, which will be released by Macmillan in Spring 2025. It’s a story that centres on the traditional 100-day celebration observed by many Asian cultures (including the Malaysian-Chinese community), and follows the journey of a newly minted big sister as she grapples with the arrival of her baby sister. As the days go by, she slowly discovers a love that deepens with time and learns to embrace sisterhood through the changing seasons.

Locally, with the wonderful team at makchic and the brilliant Delia Razak as illustrator, we’re currently working on a book on internet safety for kids (featuring several characters from the same universe as What If? and serving as a follow-up in an ongoing picture book series) and aimed at a 2025 release.

Boys Don’t Fry is available in-store and online.

Author event with Florentyna Leow

Join us for a conversation with Japan-based Malaysian writer Florentyna Leow who will be speaking with Elaine Lau about How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, an intimate collection of essays about navigating life, friendship, and belonging in the storied city of Kyoto, Japan. The talk will be followed by audience Q&A and book signing. Tickets are RM10, and you will receive a RM10 voucher to use on event day.

About the book:
Twenty-something and uncertain about her future, Florentyna Leow is exhilarated when an old acquaintance offers her an opportunity for work and cohabitation in a little house in the hills of Kyoto.

Florentyna begins a new job as a tour guide, organising elaborate trips around Kyoto’s cultural hotspots. Amidst the tourist traps and temples, she develops her own personal map of the city. Meanwhile, her relationship with her new companion develops an intensity as they live and work together. Their relationship burns bright, but seasons change and things grow strange between the two women.

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart is a collection about the ways in which heartbreak can fill a place and make it impossible to stay.

About the author:
Florentyna Leow is a writer and translator. Born in Malaysia, she lived in London and Kyoto before moving to Tokyo. Really, though, she lives on the internet. Her work focuses on food and craft, with an emphasis on under-reported stories from rural Japan, like English Toast (neither English nor toast), a shrine dedicated to ice, and Japan’s rarest citrus. She cannot go five minutes without thinking about food. How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart is her first book. She can be found @furochan_eats on Instagram and Twitter, or at www.florentynaleow.com

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Lit Recap: Author event with Red Hong Yi

Malaysian visual artist Red Hong Yi is renowned for her larger-than-life portraits and art installations created using everyday objects and materials not typically associated with art-making: socks, teabags, bamboo chopsticks, eggshells, and coffee stains, to name a few. An architecture graduate who found her true calling in making art, Hong Yi has established a worldwide following with her unique creations and artistic vision.

Hong Yi spent the better part of the pandemic writing How to Paint Without a Brush, an autobiographical survey of her work over the past decade, charting her growth and development as an artist. The book, which features Hong Yi’s earliest works and her transformation from promising architect to global artist, was put out by American publisher Abrams in May this year.

Lit Books hosted Hong Yi in an author event on 27 May, 2023, and the wonderfully down-to-earth artist spoke candidly with Fong Min Hun and our audience about how the book came together, her art and journey as an artist. The following is an excerpt from the hour-long chat.

On how the book and its format came to be:
What’s amazing about Abrams my publisher is they were open to ideas. They said we could do something that’s about your culture as an Asian artist or a compilation of your projects or it can be a materials book… If it’s purely autobiographical, they told me from the get-go it might not sell as well as a how-to book. That is why there’s a how-to at the back, so it appeals to a more general crowd. I thought if I’m going to come up with a book, I want it to reach as many people as possible.

On the process of writing the book, the challenges and joys:
I found it quite intimidating at first. I love reading, and I do enjoy writing but I never thought of myself as an author… The best advice I was given was just to write the way you speak. I read a lot of advice tips from authors and they said your first draft is going to be bad; you’re going to have to edit and edit, which is what happened.

The first draft was hard. I felt it was really rigid and boring. My mom read the first draft and she was like, ‘The first page makes me want to sleep.’ That was really scary for me and I thought I better get rid of all this jargon and make it more personal. I was trying to make it sound hyper-intellectual at first. But then I thought maybe I should write it in a tone like I’m talking to a friend, so I changed it completely. I quite enjoyed that process. 

The introduction was the part that was the hardest for me — to come out and be vulnerable. You’re talking about challenges you had, your childhood, and I felt I had to really dig things out of me. That was daunting, but also beautiful, too.

I had [art consultants] Rachel and Beverly from RogueArt help me. I felt I needed feedback from people in the art industry that knows art in the Southeast Asian context so they read the draft and helped me with the edits quite a bit. 

I dedicated this book to my mom and dad because they were the ones who taught me how to paint and draw when I was a kid. My mom especially — she had a Picasso print from Ikea in her room and I remember she told me, ‘Look at it — it’s just a few lines, but you can tell it’s a person. You don’t have to make it elaborate.’ I thought that was so profound. 

On why she uses materials in her artistic creation:
I think a lot of it really comes from my background in architecture. When I graduated I realised that I really wanted to create all these portraits but painting, which is something I used to do in high school, didn’t come naturally to me anymore. What’s me is reading floor plans, playing around with the material, understanding space and scale. If I’m going to create art that’s really me, I thought I should make it with materials and tools I know best… Till today that speaks to me.   

On her wide choice of materials:
I see this book as a compilation of my first 10 years. Some of my early inspirations were artists like Ai Wei Wei, who uses a range of materials. That became my inspiration at the start. My first decade is about experimenting with materials. But the next decade, I do want to stick to a certain type of material and master them. I’ve been burning red paper in particular and searing that red pigment onto canvas. That’s become my focus and I do want everything to be predominantly red — I’m going through this red phase right now. I’m hoping it would become a more recognisable material in the future. 

Signed copies of Red Hong Yi’s How to Paint Without a Brush are available in-store and online, while stocks last.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Preeta Samarasan

Fourteen years after her critically acclaimed debut novel Evening is the Whole Day was published, Preeta Samarasan returns with her second full-length novel, Tale of the Dreamer’s Son. It is an ambitious and darkly humorous book that examines the hubris and frailties of a community of Malaysians. Novel and insightfully written in a way that only Preeta can, the book delves into the synthesis of religion, politics and violence that lies at the heart of this country.

The France-based Malaysian writer celebrated her homecoming and launch of the new novel at Lit Books on 5 Nov, 2022. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation she had with Min Hun.

On how the novel first took shape:
This book very much began with the characters, with their individual stories. […] It’s about the children, first and foremost, who are just dragged along their parents’ weird, spiritual quest. It’s, of course, also about the way that the Malaysian political context shapes the destinies of the characters, in a quite obvious way.

I began with the child, the narrator Clarence Kannan Cheng-Ho Muhammad Yusuf Dragon. I started with him because I have been very interested in the way that parents decide what values their children are going to believe, the values that they’re going to pass on. I think this is true for all children but it’s sort of more apparent when the parents embark on some unusual spiritual journey.

Preeta: “We tell these stories in an effort to somehow fix something in the retelling.”

I tend to not begin with themes. Everything grew out of this idea of who would this child be, what would it be like to be an observant child yet a child sort of marooned in this weird situation where your parents, they have this weird relationship to the cause. And you’re there trying to figure it out. I did have this novel be bookended by May 13th and Operasi Lalang, and I think the themes emerged out of that as well.

On whether the novel is the story of Malaysia writ small:
It is this one guy who’s a visionary trying to build what he feels he can build… Yes, Malaysia writ small. He’s building a small community where all of what he wants Malaysia to be can be done in this hermetically-sealed context. He’s lost hope that it can happen on the grand scale, but he can at least do this.

On how she came up with name and concept for the Muhibbah Centre for World Peace in the book:
It went through several iterations. I had various, different names, and none of them felt right. And then one day, we were discussing the whole concept of muhibbah on social media and I was like, ‘That’s it!’ That’s the Orwellian concept this book needs … you know, this big hope but it ultimately means nothing. It’s empty. It doesn’t ever happen.

It’s not based on any one particular sect or cult. My parents, they never entered into any residential commune like this where they were fully involved in the cause, but they experimented in a lot of different things. My mom especially was always seeking truth. As a child I was exposed to a lot of religious movements and the characters are amalgamations of people that I ran into and also of the infighting that I saw in all of these movements. And also, the way that I was exposed pretty young to different religious leaders and the way they’re all this sort of weird mix of really believing in the cause, being really committed to their values but also being flawed human beings, having their own desires and imperfections.

On whether May 13th continues to be a major issue in Malaysia:
I think on a conscious level, no. I think most people don’t think about it, really. It’s sort of gone. But I think that, the fact that people don’t think about it is the exactly why it continues to matter. Because I think we’re not really exorcising those ghosts; we’re not really facing our history and not really talking about why and how we would want to depart from where we were. Precisely because we don’t talk about it in any meaningful way, it’s still very much a part of our biological makeup as a nation.

On whether her role as a fiction writer is about seeking redemption:
I feel like that’s kind of what almost all writers do. We tell these stories in an effort to somehow fix something in the retelling, even if the retelling is not in an obvious way because it’s not like we retell the story and then put some happily-ever-after perfect ending. But somehow in the retelling, it’s a way to relive it and to fix certain things. I think this is an idea that was there in my first novel and it’s very much there in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It’s in a lot of books, this idea of going back into history and somehow if you can think about it the right way, if you can just fix the story in your head, that you’ll change something, that you could change the way that we experience the present.

Preeta says that this novel required her to “invent a lot more, speculate a lot more, imagine a lot more”.

On her favourite character in the book:
Oof. They really aren’t likeable characters. They each have their moments where they’re actually being kind of a halfway decent human being. I have a lot of sympathy for the narrator, especially when he is a child. But would I want to be his friend? No, absolutely not. He’s terrible. I mean, I wouldn’t want to spend more than two hours with him. When he’s a child, he’s my favourite character in the book. He has the possibility of becoming what he doesn’t become.

On portraying identity and class in the novel:
I think it would’ve seemed too unrealistic to have everyone treating everyone, regardless of race or class, with the utmost respect all of a sudden. You can’t just switch on a switch and all of a sudden Malaysians, or anyone anywhere in the world, becomes capable of never thinking about class or race. Of course, they arrive at this community and the idea is that they’re never supposed to think about race and class. But they just can’t do it. In the end, they’re just conditioned by their prior lives. I’m not trying to make any larger point but as a writer, I felt myself constrained by reality. Like how would Malaysians behave if they suddenly found themselves in a place where they can’t talk about race? I don’t think they could do it.

On how different the experience of writing this second novel was from the first:
It was quite different, for one because Evening Is A Whole Day is so much closer to my immediate life experience. It was about a Malaysian Tamil family. It wasn’t autobiographical, but it drew a lot on my familiar world. In this one, I had to, sort of, invent a lot more, speculate a lot more, imagine a lot more. So the experience of writing it was very different. The experience of publishing it was night and day. […] It’s not a book that’s easy to pigeonhole ethnically and because it’s a much less South Asian but much more Southeast Asian book, it’s much, much harder to sell because Southeast Asia is unfamiliar to the West. And the West is not particularly interested in Southeast Asia yet. They say they are, but they’re not really. So yeah, it was very different in that sense as well.

Check out Tale of the Dreamer’s Son here.

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Lit Review: ‘We Could Not See the Stars’ by Elizabeth Wong

by Fong Min Hun

As booksellers, Elaine and I constantly work through an endless pile of books to determine their suitability for our shelves. We usually divvy up the books between us and avoid reading the same book to speed up the assessment process (which makes for interesting book conversation, because rather than discussing something we had read together, we are almost always telling each other about the book that we just read). It’s not often that we would say to the other person, ‘Hey, you need to read this book’ but she said just that after finishing Elizabeth Wong’s We Could Not See the Stars several months ago. I mumbled, ‘Okay, I’ll get around to it,’ and left it at that. But several weeks ago, she’d thrown the book at me, metaphorically speaking, and said ‘Read It!’, because the author was going to be making an appearance at our shop and I Needed To Read The Book. And so I did. 

At first blush, We Could Not See the Stars is a work of speculative fiction set in an alternate Malaysia populated by emigrant Chinese in which Manglish is spoken exclusively. The story begins in Kampung Seng, a small fishing village on the west coast of the Peninsula, where our protagonist, Han, lives the quiet, unassuming life of a rural fisherman. He schleps for his rich uncle — Tauke Lim — who owns the largest fishing operation in the kampung and spends his days aimlessly rooting around, despite his young age. What sets Han apart from all others, however, is his spotty provenance: his mother, Swee, had suddenly appeared at Kampung Seng with him in tow years ago armed with a mysterious looking spade, and never disclosed any information in regards to her origins or her family. That she would then deliberately run into the sea to her death several years later, leaving no clue as to her origins save for the odd-looking spade, would further deepen the mystery of the pair. 

Han, who has little recollection of his mother and even less of their past, is phlegmatic about this void in his life even though he is plagued by dreams and fragments of memories embedded in his being. All this changes when his mother’s spade is stolen from his house — “She’s dead and I have nothing left of her!” — spurring Han to go after the thief, setting him off on a journey that will take closer than ever to the discovery of the truth of his heritage. His odyssey will see him leave his tiny kampung for the first time, taking him to the Capital in the Peninsula, then across the deadly Desert of the Birds, and finally across the sea into the Hei-San archipelago where the secret of his origins lies within the forest of Naga Tua. 

First, a word about the language. It is clear from the off that Elizabeth Wong is adamantly writing a book about Malaysia, for Malaysians. However, there is also no doubt that she is writing about a specific setting of Malaysia and for a specific segment of Malaysians:

In their evenings, they lingered in the parking lot of the former Golden Star cinema. The last rays of sunlight flared across their motorcycles as they smoked their cigarettes, and the dust clouds from the main road billowed around them. Sometimes they would race from Golden Star to Liu’s prawn farms on the other side of the village, and back again… If they were at Boon Chee, they would watch football matches that were showing on the twenty-year-old Sony TV that hung over the entrance, next to Laughing Buddha looking at them. ‘Eh, boss, boss, more beer, peanuts also, why like that so slow?’ Chong Meng would holler, and the workers would scurry. 

Those of us of a certain vintage and variety would certainly recall such locales: Chinese townships anchored by the local cinema — the Sentosa, Paramount and Ruby cinemas come to mind — supported by an enclave of petty merchants selling sundry items and fireworks under newspapers during Chinese New Year. The local patois would very much be dictated by the majority dialect group in the area, and if any English was spoken in these areas, it would be in the Manglish so deftly illustrated in the line of dialogue above. Even the cry of the rooster, which Wong phonetically dishes out as Goukokoko, is typically Manglish; nowhere else would you find a rooster’s cry written out in this way, in the same way that so many thousands of Chinese Malaysian mums have sounded the cry of the rooster to their children. 

Indeed, all of Wong’s characters speak in Manglish in the novel. Nevertheless, it is a particularly Chinese Malaysian variety of Manglish that dominates in the book which leaves the question of, ‘What about the other races?’ unanswered. The fact of the matter is, the other races don’t feature in the book at all; or if they do, their distinguishing marks are subsumed under generalities and abstractions. (White men do make an appearance in the book, although they are, perhaps slightly pejoratively, described as the White Ghosts, a literal translation of the Cantonese term for Caucasians, gwai lo [鬼佬]. Before anyone loses their composure over this, it’s a very minor role and their presence more a function of world-building demarcating boundaries than anything else).  

But there is a reason for the Chinese-Malaysian-centricity of the book. At its core, We Could Not See the Stars is a fable about the Chinese diaspora, and about the descendants of those who left the motherland for Nanyang in search of riches in these relatively virgin lands. It is about those of us who have been separated from our ancestral lands for generations, who have lost all bonds of familiarity with these lands, and yet hold on to a thin thread that ties us to a past and impels us to seek out our identity by following that thread of history. This theme is repeated in several passages through the novel:

We are all part of this world, Ah-ma explained, connected in this great shining net of humanity, and to belong in it fully, one needs a past, a history. 

For we are stardust — we are merely a minuscule physical manifestation of larger processes, planet forming from bits of rock and dust, plants generating oxygen, comets and asteroids delivering water, volcanoes spewing aleum, creating homes for humans to find and populate; we are one sentence in a larger story, one whose ending has not been written yet. To lose this history is death.

We Could Not See the Stars is not a perfect novel. I have some reservations about the pacing and the structure of the book, and there is a sense that the balance between world-building and plotting is slightly off-kilter. Nevertheless, the book continues to resonate deeply within me because the problem of historicity and identity is one that I can strongly identify with. Going back to the metaphor of the thread of history which ties us to our past, we can also see that the thread thins and weakens with each successive generation. There will be a point of inflection in which the thread snaps altogether, and decisions will have to be made: about when and where we are to re-anchor ourselves, and to decide our part in the larger narrative. We will need to do this, because, as Wong tells us, to lose this history is death. 

Join us for an author session with Elizabeth Wong in Lit Books on 6 Aug! Purchase tickets here.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Hanna Alkaf

Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf’s third novel, Queen of the Tiles, is set in the world of competitive Scrabble. Hence it was only fitting that the author session held at Lit Books on 2 July, 2022 would feature life-size Scrabble boards where attendees could try their hand at fielding high-scoring words. The event was organised by the Two Book Nerds Talking podcast headed by Honey Ahmad and Diana Yeong, who are no strangers to those who have been following us for a while. This dynamic duo has collaborated with us on numerous literary events over the years.

The morning of Hanna’s event dawned bright and beautiful, and the audience who came were eager to get up close and personal with one of their favourite authors. Hanna spoke at length with Honey and Diana about Queen of the Tiles, a mystery novel set in the world of competitive Scrabble that explores teenage friendship, grief and mental health. The full podcast will be out soon, but in the meantime, here are some snippets from the hour-long interview.

On how she came to write Queen of the Tiles:
I grew up in a time when my brother was playing competitive Scrabble. There used to be weekly tournaments at the Park Royal Hotel downtown, and I used to teman my mother to send my brother and pick him up. I sort of absorbed the atmosphere and would watch my brother walking around with these massive printed out lists of words that he bound with duct tape on one side — he would study them.

While I was thinking about what my next book would be after The Weight of Our Sky [Hanna’s debut novel], the idea came to me to write about a Scrabble tournament because I’d never seen books that really centred a Scrabble tournament before. And then I thought, well, what if I added murder…

On how she crafted Najwa, the novel’s main character:
Najwa was tough in a lot of different ways to write because first of all, Najwa is dealing with such immense grief. In order to write those kinds of emotions, I find that I have to mine them within myself and really explore my own feelings in order to bring that to the page, and that’s a tough thing to do. You have to scrape away the layers of protection you put around yourself and really sit with your own ideas of grief and loss.

The other level is just that Najwa is much smarter than me so it’s very hard to get into her head and write the way that she thinks, which is to float from word to word, definition to definition, and tie it altogether. I wanted to write her that way and I was also very mad at myself for writing her that way because it made my life much more difficult. The search for the perfect word at the perfect time that would tie to the next word and the next word, that wasn’t an easy thing to do. It didn’t come naturally to me. It involved a lot of reading of the Scrabble dictionary.

On being unapologetic about injecting Malaysian elements into her stories:
There are things about the Malaysian experience of growing up that stick and that I really want to see written about normally in the narrative, the same way that we accepted tea parties with tea and crumpets, nurseries and governesses — we all read this as kids and we just accepted that they were the narrative of our childhood even though it didn’t look anything like our childhoods. And that’s what I wanted for us. I wanted to read it and be like this is just a thing. It’s one of those things that I write without trying to make it a big deal. It’s not a focal point; it’s not a thing I want outsiders to look at and exoticize. I just want it to feel familiar to you.

When we talk about who I’m writing for, I’m writing for Malaysians. I may be published in the US, but I’m writing for Malaysians. I want them to feel like they are home to you. I write them thinking about how I was at that age, how I grew up, how my kids are growing up, what’s normal for us, and what’s normal for them.

On plotting an absorbing and compelling mystery:
Queen of the Tiles is in many ways my most technically difficult book because plotting a mystery is very difficult. Writing any sort of mystery is very difficult and very technical and it involves a lot of meticulous planning and follow-up, going back and forth and making you’re foreshadowing right and adding the correct red herrings and making sure that you’ve led people astray enough times and all sorts of stuff like that.

On her favourite word:
One of my favourite words is obsequious. I just like the way that that falls off the tongue. It sounds like exactly what it is — a slimy person. There’s something about the way you say it that’s very satisfying.

Watch out for the full interview with Hanna Alkaf soon on the Two Book Nerds Talking podcast, which you can subscribe to on Spotify and Apple podcast.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Shivani Sivagurunathan

After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, we hosted our first in-person, in-store literary event on Saturday, 4 June, 2022. The occasion was to fete Malaysian author Shivani Sivagurunathan and her first full-length novel, Yalpanam, published by Penguin SEA last year. The novel is about the unlikely friendship of 185-year-old Pushpanayagi and her 18-year-old neighbour, Maxim Cheah, and how both would have to revisit the past in order to become whole persons and move forward in their lives.

Shivani, who is assistant professor in English and creative writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, spoke with Lit Books owner Fong Min Hun about the long journey it took to write her first full-length novel and the intricacies of the story and characters. Excerpts from the conversation is reproduced below.

Min Hun: How did you come to write this particular story and how long did it take you to write it?
Shivani: It was a very convoluted journey because I started writing it in 2011 just after my first book was published, Wildlife on Coal Island, which is a collection of short stories. I was on a writing spree basically; something was unlocked within me. The first image that appeared with regards to this book was of Pushpanayagi herself. What I saw was a really fat old woman in a white saree doing a bit of gardening. It was a very compelling image. I saw that the garden was very fertile, almost Edenic, and at a slight distance was an old colonial-style house. 

That was a very magnetic image that I started to follow and basically, image followed image followed image, and then a story was unfolding. The first half of the novel, right up to the point where Maxim moves into yalpanam, would flow beautifully. It was very engaging; I was really getting into the mood of writing. I felt very much in control. When I reached the middle point of the novel, things would just fall apart. I would be lost; it drove me mad. From 2011 to 2014 I was writing and rewriting this novel.

This book went through so many changes and finally in 2014, I put it away. I thought fiction writing isn’t for me; I’ll just go back to poetry. In retrospect I see that what had to happen was I had to grow up as a person and as a writer in order to complete this book. I put it aside, got a job teaching creative writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia and frankly, that was the training I needed.

In 2018, I managed to score myself a sabbatical. I got six months off work to do something. Initially I was not planning to go back to this novel… I had a novella written in 2014 so I thought to return to that novella and work on that. But a writer friend of mine took me away to Tioman and encouraged me to go back to the novel. Very interestingly I realised that the distance, the time spent away from the manuscript, really helped me to see it more clearly. I could read it more objectively; I could see where it was problematic. I basically rewrote it. 

MH: How autobiographical is this book?
S: I’d say that all fiction is autobiographical; it’s just a question of how [much so]. This novel is not very overtly autobiographical but I definitely did draw on my complex relationship with my Sri-Lankan-Tamil heritage, exploring the complex relationship one can have with one’s own inheritances in terms of the question of displacement and the pain of feeling severed from one’s own culture. 

MH: It’s a challenging book to read, Shivani, but at the same time rewarding. I find with a lot of difficult literature, if you persist with it, while there may be parts that you don’t fully understand, you find yourself rewarded by it at the end. Your book was one of those. There were two or three different timelines going on at the same time and at the start, I think you deliberately try to confuse your reader. For example in the book, you talk about the rupturing of the notions of reality and when I read that I thought to myself, ‘This is what Shivani is doing. She is trying to shake me out of this comfort zone from the very start of the book.’ Was that what you were trying to do?

S: Absolutely. I’m really glad that you experienced that. When the novel starts, we see Pushpanayagi, who’s basically been a recluse for close to seven decades. She lives in this house on her own, and the only person she meets is Hadi the vegetable seller who comes to her house to collect the vegetables that she grows; that’s how she earns a living. She’s been living in a state of stagnation for seven decades and she has a very myopic vision of reality, of the world, and of herself. The way she lives life is a very narrow way of living. The process of transformation that she goes through is a process of dismantling these fossilisations, a rupturing of this perception of reality that has basically kept her in a kind of paralysis.

Similarly, with Maxim — she’s been brought up in this very sheltered home, she’s been fed on a diet of certain beliefs and ideas that are very limiting. The journey that they’re both on is one of dismantling these encrustations and that necessitates a questioning of what they’ve been believing, a questioning of assumptions, and then seeing what else is there. It’s problematising reality, problematising what is. It’s saying that reality is so much bigger and so much more complex than we think it is. There are multiple versions, multiple perspectives. It’s sort of asking the reader also to consider what you’ve been taking for granted and saying let’s open up the world. 

MH: Maxim wasn’t particularly enigmatic but I couldn’t figure her out. Why was she so hurt by her family’s circumstances that she felt the need to run away? Tell me more about Maxim and how she fits into this picture.
S: Maxim is, you’re right, not a very enigmatic character. She’s also very young. There is a big contrast between someone who is 185 years old and an 18-year-old who is particularly emotionally immature. She’s a deeply lonely person. She’s friendless. She hasn’t really had that kind of training in looking at her emotions, at her interior world, and being able to process it and understand what’s going on. In terms of her response to her situation, I think it’s fitting for the kind of person that she is.

MH: There is something very broken about Maxim, or something fundamentally missing in her and we do get that part of the story later on when she tries to uncover her own secret history. You were talking about how reality is not all that it seems to be and there is something about reclaiming history and the past for an alternate future. So, this is a book about secret histories, isn’t it?
S: To some extent, yes, the unearthing of stories that have not been heard before, the stories, the voices, the experiences and feelings that have been repressed that have been banished to some kind of psychical outer space that need to be aired in order for us to get a fuller perception of reality. What does it mean to open up reality? It is to bring in these perspectives that haven’t been seen before. In that sense, yes, there is a lot of secret histories that are coming to the surface. 

MH: There does seem to be a lot of writing with a preoccupation with secret histories, or an attempt to try to flesh out the world as we know it through knowledge that was once known but perhaps now hidden or now lost. I’m wondering, why do you think there is this current in contemporary writing? Is it because we are somehow dissatisfied with who we are today? Is modernity so sterile and so limiting that we want to recover something about ourselves that we no longer have?
S: That’s a great question. I think it comes, yes, from our dissatisfaction with who and what we are now because we feel lost in terms of our identity. Maybe we don’t feel like we’re grounded enough or that we understand where we are. What do you do if you you’ve lost your way? You can’t move forward without going back. There’s always something that occurred in the past that hasn’t been resolved, accepted or processed, that hasn’t been truly grasped. And so, we have to keep returning to the past in order to really understand where we are now.

MH: There are two very distinct voices throughout the book. One voice is very poetic, uses a lot of imagery and allegory. The other one is more straightforward prose. Was this tension between these two voices deliberate?
S: Yes, in a very practical sense because there are actually three narrators in the novel. There’s Pushpanayagi’s point of view, there’s Maxim’s point of view, and then there’s a third unnamed narrator…. the grandiose, philosophical, poetic voice. I had to make sure that the language Maxim uses and the language that Pushpanayagi uses were authentic to the kind of people that they are. Maxim would never speak in very poetic, grandiose ways. For Pushpanayagi, in the initial stages of writing her, her voice did come out very poetic, but then as I clarified her voice, I realised that it wasn’t actually that philosophical or that dense. Then I realised that there was still space for a lyrical, philosophical voice, hence, the third narrator. I have a very clear idea of who or what that narrator is and it’s sort of related to the core of the story, which is asking metaphysical questions.

Yalpanam is available here.