Tag: malaysian fiction

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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 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 Review: ‘The Girl and the Ghost’ by Hanna Alkaf

by Elaine Lau

I stopped reading children’s books when I became a teenager and graduated to ‘older’ works such as western classics and crime fiction. It wasn’t until we opened Lit Books that I rediscovered middle-grade fiction and found to my utter delight a world replete with gems.

Many of these stories of adventure and hijinks are about meeting life’s difficulties and complexities with courage and hope. Good middle-grade fiction tackle weighty issues without dumbing it down and without being preachy. When it is done well, my god does it make my heart sing — and I reckon, it will you, too, dear adult reader, and not just your child. To quote WH Auden, “There are good books which are only for adults… but there are no good books which are only for children.”

When Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf revealed at the author event for her debut young adult novel, The Weight of Our Sky, at our store last year that her next book will be a children’s novel, I looked forward to it with not a small amount of excitement. The Girl and the Ghost is the novel in question, published this month by HarperCollins, and it is a deliciously chilling novel about family legacies, friendship, and jealousy, but also forgiveness, kindness, and courage.

The story begins with Suraya inheriting a pelesit, a familiar spirit from the witch grandmother whom she’s never met. A bit of a loner who grows up with an emotionally absent mother, Suraya grows up with the pelesit — whom she christens Pink — as her closest companion. Pink, in turn, watches over her obsessively, and sometimes with a little too much zeal.

So it happens that when Suraya befriends the new girl in school, Jing Wei, Pink reacts jealously and to the detriment of both girls. Things come to a head, eventually leading Suraya to divulge to her mother what’s been going on at which point her mother enlists the help of a pawang hantu, Encik Ali. But to their horror, Suraya and Jing Wei discover he has sinister designs for Pink. They take it upon themselves to help Pink return to where he came from so as to escape the clutches of Encik Ali. The two embark on an urgent mission where danger lurks at every turn and they find unexpected allies of the supernatural kind coming to their aid — a bit reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

Hanna has crafted a story with verve, emotion, and empathy in The Girl and the Ghost, and reading it gave me all the feels. Be forewarned, however, that if you have a particularly sensitive child, the story gets pretty dark and gruesome in the final confrontation with the pawang. There’s a lot to unpack in the novel, as it examines heavy themes such as the harm of holding on to something even when it’s time to let go, the way jealousy poisons relationships, and how the avoidance of difficult or painful parts of our lives just makes things worse in the long run.

But there’s a lot of light as well. The precious gift of friendship is a key thread that runs through the novel. Jing Wei is the very portrait of a true friend, a Samwise Gamgee-type to Suraya’s Frodo Baggins who jumps with both feet in, come what may. There is also the tenacity of hope, bravery in the face of fear, and love in action.

Suraya as a character is bookish, kind and non-confrontational. She is the very definition of a good girl, “one who does as she’s told… who doesn’t like to make trouble for other people”, taunts the pawang at one point. But as it becomes clear, it isn’t that she’s afraid to fight, but that she’s one who chooses her battles — when it comes down to it, she will face demons to protect someone she loves.  

The Girl and the Ghost is a good book. And as Auden informs us, no, it is not just for children.

Verdict: 8/10

Availability: Paperback, RM49.90. Purchase here.

Special thanks to HaperCollins for an eARC of the book.

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Lit Recap: Author meet-and-greet with Hanna Alkaf

On Saturday, Feb 17, we celebrated the publication of Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf’s debut young adult (YA) novel, The Weight of Our Sky, with a meet-the-author event that saw more than 70 people in attendance. We were heartened to see the enthusiastic response to Hanna’s novel, which is about a music loving teen with OCD, Melati, who does everything she can to find her way back to her mother during the historic race riots of 1969 in Kuala Lumpur. This is one of those books that on the one hand, is gut-wrenching, but it is also heart-warming. There are heart-breaking depictions of human cruelty, but also of immeasurable kindness. Most of all, it is an empowering tale of hope and courage in the face of terror, both from within and without. Min Hun conducted a Q&A with Hanna, an edited version of which is reproduced below.

Min Hun: Tell us about how you came to write a novel set during the riots of 1969.
Hanna: The Weight of Our Sky was a book that had lived in my head for a long time before I started writing it, mostly for the reasons you mentioned, that we don’t talk about May 13. I remember it from my history textbook but it was really glossed over and sterilised. It always fascinated me what we were not told and what voices we were not hearing, and what was being obscured.

What sort of research did you do to write this book?
I love doing research; it’s so fun to me. But I’m also a journalist by training so I approached it a lot like as if I were writing an investigative feature. I read everything that I could on it: articles written at the time, both from in and out of the country, I read government white papers, any book that I could find. I interviewed survivors and I consulted experts on the things that I needed to get the details right for — although I did end up missing a couple of things.

How did you create your characters?
They are an amalgamation of different people and they are fully Malaysian. It’s very hard to see characters like that in the current YA novels… I write YA and I write for kids because as a kid who read a lot of English books growing up, I don’t think I ever saw anybody who looked like me. I feel like when you’re reading as a kid, a teen or young adult, that’s when what you read is most formative. I think it means a lot to a kid to be able to read a book that they can see themselves in.

There is a theory from researcher Dr Rudin Bishop, who says in kid lit it’s important that children have both mirrors and windows. They should have windows into experiences other than their own and they should also be able to see themselves reflected in the fiction they read. Malaysian kids get a lot of windows but we have very few mirrors. I also enjoy reading YA, and I just really wanted to write Malaysian stories for Malaysian kids.

It was full house with standing room only at the event.

Mental illness is a big part of this book and your first collection of stories, Gila, is also about mental illness. Can you tell us about your interest in the subject and why mental illness is an important part of this novel?
I wrote Gila, a nonfiction book in 2015. I wrote it after I had my daughter, and I was freelancing at that time. I was working on an article about postpartum depression, a very relevant topic to me at that time. I had interviewed 4 or 5 women, and the thing that I noticed was that all these women were educated and lived in urban areas, but not a single one of them — even though they had reached the point of psychosis — had gone to see a psychologist or psychiatrist. They relied on other things — they relied on faith, on community and family but they never went to see a professional. This was weird to me because if you’re sick, you go to a doctor. If your brain is sick you go to somebody who can help you but that wasn’t the case. And I started thinking about why that was. I started doing some research, and I thought if there was something interesting to be uncovered here, I could pitch it as a series of articles. As it turned out, it was one of those topics where the more questions I asked, the more questions I came up with. It became clear that it was a topic that really needed to be talked about in a lot of different but interconnected ways, and that’s how Gila came about.

When I wanted to start writing the novel, I knew that I wanted to create a protagonist who was dealing with this intersection of faith and mental illness, which was a thing that was coming up a lot in the interviews. As Malaysians, we are surrounded by faith, whether you’re a person of faith or not. I wanted a book that explored that intersection between faith and mental illness because I think at the age the protagonist is at, you’re questioning a lot of those things. 

I think you also represented the way our society tends to approach mental illness. It is still largely a taboo topic of discussion, or it’s something you can’t explain. In the novel, Melati’s mental illness was stifling in a way because this sense of losing control, of being enslaved to mental illness, is something we’re all naturally uncomfortable with.
You’re not the only one. I’ve had people say things like the parts where she’s dealing with her OCD, they’re tedious to read and they’re painful. But that’s what OCD is. OCD is tedious and it’s painful. It’s not having these quirks of needing to clean one’s hands or arrange things a certain way. It’s tedious and it’s painful. I wanted the text to reflect that and really put you in her head.

Given how sensitive we are as a society with racism, were you at any point concerned about what you were writing?
Not really, only because we’re not a society that talks about it and that’s a problem. The more we don’t talk about the painful parts of our history, the more likely we are to never learn from them. If we just keep obscuring things that are hard and that are painful and uncomfortable… we have to sit with our discomfort. This is a thing that happened in our history, we have to accept that it happened and we have to figure out why. 

The Weight of Our Sky is available at RM55.90.