Though I Get Home: Interconnected Short Stories From Malaysia

Though I Get Home by YZ Chin.

Though I Get Home is YZ Chin’s debut book, a collection of interconnected short stories that illustrate the Malaysian post-colonial experience and modern-day political dissidence. I picked it up because as a writer, I am interested in post-colonialism, diaspora communities, and activism.  Furthermore, I would like to experiment with Chin’s use of interconnected narrative with my current project, In the Shadow of the Middle Kingdom.

The book centers around Isabella Sin, known as Isa, an aspiring writer-activist who was imprisoned for writing obscene poetry. The government arrested her he along with others who participated in a protest in Kuala Lumpur. Her grandfather, Gong Gong, had worked as a butler and a nanny for a British family during colonial times, had told her stories that ignited Isa’s fascination with England. After his death, Isa spent a year in London, which led her mother to blame her lack of marital prospects on her Anglophone speech and attitude. There is also the story about her friend K, who at the opening of Starbucks in Taiping, pondered whether or not to leave her ex-boyfriend who had already broken up with her.

There are other characters in the book who aren’t directly related to her, like Howie Ho, a Chinese Malaysian studying in New York, who dated an American girl who was sympathetic to Malaysian activists and had a penchant for writing poetry. There’s also Ibrahim, a member of the RD, who acted as the moral police. His job was to make sure that their fellow Malays, who are all technically Muslims, are preserving their purity and not engaging in sexually deviant behaviors, such as sex before marriage and cross-dressing. They knocked on the windows of parked cars and broke into hotels to make sure that everybody was behaving themselves.

Initially, I didn’t care for the book. I didn’t connect with the storytelling and felt that the book was messy overall. I didn’t always understand how each story related to one another. There was a story about a concubine that seemed out of place. Furthermore, while reading  “A Malaysian Man in Mayor Bloomberg’s Silicon Alley,” I was frustrated reading about this Howie Ho, a seemingly unrelated character who went away to the US for college, dated an American girl, and went back to Malaysia to vote for an election. It is the longest story in the book, and at first, I didn’t understand why he even mattered. Chin does reveal the relevance of this character at the end, but I wish there was some foreshadowing in the earlier stories. Also, there is a thread in the story where Howie Ho witnessed an incident of abuse and violence in his college dorm room but chose to do nothing. That annoyed me—not only because I thought he was a coward, but I also didn’t understand how the incident added to his character.  I just felt appalled and disliked him.

Having said that, I enjoyed some of the stories, such as “The Butler Opens the Door.” After the daughter of the British family he was working for had gone missing, Gong Gong staged a funeral to help his employer grieve properly. The British people who attended the funeral were appalled and fascinated at the same time, which reminded me of my own grandfather’s funeral that I attended as an eight-year-old. It was an open casket funeral, and Mama had led me to see him, despite my unwillingness. I saw him through a glass sheet over a fridge-like thing— I jolted at how cold it felt when I touched the surface. He looked like he was sleeping, but he also seemed strangely hollow and weird. I didn’t like it. On the same day, I also got yelled at for playing with the joss papers, the money for the dead, by folding them into cranes and other origami animals before feeding them to the fire. There is a lot of burning at a Chinese funeral: I watched in awe as flames engulfed an entire paper home that looked like a dollhouse and a paper car. All these memories came rolling through my mind as I read about this funeral with no corpse.

Initially, I didn’t like the book. However, after reading parts of it a few times to write this review, I grew to appreciate it. It’s like a bottle of good, vintage wine that takes time and patience to enjoy. I learned a great deal about Malaysian history, politics, and how similar Chinese folk religion is wherever people practice it.

 

Telltale Signs that China is Slowly Taking Over the World

My first experience with censorship was when I first moved to Dubai. When I first moved there, I tried to log into my OkCupid account. Instead of the blue and pink login page, I was directed to a grey and red warning sign that told me that this site was restricted. I was stunned. Growing up in Canada, I had never had an experience where I couldn’t access a website due to government censorship. I eventually got a VPN and accessed whatever I wanted. However, I vehemently disagree with censorship in any form, personally and professionally.

When I was working as a librarian, I made a pledge to provide equal access to information and to fight censorship. China, with its great firewall, blocks thousands of websites and services, most of them from the West. Obviously, the Chinese policies regarding the internet and the dissemination of information have never sat well with me. However, now living in Hong Kong, reading about how the Communist Party of China (CPC) is controlling their populace and using their wealth to control other countries’ foreign policies and economies brings a chill down my spine.

On August 6, I read an article in The New York Times, A Generation Grows Up in China Without Google, Facebook or Twitter. It describes a group of Chinese millennials who grew up with social media sanctioned by the CPC. Unlike the rest of the world, they didn’t use Google, Facebook or Twitter. Except for one student who studied in Australia, the young people interviewed for the article either don’t know about western social media or don’t see the need for them. They basically trust whatever is fed to them through Baidu, WeChat, Tik Tok, and Weibo:

Accustomed to the homegrown apps and online services, many appear uninterested in knowing what has been censored online, allowing Beijing to build an alternative value system that competes with Western liberal democracy.”

What worries me is that these young people have zero curiosity over other ways of thinking and a lack critical thinking skills. They will not question or hold their government accountable.

It gets worse:

“These trends are set to spread. China is now exporting its model of a censored internet to other countries, including Vietnam, Tanzania, and Ethiopia.”

This is a digital colonialism.

Back in April, I wrote “China’s New Silk Road” where I talked about the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) and how it’s changing political and economic policies in Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. In some ways, BRI is a form of Chinese colonialism, where the CCP can exert control over and gain strategic advantages by investing in foreign countries. This in itself is scary enough, but now, they are entering another realm importing their internet to African countries.

 

Original illustration for “China’s New Silk Road.” Illustrated by Ahmara Smith.

Am I being paranoid, or is China trying to take over the world through their version of the internet?

I am sitting here trying to grapple with my fear. Why am I so freaked out? Other people who read The New York Times article might pick up on the fact that this article is not legitimate—it is merely Chinese propaganda on the New York Times—after all, no sensible Chinese citizen would speak out against the CPC and its policies, especially to a foreign newspaper. To me, just the fact that the New York Times printed the views of these young people shows that they want to normalize this alternative, Chinese approach to the internet. It’s like they are saying, “Look, censorship is working. We’ve just brainwashed a population of young people who aren’t curious or critical and would not defy the government.”

Remember the man who stood in front of the tanks during the Tiananmen Square Protest? He wouldn’t have existed in the year 2018.

Tank Man by Jeff Widener,
1989.

Using the power of technologies and harnessing the wide reach of the internet, the CPC has bred the perfect citizens under a dictatorship. And, it only took less than a generation. We should be worried, very very worried.

For the last month or so, I have been writing personal stories, such as lessons on love and my first marriage. I almost forgot that this quest to tell my story and discover my Taiwanese culture came from a deep-seeded fear of China’s influence. I don’t want to live in a world where the government restricts our access to information. I don’t want to live in a world where people are passive and uncritical of their surroundings. I don’t want to live in a world where activists, writers and artists and jailed for speaking up against the government and challenging the status quo.

I can feel the chill as the shadow of the Middle Kingdom creeps closer. I don’t really know what to do about it. I don’t know if I can do anything about it. All I do is read news about the growing influence of CPC around the world, be horrified by it and write about it.