Harmony Silk Factory [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Stop the publishing industry, I want to get off! By shoveling out tons of derivative crap like Nicole Krauss' "History of Love," real gems are getting overlooked. Despite the off-putting title, "Harmony Silk Factory" is one such gem, a very pleasant surprise that much outperforms the ritualistic pap that's come to dominate so much "Asian-American fiction." Tash Aw is a truly gifted writer who manages to weave together fascinating tidbits of Malaysia's history and culture with the story of a screwed-up family. Best of all, he tells the story in the voice of a terrific, stereotype-busting character-a pedantic, vain and genuinely funny riff on a dutiful son, a kind of Tristram Shandy who finds himself in Southeast Asia. None of these all-wise, all-suffering stock characters who have come to dominate this psuedo-genre. Aw is a great talent, and I hope he finds the readers he deserves. Please try this book!

British administered Malaya during the 1940's is fraught with ethnic and cultural tension. The Japanese are advancing down though South Asia, having just occupied much of Manchuria. The British are hanging onto Malaya by a thread, there are already rumblings amongst the locals of a communist takeover. In this hauntingly beautiful country, everything is about to change with certainty that "death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed."

Set against this tumultuous backdrop, The Harmony Silk Factory tells the story of Johnny Lim, a Chinese silk merchant who was raised, not only as a thief, opium smugger and black marketer, but also a murderer and a "monster." Johnny is truly an enigmatic character; a gifted son of a poor family, as a young man he ekes out a living working in a British-run tin mine in the Kinta Valley area where he is subjected to the racism if the cruel, incompetent managers.

But Johnny has a gift for machines, "the parts of an engine falling away into his hands like a piece of silk" and he uses these talents to his best advantage. Soon after leaving the mines, Johnny, traverses the country, eventually turning into a brilliantly successful salesman at the Tiger Brand Trading Company. Only the kindly owner of the shop, Tiger Tan, is higher than Johnny in the chain of command, but Tiger takes an immediate liking to the ambitious boy.

When Tiger suspiciously dies, without warning, Johnny, now the factory's most knowledgeable silk merchant takes over the company, turning it into the most notorious establishment in the country where only the privileged few pass through its doors. Having achieved material success and notoriety, Johnny readily admits that the Factory now "belongs to him; it is utterly his: to mold, control, love, and destroy." A self confessed communist, he avidly reads Carl Marx, while using his newfound wealth to fund a fledging Communist guerilla army.

But Johnny remains mysterious and unknowable. When he collects taxes on behalf of Mamoru Kunichika, a debonair and smooth Japanese professor, is he essentially selling himself out to the Japanese? Or is he actually a fearless communist guerrilla who is working with the grass roots to defeat the enemy imposters? Is he a self-made business wizard or a scheming manipulator? Or perhaps he's a doting husband, who fawns over he new wife Snow Soong, rumored to be the most beautiful woman in the Kinta valley.

One thing remains clear - ordinary people are fearful of a man such as Johnny. His son Jasper, who narratives the first half of this epic story, is adamant that "his father had been born with an illness, something that had eaten the core out of him, infecting him forever." He became "almost mythical, and otherworldly phantom, not at all flesh and blood."

Author, Tash Aw, divides the novel into a triptych of three different narrators, each giving their own interpretation of events reflecting their various personalities, biases, and judgments. Snow, who dies in childbirth, narrates the middle section though a series of diary entries, and Peter Wormwood, a flamboyant, sexually ambivalent English aesthete tells the third section. Snow is torn between her loyalty for Johnny and her volatile attraction to Kunichika, while Peter becomes a sort of mentor and confidante to Johnny, teaching him all things British, and advising him on how to cope with Snow's snotty parents.

The Harmony Silk Factory is an exquisitely patterned mosaic of memory and reminiscence. Peter, leaving England forever, for a paradise, a tropical Arcadia, his vision of perfection, tries to piece his recollections of Johnny together as the fabric of memory comes apart his my hands. "For those few brief seconds, I found myself looking into the face of a friend. The only one I would ever love." And for Snow, there are things she has already lost, but what will happen to her memories? "The obstacles are insurmountable. The boundaries still there, He possesses a world that is forever locked away from me."

Aw makes the most of his exotic setting - the fragile beauty of the earth, the vivid colors, the weight and luminosity of the flora and fauna. His story is mercilessly gripping and his prose is often lucid, uncluttered, and beautiful.

There is a sense of inexorable mystery and a feeling of timeless abundance as these three stories weave together, bringing a fully-fledged portrait of Johnny Lim to life. Going backwards and forwards through time, The Harmony Silk Factory is an elegant, intimate book; a literary mirage of echoing voices and memories. Mike Leonard June 05.

At the end of the introduction, The Harmony Silk Factory's first narrator Jasper declares emphatically that he is "ready to give [us] this, `The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny." In the story Johnny was the merchant owner of the title's business, as well as the most important man in the Malayan Kinta valley. According to Jasper, Johnny was a bootlegger, a cheat, a murderer, a Communist, and a traitor, among other things. Johnny Lim was also Jasper's father. It is this connection that hints to the reader that this `true story' is not the `whole story.'

Tash Aw's first novel, actually his first work of published fiction in any format, examines the infamous Chinaman from three points of view: first the son Jasper attempts to cover most of his father's life, then Johnny's wife Snow records the events and thoughts on a holiday in a personal diary, and finally a geriatric English monk named Peter Wormwood reminisces on his past with Johnny. Yet although the three voices reveal what they can about Johnny part of him remains an unknowable mystery. While the character's relationships with Johnny become more intimate as the novel progresses Johnny becomes more mythical in the reader's mind.

Jasper, for instance, tells how his father was shot on the day Malaysian independence was finally declared in 1957. Because Johnny survives the assassination attempt people begin to say that he is invincible, otherworldly.

Aw has cultivated an elegant and tragic story over three distinct narrative voices, a story that is bigger than even the legends surrounding the Harmony Silk Factory's operator. The characters are all first exotic, like the jungles of the Malayan setting, but they become almost wonderfully known. Wonderfully because, while most of the novel is set at the end of the British colonizing of the Malayan peninsula just before World War II, this tropical story rarely feels foreign or intimidating. Aw's prose is magical in its familiarity. We feel the warm water of the Malaccan straits in the evening just as we feel the impending sense of crisis as the Japanese prepare to take control of the colony from the British. Aw provides us with a sense of common history with this pacific country on the other side of the globe.