In Conversation With...

Tan Twan Eng on the ‘small human events’ that shape his powerful novels. By

Tan Twan Eng was born in 1972 in Penang, on the coast of Malaysia; he grew up in the capital Kuala Lumpur and later came to South Africa to do a master’s degree in law at the University of Cape Town.

In 2007, Tan published The Gift of Rain, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize; this was followed five years later by The Garden of Evening Mists, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize and won both the Man Asian prize (2012) and the prestigious Walter Scott prize for historical fiction (2013). For the Walter Scott prize, he was chosen above Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies), among other authors.

Tan sets his stories in specific moments in time, layering each narrative with rich colours and complex storytelling. Both novels delve deeply into the period of the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation of Malaya — as it was known then — and the agonising impact it had on the people who lived through it.

The Gift of Rain is narrated by Philip Hutton, a half-Chinese, half-British 16-year-old son of one of Malaya’s richest shipping families. With World War II looming, Philip meets Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat and aikido master who lives close to their home and becomes Philip’s mentor. Their idealised relationship tumbles when Philip realises that Endo is a Japanese spy; the story is a reflection on their bond and conflicting loyalties.

In The Garden of Evening Mists, the narrative follows recently retired supreme court judge Teoh Yun Ling, who returns to the Cameron Highlands of Malaya hoping to find peace as she suffers from the decline of her mental faculties. The book becomes a series of chronic flashbacks that describe her experiences in a prisoner of war camp — she was sole survivor — and her intriguing relationship with the former gardener of the Emperor of Japan.

Tan’s lush, dense novels conjure up vivid imagery of life in the Malaya highlands and along its humid shores. In both stories, one of the main characters is Japanese, and both had some affiliation with the Japanese during the occupation.

Japan, the war and history

“When I was very young,” Tan says, “my mother, who was born after the war, told me how one of her aunts was watching a movie in a cinema when Japanese troops burst in and started firing their guns wildly. Because her aunt was so short, the bullets missed her and hit the heads of the people seated in front of her, showering her in their blood.”

Thus, the theme of war becomes a constant, allowing Tan to explore the moral and practical conundrums into which such events throw people. Yet his writing is never accusatory, and nor does it clearly define one character as evil. Instead, Tan’s writing is about nuances and the humanity that is our common thread.

“I wish to understand. And how else can we understand another person if we don’t regard him or her as a fellow human being? Every character I write must be alive, must come off the page, and the only way to accomplish that is to see them as people, with all their strengths and flaws, right from the very beginning,” he says.

On love and memories

Then, there is love — intense, complex and abundant. Both novels follow the intercultural relationships between their two main protagonists, Philip and Endo-San, and Yun

Ling and Aritomo. But Tan is hesitant to attribute the force of their friendship purely to their crosscultural nature.

“The intensity arises not solely from the fact that it’s forbidden, but from other factors and events happening in their lives too. It’s illuminating to write about characters where the dynamics of their relationship appear, at first glance, unequal; where one person appears to be more dominant than the other, because of age or experience or advantage.”

Because the novels are set in this period, questions around what happens when the war is over and peace returns are central to the stories.

“How do people reconstruct their lives and deal with what they had lost? How do they reconcile themselves with the things they had to do in order to survive, their principles and beliefs which they had to betray?”

In The Garden of Evening Mists, the narrator, Yun Ling, says: “For what is a person without memories? A ghost, caught between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.” This is a question the author juggles with even today: the place of events in history and how we should be remembering them. He recalls a day when, trying to escape the midday heat, he finds refuge in St George’s Church in Penang. While sitting there, he notices a Japanese couple taking a tour of the church; the tour guide tells them about the history of the place.

“[The tour guide] was telling the couple how the roof had been bombed by Japanese planes in the war,” Tan says. “The Japanese man looked sombre. ‘Very bad, the war,’ he muttered stiffly. ‘Sorry, very sorry.’

“The church volunteer brushed away his words. ‘It’s okay, never mind, long time ago,’ she said, smiling. ‘All forgotten already.’ I looked at her and thought, ‘No, it’s not okay. And it shouldn’t be forgotten.’ But a few moments later I said to myself, ‘Perhaps she’s the wiser one. To forgive, to put the bitterness aside and get on with life.’”

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