The Harmony Silk Factory

Tash Aw, the author of this novel, was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia, is now living in London. The novel shows the way in which a Chinese-Malaysian called Johnny, actually narrator's father in the story, destroyed everything relevant to him. I started this novel when visiting Malaysia in January. Tim recommended me to read it; his choice was right on my interests in history.

The author is a good storyteller putting a fluent rhetoric out of the real Malaysian history by adapting Borges's tactic blurring between the real and the fictional. It seems to enhance reality in the narrator's statements, but actually, at the same time, fantasize history. This is one of the most interesting aspects shown in global cultural production since 1990s: reinventing historical events. This leads to the pseudo-historicity of the past, the pleasure principle of popular culture, the principle that we want to believe to be exist, not the true representation of the given.

In this way, the author does not seem to succeed in making a round characteristic of Johnny: all of sudden he turns out to be an absolute evil-like man without proper reason. By this, the whole story of history is easily transformed to fantasy, which cannot be discriminated from reality. The confusion of the boundary between reality and fiction is said a wide phenomenon of post-modern society, however it seems different in Malaysian culture; Malaysia has always already been post-modern since the colonial age. This reality allows Tash Aw's novel such unreal reality. In Asia, reality is fantastic than fantasy.