The Harmony Silk Factory
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
· Part One · - JASPER
1. Introduction
2. The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny (Early Years)
3. The Kinta Valley
4. How the Infamous Johnny - Became a Communist—and Other Things
5. Johnny and the Tiger
6. Three Stars
7. Snow
8. How Johnny Became a God—in the Eyes of Some
9. The End
10. Conclusion
· Part Two · - SNOW
24 th September 1941
25th September 1941
27th September 1941
28th September 1941
29th September 1941
30th September 1941
1st October 1941
2nd October 1941
3rd October 1941
4th October 1941
5th October 1941
6th October 1941
7th October 1941
8th October 1941
9th October 1941
10th October 1941
Later
11th October 1941
12th October 1941
13th October 1941
16th October 1941
Later—by a kerosene lamp Mamoru brought for me
17th October 1941
17th October (late afternoon)
20th October (perhaps—I am not certain of the days)
21st October 1941 (the next day—definitely!)
22nd October 1941
23rd October 1941
24 th October 194 1
25th October 1941
26th October 1941
29th October 1941
1st November 1941
3rd November 1941
4th November 1941
5th November 1941
7th November 1941
8th November 1941
10th November 1941
11th November 1941
15th November 1941
· Part Three · - PETER
The Harmony Silk Factory
PRAISE FOR The Harmony Silk Factory
“A beautifully composed and memorable story about life and death in this, for us, still rather remote part of the world . . . a story quite mesmerizing for anyone unfamiliar with the territory. Clearly Tash Aw is a writer to watch, with a first book anyone who travels by fiction will want to read.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Bewitchingly written and gracefully assured . . . dazzling. Aw makes the most of the exoticism of his setting. . . . The story Aw tells is mercilessly gripping and his prose is lucid, uncluttered, beautiful. Where Aw emerges as uncontested winner is in the subtle modulations of the three narratorial voices. . . . Aw orchestrates a graceful ballet of dissonances and congruences, or echoes and discords.”—The Times (London)
“Aw slices his first novel into three segments, wherein three characters dissect the nature of Johnny Lim, a controversial figure in 1940s Malaysia. Depending on the teller, Johnny was a Communist leader, an informer for the Japanese, a dangerous black-market trader, a working-class Chinese man too in awe of his aristocratic wife to have sex with her, or a loyal friend. Often witty and taut . . . boisterous and enjoyable.”—Publishers Weekly
“[Aw] writes with what seems like effortless fluidity . . . dazzling.”
—Guardian Unlimited
“Malaysian-British Aw makes an impressive contribution to a literature for which Conrad and Maugham are famous in the story of an audacious, successful Malaysian businessman during World War II. Via Aw’s fast-moving prose and shimmering dialogue, which has an odd, affecting noirish manner, three different accounts of Johnny Lim and varying views of historic and personal reality unfold while the Japanese invade, the Communist Party gathers momentum, and alliances are made and broken.”—Booklist
“Aw debuts with a lush offering set mostly in Malaysia during the 1930s and 1940s yet interwoven with the present. Written in crisp and flowing prose, yet with a formal intonation that gives the narrative a certain British air, this work demonstrates the author’s storytelling ability as it brings the depths of the Malaysian jungles to the reader.”—Library Journal
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Tash Aw
Readers Guide copyright © 2006 Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Aw, Tash.
The Harmony Silk Factory / Tash Aw.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-594-48174-1
1. Malaysia—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6101.W2H
823’.92—dc22
http://us.penguingroup.com
ACKNOWLEGMENTS
Clare Allan, Susan Ambler, James Arnold, Lil Aw, Richard Barltrop, Diana Evans, David Godwin, Philip Goff, Jennifer Kabat, Paul Magrs, Julian Pettifer, Iain Ross, Cindy Spiegel
For my parents
· Part One ·
JASPER
1. Introduction
THE HARMONY SILK FACTORY is the name of the shop house my father bought in 1942 as a front for his illegal businesses. To look at, the building is unremarkable. Built in the early thirties by itinerant Chinese coolies (of the type from whom I am most probably descended), it is the largest structure on the single street which runs through town. Behind its plain whitewashed front lies a vast, cave-dark room originally intended to accommodate light machinery and a few nameless sweatshop workers. The room is still lined with the teak cabinets my father installed when he first acquired the factory. These were designed to store and display bales of cloth, but as far as I can remember, they were never used for this purpose, and were instead stacked with boxes of ladies’ underwear from England which my father had stolen with the help of his contacts down at the docks. Much later, when he was a very famous and very rich man—the Elder Brother of this whole Valley—the cabinets were used to house his coll
ection of antique weapons. The central piece in this display was a large kris, whose especially wavy blade announced its provenance: according to my father, it had belonged to Hang Jebat, the legendary warrior who, as we all know, fought against the Portuguese colonisers in the sixteenth century. Whenever Father related this story to visitors, his usually monotonous voice would assume a gravelly, almost theatrical seriousness, impressing them with the similarity between himself and Jebat, two great men battling against foreign oppressors. There were also Gurkha kukris with curved blades for speedy disembowelment, Japanese samurai swords, and jewel-handled daggers from Rajasthan. These were admired by all his guests.
For nearly forty years the Harmony Silk Factory was the most notorious establishment in the country, but now it stands empty and silent and dusty. Death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed, completely and forever. That is what Father sometimes told me. I think it was the only true thing he ever said.
WE LIVED IN A HOUSE separated from the factory by a small mossy courtyard which never got enough sunlight. Over time, as my father received more visitors, the house too became known as the Harmony Silk Factory, partly for convenience—the only people who came to the house were those who came on business—and partly because my father’s varied interests had extended into leisure and entertainment of a particular kind. Therefore it was more convenient for visitors to say, “I have to attend to some business at the Harmony Silk Factory,” or even, “I am visiting the Harmony Silk Factory.”
Our house was not the kind of place just anyone could visit. Indeed, entry was strictly by invitation, and only a privileged few passed through its doors. To be invited, you had to be like my father—that is to say, you had to be a liar, a cheat, a traitor, and a skirt-chaser. Of the very highest order.
From my upstairs window, I saw everything unfold. Without Father ever saying anything to me, I knew, more or less, what he was up to and whom he was with. It wasn’t difficult to tell. Mainly, he smuggled opium and heroin and Hennessy XO. These he sold on the black market down in Kuala Lumpur for many, many times what he had paid over the border to the Thai soldiers, whom he also bribed with American cigarettes and low-grade gemstones. Once, a Thai general came to our house. He wore a cheap grey shirt and his teeth were gold, real solid gold. He didn’t look much like a soldier, but he had a Mercedes-Benz with a woman in the back seat. She had fair skin, almost pure white, the colour of salt fields on the coast. She was smoking a kretek and in her hair she wore a white chrysanthemum.
Father told me to go upstairs. He said, “My friend the general is here.”
They locked themselves in Father’s Safe Room, and even though I lifted the lino and pressed my ear to the floorboards, I could hear nothing except the faint clinking of glasses and the low, muffled rumble which by then I knew to be the tipping of uncut diamonds onto the green baize table.
I waved at the woman in the car. She was young and beautiful, and when she smiled I saw that her teeth were small and brown. She was still smiling at me as the car pulled away, raising a cloud of dust and beeping at bicycles as it sped up the main street. It was rare in those early days to see expensive cars and big-town women in these parts, but if ever you saw them, they would be hanging around our house. None of our visitors ever noticed me, though, none but that woman with the fair skin and bad teeth.
I told Father about this woman and how she had smiled at me. His response was as I expected. He reached slowly for my ear and twisted it hard, squeezing the blood from it. He said, “Don’t tell stories,” and then slapped my face twice.
To tell the truth, I had become used to this kind of punishment.
Even when I was young, I was aware of what my father did. I wasn’t exactly proud, but I didn’t really care. Now I would give everything to be the son of a mere liar and cheat, because, as I have said, that wasn’t all he was. Of all the bad things he ever did, the worst happened long before the big cars, the pretty women, and the Harmony Silk Factory.
Now is a good time to tell his story. At long last, I have put my crime-funded education to good use, and have read every single article in every book, newspaper, and magazine that mentions my father, in order to understand the real story of what happened. For more than a few years of my useless life, I have devoted myself to this enterprise, sitting in libraries and government offices even. My diligence has been surprising. I will admit that I have never been a scholar, but recent times have shown that I am capable of rational, organised study, in spite of my father’s belief that I would always be a dreamer and a wastrel.
There is another reason I now feel particularly well placed to relate the truth of my father’s life. An observant reader may sense forthwith that it is because the revelation of this truth has, in some strange way, brought me a measure of calm. I am not ashamed to admit that I have searched for this all my life. Now, at last, I know the truth and I am no longer angry. In fact, I am at peace.
As far as it is possible, I have constructed a clear and complete picture of the events surrounding my father’s terrible past. I say “as far as it is possible” because we all know that the retelling of history can never be perfectly accurate, especially when the piecing together of the story has been done by a person with as modest an intellect as myself. But now, at last, I am ready to give you this, “The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny.”
2. The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny (Early Years)
SOME SAY JOHNNY WAS BORN IN 1920, the year of the riots in Taiping following a dispute between Hakkas and Hokkiens over the right to mine a newly discovered tin deposit near Slim River. We do not know who Johnny’s parents were. Most likely, they were labourers of Southern Chinese origin who had been transported to Malaya by the British in the late nineteenth century to work in the mines in the Valley. Such people were known to the British as coolies, which is generally believed to be a bastardisation of the word kulhi, the name of a tribe native to Gujerat in India.
Fleeing floods, famine, and crushing poverty, these illiterate people made the hazardous journey across the South China Sea to the rich equatorial lands they had heard about. It was mainly the men who came, often all the young men from one village. They arrived with nothing but the simple aim of making enough money to send for their families to join them. Traditionally viewed as semi-civilised peasants by the cultured overlords of the Imperial North of China, these Southern Chinese had, over the course of centuries, become expert at surviving in the most difficult of conditions. Their new lives were no less harsh, but here they found a place which offered hope, a place which could, in some small way, belong to them.
They called it, simply, Nanyang, the South Seas.
The Southern Chinese look markedly different from their Northern brethren. Whereas Northerners have candle-wax skin and icy, angular features betraying their mixed, part-Mongol ancestry, Southerners appear hardier, with a durable complexion that easily turns brown in the sun. They have fuller, warmer features and compact frames which, in the case of overindulgent men like my father, become squat with the passing of time.
Of course this is a generalisation, meant as a rough guide for those unfamiliar with basic racial fault lines. For evidence of the unreliability of this rule of thumb, witness my own features, which are more Northern than Southern, if they are at all Chinese (in fact, I have even been told that I have the look of a Japanese prince).
I have explained that my ancestors probably came from the South of China, specifically from Guangdong and Fujian provinces, but there is one further thing to say, which is that even in those two big provinces, people spoke different languages. This is important because your language determined your friends and enemies. People in our town speak mainly Hokkien, but there are a number of Hakka speakers too, like my Uncle Tony who married Auntie Baby. The literal translation of “Hakka” is “guest people,” descendants of tribes defeated in ancient battles and forced to live outside city walls. These Hakkas are considered by th
e Hokkiens and other Chinese here to be really very low-class, with distinct criminal tendencies. No doubt they were responsible for the historical tension and bad feeling with the Hokkiens in these parts. Their one advantage, often used by them in exercises of subterfuge and cunning, is the similarity of their language to Mandarin, the noble and stately language of the Imperial Court, which makes it easy for them to disguise their dubious lineage. This is largely how Uncle Tony, who has become a hotel tycoon (“a hotelier,” he says), managed to convince bank managers and the public at large that he is a man of education (Penang Free School and the London School of Economics), when really he is like my father—unschooled and very uncultured. He has, to his credit, managed to overcome the most telltale sign of Hakka backwardness, which is the lack of the “h” sound in their language and the resulting (and, quite frankly, ridiculous) “f ” that comes out in its place, whether the person is speaking Mandarin, Malay, or even English. For example:
Me (when I was young, deliberately): “I paid money to touch a girl down by the river today.”
Uncle Tony (in pre-tycoon days): “May God in fevven felp you.”
He converted to Christianity too, I forgot to say.
JOHNNY LIM WAS OBVIOUSLY NOT my father’s real name. At the start of his life, he was known by his real name, Lim Seng Chin, a common and truly nondescript Hokkien name. He chose the name Johnny in late 1940, just as he was turning twenty. He named himself after Tarzan. I know this because among the few papers he left when he died were some old pictures, spotty and dog-eared, cut carefully from magazines and held together by a rusty paper clip. In each one, the same man appears, dressed in a badly fitting loincloth, often holding a pretty woman whose heavy American breasts strain at her brassiere. In one picture, they stand on a fake log, clutching jungle vines; his brow is furrowed, eyes scanning the horizon for unknown danger while she gazes up at him. Behind them is a painted backdrop of forested hills, smooth in texture. Another picture, this time a portrait of the same barrel-chested man with beads of sweat on his shoulders, bears the caption, “Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic Champion.”