Formal Choice

As Kate McLoughlin, professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, notes in Authoring War, chroniclers of war have favored different forms of writing in relation to different conflicts: from the epic in Ancient Rome to the lyric poem of World War I, the epic novel of World War II, the Vietnam War movie (mostly from an American perspective), and the Iraq War blog. Perhaps the short story or novella is the form of choice for the South East Asian revolutionary then, from “the Generation of ’45” who expressed frustrations with the Indonesian revolution, to Nguyễn Minh Châu, who called for less propaganda and more realism in representations of Vietnamese experiences of war, to Siburapha and Sidaoru’ang, who explored Thailand’s class struggles in their writing.

In Delicious Hunger, the short story form serves as a series of vignettes that are not connected to nor contingent on each other, nor particularly concerned with specific political or contextual history. “I wanted my translation to honor Hai Fan’s uncompromising vision, which meant treating the lives and life choices of the Magong comrades as equally valid to anyone else’s, without the need for additional explanation or justification,” says translator Tiang (Magong is a contraction of Malaiya Gongchandang, the Chinese name of the party). “Hai Fan’s stories work on their own terms, whether or not the reader knows their background, and so I chose not to weigh down the text with too much baggage in the form of additional historical material.”

This brings to mind philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s argument for the right to opacity in the context of translation: one has the right not to be totally transparent with one’s reader, and particularly if they are reading from and in the West, one has the right not to overexplain or justify.

There is a lack of explanation and embrace of unknowing in both the absence of context and in the translation itself. Chairman Mao, MCP secretary-general Chin Peng and the 1989 Hat Yai Peace Agreement, which brought an end to the insurgency, receive only brief passing mentions with no introduction or explanation. “The Enemy,” “Leader,” and “Quartermaster” are the nouns of characters rather than their names, removing personhood from these presences of authority.

Certain terms and phrases are explained, partially explained, or left in their original language, in a combination of Hai Fan’s specific experiences and Tiang’s subjective, or “vibes-based,” translation of Singaporean and Malaysian literature — incorporating the fluidity, flexibility, and hybridity of languages in the region.

Dislocated Memories

Communist insurgency (although it should be noted that Hai Fan prefers the term “movement”) was a key feature of the Cold War world order in the aftermath of World War II. It was also a site of national liberation struggle, connected globally, with other similar struggles in Vietnam, China, and further afield. It is impossible to read Delicious Hunger as separate from this broader context and the individual, personal challenges that arose from it.

In the story “Mysterious Night,” an older leader orders a younger female comrade to “trust and rely on the revolutionary masses.” The fact that the woman is killed in enemy fire in the following scene perhaps signals the fallacy of this ideological messaging. Another story, “In the Line of Work,” takes its title from the refrain repeatedly spoken by one of the characters, Lim Kuan, who readily accepts anything that happens to him in the context of the revolutionary struggle. This includes severe injury to his leg, resulting in amputation, with its calf “like a withered branch stripped of its bark . . . the stump scraped red, raw and bloody.”

Such scenarios reflect the realities of the uncertain and disjointed times that Hai Fan lived through, when the Communist movement was beset by factional infighting. While the author doesn’t directly reference these internal fissures, a sense of frustration and disappointment is palpable within the disorientation and dislocation that several of the collection’s characters experience.

“Hai Fan’s book is sold as fiction, but it is closer to historical fiction, which makes it very fascinating,” says historian Jason Ng, coauthor of Narratives From Piyamit: Life Stories at the End of the Revolution, an oral history of MCP guerrilla experiences during the 1970s. For Ng, this kind of literary work is important in humanizing those who were condemned as enemies of the state. “Books like Delicious Hunger expose the complexity of this historical memory, and for Malaysian history, it muddies the waters. It serves as recreations of lost memories.”

Complicating official state narratives about communism in Malaysia and Singapore risks controversy. After the launch of Narratives From Piyamit in Betong, southern Thailand, last month, Ng and publisher Chong Tong Sin (who also published What the Rainforest Told You) were detained and questioned by customs and travel control officers upon their return to Malaysia. More than twenty Chinese-language copies of the book were confiscated; Ng says that they still have not been returned.

This comes two years after two bookstores, including Chong’s Gerakbudaya bookstore, were raided by Malaysia’s Home Ministry. Eight Chinese-language books were confiscated from Gerakbudaya due to alleged “communist elements,” while a Malay translation of a book about Karl Marx was confiscated from another store. A selection of books that relate to communism and socialism are also listed on a publicly searchable database of banned books in Malaysia.

Recalling novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen’s work on just memory (which explores the complicated ways that memories of conflicting or traumatic events are constructed), war, and the ethics of remembrance, visual artist Sim Chi Yin writes of memory art as a way to confront and collaborate with ghosts of the past. “The stories, histories and memories of the local left-wing movements have been silenced or, worse than that, demonized,” Sim writes. “It is these silences and mutings that have now become fertile ground for much of the art-making around the Malayan Emergency.”

It is fitting, then, that an artwork made by Sim forms the cover image for Delicious Hunger, showing a prosthetic leg made up of composite components. “I keep feeling as if my leg is still there,” says the character Lim Kuan after his amputation. We can read this phantom, spectral leg — a recurring motif throughout Delicious Hunger — as a metaphor for missing elements of Malaysian and Singaporean historical memory of the Communist movement. Delicious Hunger is Hai Fan’s endeavor to recover these sensations and feelings, grounded in the truth of his experiences — inconveniences, messiness, inglorious intimacies and all.