We, the Survivors

July 1, 2019
A rumination on the way systems of power and currents of hope in modern-day Malaysia can influence a life. When Lee Hock Lye clubs a Bangladeshi stranger to death with a two-foot piece of wood, everyone is searching for a motive. Even after Ah Hock has served his three-year prison sentence, an American-educated sociology student wants to interview him for her dissertation. She wants to understand his story. "Why? That's what you want to know. Just like everyone else," he confronts her early in the novel, "But like the others, you're going to be disappointed." Ah Hock himself has spent months reckoning with the why of it all, but to no end. "I tried to excavate the layers of my thoughts," he explains, "digging patiently the way I used to in the mud on our farm when I was a child." Still, Ah Hock invites the student into his home and, over the course of several months, shares the details of his past, hoping she can "set the record straight" where his defense attorney got it wrong. Aw (Five Star Billionaire, 2013, etc.) drops readers into each phase of Ah Hock's life, beginning with his birth in a small Malaysian fishing village, moving through his childhood days as a passive onlooker to his friend Keong's reckless ambition, and capturing in warm detail the sense of "permanence" and "abundance" he once felt building a farm with his mother. As he crafts Ah Hock's narrative, Aw masterfully conveys his protagonist's specificity while also weaving together a larger picture of the class divisions, racial biases, unjust working conditions, and gender roles that pulse under the surface. Through his interviews with the student--and his reflections on his role as a subject--Ah Hock shares the vital pieces of his story that escaped cross-examination. A raw depiction of one man's troubled life and the web of social forces that worked to shape it.

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Starred review from July 29, 2019
Aw’s captivating novel (after Five Star Billionaire) revolves around a fateful moment of violence set against the backdrop of an ever-changing Malaysia. In an almost stream-of-consciousness work, readers become the proverbial fly on the wall as the main character, Ah Hock, a convicted murderer, tells his tale to a graduate student working on a book. In alternating chapters of Ah Hock’s rambling confession and brief personal exchanges between Hock and his interviewer, Hock’s story wanders through his poverty-ridden upbringing with a single mother, his unsuccessful marriage, his murder trial, his days in prison, and, finally, to the night he committed murder. A simple man, Hock has spent his life believing hard work would bring success; as the manager of a fish farm, he reaches that success, but when his workers develop cholera, he’s forced to find replacements. Desperate for a solution, Hock seeks help from a boyhood friend now trafficking illegal workers, and this fateful decision leads him to an act of violence he never thought himself capable of. As Hock and his interviewer seek to understand what brought him to kill, readers are drawn into a Malaysia overwhelmed with thousands of immigrants seeking refuge, employment, and survival. Aw’s potent work entraps readers in the slow, fateful descent of its main character, witnessing his life spiral to its inevitable conclusion.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
You want me to talk about life, but all I've talked about is failure, as if they're the same thing, or at least so closely entwined that I can't separate the two?like the trees you see growing in the half-ruined buildings in the Old Town. This devastating opening line frames the life of Ah Hock, whose outsider status as a Malaysian of Chinese descent is only bearable because there are folks who occupy the darker fringes even Hock has the luxury of escaping. Growing up in a fishing village, he worries about mingling with the plantation Indians because they might infect us with their poverty. Hock has actually murdered such an outsider, a Bangladeshi migrant worker. In narrating his life story to a visiting journalist, Hock dives into the whys. The careful stratification that Hock's life is built upon is upended when new fish-processing plants are erected in town, and palm-oil plantations ravage the countryside. A slick but faithful friend helps Hock navigate this new landscape, but they become mere pawns in a larger game of chess. Aw (Five Star Billionaire, 2013) savagely erases any doubt that only the fittest survive in the ruthless world of global capitalism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2019

In a Malaysian fishing village, unassuming Ah Hock kills a man, and what unfolds during his interview with a local journalist is a story of unsettling change in a society that continues to be ruled by power, race, and class. Aw has twice been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

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