14 Feb Tash Aw’s ‘A Stranger at the Family Table’

‘All that is broker must remain in the past’. That’s a reflective line from a very fine essay by Tash Aw, ‘A Stranger at the Family Table’, published in The New Yorker a couple of days ago. It really is a subtle and insightful piece of writing: a meditation on the personal and social dynamics of migration, told initially through the stories of Tash Aw’s grandparents – ‘the strangers, lost on a pier’ – and then in a conversation with his father. It also has important things to say about relationships across generations, the journey from poverty to privilege, and the changes ‘making us drift apart from the rest of our family – but more precisely, it was about money and class and guilt’ and the ‘impossibility of any convergence’ between these worldviews. And, of course, these are precisely some of the themes that Tash Aw has explored in three fine novels produced over the past decade: The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), Map of the Invisible World (2009) and Five Star Billionaire (2013). The most recent novel is fascinating in that it depicts the Chinese dream in a snakes-and-ladders universe of opportunity and ruin, through the eyes of Chinese Malaysians – from tycoons to factory girls – trying their luck in the new China, the reverse of his own grandparents’ journey. You can read the full essay here: A Stranger at the Family Table.