Slow Boat to China and Other Stories

by Ng Kim Chew, Carlos Rojas (Translator)

"Dream and Swine and Aurora," "Deep in the Rubber Forest," "Fish Bones," "Allah's Will," "Monkey Butts, Fire, and Dangerous Things"—Ng Kim Chew's stories are raw, rural, and rich with the traditions of his native Malaysia. They are also full of humor and spirit, demonstrating a deep appreciation for human ingenuity in the face of poverty, oppression, and exile.

Ng creatively captures the riot of cultures that roughly coexist on the Malay Peninsula and its surrounding archipelago. Their interplay is heightened by the encroaching forces of globalization, which bring new opportunities for cultural experimentation, but also an added dimension of alienation. In prose that is intimate and atmospheric, these sensitively crafted, resonant stories depict the struggles of individuals torn between their ancestral and adoptive homes, communities pressured by violence, and minority Malaysian Chinese in dynamic tension with the Islamic Malay majority. Told through relatable characters, Ng's tales show why he has become a leading Malaysian writer of Chinese fiction, representing in mood, voice, and rhythm the dislocation of a people and a country in transition.

Genres: Short Stories, China

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2016

About the author

Ng Kim Chew was born in Johor, West Malaysia, and lives in Taiwan, where he is a professor of Chinese literature at National Chi Nan University. His short story collections include Dreams, Pigs, and Dawn; Dark Nights; From Island to Island: Carved Spins; Earth and Fire: The Land of the Malay People; and Memorandums of the South Seas People's Republic. He has won numerous awards for his fiction, including the United Daily Literary Award and the China Times Literary Award.

aka Jinshu Huang

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of short stories did take me a little while to get into, because (as could be expected from a professor cum author), they're pretty dense and often quite meta, so not ideal for sleepy-brained bedtime reading. Once I got dug in, however, they were really interesting, and about a sector of the world (ethnically Chinese Malaysians) I've never read about before. The translator's introduction was also really helpful in linking together patterns etc through the stories.

Thanks to Netgalley for the chance to read this!

[Michaela Raschilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now despite the fact that there are a number of days between when I started this book and when I finished it I read it in only two sitting and I have to say that I recommend spacing these stories out more than I did. This is definitely a collection that needs each story to be taken in its own stride. It deserves having each story read and evaluated of its own merits because they are all thought provoking, beautiful, or haunting in their own way.

Due to the fact that I chose to push through it and read it in a handful of sittings, mostly because I put an imposed deadline on myself and for no other reason than that, I felt like the stories at the beginning were far stronger than those at the end while still constantly taking note of the fact that the stories were delicately woven and built filled with juxtaposed formal language and profanity.

I don't plan to get into any detail of the stories individually because I honestly think this is a collection that is a must read. I will say that there are stories that involve a reporter searching for an enigmatic and completely unknown author who blew the world away with their writing, a boy eating turtles in the dark of night so that he can collect their shells obsessively to the point of fetishization, and the love between one regal tiger and an old boat long run ashore.

I feel like aside from the writing, the strength of these stories is the way that they seem to weave together seamlessly. That isn't to say they have a continuing plot but they bring up elements, themes, or structures from the previous stories. The translator did an incredible job of making sure the order was perfect. That is one of the things that makes a good short story collection great, when they are presented in a way that facilitates the stories talking to each other and building off each other. That is definitely the case here.

I do have to say that there were some elements that appeared so often it began to annoy me slightly, but this is most likely due to the fact that I read them all so quickly. I don't think this feeling would persist if I reread it and spread them out over time. I do plan to reread this collection as there were many images and themes I found incredibly interesting. Why exactly does falling asleep on an ant hill have so much importance? Is it simply that the author had a traumatic experience as a child or is it something more? I feel like I can only discover this now that I know all of the stories as they are and how they stack up next to each other.

Reading this collection was like stepping into the middle of a tropical rubber forest in Malaysia and sometimes stepping out the streets of various countries in the south of Asia, places I have never been and had heard very little about but now want to visit and explore and learn about. It let me in on the tension and animosity between the Malay people and those of Chinese decent but Malaysian born. It discussed the changing times where subsistence farmers worry about sending their kids to college as is expected in the rapidly industrializing world that has just started to brush their lives, many discuss what literature means and what it can do, some focus on identity or personal gratification, but all of them have something to say and it was a wonderful experience to dip into.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the March/Apr 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Eunice Ying Ci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories in this collection ought to be rated five stars, others merely one or two. So let’s settle for a three, though I am quite fascinated by the style of the writing and enjoy that the stories are in fact probably best read in relation to one another rather than in isolation. I particularly liked “Fish Bones”, “Allah’s Will”, “Dream and Swine and Aurora” and “Inscribed Backs”. “Slow Boat to China” was also pretty captivating. Some of the lesser stories feel relentlessly convoluted, and when the whole collection turns upon itself like an ouroboros, blurring the boundaries between narratives and echoing narratives, you would think some of the stories could afford to be a little bit less labyrinthine. The same kind of experimental complexity over and over eventually becomes predictable. Nevertheless, I am reasonably fond and taken by Ng’s writing and am interested to read more of his writing.

[Darcel Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

While reading "The Disappearance of M", I wondered: What is considered to be "national literature"? Besides the obvious notion of nationality, would the ethnicity of the writer and language of the medium matter?

[Holly L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich, inventive, hallucinatory, and difficult to take apart...

[Wayne Low · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spellbinding

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book which should probably be subtitled One Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese dude's belief that Yu Dafu is still alive, explored in a fictitious setting. Because did Yu Dafu survive his likely assassination by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945 and then go on to continue writing on banana notes or tortoise shell backs or forced to a small Malaysian island to convert to Islam and never write Chinese characters again? Because that's what the stories in this book are about. Pretty much all of them. Variations on the theme of Yu Dafu's non-death.

What causes such an obsession to write and write stories about one thing? I know I write and write stories about bad mothers again and again because of my own insecurities. Maybe Kim Chew Ng imagines that he's an illegitimate son of Yu Dafu, in some fashion, and writes these stories out of these fantasies. Maybe Kim Chew Ng has a whole other roster of stories not about Yu Dafu and these ones were collected together because of their thematic similarities? I don't know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature to know for sure.

To be fair, it isn't that I don't know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature; I know nothing about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature. So the whole collection was sort of a surprise. I guess I wasn't expecting it to be humourous. It isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but the characters get themselves into ridiculous situations, like a researcher pretending to be a monkey while trapped on an island with a visually impaired Yu Dafu-esque figure in order to get closer to Yu Dafu without Yu Dafu realising it. Or characters getting themselves abducted by an elderly female pirate and her crew. Or a character being sexually aroused by turtle shells. It's odd and entertaining, but still a bit distancing because of cultural barriers. Like I didn't know what the May 4th Generation was, so sometimes I felt a bit lost. But usually just pleasantly lost, like wandering around a pretty, different city, with lots of wondrous stuff to look at. So it was pleasant, my first foray into a collection by an overseas Chinese from Malaysia now living in Taiwan.

In the last story, the only one that I was disappointed in, because it just stopped and I was confused by its abruptness, a character makes a video game to run through all the possibilities for an overseas Chinese coolie living in Malaysia/Singapore sixty, seventy, eighty-odd years ago. This book feels like that but for Yu Dafu. And so, now I know a lot more about Yu Dafu, and the possibilities that may have existed if he didn't really die way back in 1945.

Slow Boat to China and Other Stories by Kim Chew Ng went on sale March 8, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Brian Rothbart · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Slow Boat to China and Other Stories” by Ng Kim Chew and translated and Edited by Carlos Rojas is a short story collection consisting of 12 stories. This is Ng Kim Chew’s first book that has been translated into English. His writing style is very unique and modern. He is supposedly known for this unique writing style, writing in a Chinese that incorporates English, Japanese, and Malay. His stories are full of humor even though they deal with such issues as poverty, domination, and other social commentary of the cultural in the Malay Peninsula. Most of the stories are related in some way. I found this collection to be very unique and interesting. It opened up a whole new world and way of thinking. If you want to be transformed then I recommend this collection of short stories.

[Ming · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read the first three stories and struggled with tracking the events and people and remaining interested in the stories. It just became too cumbersome a task to read this and then I stopped caring.

I, otherwise, love the intersection of peoples and cultures. But I found this presentation too esoteric and too inaccessible in its writing or writing style (translation style too?)