Resurrecting a Lost History Some time last year, I watched a classic Hollywood movie, 55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963), about the Boxer Rebellion on a British television channel. The synopsis of the film says: ‘This intelligent historical epic concerns the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 when extremists besieged the compound of international diplomats.’ These so-called ‘extremists’ are the people who were starving, who were trying to protect themselves and their culture from the foreigners – the foreigners who brought in opium to drug the nation, to take over territory after territory from the Qing government. But in Western media, the victims become the villains, and the invasion is portrayed as a heroic, unquestionable act. How awfully history has been manipulated, and how little, in general, people know about happenings in the past. This is one of the reasons behind the writing of Little Hut of Leaping Fishes. Little Hut of Leaping Fishes is set in the last quarter of the 19th century, the dying days of the Qing Dynasty. It was the time when the West invaded the East with their power and culture, a culture that conflicts with local beliefs and practices. After the Opium Wars, China’s door was forced open, and some ignorant Chinese people, either indulging themselves in the drug or making profits from it, further accelerated the country falling into foreign hands. In this difficult time, my character Chai Mingzhi – the eldest grandson of a feudal landlord profiting from opium farming – tries to change his and the people’s lives by becoming a mandarin. I planned the story in a way that the journey of my character mirrors the social and political turmoil of his period. The important events in Mingzhi’s life coincide with the important events in the history of China. The book begins with Mingzhi’s birth in 1875, when Emperor Guangxu was enthroned, and ends at the encroachment of the Eight-Nation Allied Army on Beijing. His wife and the child she is carrying die during the failed reformation campaign by the intellectuals in 1898. Mingzhi’s family becomes a miniature of China: The treacheries and corruption in his family mirror the treacheries and corruption in the Qing Imperial government; his feudal landlord grandfather represents the corrupt Qing government; and his father is an opium addict and this alludes to the opium infested China. Mingzhi’s pain and sufferings are the pain and sufferings of the people under a corrupt government. His experience of the Western culture reflects China’s reaction to the new culture that has changed the country forever, in both positive and negative ways. All these changes have a profound impact on generations to come, including you and me. The mass migrations of the Chinese people during the turn of the 20th century and the emergence of multi-ethnic societies in South East Asia and China’s neighbouring countries, in particular, are the direct results of this historical era. As such, this book is about a lost history, the history that has made us who we are. What happened in the past in China changed the social, cultural and political landscape in this region. We have to understand the past in order to deal with the present, and this book gives us this opportunity. As a child, being a fourth generation Chinese in Malaysia was something so natural that I had never questioned my origins. Snatches of stories told by my grandfather’s generation – the drought, the floods, and the famines, the people who exchanged their babies so that they could eat their flesh, and the conflicts between Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager – to me, were fictional inventions by the adults to scare a naughty girl, and all the stories ended when Grandpa passed away when I was twelve. But then, it came back to me, years later, on my first visit to China. It was summer 1999. I stood on the plateau of the Yellow River, feeling small and vulnerable. Standing by the embankment I stared at the surging waves; the Chinese literature I had learned as a child, the cultural practices my family exercised seemed to be a splash of yellow sand that disappeared swiftly into the roaring water. There, the mighty river, was the source my culture, my history, my origins, which I knew so little about. A question began to stir in my head: Why, as a Chinese, did I live in Malaysia and not China? I began to realise, the stories from Grandpa’s generation are not just stories. They are history – their history, and my ancestors’, the history of the generation that had left their homeland during those turbulent years. It was lost in the lands far away from home, when the children grew up and had their children, when going home became impossible. It is the history of a time in China which is less known to the world, the reasons behind the mass migration of the Chinese to South East Asia and other parts of the world during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is the history that had made me who I am. It was at that juncture on the plateau of the Yellow River that the idea for Little Hut of Leaping Fishes came to me, though it took me a while to pen it down. For someone who grew up in a small town in the 60s and 70s in Malaysia, writing had been an impossible dream. My parents, having less than 10 years of education between them, naturally placed the survival of their family – seven children and two elderly grandparents – at uppermost priority. Perhaps it was the constant busyness at home, I began to find refuge in books and later in writing. As a child, writing helped me to escape from the real world; as I grew up, the reality I witnessed and felt became submerged, and writing became my tool to explore and expose the many true faces of life, the human sufferings, social injustice, and the reasons behind all these. However, the joy of writing stopped abruptly when I graduated from the university. It was an unspoken fact that we children were to fulfil our filial duty: to secure a ‘proper’ job and repay our parents for their deeds. So I did. From a tutor to a journalist to an organisation and methods executive – secure positions, handsome income. But something was lacking. The creative bug inside me grew unsettled, struggling to unleash itself. In October 2002, I gave up my lecturing job in Kuala Lumpur and left for Glasgow, where the writing of Little Hut began. I decided to write it in English after a friend sent me her book, written in simple, artistic prose. I realised that creative writing is not about how large your vocabulary is, but how you use it. Writing in a second - or third - language provides greater room for creative invention. As someone with a background in screenwriting, I prioritise visual/film language in prose writing, and allow flexibility in the construction of phrases. In other words, I sometimes ignored the formal rules of English grammar and defied the rigid structure of sentences. As if there were a camera in my head, I followed the characters’ actions, ‘recording’ them with appropriate framing angles and distance. For example, when my character is stabbed with a knife, I wrote: ‘A flash of metal. / A splash of red. / A scream.’ There is a montage of close-up shots: the fast-moving knife, the flowing blood, followed by a sound effect – the scream. The result is cinematic rather than simply visual. And naturally, the narrative follows a scene-by-scene structure. This way, I presented the scenes on the pages as they would have been on the screen. I want the readers to feel as if there were watching a film as they read along. I began writing with the aim of exploring the concept of ‘home’ then worked out a backbone, focusing on a character who is trapped (feeling homeless) in his own environment and who tries to change his and the people’s lives in late 19th-century China. I didn’t plan the details, though. Writing to me is more of a problem-solving process. I wrote and thought along, and added in minor characters when necessary to move the narrative forward. It has been more than a year since I finished the last sentence of Little Hut. Yet the image of Mingzhi standing on the deck, letting ‘the hem of his gown flutter in the wind’ and staring ‘ahead at the horizon, where the water turns a deeper blue and the river widens into the sea’ sometimes finds it way to my mind, and I would think of my great grandparents and those of their generation, and their journeys southwards. June 2008