Tash Aw’s epic Malaysian tale gets off to a promising start in ‘The South’

It’s 1997, the Asian financial crisis is tanking stock markets and “I’ll Be Missing You” by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans is playing in the market of a southern Malaysian town where one teenage boy, Chuan, buys another, Jay, a knockoff Italian brand shirt. “I really don’t need anything. Really,” Jay tells him. “I know,” Chuan responds. “But I want to buy you something.”

This tender moment comes midway through Tash Aw’s new novel, “The South,” which follows Jay Lim, a 16-year-old high school student, over the holiday break he spends on a parcel of land his mother inherited from her father in-law. Neither Jay nor his sisters, 18-year-old Yin and 20-year-old Lina, quite understand why they’re going there, especially as their widowed grandmother in the north, who they’d normally visit over the break, is ill. But Sui Ching insists and, for once, her husband, Jack, follows her lead, and so the family heads south to the “twenty hectares of scrubby jungle and farmland” that now belong to her.

The land and the farmhouse that sits on it have long been in trouble, though. Fong, the farm manager, looks around while he waits for the Lims to arrive and notes the dry patchy grass, the concrete that’s replaced the wooden porch, and wonders: “Why does he insist on calling the veranda the veranda, and the lawn the lawn? Neither is what it used to be; those words are vestiges from the past.”

And yet the past is very much alive in “The South,” which is the first of a planned quartet that will follow the Lims over the course of several decades. It was originally meant to be a doorstopper of an epic, but as the Malaysan author himself no longer has the patience to read such tomes, he told the Guardian, he felt it would be artificial to write one; he called Jay “a substitute for me” in the same interview.

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“The South” follows the growing attraction and affection between Jay and Chuan, but it is also invested in other characters’ lives, and switches perspectives throughout between first- and third-person narration. It appears, though, that the whole book is narrated by Jay, who moves back and forth between narrating his memories from within and describing what was going on from without.

This is signaled in the very first chapter, when the two boys have sex for the first time and are referred to by third-person pronouns until the narrator breaks in: “I call them boys but in truth they are no longer boys. What are they, then — because they are not yet men? Maybe it isn’t important to know at this precise moment.” But Jay also imagines his way into moments that he can’t possibly have witnessed: Fong, alone, waiting for Jay’s family to arrive, for instance, or Sui Ching considering whether to tell her child about the affairs their father has been having.

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Aw allows much to remain unknown, uncertain, or unsaid in “The South,” and he does so beautifully, allowing readers to find the nuance within the very specific scenes. When Chuan buys Jay a shirt, the glaring class difference between the boys is unspoken: Jay, whose father is a mathematics professor, lives in the capital and is presumed to have a middle-class future that will include a college degree and a white-collar job. Chuan, on the other hand, is Fong’s son and has grown up on the failing farm that belonged to Jay’s grandfather (and now belongs to Jay’s mother). Older than Jay, Chuan left school early and has been working any job he can — most recently at the 7-Eleven in the nearby town — saving money to rent his own space, away from his father, while also still working on the farm when necessary, apparently without pay.

So when Jay says he doesn’t need a shirt, he means it literally, but he’s also speaking from a place of self-consciousness, knowing that Chuan works for a living while he is still at school and has parents who can pay for his necessities. Chuan is, of course, aware of all this too, but it doesn’t matter; he wants to buy his new lover a present, wants to give him something beautiful, and so he does.

In another scene, Jay recalls a place that “offers respite, not just to me but to others like me,” a clearing beyond his school’s sports field which he found accidentally one day, discovering the place where the bullied queer boys hid out, a place where they could do each other’s hair, put on makeup, and generally be at peace with one another. Within this memory, Jay performs a bit of narrative time travel: “In the future, I will find myself in similar spaces, often shaded by trees, by lakes or rivers or among rolling dunes by the sea, or in a park in the middle of a metropolis in the summer, and I will remember this clearing, with its particular scent of loneliness, remember the melancholy that feels like an experience shared by everyone who visits this space and claims it as theirs, so that even when I am alone, I will feel connected to others.”

Once again, here Jay is not saying outright what this means, but the trained queer eye will recognize this as a description of cruising spots that he will grow up to discover, signaling to the reader that the 16-year-old version of him we’re witnessing is only at the very beginning of his queer life.

“The South” is a strong opening for Aw’s projected quartet, a quiet yet expansive novel, and it’s with great anticipation that I discovered that he is already hard at work on the second installment. If the first book is anything to go by, there is a lot to look forward to.

Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”