A guide book is a good starting point for your travels. You can find good museums, where to stay and where to eat. But to really find out about a new place, fiction is best.
I recently visited Malaysia, which is a country most people don’t think much about. Because it’s sandwiched between Thailand and Singapore, there’s an inclination to assume Malaysia must be like one of the other country. It’s not.
I survived on the scant history section in my Rough Guide on my first trip, but for this second visit, I decided it was time to know more about the country, which is predominately Muslim Malay. Being on the trading Straits of Malacca, the country also has influences and populations from around the world, especially from China and India.
I started with one of Malaysia’s most celebrated authors, Tan Twan Eng, who has been short and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and has won the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
His first novel, The Gift of Rain, is set on the island of Penang, Malaysia. During World War II, when the threat of Japanese invasion looms, a young Phillip Hutton befriends a Japanese diplomat. Soon after their close friendship forms, Malaysia was invaded. It’s hard for Hutton to figure out where his allegiance lies.
If you want to understand Malaysians still detectable annoyance with Thailand, it may help to know that the Thai government gave the Japanese army access through their country to invade Malaysia and eventually Singapore. It was a bloody and cruel occupation.
To save his family, Hutton works for the occupying Japanese. But seeing the cruelty inflicted on his people, he starts passing information to Malaysian guerilla fighters. It is a twisting and brutal tale. Regardless of whether you ever plan to visit South East Asia, Tan is an author worth investigating.
To get a feel for modern day Malaysia, I buzzed through a series of Inspector Singh murder mysteries by Singaporean author Shamini Flint. This plump, chain-smoking Sikh is a fish out of water in the Singaporean police department. Seemingly more interested in finding his next beer and chicken curry, this old-school detective hunts down murderers in a series of South East Asian countries. The first who-dunnit is set in Malaysia.
As a Singaporean, Singh is exasperated by chaotic Kuala Lumpur: entire families piled on a motorcycle and darting through traffic, cracks and man-swallowing pits in the broken sidewalks, and the constant stench of drains. At the same time, Singh appreciates a country where he can smoke.
Malaysians and those who live in clean, organized and wealthy Singapore have a friendly competition about whose country is better. As noted in the Inspector Singh series, the argument generally ends with a Malaysian delivering the knock-out punch: “Who wants to live where it’s illegal to chew gum?”
I’m quite hooked on this series, and have followed Inspector Singh to Indonesia, Cambodia and India. I may have more travelling to do. If you have a particular work of fiction that really helped you appreciate a country, let me know!
