Wherever in the world I go, whoever I’m speaking to, it takes about 1 minute, sometimes less, before the person I’m speaking to says, “Where are you from?” For most people, this is not a difficult question to answer, but for me it involves a tiny degree of soul-searching – how do I best explain my cultural background? Sometimes I try to get away with the simplest answer: I’m from Malaysia. But since I’ve lived mainly in England for twenty years – more than half my life – I don’t feel this properly answers the question. I quite often dodge the question and say, simply, “I’m Malaysian.” But then I am in difficult territory, particularly since my interlocutors are often westerners, who don’t always have a refined sense of Asian geography. The typical line of reasoning goes something like this:
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from Malaysia.”
“Oh right, so you’re Malay.”
“No, I’m Chinese.”
“So you’re from China?”
“No, I’m from Malaysia.”
“But you just said you are Chinese.”
Twenty years of explaining the difference between Malaysia, China and England – the countries of my national origin, ancestral origin and current residence – have left me in a state of mild panic whenever confronted with this question. This is further complicated by the fact that people often ask me where I was born, as a way of working out the country from which I moved to England. And there the explanation becomes even more confusing, because I happen to have been born in Taiwan, where my parents worked for a number of years in the early 1970s. So you can imagine the layers of explanation involved, especially to a European who can’t quite figure out the geography of East and South East Asia.
The question of where someone is from is relevant not just during these moments of awkward explanation. Since becoming a professional novelist, I have become aware of the pressing need for publishers, readers and above all academics to categorise a writer according to nationality or cultural origin. In this way, I find that I am now a writer who falls into one of a certain number of categories, depending on where and to whom I am speaking. Sometimes I am a “diaspora” writer – though it is not clear which diaspora this is. Other times I am simply an “Asian” writer, as if writers from Korea are exactly the same as writers from Bangladesh. Lazier categorisation sometimes lumps me in that most dreaded of all categories: “Writers from around the world,” as if cultural distinctions cease to exist the moment one steps out of the western world.
But it is not just westerners who are fixated on the idea of where one is from. From my experience, Asian people are even more obsessed by this question, particularly in a writer’s home country. I was recently in Singapore and spoke at a conference attended by many university academics. Some of them were compiling a book of writing by Singaporean and Malaysian novelists, many of whom, like me, live abroad. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Malaysia and Singapore were, until 1965, one country, and the two still maintain very close links – there is, for example, much moving and resettling between the two countries, particularly of the ethnic Chinese population. The criteria for deciding who was Malaysian and who was Singaporean, according to this university study, thus became incredibly complicated. If a person moved away from Malaysia at 16, was she still Malaysian? Yes, but only if she still wrote about Malaysia. If a person now aged 70 moved to Australia at the age of 40, and still had a Singaporean passport, but only wrote about Australia, could they still count of Singaporean?
I know that national origins are extremely important. Notions of patriotism, pride and a sense of belonging, of knowing where one is from – all these are fundamental to the human condition. Moreover, national or cultural identity often defines a novelist’s identity. It is difficult to imagine Thomas Hardy or William Faulkner (just to pick two random examples) having written what they had written had they not lived in southwest England and Mississippi respectively.
Ultimately, however, it seems to me that, that questions of origins should not, and indeed do not, affect great works of literature, which are universal in their reach. If we take an archetypal English writer – Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, for example, it will immediately become obvious that notwithstanding their deep roots in a particular culture, they manage to touch people everywhere in the world. Even works that define one country are often easily read elsewhere. One only has to look at the great classics of Chinese history to realise this. Journey to the West (Xi You Ji), for example, much loved abroad (indeed, the subject of a recent hit muscial in British theatres), involves, obviously a journey. It is a journey to another country, a tangible link to reach out to others. We could spend much time talking about this monumental work, but for the present it suffices to say that in its combining of an adventure story, philosophical allegories, satirical sketches, it is a timeless work that has meaning wherever you read it.
And that, I guess, is the purpose of novels: to transcend boundaries, to aspire to something that can touch people everywhere, and at any time – writing should be as relevant and moving to someone in rural China as someone in downtown Manhattan. Moreover, we live in a globalised society, one in which people move more freely than ever before; the country of one’s birth is often not the country of one’s residence. The exchange of ideas and cultures is so great, so exciting, that it seems strange to want to identify someone solely by where they are from – our presence here today, for example, is testimony to the importance we attach to breaking down boundaries in today’s world.
In the final analysis, all novelists are, to some extent, outsiders, no matter where we are from. A writer’s insights come from a sense of being set apart from the rest of his society, no matter how deeply attached he is to that society. And I think this enables us to capture the madness of the modern world, in which everything seems to change so quickly. A city like Shanghai seems to represent this modernity more than any other. People come here from all over the world, for all sorts of reasons. Where they are from seems to me to matter far less than the fact that they are here, speaking to each to each other in an ongoing dialogue.
