Horticulture and Healing

Horticulture and Healing

Love and forgiveness are central elements in this atmospheric novel which recalls painful events in Malaysia in the run-up to independence

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Horticulture and Healing

At midnight on Dec 8, 1941, troops of the Japanese Imperial Army came ashore on Padang Pak Amat Beach in Kelantan, northern Malaya. Less than 48 hours later Japanese bombers sank Royal Navy ships including the HMS Prince Of Wales off the east coast of Malaya, near Pahang. An hour prior to the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the US, Indian detachments of the British army in Malaya were engaged in a desperate attempt to hold back the Japanese advance. This battle marked the beginning of the Pacific War and the occupation of British Malaya, the historical backdrop to Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng's atmospheric second novel, winner of this year's Man Asian Literary Prize.

The Garden Of Evening Mists By Tan Twan Eng 348pp Cannongate Books

The Garden Of Evening Mists opens in late 1980s Malaysia as Cambridge-trained Judge Teoh Yun Ling takes early retirement and returns to the Cameron Highlands, the hill station in northwestern Pahang where she spent her younger days. She has been diagnosed with aphasic dementia and wishes to document experiences she had, 36 years before, while her memories of that period are still intact. She also has plans to meet a Japanese professor who is studying the life and work of Nakamura Aritomo, a former gardener of Emperor Hirohito's who migrated to northern Malaya three decades before where he created a traditional Japanese garden.

As Yun Ling retraces the events of her past, the novel flashbacks to two different time periods: the Japanese occupation of her country (late 1941 to 1945); and the communist insurgency of the early 1950s, the period the British termed the First Malayan Emergency.

During the Occupation, Yun Ling and her elder sister, Yun Hong, are interned in a military camp where Yun Lin, the more attractive of the two, is forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers. During their captivity the sisters often reminisce about a family trip made to Japan before the war when they were taken to see a traditional garden in Kyoto. They often find solace in recalling images of that oasis, its remembered beauty helping to distract them from the hardships they have to endure. Yun Hong does not survive to see the end of the war, dying in the camp. Yun Ling vows she will one day create a Japanese garden of her own to cherish the memory of her sister.

In the early 1950s, after graduating from Cambridge University and taking a sadistic satisfaction in prosecuting a host of Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling moves to the Cameron Highlands to live with a friend of the family who introduces her to Nakamura Aritomo, the emperor's former gardener.

Aritomo is asked to design a garden for Yun Ling, but he refuses. He does, however, agree to take her on as an apprentice in the hopes that she will eventually be able to design a garden of her own. Yun Ling reluctantly agrees and the making of this garden become a symbol of the healing process she must undergo to recover from her experiences during the war. The time spent in the garden's construction, Tan writes, "captured everything beautiful and sorrowful about life".

The training she receives from Aritomo goes beyond classic garden design to encompass the intricacies of archery, calligraphy and meditation. And before the monsoon rains arrive, the two have become lovers. Aritomo draws a tattoo on her back and there is an implication that this image could be a map giving directions to the location of treasure hidden by Japanese troops at the end of the war.

Tan's prose, at its sparest, has a disquieting and unsettling beauty, though it is sometimes marred by the use of unnecessary metaphors, quotations and stories within stories. The Garden Of Evening Mists is straight storytelling of the old-school type. As an historical novel it faithfully captures the essence of a period long gone, and yet alongside this narration is nostalgia for a time of tea plantations and servants, kings and emperors. The centre stage deals eloquently with the nuances of human emotion triggered by remembering and forgetting and the ways in which we deal with the dilemmas caused by those acts. Tan portrays Yun Ling, a person who has witnessed and experienced great cruelty, in a most realistic way. She comes across as introverted, uneasy, complex. And while she appears to be both nationalistic and unforgiving, Tan surprises us with the following glimpse of her worldview _ "Old countries are dying... and new ones are being born. It doesn't matter where one's ancestors came from. Can you say _ with absolute certainty _ that one of your forebears did not sail from Siam, from Java, or Aceh, or from the islands in the Sunda Straits?"

The other members of the cast are not as well drawn. Aritomo, the gardener, seems much too wise, too versatile a personality to be content with pottering around in his backyard. The story of his disappearance somehow reminds us of the fate of Jim Thompson, who makes a brief appearance in the novel as "an American from Bangkok".

In his chronicling of history, Tan leaves his readers ample room to exercise their imagination. The book switches back and forth, moving through three distinct periods, but the time-line of historical events is kept on track. Towards the end of the novel, my heart sank when Tan has Yun Ling say: "Chin Peng wants to come home." Sadly, as many readers in these parts will surely be aware, he was never allowed to do so.

Chin Peng, long-time leader of the Malayan Communist Party, lived in exile in Thailand from 1989 onwards. In 2000, he unsuccessfully applied for permission to return to Malaysia. In June 2008, he again lost a bid to be repatriated when an appeals court ruled that he needed to produce documents to prove his citizenship. Chin Peng had always maintained that his birth certificate was lost during a police raid back in 1948, during a period central to Tan's novel. Chin Peng died three months ago, at the age of 89, in a Bangkok hospital.

With the passing of the man some dubbed "the last communist in Southeast Asia", the Malayan Emergency seems all the more removed from the present time _ a reassuring reminder, should one be needed, that the world which Tan has recreated so beautifully is indeed long gone.

Do you like the content of this article?
COMMENT (1)