Just.Hold.(ing).Still

Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists isn't my usual type of book, but a few years ago I was in a struggling bookstore and wanted to get something, anything, so I picked this up. When I finally decided to read it, I got a chapter or so in and realized that it's of that literary genre that has hundreds of examples, of which two immediately off the top of my head are Remains of the Day and The Girl with the Pearl Earring, i.e. literary historical novels set vividly, or one can say lusciously, in a specific time and place in order to attempt to capture the complicated social setting of the peoples in that time and place, and upon which the emotional thrust of the story is pinned upon a heterosexual relationship with elements of complicated forbidden-ness that prevents or will punish emotional fulfilment if that relationship is fully realized.

If you know the vibe, you know it, is what I'm saying.

There's also a movie! The edition of the book I have has a cover that is a still of the movie, and in my opinion said cover captures the feel of the book perfectly. I may check out the movie later, if I'm feeling it. I hadn't heard about it at all, considering it's set here, but as a small indie movie I suppose that's not much of a surprise.

Mainly taking place in Cameron Highlands, the drive of the book is a relationship between Yun Ling, a Straits Chinese lawyer and survivor of a Japanese internment camp, and Aritomo, a former gardener of the Emperor Hirohito who left Japan prior to WWII breaking out (and was thus not involved in the war.... maybe). The novel intercuts between a present day of the 1980s when Yun Ling is a retired Judge reminiscing on the past, and an extended flashback of Yun Ling narrating the events of the time she met Aritomo during the communist Emergency. That backdrop is, to put it lightly, a sensitive time.

I am not the usual reader of literary books, and I cannot speak in depth to the themes and language of the genre. I could be more self-conscious about that, but I won't, and anyway the story was interesting enough despite my side-eyeing tropey conventions of the genre, and the descriptions of home neat in their familiarity be it first-hand or second-hand through the stories I've been told by my parents and grandparents of colonial times.

Unlike the other examples of the genre mentioned above, Yun Ling and Aritomo do start an affair of sorts (after she becomes his apprentice in Japanese gardening), though Yun Ling's narration is so sparse that it can't really be described as a relationship of passion, I think, and of course it can't have a happy ending. But I liked how that played out, I think because I don't mind as much the mining of these difficult relationships of pain in fiction. So Yun Ling's main motivation is to find the internment camp she escaped from, because her sister died there and Yun Ling wants to lay her sister to rest. The maybe-reveal at the very end of the book is that Aritomo may have had something to do with designing that camp (and Yun Ling's suffering), and that Aritomo made a map to said camp for Yun Ling, within the design of his garden and a tattoo he puts on her back, and once both garden and tattoo are done he quietly left her one night, either to death or suicide.

I found the story interesting enough, and enjoyed reveals made through the layers of the past and present portions of the story. I liked its attempts to make the main characters kind and difficult at the same time, even when I disagreed with what appear to be some of the novel's final conclusions (the most obvious one being that anger has to be cleansed). That said, I couldn't connect with any of the characters enough to care as much about how it played out, though that could just as well be due to my own biases. The only way I could understand Yun Ling's falling for Aritomo is that it is a simultaneous form of healing (by being with the only person who would acknowledge her trauma as a camp survivor) and self-harm (because... everything). Which I suppose makes sense as much as anything else.

That said! And this has less to do with what the novel is doing on the whole, and is honestly a tangential bugbear that I just need to get down. I do believe that books cannot be everything to everyone and should not try to be because then no one is happy, so to focus on specific themes or relationships is, of course, better. Yet it is very interesting how, despite the familiarity of the setting, how alienating I found it at the same time because it centers heroic and/or complicated Chinese, Japanese and.... white characters. A few Orang Asli are there, but barely get voices. A few Malays are there, but are either racist or set dressing. Indians are servants who leer at the female main character. (To be fair, there is one Indian character later on who does get a personality, but like in comparison, there are three -- THREE - gay Japanese men who get their sympathetic stories told at length, one of whom is a full-on war criminal.) You can argue that this is all because of Yun Ling's limited point of the view (at an early point in the book she dismisses indigenous gardening as inferior to ornamented gardening with imported plants, i.e. Japanese garden style) but to have that POV unchallenged was OOOOFFF.