Aw’s memoir subtly laments the gulf between him and his parents, the present and the past
The novelist Tash Aw was 15 when he noticed the difference. He knew that his classmates at school weren’t all ethnically Chinese like him. There were Tamil kids who played hockey, “Malay rocker boys” who cut out pictures of Metallica from magazines and glued them to their textbooks. But now, as they all geared up to sit their O-level exams in a publicly funded school in Kuala Lumpur, Aw realised that the divisions between them weren’t so neat. There was a boy whose parents were illiterate and worked as labourers in a rubber tree plantation. Other kids, from richer families, would be sent the following year to plush boarding schools in England, regardless of how they fared in the exams.
Aw is frustrated by the sentimentalism of immigrant success stories, their inevitable veneer of redemption