In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

I was born in a region fractured by civil uprising, in a time of violent protest and revolution that would color almost all of my childhood and teenage years. Throughout the seventies, the struggles in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, played out on an international stage, dominating the news. Away from the headlines, smaller struggles would flare up in Jakarta or Bangkok or Manila, and we got used to seeing news images of students taking to the streets, or of burning cars in front of buildings with barbed wire. In the relative calm of Kuala Lumpur, these reports hovered constantly in the air but were largely absent from conversations at home. The events took place in the capitals of our closest neighbors, in cities that looked like ours, filled with people we knew. The papers would arrive, my parents would flick through them without comment, and I would read them myself later, trying to figure out what I could. At the earliest age, I understood that instability was so much a part of our lives that it wasn’t worth talking about.

It was not so much that we had become inured to trauma by our own experience of poverty and deprivation—a theory frequently offered by people of my parents’ generation. As an adolescent I began to form my own critique of Southeast Asian politics, railing against our reticence to address the catastrophic events in the region (“You young people, you don’t know what real suffering is, talk to us about revolution once you know what it means to starve”). We were trying to deny the truth: that our own peace was fragile, too newly attained for us to feel that it would stay for long. Malaysia was still recovering from the killing of hundreds of its ethnic Chinese citizens in the riots of May 1969—a subject rarely discussed in public or in private. In Indonesia, Suharto’s New Order was struggling to maintain a semblance of normality after the massacre of an estimated one million people during the coup of September 1965. It felt as though violence on a national scale could erupt at any moment. On my way to class one day (I was still in primary school), I saw on the front pages of the newspapers Benigno Aquino’s body on the tarmac at Manila airport following his assassination. In the way that we, a traditional Asian family, were superstitious about talking about death for fear of inviting it into our homes, we were afraid of dissecting the turbulence elsewhere in the region, in case it somehow pushed through the cracks and filled our own lives again.

But when I recall this period—from the mid-’70s to the fall of Marcos in 1986—what I remember is not the danger but the sense of optimism. We should have been paralyzed by fear, but instead our days were filled with a glorious normality. We went to school, we saw Star Wars at the cinema, we discovered burgers and french fries. Malaysia, like many of its neighbors in Southeast Asia, was just at the start of two decades of rapid economic growth, and perhaps it was precisely this deliberate silence about the trauma, both recent and continuing, that allowed us to enjoy that moment. Look away from suffering long enough and soon it’ll cease to exist; we can make anything disappear if we simply deny its existence. Or perhaps our memories are selective. When we creep back into the recesses of our political memory to try and fashion a narrative from it, what are we trying to do? We wanted so much to be middle class, and for violence and oppression to belong to our past rather than our present, that we retained only what was pleasurable.

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature-length film, By the Time it Gets Dark, is ostensibly a story about the brutal crackdown on student demonstrators at Thammasat University in Bangkok in 1976—the year of the filmmaker’s birth, forty years before the film was released—but its unpredictable, twisting narrative doubles back on itself in such strange ways that it becomes an interrogation of collective memory, a questioning of the role of history in contemporary Southeast Asia. The premise appears simple: two women arrive at an isolated house in the countryside, relieved to be there yet not entirely at ease with each other as they admire the spectacular views of the dry northern landscape. They have the clothes and demeanor of Bangkok dwellers, and we soon learn that they are there to tell the story of the Thammasat University killings. Taew, the older woman, was a leading figure in the student protests of the time, and has since become a celebrated writer. Ann, the younger, is a filmmaker, and spends the following days organizing oddly formal interviews with Taew, recorded on her camera, trying to piece together enough information to write a screenplay for a film based on the killings.

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In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

Still from Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone.

For most of the second half of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2006 masterpiece of unfulfilled desire, the characters struggle to breathe through makeshift face masks, fashioned from materials as desperate as plastic bags or metal jelly molds. Their daily lives are being slowly constricted, suffocated by something in the air, which we presume to be Kuala Lumpur’s famous near-annual smog, except no one really knows for sure—the news on the radio provides conflicting information—so the smoke that descends upon the city takes on a more sinister aura. The air itself has become dangerous to breathe. No one knows when this oppressive anxiety will end.

As I write, Kuala Lumpur is in virus-induced lockdown. Looking out from my apartment I can see only the odd car on what is usually a busy highway, and the neighborhood is almost eerily calm. The city’s streets are emptier and more silent than in the film, but the sense of stasis and uncertainty is the same. Both in the film and now, the anxiety is caused by something that threatens our health, but it is also tied to a deeper malaise: a fear that our societies are fragile and ill adapted to the swirling changes of modern life.

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In Tash Aw’s column, Freeze Frame, he explores his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema. In this installment, Yasmin Ahmad’s Orked trilogy.

Still from Yasmin Ahmad’s Mukhsin (2007)

In the heart of the old town in Ipoh, Malaysia’s third largest city, a cluster of colonial-era shophouses has been saved from destruction and, over the last decade or so, reincarnated as a hipster enclave. Boutique hotels with concrete and plywood interiors and cafés serving single origin coffee sit next to kopitiam, the traditional eating houses of Malaysia. It’s a beguiling cocktail of history, modernity, and multiculturalism that seems to perfectly embody the youthful energy of the country. Nestled in a back lane in one of the most touristy parts of town is a small crowdfunded museum dedicated to the work of the filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, who, at the peak of her powers in 2009, died from complications arising from a stroke. In the first decade of the new millennium, she had made six feature-length films in the space of six years. She was only fifty-one when she died.

A picturesque city with a heavily ethnic-Chinese, largely Cantonese-speaking population, Ipoh is the setting for two of Ahmad’s most loved films, Sepet (2004) and its sequel, Gubra (2006). (A prequel, 2007’s Mukhsin, is set in a rural town a hundred miles south). Away from the frenetic and sometimes overwhelming rhythms of life in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh is the perfect place to understand why Ahmad’s films left such an indelible mark on the emotional consciousness of many Malaysians. Its leafy middle-class suburbs blend happily into a compact city center whose architecture—less a victim of rampant real estate development than in other major cities—reflects the country’s rich mixture of ethnicities with their distinct languages and cultures. Here, the effects of Malaysia’s racial politics still feel secondary to the easy harmony of everyday life.

The three films that make up the loose trilogy revolve around a young woman called Orked and her quest for love, identity, and independence. Ethnically Malay, religiously Muslim, Orked has—according to her Malay friends—an unhealthy interest in Chinese people and culture, by which they mean Chinese Malaysians, who account for the country’s largest minority, rather than anyone from the mainland. Orked idolizes Takeshi Kaneshiro, the Japanese Taiwanese screen idol, and has watched Fallen Angels several times over. With her wisecracking friend Lin, she goes to the street market one day to buy more of his films, and at the counterfeit DVD stall, she meets a young Chinese vendor, Jason. It is love at first sight.

Wrapped in the framework of a comic teen melodrama is a constantly unsettling examination of race and class distinctions in Malaysia. Watching these films again, in a country made increasingly anxious by the politicization of racial differences, I’m reminded of the confrontational quality of Ahmad’s films, of the uncomfortable nature of hearing the same things delivered on screen that people say in real life. The casual racism that Malaysians live with on a daily basis takes on a distinctly threatening tone when captured on film, even if the film purports to be a teen romance.

Sepet is the Malay word for “slit-eyed,” a term that Orked’s ethnic-Malay friends use to describe Jason and other Chinese characters, so we know from the outset that the two young lovers have a tough time ahead of them. But this is more than just a formulaic story of Montagues and Capulets: in a country like Malaysia, Ahmad’s portrayal of innocent interracial love represents a challenge to the official narrative of nationality and belonging. I was six years old when I first heard the expression Cina babi (Chinese pig); balik Tongsan (go back to China) followed soon after. At first I thought that these things were being said to a random passerby from Beijing; I had no idea they related to me. By the time I understood fully what they meant, the idea of being Chinese, and somehow distanced from the idea of Malaysian-ness, had become so much a part of myself that I thought about it as little as I did the birthmark on face. And yet, at the same time, I felt fully embedded in Malaysian life—in its cultures, languages, and history. What was I to do with this split personality? Listen to the official narrative that had me down as a migrant, or guest, or carry on living life as any ordinary Malaysian? Watching Ahmad’s films for the first time, I felt as though the dichotomy that was me, and so many other Malaysians, was finally being articulated on screen.

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In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema. In this installment, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times.

Still from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times (2005)

Not long after the turn of the millennium, there were a few years where it seemed I was saying goodbye to people all the time. People I loved, who had been part of my life for a very long time, but also people I’d only recently met and formed close friendships with strangely and swiftly, the way you sometimes do when you find yourself in a city far from home. My first book had recently been published and suddenly I was offered opportunities to travel in ways that I had only dreamed of as a child. I went to places I’d always wanted to visit, and occasionally I would stay on once the book tour was over, forming attachments to cities that seemed magical and full of promise, like Vancouver or Mumbai. Friends would put me in touch with friends of theirs, in some cases people they barely knew, who would show me around, and talk to me about what it meant to live there. They opened their lives to me and in doing so, changed the way I saw the world. Each time I had to say goodbye I felt unexpectedly sad, as if I was losing something that I had come to regard as my own—as if after only a few days, a week, a month, I had carved out a space for myself in that new country, in those new friends’ lives, only to leave it all behind.

Shanghai, where I lived on and off over the space of two years, proved especially difficult to leave. I had initially gone there to research a novel, but friends in Malaysia thought that I was going to rediscover my Chinese roots. I laughed because the idea seemed ridiculous. Growing up in Malaysia, I couldn’t not be aware of my origins—of what it meant to have the language, culture, and physical features of southern China embedded in my identity, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t need to go searching for a heritage that was already mine. And yet. Several times in Shanghai, I met locals who weren’t interested in the multiplicity of my identity (Chinese Malaysian, Chinese- and English-speaking at home, Malay-speaking at school, et cetera). For them, I was Chinese, and only Chinese, a simplicity that should have upset me, would have upset me if I had been in New York or Paris. But in Shanghai, it felt as though the city were absorbing me, claiming me as its own, even though we both knew that this sense of belonging was just an illusion.

Back in Kuala Lumpur, I spoke with my parents about this odd sensation of wanting to be part of somewhere that isn’t your home. I asked them about the three years they spent working in Taipei in the early seventies, a time when—as the few remaining stories and photographs would suggest—they seemed happy and settled. (There had been race riots in Malaysia in 1969, hundreds of ethnic Chinese had been murdered on the streets of Kuala Lumpur; Taipei must have been a relief). Had they been tempted to stay in Taipei? Were they sad to leave? They shrugged. “Don’t remember,” they said. “Anyway, that’s life, isn’t it? It was time to go home.”

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In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

The story of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) seems simple enough at the outset: a handsome soldier stationed in a rural community on the edge of the forest in northern Thailand meets a young village man. Their lives are by and large carefree, filled with an innocence that feels entirely fitting with the peace and splendor of the countryside around them—the tawny deciduous jungle punctuated with lakes and rolling grassland, the mountains that stretch to Laos and Myanmar in the distance. They listen to pop music, stroll around the night market in the small local town, visit cave temples, spend quiet afternoons sheltering from rainstorms in a sala overlooking a tranquil pond. They fall in love.

Though they never manage to articulate their emotions, we are left in little doubt as to how they feel about each other after an hour of slow-burn desire, during which Tong, the younger, more inexperienced of the two, begins to figure out that this new relationship is not quite the laddish one he expected it to be. Keng, the soldier, is much more direct, familiar with same-sex relationships and comfortable in his queer masculine identity. (In one of their outings to the local town, he flashes a knowing smile at the buff aerobics instructor conducting public classes in the main square, a brief half-second that carries the weight of a whole history of off-camera, off-script liaisons.) But even as he courts Tong in an almost old-fashioned, mostly nonsexual manner, it’s clear that he has never before been in such a position of vulnerability. His longing for Tong is new and unknown. At the end of one long dreamy evening together, they finally express their physical desire by kissing each other’s hands—in fact not just kissing but licking, gnawing, each almost eating the other man’s fist. As Keng rides home, the night seems magical and unending, filled with color and music.

And then, the night is over.

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In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

Still from Wong Kar Wai’s “Happy Together”

In the summer of 1997 I was living in London, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I’d left college and had been in the city for a year, trying, like so many other twentysomethings, to write a novel. I’d given myself a year, but as the chapters took shape so did a curious tension about the way my life was playing out. Part of me was exhilarated and determined: I was writing about a country and people—my people—that did not exist in the pages of formal literature; I was exploring sexual and emotional boundaries, forming relationships with people who seemed mostly wrong for me, but whose unsuitability seemed so right; I was starting, I thought, to untangle the various strands of my cultural identity: Chinese, Malaysian, and above all, what it meant to be foreign, an outsider.

But the increasing clarity of all this was troubled by a growing unsettledness: I had imagined that the act of writing my country and people into existence would make me feel closer to them, but instead I felt more distant. The physical separation between me and my family in Malaysia, which had, up to then, been a source of liberation, now created a deep anxiety. All of a sudden I saw the huge gulf between the person I had been and the one I now was. In the space of just five or six years, university education had given me a different view of life, a different appreciation of its choices. My tastes had evolved, the way I used language had changed—not just in terms of syntax and grammar but the very fact that standard English was now my daily language, rather than the rich mixture of Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Malaysian slang that I had used exclusively until the age of eighteen. I was writing about the place I was from, about the people I loved (and hated), but felt a million miles from them.

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