Fiction in Southeast Asia: A Novel Top Ten

Numerous novels have been written about or set in Southeast Asia, some good, some bad, some obscure. If asked to name some of the best-known authors on the region, most people would probably confine their answers to the likes of Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and George Orwell. Good writers they are, without a doubt, telling many a fine tale of Old Asia and its encounters with Europeans east of the Ganges.

Yet there are many more, with stories of Southeast Asia almost beyond recounting. Authors new and old, including some of the best-remembered names in literature, have found Southeast Asia a rich background on which to weave a yarn. So well-appointed is the region, in fact, that Maugham, Conrad, and Orwell might not even be among the best ten ever to have romanced the region. Nor might Robert Olen Butler, writer of several novels on the Vietnam War, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

So what might be the top ten novels set in Southeast Asia? Who has written the most outstanding novels or plays, available in English, on the region? As a ground rule, and to even the playing field between local and exotic authors, these writings may be confined to, for lack of a better description, "Southeast Asia-other culture" themes. Before getting to that, perhaps a review of the lie of the literature is in order. Just what is out there?

Well-known authors include Edgar Rice Burroughs who wrote Jungle Girl. Although his heroine never gained the popularity of Tarzan, Fou-Tan's adventures in Cambodia still make lively reading. One of the best and brightest things David Halbestam ever wrote was One Very Hot Day when he was a Vietnam War correspondent in the mid-60s. Paul Theroux's Saint Jack and James Clavell's King Rat depict two very different characters in Singapore. Louis L'Amour's West from Singapore and Christopher Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously describe parts of Indonesia, and are so divergent in scope and attitude that one marvels they could both be set in the same country and only about thirty years apart.

Western fiction on the region is nothing new. No less a dramatist than John Dryden tried his hand at Southeast Asian fiction when in 1699 he wrote the play Amboyna, to protest a Dutch massacre of English traders on the East Indies spice island of the same name. For that matter, bad Western fiction on the region is just as old. No less an author than Sir Walter Scott referred to Amboyna as "beneath criticism". And so it is: the drama is an anti-Dutch polemic with angelic English pioneers, demented Dutch, and wooden Amboynans who necessarily had to play backdrop to this farcical melodrama.

By the beginning of the 20th century, dozens of authors were exploring the region. But as with the background in Amboyna, the Southeast Asians in these stories by Europeans or North Americans serve as colourful scenery for the real protagonists, namely the Westerners. Thus it is in such diverse stories as Adventures in Java (a book "for boys" in 1888), The Sultan of Sulu (a musical and "original satire" by George Ade set in the Philippines, ca. 1899), and Clavering Gunter's Jack Curzon, or, Mysterious Manila, written in 1898. These stories all discuss the doings of Americans in exotic places. For that matter, such classics as Lord Jim and Almayer's Folly by Conrad tell mainly of the British and their adventures in the Indonesian archipelago. Novels by the French and Dutch are similarly Euro-centric.

In recent years Southeast Asian authors, too, have begun writing their own novels and plays. Particularly in the Philippines, there is an indigenous writing culture that has given rise to a sophisticated body of literature in English by such powerful authors as Caros Bulosan and Edilberto Tiempo who are adept at depicting the interplay of East and West. Malaysian and Singaporean authors are also producing, in fewer numbers, their own novels. Elsewhere in the region, uncountable novels are being written in vernacular languages that are only sometimes translated into English.

A special category is the American novel about Vietnam. Although French authors composed a multitude of works of fiction on Indochina, the outburst of American works on the war much exceeds all that went before in volume if not excellence. This genre got of to a slow start with Tiger Bridge, William Warren Hasting's 1937 novel about an American bridge-building company in Vietnam. By 1987 so much had been written following America's involvement in the region that a bibliography of works of fiction set in Vietnam numbered over 500 titles. Today there are so many more that doctoral dissertations have been devoted to the Vietnam novel, while bibliographies cover smaller niches such as the novels of Vietnam veterans. Recently, a growing number of Vietnamese have started telling their side of the story, often most compellingly, providing a thoroughly different perspective on such topics as MIAs and being wounded in action.

Thus the literature is broad in scope and varied in character. Within this wide range, should Conrad, Maugham, and Orwell make the list? Read on. But first a brief note: Orwell's Burmese Days, by inexplicably making the immigrant Indian doctor the hero causes the book to reflect too much of the colonial attitude to meet the criteria established here, which call for cultural sensitivity in dealing with East-West themes. Although surely there were marvellous Indians and dastardly Burmans, Orwell's approach comes close to colonial type-casting and thus misses the mark. Somerset Maugham wrote few novels on Asia. One, The Narrow Corner, set on a Malay island, just missed the mark. Mostly he wrote short stories on the region, some of which are delightful. And as for Conrad? Well, let's see:

THE FICTIONAL TOP TEN
(In alphabetical order, by author)

1. Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 1991

While it may not "surpass" all American fiction as the cover blurb claims, nowhere will there be found so many harrowing encounters and astounding escapes. Bao Ninh, a veteran of the American War, weaves semi-autobiographical accounts of conflict in the A Shau Valley, post-war letdown, and trauma, combining the lead character and himself into a perfectly fitting mesh. Tolerated--but only just--by Hanoi's leaders, the Vietnamese title had to be changed to the Destiny of Love.

2. James Clavell, King Rat, 1962

How to survive, even prosper, on rodent meat in Singapore's Changi Jail during World War II and then lose it all when the prisoners are liberated. Ex-POW Clavell tells how the anonymous "King" parlays chutzpah, deftness, and venture capitalism into a personal empire behind the barbed wire of the prison camp. Unlike Clavell's later works, King Rat draws grit and melancholy from his own experience as a prisoner of the Japanese.

3. Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands, 1896

Among Conrad's most memorable vagabond characters of the East is Wilems, a connoisseur in drinking, an adept at the game, and one who thinks he knows all about himself. He learns much more, though, after being marooned on an East Indies isle where he comes to terms with himself against the lush tropical background east of Java. While dealing primarily with Wilem's inner struggles and values, Conrad treats the reader to a wealth of imagery of the area at the beginnings of intensive Western contact.

4. Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1956

One of the first novels on Vietnam, the characterisation epitomises American, French, and Vietnamese attitudes and their interaction on the road to futility. A Harvard man in the CIA, Pyle, presciently depicted the star-crossed naivete that ended in failure in Vietnam over a decade later. He finds emptiness in a search for a "third force" between Vietnamese communism and French colonialism.

5. Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse, The Lacquer Lady, 1929

Based on a real person and favourite of Kipling's Supalayat who "did a very foolish thing", the Lacquer Lady is the daughter of a rogue British merchant and a Burmese woman. Fanny, "the spoiled pet" of Supalayat, engages in a risky love affair with a French adventurer in Mandalay during the 1880s, partly precipitating the final British take-over of the Kingdom of Burma in 1886.

6. André Malraux, La Voie Royale (The Royal Way), 1930

Though failing as an apologia for his (real-life) theft of sculptures from Banteay Srei in the greater Angkor complex, Malraux's novel succeeds in capturing the essence of French Cambodia and its frontiers at many levels. Alternately an adventure story, a reminiscence of an early French adventurer, and a political analysis, the dense novel rewards the assiduous reader.

7. Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn, 1970

The final part of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy in which Mishima traces a soul through different rebirths, The Temple of Dawn compellingly portrays Princess Ying Chan, who believes she had been Japanese in previous lives. Totally superior to accounts of Golden Triangle scoundrels and Bangkok bawds who people most Western fiction on Thailand, Ying Chan and her relations with lawyer Honda in Bangkok and Japan make unforgettable prose.

8. Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato, 1975

An allegory told through an account of an infantry patrol going into battle. While engaging the enemy, one member of the patrol, Cacciato, sets off on foot for "Gay Paree". Alternating scenes are given of Cacciato and a pursuing squad heading west to bring the insane soldier back while the rest of the patrol fights an equally insane war. Not in the top ten for Vietnamese Vets, but a commanding tale of the war and the wider issues surrounding it.

9. Jose Sionil, Ermita, 1988

Ermita, daughter of a rich Filipino woman raped by a Japanese soldier during the chaotic end of World War II, is left for disinterested Aunt Fly to raise. After making her adult way to a high-class bordello, she comes both to excel in her chosen profession and to exact revenge on her family--by, for example, seducing the mother's American father and making sure Mom finds out. The novel is operatic in theme, intriguing in detail, and never lagging in plot.

10. Han Suyin, ...And the Rain My Drink, 1956

Set in the British Federation of Malaya during the anti-communist "Emergency", Han Suyin's novel skilfully recreates the interplay of the period involving Chinese terrorists, British police, Malay Muslims and assorted other groups in the polyglot society of the peninsula. Credibly dealing with each of these cultures, the story follows Ah Mei from her capture with a grenade in her hand, through prison, and finally into a car heading towards the Causeway for a honeymoon in Singapore.

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