Telltale imperial era

Malaysian-born, Glasgow-based novelist Chiew-Siah Tei has always wondered how her grandparents ended up settling in Malaysia in the second half of the 19th century after a long journey from China. She thinks she has learnt a lot about her cultural roots in the course of writing her first novel in English "Little Hut of Leaping Fishes", recently published in the UK by Picador.

 "Through my novel, I want readers, who are children of Chinese families in Southeast Asia, to understand their past - why their ancestors needed to emigrate. So they can deal with the present much better," Tei told The Nation during her recent promotional tour to Bangkok. 

"Little Hut of Leaping Fishes" captures China's struggle to maintain its sovereignty in an age when Western powers were grabbing a slice of the East.

The novel tells the story of Mingzhi, the grandson of a feudal landlord and opium farmer. The young Chinese grows up witnessing his country's transformation from an imperial nation to a republic in the late 19th century.

With progressive intellectuals roaming the Forbidden City and Westerners a common sight in Shanghai and Beijing, Mingzhi is torn between two conflicting forces: Western modernity and his family's Confucian values.

The story unfolds with key events looming in the background: the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, the Hundred Days' Reform and the Boxer Rebellion of 1898. Natural disasters, such as floods and famine, also added to the population's misery.

These events forced Chinese families, Tei's included, to leave their motherland to find better fortune elsewhere in Southeast Asia. It is this side of the story that Tei wants to highlight.

"The 19th century is an important period for many Chinese. I wanted to find out what had caused a mass migration in that period, the reasons for the formation of the multi-ethnic society in this region. This book is about a lost history of these people," she says.

Tei was able to back her portrait of life in the China of those times by combining Chinese personal accounts, written by members of the elite of that era, obtained from documentaries and films.

As a foreign-educated, liberal Chinese girl from a conservative family, Tei struggled to understand some of the orthodox values described in her novel, such as the punishing of adulterers by drowning them in separate pig cages, the hierarchical family model, the rampant male chauvinism, the practice of polygamy, the subjugation of women and other social inequalities. For Tei, these are hard to accept and so she felt the need to highlight "the old corrupt customs" in the conservative Chinese society.

 "At the time, women had no status. In my work, I try to give a voice to women characters as the novel progresses, especially when progressive intellectuals brought reforms to China. In some ways, the novel portrays how the role of women gradually changed toward the end of the 19th century," she says. Women in the communist era, for example, enjoyed greater freedom than in the imperial era, she says, because the communist leaders encouraged women to take up posts in the (communist) party.

"I'm a liberal myself, like Mingzhi in the story, but sometimes, there's some conflict in my heart when I have to compromise the old with the new. But I dare to question unquestionable norms," she says.

However, Tei says there is more to the novel than just reminding the Chinese of their past. She feels the urge to project an accurate image of China and the Chinese to global readers, especially those in the West. Having seen a distorted portrait of 19th-century China projected by the Western media, Tei wants to correct the way China is perceived by the West. This is especially the case when it comes to the Chinese freedom fighters, the Society of Right and Harmonious Fists, simply known as the Boxers, who were on a mission to drive out all foreigners from the "Land of the Dragon" in 1898.

She is particularly disturbed by the portrayal of the Boxers in Nicholas Ray's 1963 film "55 Days at Peking", recently shown on British television. In the film, the Boxers are portrayed as the bad guys and the British, the heroes. "These Boxers tried to protect their country. To me, they are heroes. This kind of portrayal gives a wrong and negative impression of what actually happened.

"So, I try to correct that perception in this novel," she says.