The Harmony Silk Factory
SynopsisPlot
The Harmony Silk Factory traces the story of textile merchant Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant living in British Malaya in the first half of the twentieth century. Johnny's factory is the most impressive structure in the region, and to the inhabitants of the Kinta Valley Johnny is a hero—a Communist who fought the Japanese when they invaded, ready to sacrifice his life for the welfare of his people. But to his son, Jasper, Johnny is a crook and a collaborator who betrayed the very people he pretended to serve, and the Harmony Silk Factory is merely a front for his father's illegal businesses.
Story
About this book
The Harmony Silk Factory follows Johnny Lim, a textile merchant of Chinese peasant background living in British Malaya during the first half of the twentieth century. His factory is the most impressive building in the Kinta Valley, and many locals regard him as a hero: a Communist who fought the Japanese invasion and was willing to give his life for his community.
Johnny's son Jasper sees a criminal and a collaborator, and the factory as a front for his father's illegal businesses. The book divides into three accounts, each narrated by a different character long after Johnny's death. He appears in turn as a resistance leader, an informer for the Japanese, a black-market dealer, a loyal friend, and a husband uneasy before his aristocratic wife. The versions never settle into one agreed life.
The setting is 1940s Malaysia under colonial administration and wartime occupation, when political loyalties shifted quickly and evidence about a person's conduct could be read in opposite ways. Tash Aw's first novel keeps its subject at a distance, letting contradiction, rumour, and personal grievance shape what each teller chooses to remember and report.
