To Be A Strange Word In A Foreign Language
Brandon Liew on Lee Kok Liang
an introduction to the profoundly human
‘Any Australian who wants to know Malaysia rather than merely know about Malaysia should read his work…
Lee Kok Liang’s concern is with the profoundly human rather than with “local colour”.’
— John Barnes in Quadrant 1985
I give an annual lecture on the Malayan decolonisation to a room of young Australian university students, whose yawns and elongated faces grow increasingly more weary each year. Black-and-white pictures of Asian politicians and White soldiers overlap on the projector screen, followed by pictures of White politicians and Asian soldiers, each slide disconnected and disconnecting in flashes of texts, maps, essay-pointers and colour-coded flowcharts. I sometimes worry that the human experience gets lost in translation.
In between the ninety minutes of dry historical material I include personal anecdotes about my family’s internment during the Japanese Occupation or their role in the communist insurgency. I re-tell the stories that were given to me, of how my grandfather saw Japanese soldiers decapitate his neighbours on the street, of how the government burned down our ancestral home that doubled as a communist hideout. I often ask them to imagine being in such a position. What would you do? How would you feel? What would you tell your children? All this, in an attempt to get the students to relate to something that happened halfway across the world, half a lifetime ago. How do you relate yourself, even briefly, to an unimaginable Other—another century, another culture, another war, another context of being?
This year, during this incessant and perhaps unfeasible bid to win them over, I introduced them to something closer to home: the work of Lee Kok Liang, a former student at the university who lived through this tumultuous era of decolonisation.
Lee Kok Liang read Arts and Law as an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne in 1950, when Malaysia (Malaya at the time) was still under the rule of the British Crown. He was an outspoken writer, editing and contributing to the now-defunct Melbourne University Magazine. While in Melbourne, he wrote editorials and three short stories set in his imagined homeland: ‘The Pei-Pa’ in 1950, ‘ami to fu’ in 1951, and ‘Just a Girl’ in 1952.
Lee completed his Law studies in London, during a period when Malaya negotiated its independence from the British and became closer to what we know as the modern Malaysian state. He returned to a free Malaysia as a practicing barrister, politician, and social activist. In 2003, ten years after his death, a manuscript based on his journey through Melbourne and London was published posthumously as a novel under the title London Does Not Belong to Me.
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a lecture in four breaths
In the eighteenth century the Malayan peninsula was a fractured and fluid political world but no stranger to the economies of migration and the geographical tensions of interloping kingdoms — the diverse cultural and linguistic patchwork of Malay settlement that emerged in this period and the regional identities they formed would later become a profound factor in Malayan politics leading to independence — there were pockets of Kerinchi, Mandaling, Achehnese, Banjarese moving downwards in the Peninsula, and the communities of Chinese, Arab and South Indian Muslims in this period had already emerged with distinctive Straits, or Peranakan identities — trade relationships had already been forged between the Dutch settlement in Melaka and these migrant populations.
By the early nineteenth century the existing power relations in the peninsula were disrupted by the expansion of European trade and the European stake-hold in Southeast Asia — the European war between Britain and the Dutch in 1780-84 made Southeast Asia of particular strategic importance within the colonial enterprise — in 1786 the ruler of Kedah ceded the island of Penang, a Straits settlement, to the British East-India Trading company — it became the interest of the British to extend their power down the archipelago — as part of this advance in 1819 Stamford Raffles a key figure and architect of British control in the region founded a new trading settlement in Singapore — in 1824 the Treaty of London saw the Dutch finally ceding Melaka to the British and marked the beginning of the era of formal colonial conquest — in 1826, the settlements of Penang, Singapore and Melaka combined to form the Straits Settlements — North Borneo or Sabah was given to the British North Borneo Company in 1882 and six years later became formally a British North Borneo protectorate — Sarawak however, would only be ceded to Britain by the Rajah of Sarawak in 1946.
By the turn of the twentieth century British influence and authority extended over hinterlands and by 1895 treaties of protection had been extended to the rulers of the states of Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang, forming the Federated Malay states — two decades later the remaining peninsular states of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, Terengganu, and Johor also came under British control as Unfederated Malay States — in the minds of the British, though not yet in the minds of the Malayans, the term 'Malaya' had become something much more than a geographical description but ideological grouping of territories: the Malay states, the Straits Settlements and Borneo.
On 8 December 1941 immediately following the events of Pearl Harbour, Japanese Occupation forces launched an attack on the city of Kota Bharu in the northern Malayan peninsula in a mere ten-week period the Japanese forces had advanced to the end of the peninsula and saw to the capture of Singapore on 15 February 1942, ending 123 years of British rule — the Japanese Occupation of Malaya marks the three-and-a-half-year historical period from this date to their eventual surrender following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 15 August 1945 — Malaya would return to the hand of the British Empire for twelve years, before formally declaring its independence as a sovereign state, Malaysia, in 1957 — less than a decade later, in 1965, Singapore would separate from Malaysia and both would continue into the modern day as distinct independent nations.
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the difference between swimming and drowning
‘London was full of rooms. I went from one to the other…
for in this city, men and women submerged their past.
I swam along with them, flipping my fins.’
London Does Not Belong to Me
In London Does Not Belong to Me, Lee’s unnamed protagonist wanders freely from one London flat to another, first observing and then mimicking the kind of ‘swimming’ that the other characters perform: working through a tangling of pasts, sexualities, and the inner lives of each Other—the immigrant, the expatriate, and the social misfit. Being in London is to be submerged in a state of a permanent flâneur, and much of the novel becomes the unfolding of this state. Some of the characters learn to swim, some tread water precariously, and some drown.
The protagonist’s arrival and subsequent wandering through foggy London and Paris in the 1950s is eclipsed by his obsessive pursuit of Cordelia, an elusive Englishwoman; his emotional rejection of Beatrice, an Australian girl; and his eventual sexual rejection of Tristam, an Englishman. These relationships play out by the end of the novel, when the protagonist leaves London by boat, as estranged from the city as when he arrived. He leaves, having drowned his past life and his true self, a drowning made necessary by his desire to ‘swim’ in London:
‘What was real and meaningful to me remained hidden and submerged, festering in the dark like an abscess…’
His journey into London is a journey into the eurocentric fog that is an attempt to assimilate into the European consciousness. Ultimately, his failure to do so, and more importantly his realisation of such impossibility, marks a distinction between the new Malaysian consciousness and the British one, between the de-colonising and coloniser, the new world and the old. This self-exile marks also the beginning of a new literary and cultural tradition of a postcolonial Malaysian world. In his foreword to Lee’s novel, the late Malaysian writer K.S. Maniam remarks,
[Lee] has attempted to enter a Eurocentric Consciousness in order to find himself as a writer… By exploring the place of an Asian/Malaysian in a predominantly European society… he is able, in a prophetic way, to mark out for himself and fellow Malaysian writers the cultural territory they have to enter and unravel.
This is immediately apparent in Lee Kok Liang’s Melbourne stories, which share a post-war anxiety as old world meets new world. The characters in ‘The Pei Pa,’ ‘ami to fu,’ and ‘Just a Girl’ are preoccupied with the old Malayan traditions while the worlds around them change— modernity is coming! The scars of the old world— the consequences of the occupation— leaves them in a state of paralysis. The trajectory of an emerging nation calls for them to shed this collective trauma. His Melbourne protagonists are left behind, struggling to conceptualise a modern Malaya in which their existence can still be valued.
The anxiety of his Melbourne stories bleed into London as Lee situates his protagonist in the cultural modernity of an English Empire. This eurocentric fog extends also to his reading of an Australian consciousness, channelled through the fate of the Australian character Beatrice. Upon arrival, Lee’s protagonist begins a relationship with Beatrice, whom he has met on campus in Sydney. Yet as his obsession with her roommate Cordelia takes hold, his relationship with Beatrice turns into one of emotional and sexual violence, as she becomes the abused object of his catharsis. Riled with jealousy at Cordelia’s apparent relationship with the Englishman Stephen, the protagonist forces himself onto Beatrice, using her as a surrogate for affection. In contrast to his night with Cordelia, where he stops his advances after her simple ‘no’, his night with Beatrice ends with drunken assault, spurned by the protagonist’s self-hatred and ‘wanting to forget.’ He later discards her in a way that distorts her appearance: ‘… when I woke up I felt repelled by the sight of the way her belly sagged against the mattress, squashing her navel into an elongated depression.’ (105) In this moment, he projects himself onto her with violence and disgust, her distorted appearance mirroring the way how he feels that he is perceived by others. It is this same physical and psychological violence that Frantz Fanon would theorise about in the 1950s and 60s, an inevitable madness of the colonised mind derived from their physical and intellectual dehumanisation by colonial society. Othered subjects are no longer human, members of the same species. This results in a state of estrangement and alienation from the social structure that has direct consequences on the body and mind.
Lee’s protagonist is aware of his reception as oriental curio, understanding that his appearance is one of a ‘bargain find or a trinket’ to Londoners, an unrecognisable refraction of any true image of his self. This limitation defines all of his relationships, but most importantly that with his muse Cordelia. He ponders,‘How wide apart your eyes are… I knew that she was wondering whether the rest of my kind had the same wide-apart eyes...’ Cordelia cannot see beyond this refraction to glimpse the protagonist as a whole person. In return, he yearns for whiteness, a cultural state in which he cannot attain, in order to see a whole Cordelia:
‘To Beatrice she [Cordelia] is not a strange word in a foreign language… Beatrice, I was sure, saw her as I never did—a whole person, a child in a woman. I had exorcised the child in her and crushed her as though she was fruit’ (157)
This state of constantly seeing and projecting a distorted self has peculiar effects on the psyche. Gopal the Indian waiter winds up institutionalised in the Dartford Asylum dreaming about ‘great white girls,’ and Colette, no longer desired by her husband Guy, is haunted by ghosts at night. The protagonist himself describes in detail a series of dreams, waking dreams and sicknesses that seem to escalate throughout the novel, culminating in the actions of rape, obsession, wandering, and finally remorseful acceptance of his fate.
In the same decade as London Does Not Belong to Me takes place, another Malayan writer, Wang Gungwu, would instigate a literary movement known as ‘Engmalchin’ in Malaya. This experimental decolonial movement, born out of the preoccupation of deriving an original Malayan consciousness through the amalgamation of English verse forms and Malayan languages, would too fail in its chimeric appropriations and dissolve by the declaration Malayan Independence in 1957. Wang produced verses strangely resonant with the main catharsis in London, like this from ‘Three Faces of Night’:
We are the audience
Of the three camps.
We are the campsters, too.
We rush around
To see the others,
But the mirror is a prism blue
It is this concept of a ‘prism’— which evokes the distorted image, the sense of knowing that you will never be seen as anything other than a distorted image of yourself—that defines how the protagonist discovers himself in Lee’s novel, through the yearning for yet eventual abandonment of the European consciousness. The protagonist ends his journey, but before he leaves, he takes Beatrice to a Chinese restaurant to symbolise the closure of their relationship, to leave her with ‘a memory of golds and reds and dragons,’ a moment laden with superficial and stereotypical Orientalism. The preservation of this image is made preferable to the truth; the protagonist embraces the function of the prism, and in turn, his role as a willing cliché of the exotic:
Should I also tell her about the dirt and the flies and the diseases? But what’s the point anyway? Everyone of us must preserve a romantic viewpoint about far distant places to which the mind could return in the midst of our grimy surroundings or when life pressed too harshly upon our individual existence. (320)
The difference between swimming and drowning, then, is to ignore your reflection in the water before you jump in. London Does Not Belong to Me reflects the boundaries of a Malayan consciousness, the fate of being a strange word in a foreign language, imprisoned by the past, thrusted towards the future, capable of great love and great cruelty.
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the book is dead; what is a book review?
Lee Kok Liang’s first piece of writing, a detective story in English, was destroyed by Japanese bombs during the occupation. While the manuscript of London in the form of his diaries was entrusted to and edited by two Australian researchers, subsequently published by a small Malaysian press in 2003, the novel is now out of print. It is gone. You can no longer buy it. I obtained my copy secondhand. I read his Melbourne stories in the original journals through the Special Collections Department at the university, accessible only by a privileged few. The book is dead, the original writing gone. You couldn’t buy it if you wanted to. What is the point of a book review?
I’ve finished this review long before its deadline, but I’ve asked for an extension because I’m still not sure.
Like Lee Kok Liang, I studied Arts at the University of Melbourne before going to London, finding myself wandering the streets, roaming from one strange flat to another. I read London in London and was affected by it: it was as though there was a predefined headspace for me, and that space hadn’t really changed in fifty years. I had to submerge myself, in order to play the part, to swim.
I have since published a little bit and published some more. I teach the decolonisation, the literature, the language. I have met a number of brilliant Malaysian poets and authors through my work. I will never meet Lee Kok Liang except through his writing.
A book review is a response of cathartic release, emotion on the page responding to emotion on the page where facts are incapable and truth impersonal. It is the last word, the coda. The evidence of a séance, and memoir of the profoundly human.
Works Cited
✷ John Barnes, “The Fiction of Lee Kok Liang.” Quadrant 29:1–2, 1985, pp. 119–22.
✷ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. (Penguin, 2001).
✷ Lee Kok Liang, London Does Not Belong to Me. (Maya Press, 2003).
✷ Wang Gungwu, Pulse, Beda Lim at the University of Malaya, 1950.
Brandon K. Liew is a doctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne with an interest in Malaysian literary history, cultural policy, and the global novel. His recent publications include poetry in the anthology Malaysian Millennial Voices and a peer-reviewed article on The Unquiet Dreams of Lesser Writers. He is the curator of A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English, an anthology audio-exhibition of Malaysian poetry from the 1950s to the present.