Name: Though I Get Home
ISBN: 9781936932160

Yz Chin

In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: a grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains; a consort finds herself a new assignment; a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a smalltown girl transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia's most notorious detention camp.

Though I Get Home

Nico J

Admittedly, I always swoon for loose collections of stories with unnamed characters and muddled, lush lives, the mundane and ordinary turned loose in a burst of wild, colored feathers. This is no exception. You'll be led down a wandering lane of several lives, with an undercurrent of Malaysian culture and the things that make it unique and weigh heavy on the characters, the things that give them context. For someone who isn't a part of that, it's confusing and makes you bristle, purse your lips, but also may remind you of the things your own parents do that are so endearingly frustrating to you. They couch those bristles in love. This is the second book featuring the history, culture, and places only found in Malaysia, with a history I'm not yet familiar with but a thread of 'aha!' connecting the two. The location of Cameron Highlands is mentioned in both, and what floats to the surface is the discussion of colonialism.

These are people you know, but you also don't. The righteousness of cultural appropriation in the name of liberating the world, the white-hero complex. The fretting behavior over princely sons while sisters and daughters languish, forgotten. The blind execution of morality management by quite literally the religious police force. The wise man who can predict the rains and the future. The place of the British within the landscape of a place forcibly taken. The angry, hopeful youth hoping to take back power. They're themes we know but stunningly-written characters that we need more of in their nuance and human weaknesses. 

Everyone should give this a try.

Though I Get Home

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