I finished Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory thinking about the characters and people in my life. Johnny Lim, Snow Soong, Peter Wormwood and Mamoru Kunichika had occupied far too much space in my head by the time I finished the novel. I was thinking about my family too. My parents, my grandparents and, eventually, my ancestors.
One idea keeps getting emphasised throughout the book: death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed, completely and forever. Different characters in the book express it in different ways. Jasper heard it from his father, Johnny. Johnny most probably heard it from his wife, Snow. Snow writes about it in her diary, and Peter repeats it in his own narrative.
I honestly think it is not that simple. I don’t think death erases everything. It leaves fragments: what we can see, hear or touch. Photographs, diaries, houses, objects, newspaper reports, rumours and memories. All these things survive long after someone is gone. The problem is that each object is just a fragment. It is not the same thing as a person.
The novel gives us three narrators trying to understand Johnny Lim through their unique perspectives. Jasper sees his father through his research, family history and resentment. Snow sees her husband from inside a disconnected marriage that neither of them seems capable of fully inhabiting. Peter remembers Johnny from the distance of old age, guilt, friendship and secrets. Each of them is convinced they know something important about him, but none of them knows him completely.
In an interview included at the back of my copy, Tash Aw explains that Jasper, Snow and Peter project their own insecurities and aspirations onto Johnny. In the end, no one truly knows who Johnny was. He simply becomes a construction made from other people’s memories of him.
That idea made me think about the people in my own life. How much do I really know my parents? I know them as my parents, but who were they before I existed? Who were they before they met each other? What were their fears, disappointments and ambitions when they were growing up? What about my grandparents and my ancestors? I will never know any of these things, but eventually I learned about my ancestors through family stories, oral history, genealogy and scattered historical accounts.
Recently, I followed a long discussion on Facebook concerning two of my ancestors, Panglima Nakhoda Budin “Gerasi” and the anti-colonial fighter, Aji Apai Limpa. The accusation was about the practice of taking heads during the era of ngayau (head hunting). The discussion became increasingly tangled, moving through questions of warfare, adat (customary law), historical context and how acts committed in another century should be understood today.
Much of the discussion itself did not interest me. After a while, it seemed to become disagreement for the sake of disagreement. But it led me to this question: how much can any of us really know about people who died generations before we were born?
We certainly can learn about them through oral traditions, family accounts and colonial records. We can also learn about the social structure and adat that shaped their world. We can distinguish between warfare and murder, between the norms of an earlier society and modern legal categories.
We must keep in mind that historical context and evidence are important before pronouncing any moral judgement. We don’t have the complete picture of the past, but that does not mean every interpretation is equally convincing.
At the same time, The Harmony Silk Factory reminded me how easily we construct people from fragments. As a direct descendant of Budin and Aji, I naturally want my ancestors to be honourable. But I also recognise that family pride can shape the way descendants interpret the past, just as assumptions, inherited stories and modern perspectives can shape other interpretations. A colonial official may interpret Iban warfare through assumptions formed somewhere in Great Britain. A modern reader may judge the actions of my ancestors entirely through twenty-first-century perspectives. Even the details of family stories can change depending on who tells them.
And I am not exempt from this. I have my own emotional investment in these people. They belong to my family history and I want to understand them fairly. Naturally, I feel offended when they are reduced to crude stories about violence or headhunting.
However, I don’t deny that family pride can also become a lens. Perhaps the best I can do is remain curious, keep asking questions, keep reading, keep learning from those who are qualified, understand the historical world in which these people lived and accept uncertainty where certainty no longer exists. And resist the temptation to put labels on complicated human beings.
I think that may be what affected me most about The Harmony Silk Factory. No character remains fixed once another person begins telling their story. In another person’s eyes, Johnny is a gangster, husband, father, businessman, survivor, traitor, protector and coward. Snow is a wife, daughter, lover, diarist, observer and intellectual. Peter has his own secrets. Mamoru writes a memoir that totally ignores his involvement with the Kempeitai and turns his experience in Malaya into something pleasant. Everyone constructs a version of the past they can live with.
And maybe we all do this too. We remember our parents according to how they treated us. We remember our ancestors through genealogies and stories that survived because someone considered them worth telling. But what about everything that disappeared? Who did they love? What frightened them? What did they regret? What things did they enjoy doing?
History often preserves the dramatic things like wars, migrations, marriages and conflicts. But a human life is mostly made from ordinary things. We inherit what survives and build a person from it because traces do remain. It’s melancholy and oddly beautiful too.
One day, the same thing will happen to us. Our children, descendants, friends may inherit photographs, social media posts, messages, objects we once touched and stories told by people who knew us. They will construct us from those fragments. They may get some things right or wrong. But we will no longer be around to correct them. That’s what The Harmony Silk Factory ultimately left me thinking about. We spend our lives trying to understand the dead from what they left behind while slowly becoming the fragments from which somebody else will one day try to understand us.
I write about Iban culture, ancestral rituals, creative life, emotional truths, and the quiet transformations of love, motherhood, and identity. If this speaks to you, subscribe and journey with me.
