"Make it—”: The Modernist Rewriting of History in Southeast Asian Fiction

“You too can make history . . . write it down. Make it—[1]” is one of the ways that novelist Vyvyane Loh spotlights the individual’s point of view with the second-person pronoun in Breaking the Tongue. The incomplete sentence encourages the reader to speculate on what has been redacted. Notably, it recalls Ezra Pound’s famous maxim, “Make it new,” his interpretation of a historical Chinese text titled Da Xue. The redaction also encourages a modernist re-examination of imperial history to uncover some of the once-silenced voices of the colonized. This modernist re-examination is part of the broader project of contemporary novelists such as Loh and Tan Twan Eng, namely the belated deployment of modernist poetics tactics, to intervene in the representation of history in Southeast Asia. 

In The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan transposes the object of shakkei from the colonized land to a Japanese gardener to decenter the figure of the colonizer, effectively elevating the presence of an ex-prisoner-of-war under the Japanese imperial rule. Shakkei refers to a principle used by the gardener, which incorporates the surrounding background into the garden’s composition. Both Loh’s and Tan’s sampling of competing imperial histories in both form and content—and their playing those elements against each other—shows how modernist poetics can rewrite the narratives of the colonial past.

The difficulty of situating these two authors within a singular national identity further complicates the entanglement of imperial legacies in the global emergence of Anglophone publishing within Asian studies. Both Loh and Tan write English-language fiction that is marketed predominantly towards English-speaking communities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Loh is a Malaysian of Chinese ethnicity who grew up in Singapore and has been living in the United States since the 1990s. Written mostly in English, her only novel, Breaking the Tongue, is set during the 1940s in Singapore, which was initially a part of British Malaya, and was later renamed to Syonan-to after the Japanese invasion towards the end. While the book is generally taught as Singaporean Literature, the label is inadequate in capturing the intricacies of both the author and work. In a 2004 interview with literary journalist Robert Birnbaum, Loh states, “I grew up in Southeast Asia, and growing up there, there weren’t a lot of writers writing about the area—even people from Southeast Asia.”[2] Instead of distinctly labeling her fiction as Malaysian or Singaporean, Loh hints at her intention to disrupt the English-language fiction landscape as a writer who originated from Southeast Asia.

Tan is a South Africa-based Malaysian writer of Chinese ethnicity who has published two English-language books, The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists. Both novels take place in Malaya during the Japanese occupation and feature star-crossed lovers who grapple with their personal and national loyalties. The Garden of Evening Mists shuffles between three time periods: the late 1980s, early 1950s, and World War II. Through a reading of Breaking the Tongue and The Garden of Evening Mists, I draw attention to how the manipulation of modernist poetic tactics illuminates Southeast Asian representations of imperial histories once dictated by the imperialists. 

The two writers under consideration are not pioneers of promoting Chinese and Japanese ideas through the English language novel—a medium that is aimed at a predominantly Anglo-American readership. Prominent modernist writers famously adopted the broader chinoiserie and japonisme of the period such as “Oscar Wilde’s . . . Dorian Gray, Pound’s faux translations of the Chinese ideograph, and the Beat generation’s interest in Buddhist Zen.”[3] Loh and Tan revisit and repurpose the modernist interest in integrating Chinese characters and East Asian design tactics in their respective works.

Before I explain these tactics, I offer a brief overview of British Malaya’s imperial histories. The origins of British involvement in Malayan politics can be traced to 1771 when British trading posts were first set up in Penang. Between 1941 to 1942, the Japanese gradually occupied Malaya until their surrender in 1945. The British colonized Singapore in 1819 and remained in complete control of the state until their surrender to the Japanese in 1942. According to Kevin Blackburn and ZongLun Wu, Malayan and Singaporean schools were still adhering to “a syllabus that taught the history of Britain and her empire before the 1950s.”[4] They add, “From the 1940s to the early 1960s, the question over how the history of Southeast Asia . . . [was] dominated by discussions among historians over how to move from a ‘Europe-centric’ to an ‘Asia-centric’ approach in the writing of Southeast Asian history” (Blackburn and Wu, Decolonizing the History, 2). The establishment of Europe-"centric" as the default suggests that these histories were traditionally dictated by the colonialists themselves, focusing on the colonialist’s perspective while obscuring the colonized native’s point of view. By illuminating the elements of the colonized native’s culture and stories, Loh and Tan decenter the colonialist in the Southeast Asian narrative.

Both writers rewrite the traditionally Eurocentric colonizer’s story in different ways. Loh disrupts the influence of the English and Japanese colonial languages by inserting Chinese characters to represent the resistance of the colonized ethnic Chinese in Singapore. Meanwhile, Tan reverses the conventional colonizer-colonized relationship established during the Japanese imperial rule through the colonized native’s manipulation of shakkei, a concept entrenched in Japanese gardening. Regardless of whether the colonized natives harness elements of their own culture or use the colonizer’s culture to empower their voices in the narratives of imperial legacies, I argue that Loh and Tan share the goal of encouraging the reader to reconsider the trajectories of the colonial past that can be overcome by their respective literary modernist tactics.

I. Logograms and time in Breaking the Tongue

Loh establishes the relationship between the Chinese language and time in her novel. She points out that it “has no strict sense of tense,” “traverses time and history, [and] intrudes upon the present” before using it to detail a traumatic memory (Loh, Breaking the Tongue, 479) . Her referencing of Pound in the opening quote of this paper signals to one of her interactions with modernism. While Pound uses a foreign language that he half-understands to create new art, Loh integrates the Chinese characters that she is familiar with into her narrative to draw out nuances that are invisible in English.[5]  Another interaction with modernism is noted in her reproduction of Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present” whereby “memory and forgetting coexist in the space and time of writing where the ‘articulation of forgetting’ occurs and becomes the central function of memory.”[6] In Loh’s novel, her protagonist, Claude Lim revisits a memory, addressing the memory gaps caused by the trauma and highlighting its intrusion into the present. Loh’s focus on the colonized’s version of events and their mother tongue de-eurocentricize pre-existing dominant historical and literary paradigms.

Despite Pound’s questionable expertise in translating Chinese poetry, his preoccupation with Chinese ideographs exemplifies how the foreign designs of Chinese characters promote interpretations that are not exclusive to those who understand the language through a conventional language education. Literary critic Ira. B. Nadel asserts, “Pound sought to conquer the distance between himself and the Orient . . . through the direct absorption of a world manifested and made possible through his immediate engagement with its imagery and symbolic language.”[7] Loh welcomes her readers to channel Pound’s spirit and bridge the distance between themselves and the narrative through their active interpretation and engagement with her text regardless of their familiarity with Chinese language and culture. Besides “the direct absorption of Singapore in the 1940s through Loh’s fictive landscape, readers’ immediate engagement with [the] imagery and symbolic language” of the Chinese characters opens a multitude of reactions and interpretations (Nadel, Constructing the Orient, 26). While Loh does not discount the merit of understanding the Chinese characters in her novel, she repeatedly affirms the subjectivity that is tied to interpretation in exposing the constructed nature and questionable accuracy of history. 

An example of how Loh challenges readers to engage actively with her text lies in the enigmatic passage with Chinese characters scattered amongst English phrases in Chapter 6. Claude’s grief for his deceased friend Han Ling-li was triggered when he encountered a Chinese translator assisting a Japanese soldier who supervises a team of prisoners-of-war after his release from imprisonment:

Ling-li. If he could write to her, this is what he would draw:

Incomplete circle, 不, travelling 之. Recompense, repay, restore; still, yet, continue. If only she were here still, if only she could continue to be, if she could be restored. All of this contained in one word: 還 Return (Loh, Breaking the Tongue, 481)

Claude presents his feelings through a garbled message that cryptically integrates two languages in its first sentence. Linguistic proficiencies alone are insufficient for interpretation. Although Chinese logograms appear early in the novel, they do not interrupt the narrative nor drastically hinder the non-Chinese speaking readers’ comprehension of it. However, in this instance, Loh breaks her consistent usage of simplified Chinese in her novel by using 還, the traditional Chinese equivalent of 还—a composite of the first two Chinese characters, 不 and 之. While a Chinese-speaking reader may be able to join the dots quickly, a non-Chinese speaking reader may not make the connection immediately. 

The isolated passage is tricky to grasp on a superficial level, even for readers with advanced Chinese literacy skills. It requires them to invest some effort analyzing it to interpret it and prompts those with poor Chinese literacy skills to become more active readers and seek assistance to search for meaning. The character, 不, literally translates to “no” and is used to denote negation or absence of a quality. Although its literal meaning has no association with circles of any kind, the presence of commas on either side of 不 suggests that it is an appositive of the noun, “incomplete circle.” In this context of an “incomplete circle,” the reader may base their interpretation on xuán, an obsolete pronunciation of 还 that means “revolve.” However, readers may also choose to consider another pronunciation ,huán, and its homonym, 环, which refers to a “ring” or “hoop.” Hence, 不 can be interpreted as an “incomplete circle” upon removal of the radical from 环 should the reader choose to take this approach of looking into the other pronunciations and definitions of the relevant characters. 

The meaning for “之” is a lot less straight-forward than “不,” especially as a stand-alone character, but the reader need not rely on the literal meaning to interpret the phrase. In this context, “之” represents “辶,” the exact radical in “还”that looks like a horizontally stretched version of “之.” Despite similar appearances, they are two distinct logograms with their own respective pronunciations and meanings. However, their differences are irrelevant as Loh emphasizes their shared resemblance to an image of a walking person. While the “incomplete circle” prompts readers to consider relevant associations of the 还 character, the “traveling 之” highlights the physical appearance of the character that does not necessarily rely on Chinese literacy skills and focuses on the pictorial-based interpretation that Pound used. Within that sentence alone, Loh taps into the foreignness of the Chinese language, as perceived by her predominantly non-Chinese speaking readers, to encourage them to take initiative and invest more thought into the process of interpretation while maintaining an open-endedness that facilitates more than one interpretation. Loh’s dissection of the Chinese character echoes Pound’s ideogrammatic method (that was inspired by Ernest Fenollosa) to interpret abstract concepts through concrete images. Unlike Pound, who clarifies the Chinese character for an English-speaking audience, Loh obscures it by including the characters as part of her explanation. The impenetrability of the Chinese character, combined with the English words, undermines English as the dominant imperial language. However, it also does not allow Chinese to usurp its place. Instead, interpretation relies on both bilingualism and deep critical thought.

Loh adopts a grammatological inversion of Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance whereby writing and speech swap places and the sound becomes the signifier. Her passage on 还 reinforces the economical nature of a Chinese character and the discourse guides the reader to prioritize a specific interpretation over others. Her literal deconstruction of the separate components of the Chinese character 还 illuminates its multiple meanings. The character, 还, remains the same regardless of the different pronunciations associated with each distinct meaning. As Loh demonstrates in her novel, the Chinese character is also able to “compensate economically” as it can take on more than one meaning. To discern which meaning is the most relevant, the reader must “defer to the discourse in which it occurs.”[8] Despite the various ways of interpreting a sign, Loh’s deconstruction of 还 shows the inclination to defer to the discourse—specifically Claude’s struggle to recall Ling’s fate.

Loh uses the Chinese language to shroud Claude’s impressions of Ling-li in ambiguity to promote the late modernist “cerebral approach” that Seo Hee Im observes. Loh’s language usage transcends the high-modernist approach of multilingualism and diverse representation of ethnicities. Instead, it offers “more abstract, logical constructions . . . to express modes of collectivity” and draws out nuances that are “better suited for the emerging world order” whereby a nation attempts to carve a stable identity from its postcolonial immigrant origins (Seo Hee Im).

Loh illustrates Stein’s “continuous present” through Claude’s fragmented and disorderly narrative. Due to the trauma that Claude experiences, the line between dreams and reality in Breaking the Tongue becomes blurred. Loh does not adhere to a chronological order of story-telling nor does she consistently rely on Claude’s third-person limited points-of-view. It is difficult to pin down a strict timeline as the narrative shifts between three major events: Claude’s childhood during the British imperial rule; Claude’s attempts to seek refuge during the Japanese invasion; and Claude’s life under the Japanese imperial rule after being released from detainment. Some passages feature the points-of-view of other characters (such as Ling-li) and employ a second-person narration, whereby the “you” is present in Claude’s dream-like prisoner-of-war scenes. The recounts of “you” manifest as versions of the same interrogation scene with increasing levels of specificity each time the scene is revisited. “You” refers to both the reader and retrospective Claude who (re)visits the traumatic memory.

Claude revisits the same memory and furnishes more details each time, which illustrates the modernist ruptured sense of time. Chapter 5 focuses on Claude and Ling-li’s attempts to seek refuge during the Japanese invasion; it contains two passages describing the same moment during Claude’s interrogation. Interrupting the main storyline, the first passage is much longer than the second one and focuses more on the Japanese soldiers’ speech and actions with fewer details about “the woman”:

—I said, open your eyes.

 . . .

Is the woman trying to say something? (Loh, Breaking the Tongue, 357).

The second passage is substantially shorter but contains more details about what “the woman” is saying. The earlier question if the woman is “trying to say something” loses its uncertainty and is reworded into an indisputable statement, accompanied by more details about what she may be saying:

The woman in the next room is saying something now.
Words you can’t understand. Chinese. Perhaps she is even
talking directly to you. She is telling you what she is going through (419).

In Chapter 6, Claude tries to adapt to life under Japanese rule after being released from imprisonment and the same scene with “the woman” is revisited with more specific details. Readers learn that “the woman” is Ling-li and “you” report what she is saying clearly:

“Open your eyes then,” [Ling-li] says. “As you can see,
I was blindfolded and gagged. . . . I will tell you, and
you will witness it.” (481)

The phrase “open your eyes” appears differently in both recounts. In the interrogation scenes across the novel, speech by any Japanese soldier is marked by a line break and an em dash. In the earlier chapter, the phrase is an emphatic reiteration of the Japanese soldier’s order to Claude to watch their torture of Ling-li—to intimidate him into surrendering information. In the final iteration, it is not a Japanese soldier but Ling-li who implores Claude/“you” to “open your  eyes” without any form of intimidation. Unlike the Japanese soldier’s intention to establish dominance over Claude, Ling-li beseeches Claude to open his eyes to confront the Japanese soldiers’ brutality and oppression against her and “erase their anonymity” (481). The different versions of the same scene experienced by Claude/“you” recall the modernist representation of time as fractured and demonstrate his attempts to restore cohesion by revisiting the same memory to fill in the gaps with his imagination.

The final and most comprehensive version of this particular memory comprises chunks of paragraphs written in Chinese with increasingly meagre translations. The lack of tenses, coupled with the repetitive “continuous present,” conveys the timelessness of trauma while recalling Stein’s Cubism-inspired creations of fragmented perspectives. In addition, Loh’s deliberate choice to fill in the gaps with Chinese characters across her novel builds on Pound’s concept of creating new art as a writer. Its promotion of the readers’ active interpretation and engagement with the text echoes Stein’s implicit consideration of “acts of reading and the relationship between the work of art . . . and efforts of imagination required by the reader or viewer to see more than the object and to experience the movement” (Kirsch, Gertrude Stein, 54). This idea of the reader’s or viewer’s imposition of their imagination in order to see more than the object, which is the Japanese gardener, is further explored in Tan’s The Garden of Evening Mists. The traditional colonizer figure is demoted and robbed of having an active, authorial voice. Instead, he becomes a passive object who is merely represented.

Borrowing Scenery in The Garden of Evening Mists

According to Stein, like “commas and quotation marks,” literal frames “impinge on the beholder’s pleasure by telling you when the painting begins and ends instead of requiring you to work out the distinction yourself.”[9] However, it can be difficult for readers to “work out the distinction” in Tan’s The Garden of Evening Mists. He incorporates the Japanese landscaping strategy, shakkei, in his protagonist, Teoh Yun Ling’s first-person retelling of the past, blurring the lines between her curated impression of the Japanese gardener, Nakamura Aritomo and possible truths. Yun Ling is a survivor of a Japanese internment camp in World War II who later becomes a judge in the 1980s. Oncoming aphasia prompts her to revisit her memories from her imprisonment during World War II and her time with Aritomo who teaches her about shakkei, in the early 1950s. She reconciles her traumatic experience as a prisoner-of-war under the Japanese with her deceased sister’s love for Japanese gardens and her own love for Aritomo.

Tan’s rewriting of the imperial legacy is founded on shakkei. In the 1980s, Yun Ling defines shakkei as “the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to [one’s] creation“ (Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists, 33). Besides affirming the constructed nature of the “creation,” the idea of being “borrowed” recognizes that the scenery remains as nature’s own even though the gardener includes it in his/her creation. The gardener can never claim ownership over the natural elements in his creation. When Aritomo first taught Yun Ling about shakkei in the 1950s, her initial interpretation was that “[i]t’s nothing more than a form of deception” (141). The word “deception” draws attention to the misleading nature of the constructed and curated view that obscures details necessary for a more complete picture. Her conflicting opinions about shakkei unveil the different views that people can have about creations that represent curated perspectives. Similarly, imperial histories can be curated and retold in various versions besides the dominant Eurocentric ones to promote other viewpoints.

The difficulty of noticing the skewed angles of narratives from the colonizer’s point-of-view mirrors that of distinguishing the lines between the constructed and the natural in shakkei. Architecture studies scholar Kevin Nute succinctly captures the essence of shakkei in his statement, “While such gardens are clearly ‘built,’ they nonetheless succeed in creating the illusion of continuity with nature.”[10] Nute acknowledges the constructed nature of the “built” gardens and “the illusion,” which suggests that any “continuity with nature” is a misinterpreted perception of one’s sensory experience. One may regard the construction of such an illusion as deceptive and unnatural, or derive aesthetic value by seeing its constructed unity. Like how Pound borrowed his “Make it New”  phrase from a Chinese book, shakkei gardens involve curating the natural to promote specific aesthetic views.

Literary scholar David Farrah further elaborates on the connection between shakkei and literary genres, specifically poetry, in “Extending the Notion of Home Through the Language of Poetry.”

Farrah describes shakkei as “a melding and manifestation of both the physical and imaginative worlds, which in turn facilitates the creative interplay of both.”[11]  The juxtaposition of  “melding” and “manifestation” differentiates the act of combining elements from the visible outcome of such a combination. The “melding” of both the physical and imaginative reflects the convergence of these distinct worlds that results in its visible “manifestation” as shakkei. Shakkei then further perpetuates “the creative interplay of both” elements that promotes different approaches to the amalgamation of the physical and the imaginative. Likewise, literary works tap into both worlds, facilitating this “melding” through written language.

Like how viewers are guided to look at shakkei gardens, the reader’s impression of Aritomo is heavily reliant on Yun Ling’s curated memories that are restricted to interactions between the two. She imposes her opinions on him explicitly in a subsequent scene in the 1950s, which hints at her authority as the main storyteller. Yun Ling tells Aritomo, “Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty . . . you can see them, but they will always be out of reach (Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists, 145). Her likening of memories to shakkei illuminates the positive effects of the enrichment that shakkei offers to the environment to make it “feel less empty.” However, it also alludes to Yun Ling’s imposition of her own prejudiced opinions to flesh out Aritomo as her loved one. Like Aritomo’s memories that he can recall but remain out of reach to him, Aritomo’s true self also remains out of reach to Yun Ling despite spending so much time with him as his apprentice and lover. Using Yun Ling as a proxy, Tan applies the principles of shakkei to veil Aritomo’s full background and activities he may have participated in outside of his gardening, suggesting that there could be other information about him that was not privy to Yun Ling, and by extension the readers. Aritomo is not only a master of the shakkei techniques. As the Japanese Emperor’s gardener, he represents the colonizers who invaded Malayan land and colonized natives like Yun Ling in her youth. In constructing his narrative, thereby disempowering him as the colonizer figure, Yun Ling transforms him into a passive object upon which she applies shakkei. Consequently, he physically embodies its idea of blurring the boundaries between the pre-existing elements of a landscape and the manipulated elements. After Aritomo’s disappearance, Yun Ling wonders, “Aritomo never could resist employing the principles of Borrowed Scenery in everything he did, and the thought comes to me that perhaps he may have even brought it into his life” (114). Contrary to Yun Ling’s belief that Aritomo imposes shakkei on his life, she is the one who imposes shakkei onto Aritomo.

In addition to Yun Ling’s own interpretation of her experiences with Aritomo, she develops more unconfirmed theories of Aritomo after receiving unverifiable information from Yoshikawa Tatsuji, a Japanese historian, in the 1980s. Hence, Aritomo’s history becomes part of the Yun Ling’s shakkei story. Like Nute’s description of Yun Ling’s shakkei first-person narrative is “the frame [that] is positioned to trim the raw view aesthetically, while at the same time obscuring many of the spatial depth clues which would normally indicate the true distance between the observer and the far-off landscape” (Nute, Place, Time, and Being, 21). The reader takes on the role of “the observer” and Aritomo “the far-off landscape.” The first-hand experiences that Yun Ling shares furnish the illusion that obscures “the spatial depth clues” and the “true distance” between the two (21). Tan borrows the aesthetic regime of the colonizer and parallels Aritomo’s narrative with the garden as the blend of natural and artificial, the verifiable and the speculative. Tan’s novel attests to how the modernist rewriting of past colonial narratives destabilizes the authority of dominant imperial histories.

Conclusion

Colonizers often use literary and art forms to propagate their language and culture as well as exert their dominance on the colonized land. Postcolonial critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o highlights language’s duality as “both a means of communication and a carrier of culture,” adding that “culture carries . . . an entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.[12] As Malaysian-born novelists who write in English, Loh and Tan contribute to this “collective memory bank of a people's experience in history” (15). However, should all traces of the colonial past be erased and forgotten? The colonial past, which is a part of a nation’s identity, cannot be changed but its narratives can be rewritten in order to give voice to the colonized locals and shed light on their experiences.

Literary forms are malleable and can be suited to the writer’s purpose in serving or undercutting the empire. An English-language novel may appear to perpetuate the colonizer’s language but Loh shows that there are ways to de-eurocentrize it and give color to the trauma and experiences of the colonized locals without completely alienating non-Chinese speakers and making it inscrutable. Tan also demonstrates the ability of the colonized local to use the ancient principles of the colonizers against them and de-center their roles in postcolonial narratives.

Similarly, other contemporary authors from other regions have rewritten traditional narratives or retooled ancient forms to capture the imperialized subjectivities. These authors include South African-born J. M. Coetzee, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, and Korean-American Mary Lynn Bracht. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe featuring a drastically different Friday who resists learning the English language and forms his own undecipherable language with letters and symbols.[13] In A Small Place (1988), Kincaid uses second-person narration to force the privileged tourist to confront and re-evaluate their ignorance of the corrupt system that originated from slavery and colonialism.[14] The protagonist in Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum (2018) finds strength in her knife skills as a haenyeo (traditional Korean diving fisherwomen) when thinking about how to defend and save herself in times of crisis after she is abducted by Japanese soldiers.[15] 16 While some writers choose to illuminate the voice of the colonized locals with their traditions and cultures, others reclaim the colonized locals’ voices by retooling the colonizers’ traditions and cultures to subvert their authority.

One way to approach such bodies of work is to use an inter-imperial heuristic with less emphasis on a modernist perspective, especially on experimental texts featuring non-European empires. Literary scholar Jacqulyn Gaik Ing Teoh establishes that “an inter-imperial heuristic allows us both to account for the staves of internationalism structuring the otherwise nationalist platforms of Indonesian authors,” and “to explain the startling resemblance of debates on literature’s social function across the literary histories of diverse former colonies.”[16] I argue that such a heuristic is also valid beyond an Indonesian context, especially in regions that were imperialized by more than one empire such as British Malaya. A modernist lens offers one way of approaching the question of how the empire writes back. However, it can also unproductively narrow other possible critical approaches that may be necessary for non-European empires and histories and the experimental texts that they inspire.

The Eurocentrism that a modernist lens encourages can also hinder the uncovering of Japan, “the only non-Western imperial power” (Teoh, “Shadow Plays,” 404). Literary critic Nayoung Aimee Kwon asserts that the struggle to attain a

multidimensional understanding of complex colonial experiences and their tenacious legacies in our world today . . . emerge partly from the censorship and distortions of all colonial archives and the knowledges formed through their dusty repositories, which are then further fragmented, distorted, and mediated through subsequently politicized historical and popular mass-media representations.[17]

The words “censorship” and “distortions” highlight the atrocities experienced by silenced colonized locals and being misrepresented in colonial archives by those in power. However, is it possible to successfully piece together these fragments and remedy the distortions? Some writers like Loh and Tan embrace such mutilation and manipulation of their colonial histories as part of the history-making process itself and illuminate the unreliability of traditional representations of the colony to beseech readers to question their pre-conceived notions about histories and engage more actively with the texts they read.

Besides demonstrating how wartime trauma fractures time, both Loh and Tan rewrite colonial histories that fit the current globalized world order with modernist poetics. When Yun Ling and Yoshikawa Tatsuji are scrutinizing Aritomo’s work in the 1980s in The Garden of Evening Mists, Tatsuji comments that Aritomo’s shakkei is, “Cunning . . . the way he has done it, playing with perspective” (Tan, 112). Like Aritomo, Tan and Loh (re)present a different perspective to give an alternative view of history and introduce historical imagination to further destabilize the authority of dominant imperial histories in their respective novels. Loh illustrates her version of Borrowed Scenery without mentioning shakkei that involves “taking elements and views of” (33) the Chinese language and culture and “making them integral to [her] creation,” which is her narrative (33). In doing so, she promotes an open-ended interpretation, similar to her redacted adaptation of Pound’s maxim. Tan also incorporates his own way of an open-ended redaction through Aritomo’s alleged involvement in war crimes that cannot be confirmed due to his disappearance. While Tan demonstrates how the colonized native can gain control over her own narrative, Loh rekindles the native’s agency over his narrative by alienating non-natives with language. While modernist poetics are often associated with European empires, both writers show that they can be adapted to rewrite colonial histories that fit the current globalized world order.