In Conversation with William Tham
Stories surrounding the Malayan Emergency have always been obscured. Set in 1981, Kuala Lumpur, William Tham’s second novel The Last Days, follows an aging communist revolutionary as he encounters a mysterious former activist; a silent assassin looms on a final grudge mission, and a forlorn publication officer becomes interested in the story of a detained activist.
The Last Days tracks down the lasting legacies and ongoing trauma of the Emergency. Through a four-part narrative, these four disparate forces meet at the doorstep of a new political dynasty. William's examination of history and memory exposes how stories disappear and may later realign in unexpected and shattering ways in this introspective political drama.
William Tham (WT) was formerly Senior Editor at Vancouver’s Ricepaper magazine and his fiction and non-fiction works have been published by Ethos Books, Penang Monthly, and Looseleaf magazine. In this interview, Evelyn Ramli (ER) focuses on the development of the novel and William’s identity as a writer.
ER
While writing The Last Days, how important was it to stick to the facts? How did you balance the history of the Emergency with your story and your own characters?
WT
In my case it was a matter of being openly selective – while I had a broad idea of the historical contours were in place, which I picked up from various readings in school, Noel Barber and Han Suyin, for example, this was never a systematic affair, since a lot of details were invented. Real-life individuals show up as characters within the novel, such as Han Suyin herself, but when it came to more specific details, such as the actual operations of the Communist Party of Malaya’s Army’s soldiers, this was where my problems started. For this reason, I deliberately left a lot of the details vague, so if you were to ask me about regimental strength, daily routines and that sort of thing, I can’t say much most of what I know comes from memoirs written after the fact, including Chin Peng’s and Fong Chong Pik’s (bearing in mind that like the official narratives, they had their own objectives and rationales for telling the other side of history, no matter how frank such narratives can be, they would work in rebuttals and very likely omissions). There’s also at least one very glaring error in the last part of the book that I could have fixed by just checking a map, which is very embarrassing. In this sense, TLD was about taking stray “facts”, memories and anecdotes, eventually piecing them together into a narrative. While I was initially convinced that I was putting together an oft-forgotten history, this was only ever an invention. It became easier to leave the Emergency in the background and to simply set the story in its aftermath (even though the revised setting, 1981, was still certainly caught up in the ongoing Second Emergency), letting those contours grow increasingly vague.
ER
I read in a previous interview that you’ve worked on this piece since 2010: when you were first drafting The Last Days, did you intend to create an introspective political drama or did it come as a surprise/naturally?
WT
This question actually ties in with the fourth, I can answer them together.
ER
What other works influenced your writing and do elements of these works appear in The Last Days?
WT
Definitely Han Suyin’s And the Rain My Drink, for a long time I wanted to call the book The Wind for My Garment, since it forms part of the same line from an old Chinese ballad from which the title of her book came from. The mood, feel and style has always been a hodgepodge of influences, such as Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, while the elements of war and its horrors came from JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and perhaps to some degree Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War. although those influences made themselves felt in more subtle ways. The initial inspiration did come from a film by Amir Muhammad, Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, although I’ve only actually seen bits and pieces of it. I wish that I had read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Usman Awang’s Tulang-tulang Berserakan or Jeremy Tiang’s State of Emergency before writing my draft, however, those would have been very instructive.
ER
Many of your previous works have been crime thrillers involving assassins, or have revolved around men caught up in violent lives—what draws you to those stories?
WT
Simply because at first glance, they seemed simple enough to write, formulaic to a degree. Also, my earliest published writings showed up in Fixi Novo’s anthologies, so there was always at last a temptation to write something deliberately seedy and dark. TLD was actually an attempt to move away from that and into more historical writings, although the elements of genre writing eventually still found their way in – one of its characters actually plays a very minor role in my first novel. But I’ve been growing increasingly wary of writing these stories and would like to move more towards historical fiction, which is why with time, the original ideas I had for TLD were largely abandoned. I dropped most of its “action setpieces” to focus more on politics and the erasure of history. It wasn’t so much of a surprise, but more of a gradual evolution. It also helped that for the most part, this idea was always in the background and I did not become very attached to it until a few years before its eventual publication, which allowed room to experiment.
ER
What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned or discovered while writing The Last Days?
WT
I had been away from Malaysia for some time before I got around to writing the first draft, and it surprised me that after all those years the local context was still the only one that felt natural, that I could write about with some degree of confidence. So in a way, the novel became part of a homecoming process. The very last paragraphs of the novel were initially meant to be more cynical, angry and dispirited, so I eventually found that I could no longer honestly keep that particular ending in place and changed it around to something more hopeful and open-ended. Surprisingly, this made a huge amount of aesthetic difference.
ER
Has being an editor influenced or transformed you as a writer? If so, how?
WT
It has been very helpful, since writing and editing often look like diametrically opposed processes, but ultimately they are symbiotic. A lot of my first drafts have been terrible, completely mixed up and overly detailed, with little sense of plotting. It takes editing to trim away, to know when less is more. With it also comes an awareness of the artifice of the text, and just how much it is subject to change. I’d really recommend that writers also be editors – even if you aren’t editing creative writing, technical or academic editing is also an excellent learning experience. Admittedly it also pays the bills, to the point that I see myself more of an editor these days.
ER
What does "writing from the heart" mean to you?
WT
Danger! I change my mind quite often and have to be careful about what is committed to text, since once something is out in the world there is no way to control it, to keep things in context. For that reason, I try never to write from the heart, but to revise, rethink and constantly edit. The best writing, for me, is the sort that emerges from a certain degree of detachment, when the text is no longer immediate and there’s time to consider the possible consequences. All writing is political, to at least a certain extent, and hence the enormous power wielded by narratives.
Note: This interview was conducted via e-mail.