"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" - Milan Kundera.
For those who are always suspicious of our shitty history textbooks - you are right.
History
is written by the winners. There's too much garbage propaganda by the
right-wing idiots to instil nationalism from an ethnocentric
perspective. Nationalism is merely a distortion of historical events to
serve a certain agenda. Textbooks are written to glorify a certain group
of people holding the reins of power from a certain ethnicity. This is
called racial hegemony. In a hegemonic version of history, women and minority races are forcefully erased & forgotten.
You'll be surprised by the amount of missing pages in our textbooks that
is only revealed by referring to alternative sources OTHER than the bloody textbook.
We should always question history and challenge the forceful imposition of amnesia on us. But most of all... the struggle against power is our responsibility to tell the truth.
That is the thesis of the novel called "The Garden of Evening Mists," written by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng. This book won the Walter Scott's Prize as well as the Man Asia Literary Award in 2013. It was further longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a book-signing ceremony in Kinokuniya, author Tan shared his writing experience with aspiring writers.
He was signing my goddamn book with a nosy aunty fangirl beside him. She was totally salivating on him, thinking "Damn. If only there are less gay scenes in his novels. If only."
I assured the aunty that a dude can swing both ways in the spirit of universal love.
Sypnosis: Teoh Yun Ling is a traumatized ex-victim of the Japanese Occupation. During the war, her sister was forced into military prostitution while she herself was condemned to hard labour in prison camp. Her sister was executed and buried in an unknown grave. Yun Ling who suffers from a disease struggles to write down her memories before she succumbs to amnesia. She needs to discharge her duty of telling the truth before it's too late. She enlists the help of Aritomo, the emperor's gardener, to build a Japanese garden for her dead sister. She wants this garden to be a memorial to ensure that nobody forgets what the Japanese did. Meanwhile, the Japanese govt is free to erase history in their textbooks, denying their war atrocities against the Chinese, bla bla bla bla....
Rating: 7.5/10
0 comments: