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Tash Aw's work. [Global Times] |
London-based writer Tash Aw, who enjoys Chinese as well as Malaysian ethnicity, is now looking back to his ethnic heritage, after winning international acclaim for his debut novel The Harmony Silk Factory in 2005.
While his first two books were set in Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1940s and 1960s, his new novel will take contemporary Shanghai as its milieu, where Southeast Asians come in search of fame and fortune.
Since the rise of China and concurrent shift of focus from Europe back to the East, the changing attitudes of Malaysian immigration towards China interested him.
"When I was a child, no one would think of going to China to work because it was considered underdeveloped and poor; everyone who left Malaysia went to the West.
Nowadays, this is no longer true - in some aspects, Shanghai has become the New York of our time - people believe that anyone can go there and find their fortune," he told the Global Times.
Wandering down the Bund last November, where dozens of historical buildings are located, Aw considered the changing times and spaces of the empty streets and quiet old buildings at night, mulling over his characters.
"Shanghai is a great city for wandering around, so I spend a lot of time discovering the city on foot. There are so many beautiful buildings that you won't notice unless you're on foot," he said.
Born in Taiwan to Malaysian-Chinese parents in 1971 and having grown up in Kuala Lumpur, he went to university in London at 18 and worked as a lawyer after graduation. He first started writing fiction seriously during college, he said, and began working on his first work in 1998.
"I continued to write my novel at weekends, but eventually I knew that I had to leave full-time employment if I was ever going to finish (it). So that's what I did in 2002."