Join us on Monday, November 6, to discuss Tash Aw's 2019 book We, the Survivors.

The narrator Ah Hock, an ethnically Hokkien Chinese Malaysian, is recounting his life story to a young journalist of how he got involved in a random gangster crime and murdered a man, which resulted in his imprisonment for three years. Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man? His vivid confession unfurls over extensive interviews with the young, privileged journalist Tan Su-min from New York, herself once a local, but whose life has taken a very different course. The process forces both the speaker and his listener to reckon with systems of power, race and class in a place where success is promised to all yet delivered only to its lucky heirs. An uncompromising portrait of an outsider navigating a society in transition, Ah Hock is the prototypical "survivor" in an unjust world.

Tash Aw was born to Malaysian parents in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. He studied law at Cambridge and Warwick. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His other works include Map of the Invisible World, We, the Survivors, and Five Star Billionaire, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. He is the author of a memoir of an immigrant family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier. His novels have been translated into 23 languages.

The e-book is available on Amazon​. If you are having trouble locating a copy, please message us at raschina@ras-china.org for more guidance.