From The Star, a top English newspaper in Malaysia
RECLAIMING ASIAN CREATIVITY
Asia will be the world’s next creative hotspot, argues Nury Vittachi
MOVE over, Harry Potter. Asian tales are on their way, and they’re going to need space on the bookshelves.
For the past 100 years, books, movies and music flowed mainly from West to East. But the flow is changing direction. Now, items of culture and entertainment are increasingly moving from East to West.
The number of Asia success-stories is growing, and the new Man Asian Literary Prize (www.manasianliteraryprize.org/2007) should inspire more to emerge.
India-born Kiran Desai won the 2006 Man Booker Prize (awarded to the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland). In the late 1990s, Japan’s Pokemon merchandize outsold Walt Disney’s in the United States. And Hong Kong’s John Woo has become one of the top Hollywood directors.
Creative people in Asia are actually regaining a dominant position that has historically belonged to the region. Many of the oldest written stories and earliest poems are from here. The earliest words ever found are on rocks from China and Pakistan. And Asia had talking animals – think of India’s Hanuman and China’s Monkey King – many centuries before Walt Disney was born.
The Man Asian Literary Prize, awarded to Chinese writer Jiang Rong on Nov 10, is part of this enormous sea change that is taking place. The award recognises Asia’s best literature that has not yet been published in English. It is sponsored by London-based financial services company, the Man Group, which also sponsors the Man Booker Prize.
Not before time. Despite Asia’s long history as a creative place, authors from the region have always been hard to find. Stop anyone in the street and ask him or her to name an internationally published Asian author. They’ll probably have trouble thinking of a single one – and then, if they’re smart, they may come up with a few names, such as Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, V.S. Naipaul and Vikram Seth.
But, in fact, all of the above live in the United States or London. Even Kiran Desai now lives in New York. (“But I still feel Asian,” she told me recently.)
Why are there so few world-class authors from Asia? It’s because the entire infrastructure that writers need is missing. First, you need a culture where stories are enjoyed, so that talented people are inspired to write good books. Then you need reading groups to polish them, editors to improve them, agents to make them saleable, and major publishers to spread them around the world. And most important of all: book lovers to buy them.
Most of the pieces of the puzzle have been missing in Asia for decades – but they are finally starting to appear. Literary festivals, readings, and poetry nights are springing up in Kuala Lumpur and most other major cities. International agents and publishers are sniffing around. Journals such as the Asia Literary Review (www.asialiteraryreview.com) are paying hard cash for Asian stories.
And one of the final pieces of the puzzle, the Man Asian Literary Prize, has started offering a respectable sum of money – US$10,000 – to show people that writing is a worthwhile activity.
Having said that, the Man Asian Literary Prize is still suffering from teething troubles. Getting the funds and the green light from Man Group Plc took several years. Internal boardroom battles among the organizers changed the leadership of the prize, leaving a widespread feeling that it had become controlled by Western expatriates.
There is continuing controversy over the choice of countries allowed to submit. Malaysia was accidentally omitted, but then reinstated. Other countries, such as Mongolia, are still missing from the list.
Despite all these hurdles, the prize was finally handed over last weekend to Jiang (actually, it was given to his publisher, as he was not present).
But a new controversy has sprung up. Critics have pointed out that while the prize was intended for authors unpublished in the West, the organizers actually handed it to a wildly successful and very wealthy writer who already has massive publishing contracts around the world.
“Jiang Rong is quite possibly the very last author in Asia who needs what the prize offers,” said an academic at the unofficial support website, themanasianliteraryprize.com. Another online literary commentator, The Literary Saloon (complete-review.com/saloon/), said the prize “was created in order to facilitate publishing and translation of Asian literature in and into English – so, of course, the first time they hand out the award, they give it to the one title that has already gotten heaps of international press and been sold for large advances!”
Malaysia’s best-known literary blog, thebookaholic.blogspot.com, run by regular StarMag reviewer and contributor, Sharon Bakar (aka Bibliobibuli), has been one of the liveliest discussion venues in Asia for debate about the prize.
One of the most intriguing debates kick-started by the prize is the question of Asian versus Western story arcs. There has been a standard form of three-act narrative story in the Western world for 2,000 years, with an introduction followed by rising action leading to a crisis and a climax, and finishing with a denouement. But Asia has quite different literary conventions and story-forms, often with a “bracelet” format: a series of stand-alone short stories all sharing a single thread that unites them.
What’s clear is the presentation of the prize last week doesn’t mark an end, but a beginning. The prize will have to evolve until it starts to fulfill its vision of inspiring writers around the region to respect the world of literature.
In the meantime, of course, the Harry Potter series of books has come to an end. So there’s plenty of room on the shelves and in bookstore windows for writers from Malaysia and other Asian countries to come out of the woodwork.
Just sit down and start to dream, and a story will come into your mind. Once upon a time...
First published: Sunday November 18, 2007