Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan (translated by Jeremy Tiang) is a collection of eleven short stories about the guerilla fighters of the Malayan Communist Party (also known as Magong) who moved stealthily through the night, dodged mines and bombs and bullets, and hunted and foraged for what little sustenance one can find in the rainforests of the Malay Peninsula. They were part of a guerilla force that had rallied against British and Japanese imperialism in what is now Malaysia and Singapore, but had subsequently been met with violent persecution by other political parties throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Male and female, young and old, middle and working class, the cast of characters in this collection come from different backgrounds and have lived different experiences. Yet in the rainforests, they are united by a burning spirit, a sense of camaraderie, and a shared journey towards becoming at one with something greater—with the collective movement for what they believed was a better common future for Malaysia and Singapore, and with the rich natural world that they are trying to blend into.
One of the most striking things about this collection is how immersive the reading experience is. The first story, “Mysterious Night”, opens with the repeated cries of a jungle animal—which turns out to be an agreed-upon signal that guerilla fighters used to announce their presence and prevent friendly fire in the thick of the night. These cries blend in with the shuffles and chatters of hornbills and deer, of leaves shuffling, of the night arriving: “The hills were full of leaves rustling, mingling with the slosh of water hitting river rocks in the valley, as if nature itself were snoring.”
Sounds are crucial to the construction of the immersive reading experience; Hai Fan uses onomatopoeias liberally and Jeremy Tiang renders them into English with syllables that prompts vocalization as one reads: the wind and bodies brush against lush foliage in bouts of “hrr shrr shrr”, mosquitoes buzz around characters’ ears in relentless “ynng ynng wnng”, and bullets fires from barrels in shots of “pnng pnng”. These sounds not only give body to the aural world of the stories, but also bring about a playful quality that encourages the reader to tap into their imaginative power.
In making the physical world of the characters tangible, Hai Fan makes their emotional worlds easier to grasp. As a reader, to hear the explosion of gunshots in the dark night the same way the narrator of “In the Line of Work” does as he waits for a pair of his comrades to venture forth as scouts across an uncovered river is to also catch one’s breath for fear and worry. To notice the familiar rustles of the quiet road-sweeping general as he draws a slender branch against the earth at the end of the detachment to erase any trace his comrades have made in “Magic Ear” is to share the sense of safety and camaraderie that the fighters share. These sensations and sentiments concerned with day-to-day, moment-to-moment survival (as opposed to lofty beliefs about international communism) are often what lie at the heart of Hai Fan’s stories and what keep his characters going.
This is not to say that his characters don’t interact with the philosophies and doctrines shared by nationalist communist parties across the world. “Hillside Rain” tells the story of Donghua, a character who hails from a middle-class family, and her relationship with labor, something the collective treasures but is unfamiliar to her. In “Mysterious Night”, unit leader Old Jiang has to constantly reaffirm his commitment to the revolution, even when it involves, paradoxically, confessing to counterrevolutionary behavior. Hai Fan does not go into detail as to what this behavior may be, just like how he does not describe the enemy in any way (they were always referred to as “The Enemy,” sans descriptor). The ideology and its opposition loomed as faceless shadows. They are omnipresent, but more as labels and taglines constructed through propaganda than as heartfelt sentiments between characters.
All of this goes back to the act of listening and learning from one another and from nature. Living together in the jungle, the characters learn about and from each other, as well as shared and accumulated knowledge about nature. “Prey”, told in three encounters with the wild animals on hunting expeditions, show that food is not the only thing humans can get out of animals: we can also learn from the love that mother bears have for her cubs, or the tenderness with which animals can treat humans if trust can be built.
While these lessons often bring the characters and their physical as well as social environment close to a sense of harmony, there are details that reflect the thinking of the 1970s, the period the stories were set in. Hai Fan’s portrayal of female characters, for example, lacks dimension. Female characters are often portrayed in moments of fragility—they either struggle with an inherent weakness like being born middle-class or being chronically frail, are going through menstruation, or are dying. While male characters also have their weak moments, suffering injuries and disabilities sustained in combat, they have redeeming moments of being physically and mentally strong, pushing through the jungles, carrying their injured comrades despite their own wounds. In the worst moment for a female character in this collection, the male protagonist of “Swansong in That Faraway Place”, Ah Xiang, knowingly uses a broken condom while sleeping with his partner, Chunxi, making her pregnant and physically vulnerable against her will. She plans to abort the child only to be guilt-tripped by him, and then, as she slowly lets go of her own opinion about her body and concedes, she dies on the battlefield. On the one hand, this death is retribution for Ah Xiang’s selfish action; on the other, it silences Chunxi completely.
Details like these, while jarring to read, do not necessary overshadow the merits of Hai Fan’s stories. They remind the reader that these stories are realist and unembellished, yet products of their time. They seek not to teach morals, but rather to reflect Hai Fan’s experiences in a down-to-earth way. With its diverse range of characters, its immersive quality, and its simple but effective language, Delicious Hunger feels like a rare collection of recollections by your weathered uncle, which gives you a glimpse into lived experiences of recent history.
Delicious Hunger
by Hai Fan
translated by Jeremy Tiang
Tilted Axis
Thảo Tô is a writer from Vietnam. Her writing has been published in Sine Theta Magazine, diaCRITICS, the Asian Review of Books, and Wasafiri.
