Think of Cold War communist insurgency and guerilla warfare might well spring to mind. Sometimes it worked, building from the hinterlands to capture the capital: see Cuba. Sometimes it failed: see Che in Bolivia. And sometimes the revolutionaries remained stuck in the wild, undefeated but unable to seize the state.
Delicious Hunger is a collection of realist short stories drawing from one such case: the Malaysian Communist Party (MCP), who spent decades in the rainforest struggling first against Imperial Japan, then the British Empire and finally the Malaysian and Thai governments. Hai Fan spent 1976 to 1989 with the MCP, but it wasn’t until 2014 that—long since settled in Singapore—he began drawing from these experiences in his writing. He writes in Chinese and his cast are overwhelmingly Chinese too—indicating one impediment that the MCP encountered, failing to secure popular support from the country’s Malaysian majority.
Hai Fan has spotlit a neglected episode in history.
The translator is fellow Singaporean Jeremy Tiang, whose novel State of Emergency reaches into similar territory. Delicious Hunger stands out not only among Tiang’s formidable credits, but also from translated Chinese fiction as a whole, and indeed from on-the-ground revolutionary fiction. Hai Fan has spotlit a neglected episode in history, drawing on real experience, real commitment, and real feeling—all without falling into sentimentality or using fiction as a vehicle for dogma or posturing.
Delicious Hunger showcases tenacity in war, but also human vulnerability and adaptability to nature. The MCP’s soldiers face a hundred ways to die or be maimed, and in Hai Fan’s telling they survive through a blend of Party discipline and networks, interpersonal bonds, and accrued attunement with the forest. In some characters—usually observed by their juniors—that attunement is raised to the level of pure intuition, or the level of a sixth sense we might attribute to wild animals. Some characters are new to the struggle; others were born into it. To survive, one must ‘read’ the rainforest, and one cannot go it alone. It’s a team effort.
Hai Fan’s prose is straightforward, punctuated by the occasional sharp onomatopoeia or crystal-clear image drawn from the biosphere, or a sudden invasion of violence and terror. One moment a solitary bird sings; the next, a slew of bullets whistle by. Reality is cruel, and content unpleasant to 21st-century liberal sensibilities is not eschewed. Landmines and the corresponding proliferation of prosthetic limbs are a fact of life, and bringing down bears, boar and elephants is a happy remedy for hunger. But disabled comrades remain comrades for as long as they can carry on, and our characters wrestle with difficult internal lives of doubt, grief, yearning, and guilt. One woman sees her own anguish over the Party’s prohibition on child-rearing reflected in the killing of a mother bear seeking her already-slaughtered cub.
The MCP’s various opponents are almost exclusively referred to as “the Enemy”, and Hai Fan expends no words on military objectives except the most immediate (usually it’s “we need to move out”). The reader is left to either infer or forget about who the comrades are manoeuvring around—though one senses the grim odds when hearing about (and finally witnessing) the Enemy’s helicopters and mortar. Seeing these pitted against the MCP’s traps, grenades, machine guns, and make-do, some readers’ minds may flit to nearby Vietnam.
Translator Tiang relates the diversity of languages present in the book, where multiple “Chineses” sit alongside terms and items from several Southeast Asian tongues
Augmenting this singular reading experience is an impressive clutch of opening and end matter. Before the first story, a Translator’s Note, followed by an Editor’s Note. Then after the last story comes a Glossary of the author’s sketches and descriptions of key rainforest apparatus (eg, basket, rifle rack, snare, stool), followed by an Author’s Note and an Afterword.
In his note, translator Tiang relates the diversity of languages present in the book, where multiple “Chineses” sit alongside terms and items from several Southeast Asian tongues—priming readers not just to the diversity of the region, but of the complex ‘borderland’ nature of the MCP’s struggle. In her note, editor Tice Cin emphasises the poetry in Hai Fan’s prose, and the depth of his characters’ emotional lives—even making use of therapeutic language such as “coping networks”—and discloses that she encouraged Tiang to “increase the intimacy” in his translation.
In his note, Hai Fan recalls how encouragement from peers led him to begin writing about the MCP, which for him became a way to encounter a past self. The following Afterword comes from the most insistent of these peers, the writer Li Zi Shu, who Hai Fan struck as a rare and potent voice in “outsider literature”, capable of digging up stories at risk of being lost with the passing of his generation. It is interesting, reading a work in translation, to learn how its source text found daylight. In a sense, the stories and auxiliary matter tell the same story: you’ll never break through on your own.