In her letter to readers at the beginning of her debut novel, The Storm We Made, Vanessa Chan writes that Malaysian “grandparents love us by not speaking” and goes on to explain that this only pertains to the four years of Japanese occupation during World War II. In every other subject, she writes, Malaysian grandparents do speak and at great lengths. But when it comes to the war, they cannot bring themselves to talk about the horrors from that time.
Chan, however, asked her grandparents about those four years during her childhood in Kuala Lumpur. She has taken these stories and woven them into a spectacular novel of a family ravaged by war.

Set in Malaya between the mid-1930s and 1945, the story is told in alternating points of view from Cecily Alcantara and her children Jujube, Abel and Jasmin. Cecily’s husband Gordon is a civil servant in the works department, an expert in water, tides, and shipping. Both Cecily and Gordon have Eurasian backgrounds, descended from the Portuguese who first arrived in the 16th century.
The novel opens in 1945 when Cecily and Gordon’s son Abel disappears on his fifteenth birthday. Teenage boys had started disappearing well before Abel, and Cecily feels it’s all her fault, not from any negligence on her part, but rather due to her decades-long role as a Japanese collaborator.
Cecily started working in Japanese intelligence in 1934 after she and Gordon were invited to a fancy dinner at the British Resident’s stately home. A “British loyalist and believer”, Gordon felt it a great honor to receive an invitation to mix with the top echelon of local society. But it wasn’t the British who made the greatest impression on Cecily and Gordon that evening, but rather a charming Hong Kong merchant named Bingley Chan. He spoke in British-accented English and seemed to charm everyone in the room. Soon Bingley became a regular at the Alcantaras’.
Gordon, enthralled with the idea that a connected British man, even one of Asian descent, would aspire to become a part of the couple’s circle, was delighted to have him visit, reveling in what he perceived to be their increased status. The two men would lean back in the cushioned rattan chairs in the front room of the house. They would swirl and sip brown whiskey that Bingley had brought, Gordon marveling at the quality, Bingley demurring when asked if he got it on the black market. An hour would pass, then two, then three, the men laughing uproariously at nothing, and Cecily sitting opposite them, smiling indulgently, nursing her first and only glass of the night.
Cecily became closest to Bingley and the only local to learn his real identity. He was not in fact a Hong Kong businessman but a high-ranking Japanese officer named Shigeru Fujiwara, “The Tiger of Malaya” (apparently based on Tomoyuki Yamashita). The things he told her about his work in Malaya suddenly gave her a new purpose in life.
He talked about a world in which people who looked like them were no longer imperial subjects, an Asia that looked out for its own, led by its own, a society that dismantled the structures of white men she had been told for so long were the only things that mattered but that she had never felt comfortable with. And as their clandestine nights continued, Cecily found that she too could envision a world taken back from the British, a future in which she, and her children, and their children, could be more than just unnoticed, bland, ornamentation.
What could possibly go wrong? As Cecily would find out—perhaps later than most—everything. Without her husband’s knowledge, Cecily began to steal classified information from his place of work that she handed off to Fujiwara. Chan has something of an affinity for the word “intel” (the dictionary unfortunately dates its use to the 1960s), and for years Cecily provided a lot of it to Fujiwara, down to the idea that the Japanese could find more success invading on land in the north than the sea in the south.
Cecily made a number of decisions, betrayals personal as well as political, that she came to regret as the realities of Japanese occupation, complete with abductions to forced labor camps on the Burma Railway and comfort women stations impinge not just on the population generally, but on her family in particular. Cecily, realistically or not, would go on to hold herself personally responsible.
Chan has populated her novel with any number of baleful characters, not all of whom are Japanese. Abel’s abductor, as it turns out, was his history teacher at St Joseph’s Boys’ School before the Japanese occupation: a British missionary named Brother Luke who called all the students “boy” when school was still in session. Brother Luke and Fujiwara appear throughout the story in different settings, ever more sinister. But much of the tension is closer to home: a neighbor Lina who became both Cecily’s best friend and her greatest rival. Cecily’s daughters Jujube and Jasmin are a decade or more apart and enjoyed a close relationship until the tensions in their household distressingly pulled them apart.
No one comes out unsullied at the end and this is why Chan writes that grandparents in Malaysia do not speak of those four years. Chan’s is one of the still relatively few novels, at least from mainstream Western press, that tells a WW2 story from the perspective of the colonized rather than the colonizing. But it’s Chan’s thrilling storytelling that will keep readers turning the pages.
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