We corresponded over e-mail this week about the Emergency, cities, and interviewing family. Born in Taipei, Aw was raised in Kuala Lumpur, moved to England to attend university, and now resides in Paris.

“My own family could well have been communist sympathizers… they do not wish this story, with its connotations of treachery and subversiveness, to be part of my identity.” Aw has written deftly about conflict and historical memory throughout his celebrated career, from his Booker Prize–nominated first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), in which a Chinese Malaysian peasant’s wartime actions are remembered differently by three people close to him, to his last essay for this magazine, a review of Asako Serizawa’s stories about the legacy of Japanese atrocities in World War II. “I’ve been in that position myself, chronicler of family history,” writes the Malaysian novelist Tash Aw in the Review’s May 11 issue. Sim’s recent show in Berlin challenges the official narratives of this tragedy by interrogating both British propaganda photographs of the war and her own family’s fearful reluctance to discuss her grandfather. The photographer Sim Chi Yin’s grandfather was one of the victims of this war.

Five thousand civilians died, and as much as 10 percent of the entire population of British Malaya was placed in internment settlements. June 16, 1948, was the beginning of the twelve-year conflict that would come to be called “the Malayan Emergency” by British colonial troops and “the Anti-British National Liberation War” by the predominantly ethnically Chinese Communist fighters seeking to overthrow them.

Book sworn to silence