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![]() ![]() ![]() 1980s) framing chapters Yun Ling Teoh, the first woman judge in Malaysia’s supreme court, has unexpectedly taken early retirement. (I’m paraphrasing.) In a cobbled-together political construct like Malaysia – in fact, a collection of diverse populations from long before colonial times – who indeed? Who are the immigrants, asks one character. But there’s a lot here about coming to terms with prejudice, about the horrors of Imperialism, about immigration and ‘aboriginal’ populations…. The novel’s framing chapters, set in the late 1980s, allow us to see that it’s something she still hasn’t quite got over. Thinking back, she re-lives a time in 1951 when, following her own torture and her sister’s death in a Japanese prison-camp in the Second World War, she could hardly bring herself to speak to a ‘Jap’. But there’s a different kind of memory and forgetting at work. The epigraph concerns memory and forgetting, and there’s a clue on the second page that the first-person narrator has a problem: she has forgotten about the death of the woman whose final weeks of healthcare she paid for only a few years previously. ![]()
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