Memory, and some other things I forgot...

I read two very interesting books this past week.  Both were by Tan Twan Eng, The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists.  They are recent books by a fairly new author, though their succes belies that--both books have made several prestigious lists, even pretty short ones

Tan set both books in Malaysia, specifically Penang.  In these books the area is lush and green and, well, complicated.  A crossroads of sorts, Penang is peopled with Chinese, Malays, Indians, and of course the colonial British, to name just a bit of the ethnic diversity.   WWII and the legacy, both good and bad (if you can be that concrete)  of the Japanese and the Japanese occupation play a key part in these novels.  Certainly the impact (and the memory of those years and peoples) are still felt and seen today and this era dominates the characters in these books even though the books themselves are set decades later.

The historian in me wants to simplify and catagorize these novels--are they historical?  What is the characters' point of view?  Was it all accurate?  This is pretty easy to do, but other than determining whether or not the novels would be good texts it accomplishes little.  For the record, I think that either of these books would be easy to teach from.  They are rich with examples  and they are entertaining enough for an intro class.  Well, maybe...I apparently have a high threshold for the less interesting, but I think that these would work.

But what were they really all about?  I could put them in a time period, a region, a point of view, a general topic.  They were post-WWII post=colonial Southeast Asian, conflict driven books about the resolution of WWII-caused conflict.  But what were they really about?

What they were really about was memory and memories and the impact of both of these things.  In someways the books lead you to think that memories and memory are but a template for what your life long after will be, indeed must be.

Hmm...I am older, I have lots of memories of what I was, what I did, the people in my life and my actions throughout these past 50 years.  Is that what I am to be, what I must do, and who I must be?   But if this is true, what of will? Can't I take a new direction and skip the roads, taken and not taken but templated in my memory.  Or have my memories pre-ordained or already caused my future? 

While I am probably not going to change my last name to Arminious but I have to believe in some level of self-will in imagining my future.  Very certainly I will be carrying along my neatly packed matching  suitcases of baggage wherever I will go, and it will shape and affect my future. But I can carry my baggage along any road I choose, traveled or not.