Home, Friendship, Flowers: Reading Tash Aw's the Harmony Silk Factory within the Context of Globalization

家，友誼與花：從全球化觀點閱讀歐大旭的《和諧絲莊》

10.29960/SIC.201212.0002

王曉慧(Hiu-Wai Wong)

Tash Aw ； globalization ； David Harvey ； Appadurai ； cultural heterogeneity

國際文化研究

8卷2期（2012 / 12 / 01）

27 - 54

英文

As a Malaysian novel in English, it tells of the entwinement of the lives of Johnny Lin, the lower-class Chinese, Snow Soong, the upper-class Chinese beauty, and Peter Wormwood, the white colonizer. In spite of the fact that the novel represents the colonized Malaysia, investigating it from the point of view of post-colonialism would be reductive. Although involving the conflicts between the white and the Asian, the novel is more about their friendship and love than the binary opposition between the colonizer and the colonized. One would rather read it within the context of globalization, which stresses much on the on-going change and flow of everything, including money, technology, culture, population, and resources. In this vast current of change, no one can stay away from the influence of the other.In what follows, this paper should first look into David Harvey's and Arjun Appadurai's theories of globalization, in order to grasp the context of the rapidly changing world. Both Harvey and Appadurai have theorized the effects of globalization, clarifying its influence on geographical landscapes due to capitalism. After attaining the theoretical framework, this paper would discuss Peter's narrations, which reveals how in the globalized era the conventional European values can no longer hold. As is shown by Peter's story, only through interacting and falling in love with the ”oriental” world can one learn more about himself and enrich his own life. All he tries to advocate is that during cultural globalization, everything is flowing and unstable to the effect that there no longer exists a secured cultural identity. Peter represents a brave adventurer in the globalized landscape who, though has once been misled by orientalism, demonstrates the bold resoluteness to seek for ”love, friendship and sacrifice” (271) on the strange, foreign land.

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