The Storm We Made - Book Review

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Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan joins the same league as her Singaporean counterpart Rachel Heng with her debut novel, a spy thriller set in 1930s Malaya.

Chan's novel The Storm We Made is about a Eurasian housewife getting swept up in Japanese plans for the conquest of Malaya. The story is told from multiple perspectives, namely that of the protagonist Cecily Alcantara and her three children. The timeline alternates between 1945 and the late 1930s. This is Chan's first full-length novel after having her work published on various platforms . The Storm We Made has its humble origin as a creative writing assignment.



The Storm We Made sees Cecily, a bored housewife married to a senior bureaucrat in the colonial administration of British Malaya, get involved with a Japanese military officer who is on an undercover mission in Southeast Asia during the mid-1930s. In his disguise as worldly merchant Bingley Chan, Fujiwara more or less charms Cecily off her feet and she also begins a romantic fling with him while simultaneously supplying him with vital intelligence gleaned from her husband. Chan appears well-versed in research papers detailing Malaya's defences during the 1930s in this aspect. She has also painted Fujiwara as a more humane version of General Tomoyuki "Tiger of Malaya" Yamashita. Initially enamoured by Fujiwara, Cecily's conservative husband Gordon gets livid once he learns the Japanese general's true identity once the British are routed in 1942. This results in hardship for the Alcantara family. Towards the end of the war, the couple's son Abel gets kidnapped and shipped off to Kanchanaburi to work on the Death Railway while their younger daughter Jasmine runs away from home. This causes much distress to the surviving members of the family, which does not get better even after the war ends and the Japanese surrender. Chan's description of the conditions at Kanchanaburi is highly realistic and disturbing, to say the least.

The inspiration for %The Storm We Made%% came primarily from Chan's conversations with the older members of her family about their wartime experiences when Malaya was under the control of the Japanese. Chan paints a vivid picture of high society life in colonial Kuala Lumpur and the brutal conditions brought about by the Japanese occupation. She also broaches the topic of cultural and national identity while living under British rule. Initially, there were some who secretly cheered the Japanese who portrayed themselves as liberators of Asian people, only to be let down by the brutality of the Japanese troops. This would subsequently lead to the rise of anti-colonial movements across Southeast Asia in years to come.

At times Chan takes certain liberties with historical facts but any historian worth their salt can uncover what is real and what is not. Like Heng, Chan has successfully blended elements of fiction into the truth. Chan's way of detailing each character's pain sometimes brings to mind Jorge Torrente's The Uprising . It does feel as if the reader is watching a movie at some points. Readers with a love for Malayan and Southeast Asian history will certainly love The Storm We Made as they loved The Great Reclamation and Boyd Anderson's The Heart Radical . It would be a great move if The Storm We Made were optioned for a TV series.

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