Heists and Hijinks

Review of How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World by Joshua Kam (Epigram Books, 2020)
By S.R. Graham

If you are feeling a bit cynical about globalization these days, I might recommend you pick up a copy of Joshua Kam’s debut novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World. It will not offer you solace from what ails us in these late-stage, deforestation, slave-labor-pushing, wealth-hoarding capitalistic times (though it has much to say about all those subjects), but it will offer you a glimmer of hope through the smog-choked clouds. Kam’s novel, like its author, defies easy borders and boxes (Kam’s cultural heritage spans Malaysia, China, and the United States). The book blends genres and histories for an adventurous romp through religions and empires. What emerges from this cultural mix is a richly speculative meditation on how one builds and repairs society through love. The theme is an old one, and the book is better for it; a self-described iconodule, Kam understands the power of what has been held sacred for centuries, through the strife of many civilizations. If you like, think of this tale as an updated, Malaysian companion to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods; Malaysia’s history provides a plethora of old gods hidden in new views, ready to spring into action.

Our titular man in green is actually a take on al-Khiḍr, ancient Sufi prophet, and he does not save the world so much as assemble the motley crew that will do the actual saving, helped along by Khidir’s minor miracles and hijinks. Kam introduces readers to Khidir through the eyes of one of the narrative’s two protagonists, Gabriel, who works as a liturgical reader for a Russian Orthodox church in Kuala Lumpur. Gabe quickly leaves the city after witnessing Khidir resurrect a reporter who will expose the corruption of a minister—a minister who turns out to be one of the disguises for our villain, known as the Mouth. Khidir enlists Gabe as a chauffeur/partner-in-crime, and the two of them race across Malaysia to thwart the Mouth’s evil plans. Those plans seem to consist primarily of continuing the destruction that humanity has started: cutting down the jungles, poisoning the oceans, and pushing consumerism in an effort to increase profit margins and spread atheism. While the finer details of the moral and spiritual conflict get lost in the many monologues between both good and evil forces, the reader is centered by the archetypal good-guy/bad-guy plot. When the Mouth rages over how “non-being is greater than being, eating greater than planting. And ashes stronger than soil,” we still get the gist, even if the tenors of the metaphors are not clearly defined.

En route to fulfill their destinies, Gabe and Khidir meet up with Lydia and Ling Mo Niang. Lydia is the novel’s second protagonist, a divinity graduate student and grieving young woman who has returned to Kuantan to pack away her recently deceased grandaunt’s house. That aunt, it turns out, was the secret lover of Ling Mo Niang, an ex-Communist fighter and sea god, who needs Lydia’s assistance to regain her powers and join in the battle against the Mouth’s latest incarnation. Along the way, the four are aided by various secondary characters, from the very recognizable—Lydia’s taciturn and concerned father, Alvin—to the very mystical—Khidir’s friend Tun Teja, of the Hikayat Hang Tuah, who in this novel escapes death to live on in an enchanted forest glen. In hot pursuit of our heroes and their friends are all manner of government forces: police, secret police, and the army, not exactly minions of the Mouth but certainly working parallel to his aims.

Even with the novel’s many wali and gods abounding, it is Lydia’s curiosity that most effectively situates Kam’s novel in the genre of intrusive fantasy. While Gabe repeatedly reminds himself—and the reader—“not to ask more questions,” Lydia’s quest for knowledge of her grandaunt and her country pulls readers into tenderly rendered, emotionally honest scenes. In one, a young Lydia goes hiking with her grandaunt to a karamet shrine of Atuk—the same god who will later restore Mo Niang to her full powers. As her grandaunt makes offerings, Lydia contemplates her widening world:

She’d never thought you had to take care of God, or even tidy his home once in a while. Inside [the shrine], the god of the hill, smug and jolly, beamed out at the slope behind them. She stood respectfully out of his view; it’s hard to see very much when you’re short.

This psychological awakening is perhaps why intrusion fantasy crops up so often in young people’s literature (think Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, or Roald Dahl’s books) and in bureaucratic despotism (Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, or the works of Kafka); to borrow the words of academic Farah Mendlesohn, the genre is a “dragging of the protagonist into…the ‘true story’ of the world.” In Kam’s text, the struggle toward awareness is at its most convincing in Lydia’s hungering mind. In contrast, despite of his protestations that he’ll ask no questions, Gabe frequently does, only they are mostly mundane (“Where are we going?” and “Am I dead?”). Such clichés are less worthy of the reader’s attention.

The emotional and linguistic power of the novel lies squarely within the love story between Mo Niang and Lydia’s aunt, Tan Toh Yun. Kam’s lively sentences are most precise, and most haunting, in the love letters between the women. One of the benefits of having these letters included within the novel is that we are, for a few pages, transported from the text’s many philosophical musings into the rhythms of life itself, with all the mundaneness of rations and boredom, shitty C.O.s, patrols, pay scales, allusions to illicit desires in the dark. “A month ago, I was teaching English—tingkat 2, kelas 3B,” Toh Yun writes to the young Mo Niang, “I didn’t know how to use a Sten gun and Lenin was confusing, even though the translation is good—so they tell me lah. But if only to see you at home with durians in your hand, I could use a gun. I think.” Many weeks later, Mo Niang writes back, “I think no matter what suffering you have survived, you keep finding places to stay untouched.” In another novel, these words might land as a ham-handed reference to sapphic virginity, but in Kam’s jungle, always under threat yet forever regenerating, the phrase offers a survivalist’s hope: with work, there will always be new beauty to discover in the world. Mo Niang’s ardor supersedes political or dogmatic validation. She tells Lydia, “everyone pretends they invented love. It was ours a thousand years before it fell into their paws. Our kind was cutting sleeves and pruning peaches and tumbling in our silks like puppies before they even had names for this. It was always ours, even if no one knows.” Moments like this serve as a much-needed balm for LGBTQ+ readers, whose community has always narrated itself into being despite attempts at erasure.

Perhaps this commitment to re-seeding the visibility of queer culture is what will best be remembered about How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and deservedly applauded in years to come. While the Malay Peninsula has historically held a plurality of accepted gender and sexual expressions (see Michael Peletz’s comprehensive Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times), British colonialism imported and legally sanctioned homophobia, which has only become more extreme in the ensuing decades, to the extent that current rhetoric tries to pass off queerness as a “Western” attribute. Kam’s work acknowledges this political climate of revisionist history and pushes back with vigor. From the (literally) immortalized eunuch Admiral Cheng Ho, who inducts Lydia and Gabe into sainthood, to Khidir himself, the novel is full of characters whose slippery sexualities are the stuff of ordinary life mythologized. Gabe notes this when he enters an underground gay bar with Lydia: “The first thing that struck him was the familiarity of everyone. He’d seen his people all over the city, he reflected. Trans women at bus stations, mak nyahs, lesbians at the beef noodle joint behind his house, Cantonese hairdressers and pockmarked men in suits bearing luminous scars...A gallery of saints, he thought. His saints, and he in their number glowing.” This version of sainthood, as something both quite quotidian and also divinely inspired, becomes the heart of the novel’s prescription for world-saving. Change is going to come regardless, but it is our ordinary, mortal work that shapes its form.

Magical intrusions, breathless car chases, and flashy fight scenes provide Kam ample room to show off his skill with simile and humor. The dead bodies of soldiers, mutilated by mines, are revoltingly and evocatively described as a “flash of pink and white, like the insides of a pomegranate.” In another instance, after one of Gabe’s self-conscious monologues on his sexual encounters with Khidir, the latter glibly jokes to their dining companions that he “had something of a heavy breakfast.” The humor does not work, however, when it consists of corny cinematic turns or knowing winks at the reader. In the middle of a pitched life-and-death fight, Lydia describes her idea to take down the Mouth as “more Kim Possible than Borges.” Later, after the crisis has passed, she delivers a stirring soliloquy on the nature of the divine, perhaps the closest Kam comes to laying out actual belief:

And all this—to feel in each limb the strength and fire and vigilant delight and ample simplicity in her belly—all this was new. The glory of God, her father might have said, but its meaning had always escaped her. Not, perhaps, a glorification of God; just the infusion of God into all matter and all living forms and every corner of this dreadful basement of steel and cement—to see it in the face of her grandaunt’s lover and these two men and then, to her rising surprise, in the face[s] of the bored police officers, pouring from each eye and lip and cheek...What that light meant, what it really did...she couldn’t say. Bell Hooks would explain this surely.

Surely the estimable Ms. Hooks would explain, if I were reading one of her books, but what does Joshua Kam think? Hopefully we will find out in his second novel.

Second novel there will undoubtedly be. How The Man in Green Saved Pahang was selected for 2020’s Epigram Books Fiction Prize, and Kam’s ambition and thoughtfulness are clear. One of the judges, Professor Rajeev Patke, noted that Kam’s novel “is filled with energy, cheerfulness and a linguistic panache that is a bit rough, but altogether charming.” Kam himself has stated that he has written the novel for Malaysians and other Southeast Asians in the hopes that the text “reflects different kinds of rebel Malaysias that also appear in the narrative of this country we’ve been given...those alternative countries that are buried underneath government textbooks.” In this matter, he has succeeded. The novel’s historical tropes span the Melakan golden age, the empires of the Portuguese and the Dutch, WWII, the Emergency, and the more recent problems of industrialization and political corruption. The text is an example of what we all once hoped globalization would offer: a synthesis of many cultures, meeting and blending in a mosaic that reflects the best of each of its parts, the sum of which is greater than but beholden to its individual narratives.


S.R. Graham is an American writer living in Philadelphia.