Tash Aw

I couldn’t put down this book without remembering the lessons of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath: that all men are born equal under the sun, and that the owners of the land have no right to legislate the lives of their workers.

In this novel we are faced with an unsparing look at the lives of the increasing armies of the dispossessed.

Tash Aw writes a gruesome, accurate tale of human beings as so much tinder on a bonfire. Where humans are moved like filth across the sea, over borders, to another human dungheap. There is filth, there is cholera, and worst of all, there is indifference. Another brown man dead? So what.

Migrant workers need a voice and a vote in the lands they visit, and the lands they settle in.

Not least the armies of Phillipine women who manage our children as nannies or our elderly as caregivers.

Not least the Mexican and other Latin American men and women who make American beds, pick their fruit, wash their dishes, wipe their children, and weed the gardens of increasingly ungrateful Americans.

Not least the Indians, Bangladeshis, Rohingyas who populate the sweatshops and construction projects of the Middle East and the Far East.… (more)