Tash Aw on Writing
Affiliate Fellow Tash Aw reflects upon his upbringing and writing in a recent interview with YZ Chin in Electric Literature Magazine.
“People everywhere in the world, even those who should, on paper, be comfortable, are struggling—struggling to make ends meet, struggling to hang on to a sense of optimism, for themselves and their children. That intense feeling of thriving in one’s life—which I believe comes from a sense of equality—seems to have disappeared. In Malaysia, we believed that the free market economy would benefit everyone, and that life’s upward trajectory would be endless, but now we are surviving rather than flourishing.”