A review by sebby_reads
Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family by Tash Aw

informative inspiring lighthearted reflective fast-paced

4.75

“Maybe it isn’t to do with our faces, but with our wish for everyone to be like us. We want the stranger to be one of our own, someone we can understand.”

Strangers on A Pier: Portrait of a Family by Malaysian author Tash Aw is a remarkable book about immigrant people and their generation as well as their longing for the lost past in their life. In less than 100 pages, it tells the writer’s personal story as an immigrant generation, his conversations with his father, and a very touching memoir of his grandmother.
In the first part of the book, Aw talked about his youth as he chatted with his father about the past. Through his family’s intricate history, he discussed the landscape of an immigrant family. Both Aw’s grandfathers were from China and they migrated to Malay Peninsula in the 1920’s. As the ship arrives the destination, there are others like them; strangers in this new land, lost on a pier and have no clue of what to expect next. Survival comes first as it always does for human beings. They work hard for their children and provide the education they never get so that they could be risen up in social class. He also discusses the ideological differences between the immigrant grandparents and their grandchildren.
In second part, Aw recounted his memories of his grandmother and the conversation he had with her. While telling his grandma’s story, he weaves into his personal experiences as a Malaysian Chinese to illustrate the dissimilarity between them but also to showcase their sharing of common attributes. At the same time, the reader gets to learn about the women of her generation and what they were ‘expected’ to be in their time.
Forgotten heritage and lost identity are common when we talk about immigrant family stories. People migrate to a new place for betterment of their lives and their generations’. Adaptability is the key and to be able to fit into a new society, one has to change. During such time, people are sometimes forced to forget the past and their narratives are silenced.
With every difficult choice they made, they shed away a small part of themselves and either a new part replaces or it remains as a void. All those changes may seem insignificant individually but later it become significant and it is too late for you to pick up the pieces you discarded.
Through Aw’s evocative narration, one’s search for their root and root of the root is delivered impeccably in Strangers on A Pier. It is not about one’s desire to dwell in the past nor condemning on the changes one has to make. It is one’s bittersweet yearning for the past that had been forcibly silence. This may be a thin book with only 90 pages however it definitely urges me to think more while reading it and demands to question after finishing the book, as well. Fast but unforgettable read, indeed.