THE STORM WE MADE, by Vanessa Chan
“Isn’t every man a good man and a bad man?” asks Cecily Alcantara, the protagonist of Vanessa Chan’s debut novel, “The Storm We Made,” which is set against the lead-up to Japan’s invasion and occupation of Malaya (now Malaysia) in World War II. The question, posed by a mother to a general who is scheming to overthrow the British, encapsulates the contradiction woven throughout Chan’s novel. Housewives become spies; saviors become oppressors; unlikely friendships bloom; and young men endure and inflict horrific violence. This is perhaps the book’s greatest power: It makes space for complexity without relinquishing the grip of a good story.
“The Storm We Made” opens in 1945 in Japanese-occupied Malaya where, despite the hard-won downfall of British rule, hopes of a “better colonizer” have been dashed. Boys are being forced into labor camps and girls are kidnapped to become comfort women. The threat of losing loved ones becomes reality for the Alcantara family when Cecily’s 15-year-old son, Abel, doesn’t come home. We soon learn, in scenes of increasing brutality, that Japanese soldiers have put him to work on the Burma Railway.
As the days progress, the tight knot of the family comes apart. We witness its unraveling through the eyes of Abel’s sisters: Jujube, who works at a teahouse frequented by raucous Japanese soldiers and a soft-spoken Japanese teacher who takes a liking to her, and Jasmin, who escapes despondency at home while secretly playing with her Japanese friend Yuki. Chan reveals how war is experienced in bodies and hearts, breaking down the morale of those who remain. She writes, “Would their family continue to exist in the horrific silence of their present, creaking around like tired apparitions in their own home, weighed down by the footfalls of their sadness?”
Interspersed with the siblings’ perspectives are chapters from a decade earlier, exposing the part Cecily chose to play in the Japanese invasion. Her role: stealing intelligence from her husband, a bureaucrat for the British administration, and passing it to General Fujiwara of the Japanese Imperial Army, who woos her with dreams of “an Asia for Asians” (and with his toxic charm). Tired of being underestimated, Cecily uses her “invisibility cloak of femininity” to effect change, consequences be damned. At first, the point of the dual timelines feels uncertain, although it does provide context for Cecily’s guilt about her family’s disintegration. Then the threads converge, forming a braid that proves to be stronger than its individual parts.
This is a novel concerned with power — how it’s given and taken, whom we must align with to get close to it — and the consuming desire for more. From the cunning general to the tormented son locked in a chicken coop, characters are constantly striving, their destinies driven by the “persistent gurgle of want.” Chan never shies from the intricacies of this hunger; it eats at Cecily, fostering delusion and inviting humiliation and shame. But simmering beneath all of this is the will to dream — for the self, the family and the nation.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to hope,” says a boy who befriends Abel in the labor camp. This boy saves his toilet-paper rations to draw faces — to record life — using his own blood as paint.
At times, Chan’s narrative feels strained. The distinction between nation and family, between men with lofty plans for their country and women with quieter ones for their children, is drawn too cleanly. There’s a tendency to overexplain both the thematic shades of the novel and its historical context, which, while complex and under-recorded, can stand on its own. Often I felt the hand of the author leading me to conclusions, and wished she trusted me to find my own way. Indeed, the power of this story is such that I would want to.
What makes the book pulse with life is not the grand sweep of its ideas but the tenderness in its details, the ordinary ways that these characters love and laugh in the face of the extraordinary. Unexpected friendships abound, but they are never frivolous; in each one, Chan conjures the transformative possibilities of love when we allow others inside.
“Your enemy looking like you — recognizing yourself in the enemy — made it so much worse because it mirrored back to you all the darkness you held,” Jujube thinks.
Yet Chan shows us, with clarity and care, how the truest mirror comes from the intimacy of human connection.
Janika Oza’s debut novel is “A History of Burning.”
THE STORM WE MADE | By Vanessa Chan | Marysue Rucci Books | 352 pp. | $27
