The Colors of Heaven

Edited by Trevor Carolan

Vintage, $11.00

by Leonard Casper/Boston Review

Asian nations bordering the Pacific usually are mentioned only in connection with their lustrous "tiger economies" or the ruinous fallout risked on the volcanic "rim of fire." The title given the 19 stories collected and edited by Trevor Carolan may seem to suggest an alternative view -- that of romantic tales in search of a musical score by successors of Rodgers and Hammerstein. These stories are far too scrupulously realistic for that; and yet they do manage a tentative faith in the possibility of humanity in an age of slaughter. The resilience of so many characters, in the midst of ominous mishap, signifies an amazing courage.

Revealing that these people possess a hidden strength probably goes beyond the more immediate motive of Canadian-born Carolan. His stated intention is not to offer models for admiration but merely to open more windows of awareness, in the West, onto the cultures of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia. (For good measure Australia and New Zealand are included.) While statistics can review impersonally the economic rigor and collective political importance of this rapidly developing arc of Asia, fiction provides a human dramatization of just how daily life on that north-south dateline is endured and transformed. Story after story in this collection is peopled by individuals shaped by forces directed toward collision but diverted toward coalescence.

Post-colonialism in Southeast Asia and sweeping postwar changes in Japan and Korea have liberated energies which now can be used by entire populations to choose between conflicting heritages, such as Western materialism, the mitigation of poverty by people power, and spiritual transcendence. Within cultures-in-transit they can perceive stages of selfhood assembled in the space between total conformity and extremes of vanity. Their implicit demand is for respect beyond toleration, and the sharing of constructive power at all socioeconomic and political levels. The intensity of the energy released rises also from the sound of once-censored voices. Many of these stories are by women, no longer insignificant citizens in male-centered societies. Others are from voices long muted by power-protective national politics. Some are even the sound of speech still stifled and therefore concealed by ironic satire or wry humor, an underground literature of protest bulging beneath simple surfaces.

In Nhat Tien's "In the Footsteps of Water Buffalo," for example, two elderly Vietnamese offer to substitute themselves for a dying draft animal at the communal plow. Dangers of institutionalized matchmaking are lampooned in Catherine Lim's "The English Language Teacher's Secret," just as the tribulations of Gerson Poyk's principal character, in "Matias Akankari," make a mockery of civilized custom when the tribal youth from the hinterland encounters Jakarta. Conversely, an Australian aborigine's profound affinity with nature is treated with culturally sensitive levity, in B. Wongar's "The Family."

In other stories, the stress inherent in sociopolitical change cannot be laughed away so easily. The expense of survival is great. In Zhu Lin's "The Festival of Graves," an aging mother who dedicated her life to the duties of her commune yearns for her daughter's love and respect, without wholly comprehending their absence. The resettlement of the Korean family in O Chong-Hui's "Chinatown" means an advance in status but also a rediscovery of what being a stranger means. Similarly, the mix of new opportunities with a sense of dislocation is experienced by the characters in Yoshiko Shibaki's "Snow Flurry," as they become enmeshed in postwar urbanization.

Far more desperate are the lives in other stories. Jose Dalisay's "Heartland" reveals a military doctor's revulsion at orders to revive a young guerrilla so that information can be retrieved from his broken body. The young man in Kon Krailet's "In the Mirror" suffers even greater disgust when poverty turns him to "paid-for" sexual acts in a nightclub. In K.S. Maniam's "Mola," a country girl, trying to escape the constant monitoring of her behavior by family members, becomes a city bride, only to find that she must fight her business-obsessed husband for even the most elementary identity and esteem.

Yet even such stories of desperation escape being parables of futility or despair. The characters' resurgent will to aspire beyond inner contradictions or to confront such destabilizing conditions as impoverishment or displacement signifies a refusal to be overwhelmed. Disorder becomes an opportunity for rearranging one's life. In Kuniko Mukoda's "Doubt," an aging son persists in attempts to recover his integrity at his father's funeral. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Mr. Tang's Girls" exposes not only the psychological battering of women forced into polygamy but their subsequent revenge as well.

Often these stories end unresolved, as if they are chapters in novels only contemplated, rather than in-progress. Told in the subjunctive mode (if only...), they are miniature semblances of entire Asian histories of this century, in which lives seem suspended -- but not lost.