Physician, Heal Thyself: Nurture and Corrosion in Lee Kok Liang's <i>Flowers in the Sky<i>

Abstract

If Lee Kok Liang’s body of prose-writing may be seen not only as a plea for Malaysian inclusiveness but also as a quest for an artistic wholeness, the apprehension that Lee feels in attempting in his first novel to replicate a Eurocentric canonical model, and his rejection of these more traditional narrative patterns in “Return To Malaya†and “The Mutes in the Sun,†finds a guarded resolution in Flowers in the Sky. The novel, a finely wrought though at times discordant equilibrium between not only the superficial binaries of temporal and spiritual, tragic and comic, Occident and Orient, but between the polyglot and multidimensional existences of immigrant Malaysians, returns, with qualifications, a clearer narrative voice(s) to Lee’s fiction. Whereas the heteroglossia of “Return To Malaya†emerges through a series of loosely connected sketches and leads through its closing portrait to the terrifying silence of The Mutes,the multiple discourses in Flowers in the Sky are revealed in a balanced dialogue between eclectic cultural perspectives and philosophical standpoints. The interests of the dual protagonists, Venerable Hung and Mr. K (possibly a parodic reference to Kafka [Brewster 189]), though seemingly aesthetically polarised, intersect regularly in their shared diasporic loneliness and in their occupations. Both, as Harrex notes (36), are interdependent healers – Hung seeks to stem the corruption of the spirit through meditation and asceticism, K the corruption of the body through technology – and their characterisations are balanced by the comi-tragic sub-plots of Gopal’s clumsy pursuit of tantric bliss and the dying Ah Loi’s agnosticism. (Copied from article).