Summary Of The Face: Strangers On A Pier By Tash Aw

The Face: Strangers on a pier by Tash Aw, is an implausible novel where Aw’s family background about the experience his grandfather had migrating somewhere else was. The novel illustrates his grandfather's journey, and the heritage from which he derives from, but it also inputs a new key term of “forgetters”. It lack the sentimental element that every migrant novel carries. The pity, and pathos most people relate to when recounting the hardships an immigrant goes through to gain acceptance and stability in a new country. In addition, it adds what others don’t which is assimilating the novel to the grandchildren, and new generation of people from the migrating families. It puts in perspective how the generations to come lose the dialect, forget

the proper way to greet elders, regret the loss of your people’s dialect, move further from your family/customs, and convert to different religions, (p.21-22).
“We do not admit weakness or sadness. Romantic heartbreak, depression, existential doubts-those are topics of conversation that belong to different cultures and younger generations, educated people who know about Freud and psychotherapy and organic vegetables. Vulnerability id shameful. Even taboo; and in the spectrum of human shortcomings, poverty id the greatest frailty. All that is broken must remain in the past,” (p.26). In Aw’s family addressing the history of how his grandfather migrated is sign of weakness to his culture. It’s a sign of weakness to recognize the difficulties one had to go through to survive, and achieve the level of economic security they have. Remembering brings the past, with the past the family his grandfather most likely left behind, the land he grew up, and witnessed him grow into a young man. The past can open hidden skeletons in the closet, it can be painful, but once your older, like his grandfather who opens up slowly in his olden age is his own way of retelling the parts of his life he wants the younger generation to know, to tell to the future generation. In a sense Aw needs his grandfather's story to complete his own to understand a part of his identity. Your family builds part of your identity, they encompass you with religion, fundamentals, responsibility, pressure you to be more educated and knowledgeable.
“...That’s what frustrates me about a particular kind of migrant, the ones who drop their cultural baggage entirely in order to assimilate successfully into their new surroundings (as opposed to the other extreme, who cling desperately to memories of the homeland, and can’t wait for the day they can retire and return to the place they have just left).

For the problem with the Forgetters is that the need to wipe the slate clean in their adoptive country doesn’t just begin and end with their arrival in their new land; it continues thereafter, repeating itself until it finds a convenient historical ground zero that is emotionally and intellectually untroubled so that a new narrative is formed about them, a glowingly positive trajectory that strives for a clean story arc, complete with neatly packaged doses of pain-ultimately overcome, of course-that punctuate the rise to comfort and success and happiness,” (p.35). “The Forgetters” as Tash Aw illustrates that the Forgetters forget about their origins. “Forgetters is that the need to wipe the slate clean in their adoptive country doesn’t just begin and end with their arrival in their new land,” it can’t just begin and end when you step foot in a new land Aw insinuates. Your life is a story that should be told to generations, your hiding your true self, your denying others the opportunity to know more about yourself, culture, identity. How can forgetting be good? How does forgetting your past compensate for your future. Your past

is what led to the future. Those decisions, so why forget? People’s origins, their life stories can influence others, and have an impact in their life. Aw has a point once you forget, it becomes a “single story” your retelling, because you bottle up that journey, you remember bits and pieces, others come up with the rest, nobody will know the full and complete story of how they can to be. How migration shaped their identity. “It’s always like this, I ask someone, they ask someone who asks someone else, but the response is always the same: we don’t know,” (p.24).
Forgetting brings uncertainty.

But people forget to escape a dark time, or hardship that they themselves have not recovered from. People forget for many reasons. Immigrants go through many obstacles when migrating, the process isn’t rainbows and lollipops. There’s more to being an immigrant. You will feel out of place, like you don’t belong, because you’re not from here, but you're not from there either, so where do you belong. On page 77 Aw’s grandfather states “But we’re immigrants,” as a reference to portray that we shouldn’t belong. Why should they, assimilation is hard. Moving and living in a country for years doesn’t mean you assimilated, but you adjusted to the society, and what was deem for you to do. We are immigrants because we make our own home wherever we go, we adjust, we don't belong, and most likely won't ever find that other piece to our identity that will make us

adjust.