By Shelly Bryant

Delicious Hunger
Hai Fan, translated by Jeremy Tiang
Ethos Books (2025) / 260 pages / SGD 24

In reviewing Delicious Hunger, I find myself compelled to begin at the book's end. In the Author's Note entitled 'An Encounter with Myself', Hai Fan writes, "I have no idea whether, by publishing this book, I'm doing the right thing at the right time" (p. 251). Reading this reflection first may incline one to detect in it a note of trepidation, but anyone who has read the complete collection of short stories might instead hear notes of care, and of a serious intellect respecting the complexities of history.

After all, as Hai Fan notes, "This is a gesture of farewell," a gesture that demands much of the author, as he acknowledges when he says, "I reordered my life and began spending my free time quieting my heart and looking back, thinking deeply, sweeping clean the small roads that lay buried beneath fallen leaves. I prepared to step into the rainforest again" (p. 252). The Author's Note ends with a reassuring tone – a reassurance born from the response to the early publications of these stories, a confidence that indeed this has been the right thing to do at the right time.

This review is just another voice added to the chorus of affirmation for Delicious Hunger, not only for its publication in the original Chinese, but now also in English, translated by Jeremy Tiang and published by Tilted Axis and Ethos Books. There is about these stories – and about their translation, and about the haunting beauty of the cover of the Ethos edition – a rightness of timing, a rightness of voice for the subject matter, and a rightness of a particular form of light touch with which events that are too hard, too close, and too painful are best treated.

For many of us who go about our day-to-day urban lives, it is easy to forget how close to us, in both physical and temporal terms, the conflicts of the rainforest have been. Hai Fan entered the rainforest as a soldier of the Malayan Communist Party in 1976, engaged in guerrilla warfare until 1989, and finally returned to Singapore in 1992. With that history in mind, I am not sure what I expected when I first encountered Delicious Hunger, but the impressions the book left on me surprised me. It is truthful without feeling over-exposed. It is direct without feeling blunt. It is poignant without any hint of melancholy. It is uncompromising without seeming angry. It is powerful without forcing anything on the reader. Ultimately, it is a voice of restraint – which never feels repressed.

For me, the window through which Hai Fan offers the clearest view of the rainforest is, paradoxically, not so much through the eyes, but through the ears. In the story entitled 'Magic Ears', we encounter a character called Wu Sheng, who is respected by those under his command even as he is also the object of some consternation, thanks to his strict adherence to rules, particularly those concerning the need to avoid excessive noise. As the story unfolds, we find that Wu Sheng's insistence on restraint from making too much noise gives him the ability to truly listen to the rainforest around him – the "magic ears" of the title. In the end, his insistence on restraint ultimately proves to be life-saving.

Hai Fan's prose echoes this restraint. His insistence on appropriate terminology is outlined by Jeremy Tiang in the essay 'Into the Rainforest: Translating Hai Fan', where Tiang notes Hai Fan's rejection of the term "Communist surrender" when what actually occurred was a peace treaty between the governments of Thailand and Malaysia and the MCP. There are many similar examples given: not arms "laid down", but a complete dismantling as agreed in the treaty; not a "riot", but a protest; not "Communist bandits", but guerrillas. In this insistence on accuracy, I find echoes of Wu Sheng's adherence to meticulous rules. Similarly, this care and precision make it easier to listen to the world around us – to that near neighbour in both time and space that is the rainforest, where battles were fought and a utopian dream pursued.

This is the right time for this book, and for this voice: a voice that shows how to be deeply engaged with history while practising restraint, how to be passionate about justice without noise, and how to listen carefully to what is still echoing close to us.

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