To look back on one's intellectual journey and development is one of the hardest tasks. Perhaps one should not even attempt it. Now in my sixtieth year, I hope I may be able to do so with some equanimity and honesty. I shall also try to link this trajectory with some of the key concerns of this volume. As I look back, it seems to me that the main difference between the earlier and later phases of my literary criticism has to do with the shift from an F.R. Leavisian unitary sense of “The Great Tradition” and a New Criticism approach, to my later concern with literature as a part of cultural politics. The later phase thus propelled me into examining issues such as the narratives of nation formation and how these are inflected by gender, class, and ethnicity; the hybridity of identity which is constantly in flux in a global-local interface. These issues have also directed me to look more closely at Malaysian writers, both those who write in English and those who use the Malay language. This does not, however, mean that I have abandoned my old loves (Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in translation, etc.).

The Early Days

Enrolled as a primary pupil in St Mary's School, then run by Anglican missionaries, in 1955, just before Malaysia (then known as Malaya) achieved its independence in 1957, I was very much schooled in the colonial mould. Yet there was no critique on my part of this colonizing of the mind. In fact, to my young mind, the world of school was sane and orderly, a sanctuary for identity building, away from the tensions of a dysfunctional fourthgeneration migrant Chinese family (my great-grandfather joined the hordes who sailed to the Nanyang regions and chose Malaya to seek his fortune, but by the time I was born, the family wealth from tin mining enterprises had been lost). The English language itself was, for me at the time, a vehicle for imagining landscapes and lifestyles which allowed for “escape”. The lilt and rhythms of the poems in Palgrave's The Golden Treasury, for example, invigorated me and the foreignness of snowy climes, of vales and dales with grazing sheep, did not estrange.