PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksWe, the Survivors considers how we tell our own stories, and how others tell our stories for us, when we are the subjects who are instrumentalized for other people’s ambitions and desires, but nonetheless attempt to speak our own truth ... Tash Aw’s brutal simplicity of portraiture lays bare the landscape of human labor and exploitation under capitalism ... Tash Aw persuades the reader to understand Hock Lye’s crime of passion. Through Aw’s deft hand we see the buildings that populate Hock Lye’s landscapes: housing areas that were once shiny and new, waiting to be outgrown and replaced in one’s personal ambitions by another housing estate ... this is the discomfiting mirror Tash Aw holds up to the nation, complete with the glare of the stark equatorial sun.
