The Garden of Evening Mists

In The Garden of Evening Mists, memory is not a perfect record of the past but a fractured, burdensome, and deeply personal landscape that shapes both personal and collective identities. Protagonist Teoh Yun Ling’s struggle with her traumatic past and encroaching aphasia suggests that while memories can imprison, the act of ordering and recounting them is a vital, if imperfect, way to reclaim one’s story. The novel’s non-linear structure mirrors this internal state, shifting between Yun Ling’s present and her fragmented past, forcing the reader to piece together her history as she races to write it down.

All the novel’s characters have been impacted in varying ways by colonial violence, and for each of them, memory is a source of pain and an obstacle to peace. Yun Ling is haunted by her time in a Japanese forced labor camp, and these traumatic recollections manifest as a profound survivor’s guilt that isolates her from others. The novel’s structure, jumping between different periods of Yun Ling’s life without clear chronological progression, mirrors her fractured psychological state. This disjointed timeline reflects the intrusive and chaotic nature of her memories. Her decision to write her story is prompted by a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia, a degenerative condition that will ultimately erase her ability to understand and use language.