“The waves, grown enormous in the dark, struck the boat. The machinery of effort and fear fell into an unresisting drift. A steady rain wet us; we remained a loose knot at the bow. Nothing was visible beyond the prow; the sea was a seething white. Phosphorescent gleams leered at us like crab eyes and then subsided, only to rise again. We, unwilled, were trapped within perfect riot: rain, dismantling haze, swinging indirection. Zain and Ahmad looked at us for a moment, frightened, then lay down under the loose oars. The boat swung from darkness to darkness like an unmothered cradle.
   Sallahudin retched violently. ‘I can’t take this!’ he gasped.
   ‘Let’s do something,’ Donald said.
   But he only rocked the boat more—a spill of water froze us—when he groped towards the oars.
    ‘Mamma mia!’Uncle Tom cried.
   We sat still, wearing out the fear.
   Zain and Ahmad talked in Malay under the oars as if safe in the womb of their home.
    ‘Have you been to Kuala Lumpur?’ Zain asked.
   ‘You know I haven’t even gone to Alor Setar,’ Ahmad replied.
   ‘You’ve got to go on a train. It moves, chuk-chuk, chuk-chuk,through many stations. Cuts through day and night. And then the capital!’
   ‘Have you been there?’
   ‘Seen only fish, boat, sand, and sea. But we can go.’
   ‘When?’
   ‘Anytime you want.’
   Ahmad laughed, a tiny piping sound against the massed roar of the waves. He could not control himself; Zain joined him. The boat struck the waves as the two rolled from side to side, utterly defiant. Our grim, frustration-set faces relaxed. The furious waves might have been bunched, cascading paper, swirling under a freak wind.”

—from “We Make It to the Capital” by K. S. Maniam

“I eat a green mango. Solid,
sour, it cuts the back of the throat, torn

taste, like love grown difficult or separate.
More chillies, more salt, more sugar,
more black soy—memory of tart

unripeness sweetened by necessities.”

—from “Mango” by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“I was outside sweeping the ground in the late afternoon—the sky blue and harsh as metal and the fish eagles screaming overhead—when their car came over the rise in the road. Big and shiny like a battleship, it reflected the sun so it hurt my eyes to look. It turned onto our land, leaving tyre tracks on the ground I had just swept. Nobody we knew owned such a car—no car had stopped in front of our house since the funeral, when Pak Abas had loaned his van to take the body to the surau.All I could think was that these people had got lost and needed directions back to the main road—or that they wanted to buy the land, and our luck had changed.”

—from “Confinement” by Mulaika Hijja

“Here the boars broke in. Swollen with
      madness caught
from deep rifts that run far into these hills,
they erupted from the earth and night,
bursting upon our careful dusunwith
     the rain.
Their violence leaves upon the curled
     barbed wire
loose knots of bristle with hanging skin,
and blood thickening into dark buds upon
     the yams.”

—from “Boars” by Wong Phui Nam

“But let it be noted that the term gringocan be and is used both pejoratively and affectionately: its meaning depends upon the speaker’s context, tone, and body language. Take the Mexican waiter who, after hearing about the U.S. bailout, strikes a match and lights the pesosthe paunched executive has just given him as a tip. He says Gringo! and it means monster.Then take Rigoberta Menchu, arrived back in Guatemala City and hugging the Peace Brigade International volunteer accompanying her out of the airport, where the police have just tried to arrest her. When she says Gringa!it means ally.”

—from “In Praise of Some Gringo Tourists” by Marilyn Krysl

Sisters, Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia, 1997
Photograph by Linda S. Connor

Goddess on Turtle, Nepal, 1988
photo by Linda S. Connor

About the guest editors: K. S. Maniam is the author of the novels The Return and In a Far Country and the short-story collections Arriving and Other Stories and Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from Malaysia. He has also written two plays: The Cord and The Sandpit. "We Make It to the Capital" is from Haunting the Tiger; and "All I Had" is from Delayed Passage, a novel in progress.

Daizal Rafeek Samad has written many scholarly articles on world literature, and last year was commissioned to write a book on Malaysian literature in English. He is also working on a book of short stories and a novel. Whisper Stars, a book of poems, is forthcoming.