To the East of the East

Novel · 220 pages · Kindle edition · 2026 · World Editions · Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Confession after departure

Min-Hui, a writer, travels to Beijing after her husband, Chien-I, disappears. Ping Lu starts To the East of the East there.

The rented apartment hands her objects before it hands her answers. Unfamiliar lingerie, cups marked with lipstick. The refrigerator has been left to spoil. Employment and banking records show that Chien-I left his job and drew his money out over time. The record is orderly, and it covers everything except where he went. She cleans the rooms and searches.

Chien-I is writing the explanation while she looks for it. From Macau, he addresses letters to Min-Hui and does not post them. He sets out the departure with May, the woman he left with, and the casino work he took under another name. He writes about his father, and about the shame of being his son. He implicates himself freely. He is careful about the sequence. He absolves Min-Hui, then lists her orderliness and her distance among the things he needed to leave. He names himself the cause of the failure. He arranges the evidence around that admission. The letters reach her in the end. By then there is no marriage left to put a question to them.

The marriage had practised this distance for years. In Taipei, Min-Hui had known her husband by what food he tolerated and by the way he slept. Once she heard running water and laughter down the telephone. A woman, perhaps. She settled on a harmless explanation. Raising it "might pierce the surface, and she wasn't prepared to take the risk." Her care was real. So was the practice of leaving dangerous questions unasked. Chien-I later reads that practice as coldness. Min-Hui writes her own letter once the search is over, and admits there that marrying into his family was part of her way up. The admission complicates her standing as the injured wife. Her letter comes as late as his.

A pirate merchant sits in a Beijing prison, describing the sea to an emperor who has not seen it. Zheng Zhilong postpones his execution by deciding what the Shunzhi emperor is permitted to hear. The stories win the emperor over. In Min-Hui's version that affection is the crime Zheng is executed for. Melchor tests the official version in This Is Not Miami. Min-Hui writes these scenes while her own marriage comes apart, and puts into the historical chapters the speech she avoids at home.

Min-Hui repeats the method in Beijing with Shangjun, a man whose past she does not investigate. Shangjun says he is on the run. She chooses proximity over verification. He attends to her with the care she had spent years directing at her husband. She reads him her novel about the Qing court to hold his attention. Min-Hui wants to be waited for and cherished, and she would take the lie to get it. She imagines a hand at her throat. The appeal is that thinking stops. The sex scene then explains what the affair has shown, gathering childhood poverty and marital anger into one encounter until Ping Lu is diagnosing Min-Hui in the act of depicting her.

May pays for the rebirth. Chien-I got her out of Beijing after one of her clients died, and in the letters she is a stray he took in. In his account, her dependence restores what his wife's competence took from him. Tash Aw counts it in The South. Almost everything the novel shows of May comes through his letters. May cleans rooms in Macau.

The novel stops to gloss itself. Chien-I compares the marriage to teeth rotting under an invisible film, and then explains the comparison. Shangjun tells Min-Hui that the writer is telling her own story, which the historical chapters have been doing in plain sight. The final letters move with a fluency closer to finished psychological casework than to speech found late. Jeremy Tiang's English lets the domestic sentences stay plain and the official ones stiffen. The explanatory passages stand out against it. The arrangement distributes what each person knows, and then a character says it out loud.

Officials receive Min-Hui at a desk, with the report ready. She declines to read it. A thumbprint is still required, and she presses it onto the sheet. The officer stamps the box and shuts the folder. "Case closed." She has gone to letters and to invented courts for an account of her marriage, and at the desk she marks the state's version without opening it. The Straits Exchange Foundation calls the disappearance an isolated incident and undertakes to raise expatriate safety at future trade talks.

Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley and World Editions