culture differences

[toujours_nigel]

Read King Rat, and am all kinds of fascinated. Not very horrified, though.

I suppose the thing is that how these men are living isn't so different, down to diet and space, from how millions of Asians do live, anyway, and so a lot of the details that I can tell are supposed to make the (European or American) reader nauseous I'm just clocking as normal for a certain level of poverty. Honestly. They get three meals a day and sometimes they get bananas or coconuts or even an egg to put in their rice. And then get to bathe every day and don't work, and sure there's very little medicine but so what? That's a good life, that is; most beggars in India would jump at that, to say nothing of prisoners and of the men women and children stuck in camps in Naxal country. Hell, never mind the very poor, they're getting four ounces of rice per man per day; now a little over thirty-five ounces of rice makes one kilogram, and I can make one kilo rice last about two months eating it twice a day, and I'm well-off. Firangs, I say. Can't do without meat.

Also, holy hell, Peter Marlowe. Dearrr man, touch homophobic.

ETA: I'm not denying that being held prisoner for years on ends takes a vast and unimaginable psychological toll, and that bitching about food etc is easier than acknowledging said toll. But somewhere that falls through for me cause to me the living conditions don't look very bad.

Comments

[naraht]

I don't mean to minimise your point about the difference in expectations about standards of living, but wasn't it a bit more than bitching about food? My understanding has always been that a great many people in Japanese POW camps either starved to death, died of nutritional deficiencies, or were liberated from the camps in various states of emaciation.

This is the result of very cursory searching but here are Australian prisoners from Changi after liberation: http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/australian-soldiers-after-their-release-from-japanese-captivity-in-singapore-1945/

Whether this is the result of differences of size or metabolism I don't know, but the diet doesn't seem to have been enough for them to live on.

From my point of view (obviously a Western one), Changi was horrific, and so is the "certain level of poverty" you're referring to.

[toujours_nigel]

I suppose it's in part a difference in frame and in part the sudden falling-away in diet? The body can sustain itself on very little, but not without a gradual taking-away.

Changi and the certain level of poverty are both horrific, sure, but the latter is fairly pervasive here, then and now, and I suppose one should insert here something about the banality of all things.

Considering that while those men were being held in Singapore and other camps and reduced to skeletons, there were millions begging in Bengal Province, not even for rice but for the broth obtained by boiling it, and couldn't get the same because what rice was there was going off to feed the troops, well, soldiers know what they're going into. Civilians turned out of work because there's no money for anything except increasingly more expensive food because everything else is getting funnelled away to feed your colonisers... well, hell, after 180-odd years I suppose even they knew who the blow wouldn't be cushioned for.

I... don't think this is a topic I'm particularly capable of being objective about.

[lilliburlero]

My sense of it is that Clavell's less inviting his readers to be horrified and nauseated per se than using the fact that in Changi conditions were actually better than average for PoWs held by the Japanese (and by the end of the war favourable in comparison even to Japanese troops) to throw the moral dilemmas and psychological states into very sharp relief. Marlowe doesn't join the King's payroll because he's desperate, he does it because he's bored and it's a thrill. And then it becomes a compulsion, and then when he's injured things do actually get desperate. For me, it's not so much meant to be a horror story of deprivation (though as a privileged Westerner I register it as very significant) as a study of a community in which resources and freedoms are artificially limited: most do survive, (though a significant number don't), and one man thrives: and how all the systems within that community work. Interesting that it appears in the same year as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is about the same thing, I think.

I'm not really a fan of homophobes are all closeted! tropes, but I really do think the thesis Peter Marlowe Doth Protest Too Much has a lot to recommend it (and insofar as he's not just a self-insert, I think Clavell might even have meant it to be).