Eating Fire and Drinking Water

Philippines-born Chinese Australian writer Arlene J. Chai's Eating Fire and Drinking Water is perhaps her best work so far. Although the writer has produced four novels since 1995, all of them exploring complex and often bittersweet relationships between generations of families and individuals, it is Eating Fire and Drinking Water, her second book, that is most compelling and absorbing.

The book begins with the orphaned heroine, journalist Clara Perez, launching her journey of searching for an identity. It is a time when the people in the Philippines begin to call for their government's political reform. As Clara's involvement in the increasingly violent student demonstrations deepens, she discovers that her own history is closely connected to that of her country. The demand of the students that the government return what belongs to the people -- the right to rule their own country -- may be seen as Clara's desire to get hold of a personal identity that has been denied her by whoever left her in the orphanage many years ago.

In addition to Clara, two other important characters in Eating Fire and Drinking Water are Bayani, the student leader, and Colonel Aure, an "artist of suffering whose canvas was the human body" appointed by the government to arrest, torture and eventually murder Bayani. These two individuals are portrayed in the book as symbols of two extreme value systems -- Bayani the good, and Aure the evil. It is between these two value systems that the people in the Philippines struggle for their freedom and democracy. It is further with her observations on the impacts of these two value systems upon individual lives in the Philippines that Clara unveils the story of her own life.

In Eating Fire and Drinking Water, each of the characters is inexplicably linked to the others. The book presents a story that is at the same time tender and violent. It captures its readers with a kind of raw but poetic beauty.

For example, there are delicate moments that speak of the metaphysical links between the characters and their link to the unseen entity that shapes each individual's destiny. But in more brutal moments the graphic description of Colonel Aure's violent handiwork also expresses the injustice that the military have repeatedly done to their own people in order to silence them.

In the words of one reviewer: "In a fast paced, racy, bold and visual dirge, Chai's words bleed and spill cathartically onto the page and into the imagination. She summons the stench of poverty, the aroma and corruption of political narcissism and the purity of spirit into the nostrils and nuances of our imaginative realms."

Arlene J. Chai's Eating Fire and Drinking Water was published by Random House Australia in 1996.

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Copyright: Christine Sun, Taiwan.com.au Portal, 2005. All rights are reserved.