共存的身體：談馬華小說〈別再提起〉與〈黃金格鬥之室〉

초록

This paper conducts a close reading of two short stories by Malaysian Chinese writers: Ho Sok Fong’s “Don’t Mention It Again” and Leong Ching-Foon’s “The Battle for the Golden Throne.” It examines the post–May 13 situation and psychological mechanisms of the Malaysian Chinese community within the national framework, focusing on the perspectives of body and memory. It argues that although neither work directly reenacts the May 13 Incident, both symbolize the racial, religious, linguistic, and cultural tensions within Malaysia’s ethnic politics through bodily experiences such as death, excretion, and bathing. “Don’t Mention It Again” reveals the division and amnesia within the Malaysian Chinese community between religion and ethnicity through a funeral dispute over a corpse, while “The Battle for the Golden Throne” portrays the “coexistence amid segregation” of national reality by depicting conflicts arising from a shared bathroom among different ethnic groups. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory and Ashis Nandy’s notion of memory work, this paper analyzes how Malaysian Chinese literature constructs ethnic memory and identity through trauma, forgetting, and re-narration. It demonstrates that the body in both stories serves not only as a metaphorical site for ethnicity and nationhood but also as a platform for memory politics. Through bodily duality and the experience of speechlessness, the stories reveal the Malaysian Chinese community’s struggle between recognition and equality. Ultimately, both “not mentioning” and “fighting” signify continuing dialectics of memory, embodying the Malaysian Chinese community’s pursuit of existence and belonging within a pluralistic national framework.

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