Smalltown Godzilla: Stories

Summary

A surreal, pathbreaking debut story collection from a contemporary Chinese Malaysian voice, exploring themes of diaspora, neocolonialism, and cultural lineage

Smalltown Godzilla introduces anglophone readers to a bold new voice in Mahua literature—a vibrant tradition of ethnic Chinese writers from Malaysia. Drawing on this diasporic lineage, Teng Kuan Kiat has crafted eight formally inventive stories, each with its own uncanny architecture. In Teng’s absurd worlds, language itself becomes an unstable material, subject to the same global forces transforming smalltown Malaysia.

In “Godzilla at My Hometown’s Weddings and Funerals,” the influences of Hollywood and the arrival of a McDonald’s threaten to disrupt the rhythms of rural life. In “Lin Yutang’s Typewriter,” the scholar sets out to invent a machine to save the Chinese language from obsolescence in a rapidly modernizing world. In “Paradise,” an aging guerrilla fighter and his young son seek refuge in a multilingual traveling carnival. And in “Ah Ma in the Shithole,” the narrator studies abroad in Taiwan to escape his dysfunctional family, only to reencounter the same horrors from his childhood in newly harrowing forms.

In YZ Chin’s finely calibrated translation, Teng Kuan Kiat’s metafiction probes the fractured identities history leaves in its wake. With brash humor and tonal agility, Smalltown Godzilla precisely renders the unsettling dislocations of modern life.