Unlike the anglophone novelists of the 1980s and ’90s, who were “writing either under the influence of, or in reaction against the white colonials”, writers of Aw’s generation are “trying to deal with our own problems, which were the creation of newly independent countries”.

As Aw points out, “for many years, to be Asian and to be a writer meant that in some way you had privilege”, and those earlier novels often unwittingly perpetuated the idea “that suffering is beautiful, that people are poor but happy”, as well as sentimentalising the Asian family. He feels a duty to reflect the distinctly ugly truth: “Suffering is suffering – it has no aesthetic quality to it.”

Aw says his fourth novel, We, the Survivors “is the most personal novel I’ve ever written … it is very close to my heart”. For this reason, it was also the most difficult to write. It is the story of Ah Hock, born in a poor fishing village in Malaysia, whose dreams of self-improvement are destroyed in an act of senseless violence. Both of Aw’s grandfathers came from China and his parents “were born into very humble families” in rural Malaysia, where the countryside means only one thing: “deprivation”.

Aw – twice longlisted for the Man Booker award – was born 14 years after Malaysian independence and brought up in Kuala Lumpur, where his father trained as an electrical engineer and his mother became a technician – “I had parents who got lucky.” He wanted to write about the people he grew up alongside, “people who have lives very close to those of my cousins”. But as he wrote, the novel also became a portrait of his divided self.

There are “really only two characters” in the novel, he says, which takes the form of a series of interviews between Ah Hock and Su Min, the well-intentioned sociology graduate to whom he tells his story: “One could easily have become me if I had been born to different parents, to parents who remained in the village. Su Min is the foreign, educated part of me.”

Despite these deeply personal elements, Aw also intended to confront uncomfortable truths about his country. Ever since his debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, set in British Malaya in the 1940s, which won the Whitbread first novel award in 2005, his fiction can be read as an attempt to capture the changing nature of Asian society during the past 100 years, which he felt wasn’t reflected anywhere in English-language writing. His novel Five Star Billionaire, which follows the fortunes of five immigrants in contemporary Shanghai, was his “homage to people of my generation, who had ridden this wave of optimism and Asian materialism, and believed that material wealth could provide them with the emotional security that they needed”.

We, the Survivors is his testament to the failure of those aspirations. “It is really an examination of how that sense of optimism has died in just two generations. We believed that life was always going to be on an upward trajectory, we were going to become more educated, we were going to become richer,” he says. “But the example of the majority of people in Malaysia shows that that’s not true.”

While novels about the immigrant experience in London or New York are hardly new, much less well documented are the same struggles happening in kitchens and on construction sites across the globe. In “most English-language Western literature, every non-white person dreams of coming to the West”, Aw says. “It’s not the only story of migration in the world. In fact, the more important story is about how Chinese people see Bangladeshis, how Malays see Nepalese. This is a story that needs to be told.” His next novel will be about the migration of Chinese people across Africa.

As part of an ethnic Chinese family, Aw is acutely aware of the way in which recent immigrants from countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and Myanmar are being subjected to “exactly the same kind of social violence” as that suffered by his grandparents.

“It really is a question of dark skin. In Malaysia they have all these words for people who are different from us, who are foreign.”

Racism, Aw reminds us, “does not revolve around the white person”. And white guilt – “actually very healthy” – is “not the only kind of guilt in the world”.

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Aw grew up speaking Malay and Chinese, learning English from a very early age; “We had to work at it just to prove our middle-class credentials.” He attended a “really bog-standard” government school, and won a scholarship to come to the UK in the ’90s and a place to study law at Cambridge University.

His background, he says, means he treats writing as a job: “I turn up at work every day. I do the hours.”