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disarming smile, as Cookie remembers, ‘The disturbingly intelligent face above the comical
body split into a grin, and I decided that I liked him’ (YLD, 5). Jill cites another catlike
characteristic in Billy. ‘Billy never swims’ she says, patting his ‘spiky black head’ as if he
were her house cat (YLD, 49). Billy Kwan and the Cheshire Cat are the sages of their stories.
Kwan would likely apply the Cheshire Cat’s logic about madness to the Indonesia experience:
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad.
You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ (Lewis
Carroll, 58)
Kwan is the only character in the novel who is actually trying to do anything about the
lamentable conditions of life among the Indonesians, and being a dwarf with a quick motor
scooter gets him into places inaccessible to the others, associating him with Bill the lizard who
was sent down the chimney to save Alice who had grown trapped in the house, even if for
Kwan it is exploiting the compassion of others more than the physical size that counts. He
also acts, like Bill the lizard, as the jury in his trials of the others, especially of Guy Hamilton
and of Sukarno. On top of it all, Billy Kwan is the lizard’s namesake.
Finally, Billy is the allusive White Rabbit. When he has become disillusioned with
Sukarno and Hamilton, Kwan disappears into the indigenous quarter of the Pasar Baru.
Hamilton, who wants to make things right between them and re-establish their working
relationship, follows him into the Pasar, chances to track him down like Alice did the White
Rabbit. Kwan, however, is inconsolable, and after accusing Hamilton and all journalists as
being just Peeping Toms, he runs and disappears back down what resembles another hole in
the earth (YLD, 237).
This difficulty to pin down Billy Kwan’s personality is a central part of The Year of
Living Dangerously. Wally remembers Billy from university days as an anarchist, but fully
expects him to have since become conservative. Cookie tells him that Kwan looks Chinese,
and Wally answers, ‘That’s his trouble. He’s not sure whether he is or not’ (YLD, 4). Billy
Kwan remains throughout the novel an enigma; no one is sure just what he is. He finds his
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