Singathology Read online

  SINGATHOLOGY

  50 New Works by Celebrated Singaporean Writers

  VOLUME ONE: LIFE

  VOLUME TWO: ART

  CO-PUBLISHED BY

  SINGATHOLOGY

  SINGATHOLOGY

  50 New Works by Celebrated Singaporean Writers

  VOLUME ONE

  LIFE

  Edited by

  GWEE LI SUI

  with

  TAN CHEE LAY

  SA’EDA BTE BUANG

  AZHAGIYA PANDIYAN

  CO-PUBLISHED BY

  © 2015 National Arts Council and Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd

  Co-published by National Arts Council and Marshall Cavendish Editions

  Marshall Cavendish Editions is an imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Publishers, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited (1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300. E-mail: [email protected].

  The publishers make no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaim any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no events be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  Singathology : Fifty New Works by Celebrated Singaporean Writers. Volume One, Life. – Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, [2015]

  pages cm

  eISBN : 978 981 4721 93 6

  1. Singaporean literature (English). 2. Singaporean literature (Chinese). 3. Singaporean literature (Malay). 4. Singaporean literature (Tamil). I. Gwee, Li Sui, 1970- editor.

  PR6010

  808.8995957 – dc23 OCN919188968

  Printed in Singapore by Craft Print Pte Ltd

  To journalise life

  In exotic fragrance

  Is an exulting poetic gift.

  K. T. M. IQBAL

  Contents

  Introduction: The Age of a Number

  Notes on Singaporean Literature

  Literature in English by Gwee Li Sui

  Literature in Chinese by Tan Chee Lay

  Literature in Malay by Sa’eda bte Buang

  Literature in Tamil by Azhagiya Pandiyan

  About this Volume: Life

  1

  王润华, 淡马锡变形记

  Wong Yoon Wah, Metamorphosis: Temasek

  2

  谢裕民, 琐记1915

  Chia Joo Ming, 1915: A Miscellany

  3

  Alfian Sa’at, Hotel: An Excerpt

  4

  புதுமைதாசன், அதே நீதி

  Puthumaithasan, The Same Justice

  5

  Edwin Thumboo, 1st April ’45, 42 Monk’s Hill Terrace, Newton

  6

  尤今, 人生的分水岭

  You Jin, The Watershed of Life

  7

  Toh Hsien Min, MCMLXV

  8

  Philip Jeyaretnam, Moonshine in Singapore

  9

  Alvin Pang, Riot

  10

  Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, Di Bawah Bayangmu

  Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, Beneath Your Shadow

  11

  陈志锐, 南大之大

  Tan Chee Lay, The Greatness of Nantah

  12

  Lee Tzu Pheng, A House Tells Its Story

  13

  Boey Kim Cheng, Rented Rooms

  14

  O Thiam Chin, Surfacing

  15

  淡莹, 家居琐事

  Dan Ying, Household Trivialities

  16

  இராம. கண்ணபிரான், பேதங்கள்

  Rama Kannabiran, Prejudices

  17

  Aidli Mosbit, Mama Lekas Pulang

  Aidli Mosbit, Mama Come Home Quick

  18

  Felix Cheong, The Model Family

  19

  Zizi Azah, How Did the Cat Get So Fat?

  20

  黄孟文, 蛋糕

  Wong Meng Voon, Cake

  21

  Simon Tay, Ash and Mud

  22

  Isa Kamari, Anggerik

  Isa Kamari, The Orchid

  23

  希尼尔, 浮岛六记

  Xi Ni Er, Six Stories from the Floating Island

  24

  Ovidia Yu, Salvation Solution

  25

  க.து.மு.இக்பால், ஊதுவத்தி

  K. T. M. Iqbal, Incense Stick

  About the Authors

  About the Editors

  Introduction: The Age of a Number

  BY GWEE LI SUI

  What is it that makes the number fifty magical in the lives of individuals and formations? What is it about putting five before zero – the middle single-digit number next to nothing – that can generate much anxiety and soul-searching? How is this number after forty-nine, after seven cycles of seven, able to disturb and even confuse us? As if our minds are wired to reflect in line with the mystery and beauty of numbers, the number fifty haunts us like a dream of ourselves we cannot decipher.

  A country at fifty stands at a symbolic threshold it wishes that it understands in view of some fated awakening. At fifty, a key part of a nation’s self-image tends to fall away. Or is it coincidental that, when America celebrated its golden jubilee in 1826, its former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died within hours of each other? How about in 1997 when India observed fifty years of independence from centuries-long European colonialism and its uniting spiritual figure Mother Teresa passed on? Inching towards its own jubilee, Singapore encountered its grave loss too when its most beloved Founding Father departed.

  Something perishes, and what survives awakes to the truths of its radical aloneness and its obligation to carry on. The age of fifty is marked by pure closure: the gate to some charmed garden shuts forever and will not open again. As Gabriel Wu Yeow Chong puts it in his poem “post-middle age” in this anthology,

  nevermore will the sky rain down colourful roses

  when our desires grow larger.1

  We are, in a real sense, cast out on an adventure of our own choosing, with nothing but the form we have made of ourselves to rely on. The implements that once secured our footing are no longer enough. Like fermenting wine, we aim more than ever for a soul to grow into.

  The word “jubilee” originated from the Jewish Torah and has been attached to nationhood from the start. Its first use involved not just a celebration but also a commitment to social renewal that could address and transform the burden of the past. Thus, on a jubilee year, every Jewish household was to recover its own lost members and land be returned to its former owners. Slaves and prisoners were to be freed and all debts remitted. The effect of these procedures went beyond being merely conciliatory. They yearned for a social maturing that could honour divine nature and reach into the best of how humans treated one another.

  Chinese philosophy, too, sees significance in the number fifty for a life’s otherwise aimless passing of years. Confucius famously spoke of how he might have been less self-possessed before, but, at fifty, he finally “understood Heaven’s Mandate”.2 These words set down the fullness of age as not something sudden or random but what is bound to conscious self-cultivation. All doubts and mistakes can be excus
ed from this point in one’s life when one at last recognises a single destiny. Perhaps George Orwell – who himself never reached fifty – had the same thought when he remarked: “At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” 3

  Yet, an individual at fifty is not the same as a nation at fifty, and we may be better off in understanding not to mix the two together. While neither a person nor a people can be sure about how much more fate still has in store, everyone knows human mortality, the absolute fact that each of us has a definite span of years on earth. In “Moonshine in Singapore”, Philip Jeyaretnam’s freed detainee – imprisoned for fifty years – therefore asks his beloved: “What time is left to us?” 4 At fifty, one has decidedly passed the midpoint of one’s life, and, while the best experiences for some have yet to happen, all have already begun to die. A life that still does not know where its centre is at this age is way behind on its own clock.

  A nation, by contrast, follows a different, more open timeline. It can – if it is not damaged by external politics – go on indefinitely for many more cycles of human lives, for as long as destiny allows. A nation at fifty may have achieved the better part of a human’s mortal experiences, but it has not yet grasped a central, seldom discussed truth: a country is, in essence, not human. This realisation will come to a people when its own history passes the limit of standard human life – say ninety or a hundred – and, increasingly from then on, every citizen will acknowledge and behold in awe the monstrosity to which he or she belongs.

  A people at its centenary will realise that it is, and has always been, an impersonal collection of fates, of small lives and their choices, rationalised across space and time. A people is an administration of such parts set alongside each other as well as one on top of another. Some parts seem doomed to pursue cycles of errors while others are, in rather limited ways, lifted by the labour of a preceding generation. Thankfully, a centennial nation can no longer grow tired in the way an aged creature grows tired. Recognising that it cannot die on its own, it in fact transcends the idea of age and feeds off age to appear timeless like an oak. A nation tills its citizens like a farmer tills the field, and its harvest is what we call civilisation.

  At a hundred, wherever a citizen walks, he or she knows that each of his or her footprints carries the choices of hundreds of thousands who had walked the same path before. This knowledge is a resource, and it grows confidence in habitual outliers such as artists and writers who find that it can bring them mystic solidarity. An artist’s or a writer’s decisions become, in some senses, less neurotic because they now come layered with the comfort of ghosts who know why these are made and have to be made. A nation at a hundred, unlike at fifty, understands just how art feeds the generations.

  After all, how does a people’s mind grow old if it is, in essence, unlike our own minds, the disintegration of which, as Aidli Mosbit’s play “Mama Come Home Quick” notes, fills us with fear and “robs us of our dignity”? 5 The deathless nation is less anxious about the possession and validation of dignity, having grown larger than any one person, group, concept, structure, and legacy. It is also less anxious in a way because it has become less conscious: the old nation has already begun to somnambulate. The old people is both awake and asleep: it sleeps to a past it cannot remember clearly or at all, the memories nonetheless flowing in the compound idiosyncrasies of individuals.

  However, at fifty, a country is still young in this respect; it has not yet outgrown its relation to a human shell. It has only stopped dreaming the wide-eyed dreams of youth, embraced both the power and the loneliness of middle-aged identity, and taken the first steps of an old soul. What it has still to do is to see its greater non-human self and to sleep its greater metaphysical sleep. The nation at fifty continues to mistake its life as something humanly vulnerable, and so Lee Tzu Pheng’s sentient house – a home for over fifty years – thinks to itself:

  I am only, and ever have been,

  a fragile structure.6

  Within this mindset, the successes of the present feel fleeting while the failures that are encountered feel dispiriting and ominous. Everywhere the fifty-year-old people sees itself primarily in terms of lack. An understanding of the past – if not the past itself – comes across as incomplete and deeply unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, what lies ahead carries the odour of stale drudgery. Older generations lament that cruel time has eroded their place under the sun. The current adult generation struggles against the limits of what it can do and the pressure of an unclear path into the future. The young feel cheated of both a meaningful and enriching history and a sure place to call home.

  It is at this point that a people’s literature rises to the fore. More than ever, what has seemed at first to be random and idle scribblings begins to look like something more, something that only age can help to reveal. Art does not just appear sociologically as a form of bourgeois pleasure or a means to showcase culture out of a national anxiety to look great. Literature becomes more explicitly what it has always been in the life of any community: a way of being faithful to lived truths about being human, of embracing and being reminded of how to be human, and of loving the inevitable coexistence of art and life.

  Writers at different ages, at any frozen moment in time, offer us a kaleidoscope of worldly truths. In Singapore, from elderly, seasoned writers such as Suratman Markasan, Edwin Thumboo, and Dan Ying, we now have a literature that is filtered through a wealth of life experiences and a weariness with the inessential. Those in their middle age such as Ho Minfong, Xi Ni Er, and Ovidia Yu give us a materiality and translucence of the present steeped in all kinds of complex and muscular reflections about the world. From young writers such as Troy Chin, Zizi Azah, and Bani Haykal, we derive excitement and conviction in a pure engagement with the fact of being alive.

  This monumental two-volume work is therefore called Singathology not just out of a naïve conflation of the words “Singapore” and “anthology”. It also seeks to highlight that the suffix “-ology” – from -logia in Greek – has the double meaning of a collection of things and a field of study or interest. A nation is here being laid open for your scrutiny through fifty works by writers who have all been conferred one of Singapore’s two highest accolades: the Cultural Medallion and the Young Artist Award. These writers have been invited to help commemorate the living Singapore in their own ways, in any medium of their choice, and this anthology is the outcome. Together, the pieces expose not so much a sense of who we Singaporeans are as what we give to ourselves, through our writers, as being about us.

  All contributions here are original and published for the first time, with the exception of Rama Kannabiran’s and Dan Ying’s works, for which only their translations are new. Although Puthumaithasan’s, Aidli Mosbit’s, and Alfian Sa’at’s have been performed before, they make their first print appearances in this collection. Simon Tay’s short story is a recreation that involves some earlier issued material, but it is fresh on the whole. Two submissions have been accepted from the following three writers: Toh Hsien Min, Isa Kamari, and K. T. M. Iqbal. Thus, in all, the anthology features fifty works – twenty-four in English, fourteen in Chinese, six in Malay, and six in Tamil – by forty-seven writers, twenty-three of whom are Cultural Medallion recipients and twenty-four Young Artist Award recipients.

  The division into two volumes – one on life and the other on art – pays tribute to that central Keatsian paradox about the unity of truth and beauty. They describe not so much the themes of the distinct pieces as the distinct narratives the volumes themselves tell. Each volume offers its own story arc and rhythm when read sequentially although both together should manifest the fullness and intricacies of the transformation of art by life and life by art. Every piece is therefore central. I am reminded of how Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī explained the importance of individualistic voices: “It was so that you might have company at every stage of your blindness being cured.” 7 Or, as Iqbal celebrates about the individual at this anthology’s centre, in the mi
ddle of fifty, with an incense stick as image:

  You

  Are a flower

  Emanating fragrance on fire.8

  I would like to express my gratitude to Tan Chee Lay, Sa’eda bte Buang, and Azhagiya Pandiyan for their masterly editorial work on contributions in Chinese, Malay, and Tamil respectively. Singathology’s three translators – Jeremy Tiang, Harry Aveling, and A. Palaniappan – have been invaluable to its central task of bringing together voices from otherwise parallel literary traditions in Singapore. I also wish to thank the National Arts Council of Singapore, and specifically Paul Tan, Yeow Kai Chai, and Amanda Yee, for their faith and encouragement through over a year’s work on this ambitious, backbreaking project. Lastly, Mindy Pang and Glenn Wray of Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) have been my firm pillars of strength throughout this most illuminating experience, and all my energy and purposefulness came from theirs.

  1 Singathology: Art 118.

  2 Confucius, Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, translated by Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 9.

  3 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 515.

  4 Singathology: Life 153.

  5 Singathology: Life 225, 231.

  6 Singathology: Life 172.

  7 Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, The Purity of Desire: One Hundred Poems of Rumi, translated by Daniel Ladinsky and Nancy Owen Barton (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 57.

  8 Singathology: Life 320.

  Notes on Singaporean Literature