Is this the best of all possible worlds? Probably not. If so, the world would be a far kinder place, I would certainly be thinner and would have written many award-winning bestselling books at this point, and I would absolutely have a flying car. But after all is said and done, a world in which I’ve taken advantage of the opportunities presented to me, and made the choices I’ve made, with the result that I have both seen some publication success and produced a uniquely wonderful and intelligent and brave human being, is a world in which I am more than happy to reside.
I don’t like giving advice, because it is so highly relative, but I will leave you with one final thought: embrace your strange, whatever that might mean. Love the things that you love, unashamedly, unreservedly, and infuse your love in the art that you make. Don’t let others dictate your choices in life, especially including the type of fiction or poetry or drama that you want to write. Only you know what fulfills you as a creative person, and if you allow yourself the sometimes terrifying freedom to pursue this passion, your choices will enable you to discover your own best possible world. The fact that you are sitting here in this audience listening to me blather on means that you are already on your way. Do it for all the yous in those other worlds who were unable to be here today, do it for the future-you who is waiting for you to catch up.
Embrace your strange, and great things will invariably follow.
Thank you.
Postscript 1: Dragging the Frame
The young woman at the bus stop told me she was my daughter. She was attractive, Eurasian, had dark brown hair and blue eyes, but only looked to be ten years younger than me, and I told her so. I couldn’t have fathered her at the age of ten, could I?
“Time travel,” she said.
“Oh come on.” Much as I’d fantasized about time travel, especially to correct the mistakes of my youth, deep down I was a nonbeliever. “Einstein said it was impossible, and Mallett has said travel to the past is extremely limited: you can’t go earlier than when the machine is switched on. And I haven’t heard anything about a time machine having been successfully invented today.”
“It happened about two hours ago,” she said. “You always were a skeptic. And you made my life hell, you know.”
The thought of confrontation with a future daughter, which seemed impossible as my wife wasn’t even pregnant yet, twisted my insides a bit. Had I slapped down her dreams? Abused her?
“No, but you disapproved of every decision I ever made. We yelled and fought for most of my childhood. Nothing I did was right in your eyes. I left home at 18, and we’ve hardly spoken since then.”
“So, saying for a second that this is true, why are you here?”
She looked over my shoulder and I turned; the 171 was approaching from down the road. My bus.
“I just wanted to tell you to ease up. Trust your daughter’s decisions. Have some faith in her. Don’t be such a prick.”
I exhaled a quiet laugh to myself. It was impossible, it was stupid. This young woman was off her nut. Best just to ignore her. At least it would make an amusing anecdote later. For a brief moment, I’d been afraid she was going to say that she was here to kill me or something.
The bus was only about ten meters away, brakes already hissing, when I said, “You don’t have to be a man to be a prick, you know. Best of luck to you back at the asylum.”
I felt a hard push from behind and I tumbled into the road as the bus arrived.
Postscript 2: Hidden In the Leaves
The day before Chinese New Year break, Sophia walked home alone from school with heavy steps. All of her primary school friends were full of excitement for the holidays, for the reunion dinners, for the many ang pow they expected to receive. There was no more Chinese an event in Singapore all year long, but Sophia always felt left out of the festivities. Her father was American, and her mother didn’t get along with her extended family, so Tara never got to see her cousins, or learn Teochew, or eat the Peranakan dishes that her great aunt was famed for cooking. She might receive a red packet from her grandparents, but that was about it. Sometimes, she felt as if she was the only one among her classmates who didn’t get to do all of the fun cultural things surrounding the celebration.
These troubled lonely thoughts took her away from her shuffling steps and the sweltering afternoon heat, and it wasn’t until her shoes scraped red clay tile rather than rough concrete sidewalk that she stopped, looked up, and realized she was standing in front of the haunted tree.
The ancient banyan occupied the dark center of the small park adjacent to her housing block, and the area around the tree always felt occluded and gloomy. She had previously obeyed the warnings of her friends at school not to stare at the tree, for (according to them) it was the home of malevolent spirits, but in a fit of pique at the jealous thought of them having such happy times with their families for CNY she ignored the superstition and peered into the banyan’s depths, eager to prove them wrong. Just a tree, she thought, nothing wicked whatsoever.
The darkness where all the branches sprouted outward from the trunk wavered a bit, and then, to Sophia’s surprise, a patch of shadow shifted position, detached itself like an intelligent oil slick, flowed down the aerial prop roots surrounding the trunk, slithered toward her on the clay tiles, stopped several feet away, bubbled upward, and then settled itself into the featureless form of a tall thin person, its edges hazy. The sounds of nearby traffic and birdsong receded into silence, and Sophia’s fingertips tingled. She held her breath.
“Hello, Sophia.” Its soft male voice came from a vague area in the middle of its chest, its accent surprisingly similar to her father’s. Though the spirit knew her by name, she sensed no negativity or ill intent.
“Hullo,” she said.
“I have been watching over you for some time.”
“Who are you?”
“In life, I was a good friend of your father’s. My name was Christopher.”
“You knew my daddy?”
“Yes, dear. Many years ago.”
“Would you like to see him now?” she asked. “He’s home sick today with a sour tummy. Too many pineapple tarts. And I can make you some elderberry juice. I know how, you know.”
“I am sure you do.”
And so the spirit of her father’s friend followed her the rest of the way home. Sophia looked over her shoulder several times, and though the spirit was more translucent in the harsh sunlight, his form remained. No one else around her, apparently, could see him.
Just before they reached her housing block, Sophia stopped and turned. “You’ve been in the tree a long time?” she asked.
“Yes. Almost ten years.”
“Why?”
“Your father is still upset over my sudden death. He hasn’t yet let go.”
“So why did you come down today?”
“Because you summoned me,” he said.
Satisfied with the simple explanation, Sophia led him through the block’s empty void deck, past the mama shop’s displays of convenience store junk food, and over to the lift lobby. A swift silent ride up the lift, and then the doors opened onto the eighth storey. Down the corridor to her flat, the painted metal gate unlocked, the front door wide open. After Sophia entered and then closed the gate behind the spirit, a voice from the third bedroom called: “Soph, is that you?”
“Hi, Daddy!”
“Be right out, sweetie. I just need to finish marking this test.”
Sophia dropped her bookbag to the smooth white tiled floor, pulled off her shoes with two loud scritches of velcro, then headed into the kitchen with the spirit following behind. She extracted the pitcher of elderberry juice from the refrigerator and poured it into two glasses, which she then placed on the wooden kitchen table. She sat down in one of the chairs; Christopher’s spirit occupied the other, the opacity of his form pulsing, as if he were breathing hard.
Her father stepped out of his home office and into the kitchen, unshaven, hair mussed, still wearing the
clothes he’d slept in the night before. He picked up Christopher’s glass and said, “Hey, thanks for pouring juice for me, sweetie.”
“It’s not for you,” Sophia said, then reached up, gently took the glass from her father, and placed it back on the tabletop in front of the pulsating spirit. “It’s for Christopher.”
A strange look came to her father’s face then, as if he had just eaten something particularly sour. “I’m sorry, honey, could you repeat that?”
“It’s Christopher’s juice,” she said, motioning to the chair in which the spirit patiently sat. “He’s visiting.”
And before her father could say another word, the surface of the spirit’s form rippled in polychromatic waves along its surface, faster and faster until the darkness and shadow faded and lightened and the form he had taken in life—a kindly Caucasian with shoulder-length brown hair, circular spectacles, prominent nose, spindly frame—resolved into clarity.
Sophia’s father gasped.
Sophia rose from her chair, maneuvered her father on wobbly legs into it, poured another glass of elderberry juice for herself, then slipped into the living room and turned on Animal Planet at low volume. Her father and his good friend had a lot to discuss, and she wanted to make sure not to disturb them.
Represented Spaces
an interview by Wei Fen Lee
Let’s tackle the bull by its horns. What is “the strange,” and what does it mean to you?
The way I conceive of the strange is that it’s anything that diverges from what we typically think of as normal.
But what is normal?
That’s the thing, it’s very subjective; normal is different for everybody. But I do think there’s still a “consensual normal” in terms of what we know about reality. We all know that magic isn’t real, for example. I can’t levitate off this chair; it would be strange if I did that. So a broad definition of “the strange” would be anything that deviates from what we know of as “the real world.”
Why is the strange attractive to you?
I guess I’ve always gravitated toward the strange in both fiction and thinking. When one faces the ordeal of the real world every day, I like wondering: what if something was different? Or as in alternate history: if one thing in history had changed, what would things be like now? The strange challenges what we think of as reality, gives us perspective into how we can change it, and shows how we might see things in the future as well.
The Alchemy of Happiness comes in the wake of Red Dot Irreal, and has an overarching unity that Red Dot Irreal doesn’t—in some ways, it is a woven work, coherent across narrative voices, different spaces, and time. How did The Alchemy of Happiness come about, and what is its relationship with Red Dot Irreal?
Well, Red Dot Irreal has a thematic unity in that almost all the stories take place in Singapore and they are all strange. But other than the fact that I wrote both books, and “In Jurong” appears in each of them, I’m not sure they are really related works.
Actually, the first two stories in The Alchemy of Happiness—“Reality, Interrupted” and “In Jurong”—are older stories. “In Jurong” came about after I visited Singapore for the first time in 2003, and has this inherent sequel-esque relationship to “Reality, Interrupted”; I toyed with the idea of having them act as a diptych for a long time, but then the idea came much later for the third one.
“Always a Risk” was written for the anthology Eastern Heathens, edited by Amanda Lee and Ng Yi-Sheng, which is forthcoming from Ethos Books in Singapore. They had a list of tales and legends specifically from Eastern mythology that they wanted the writers to riff on, and I kept coming back the Lady White Snake legend, which seemed very interesting to me. I had seen the 2011 Jet Li movie [The Sorcerer and the White Snake] and so I thought that maybe I could do something with that particular legend, but I wasn’t sure just how to approach the story. And then one day, the character of Blue, who was in my earlier stories, piped up in my head and insisted, “Hey, I need to be in this!”
So how did the first two stories come about, then? Did you write them thinking of each other?
I definitely wrote “In Jurong” with “Reality, Interrupted” in mind. “Reality, Interrupted” had these characters [Blue and Dane] I had written about in previous stories, but I hadn’t really done them justice yet. There was a novelette called “Wicked Game,” the very first piece where I explored these two elemental siblings; it’s in my older collection The Curragh of Kildaire. I think the ideas in that piece were interesting and big, but I wasn’t quite good enough as a writer yet to properly tackle the story. And then I wrote a middle grade level piece called “Watersnake, Firesnake” that features them as well, albeit as secondary characters.
Blue is very much a trickster, and her brother Dane—I picked the name Dane because he’s like her guard dog, her kind of companion—doesn’t have a whole lot of agency on his own. I was planning to actually write a novel about them at one point, and the beginning of that novel eventually turned into “Reality, Interrupted,” on the advice of my graduate thesis advisor, John Kessel. They were just very vibrant characters in my head; I kept thinking about them, and wanting to see them in different situations.
Anyway, “Reality, Interrupted” came about after a 2008 holiday back to the US for Christmas. My sister Kristin wanted to host the festivities that year, and she lives in Brooklyn (which is actually my birthplace), so I flew from Singapore to New York, and my parents drove up from South Carolina a week later. But in that week when it was just Kristin and me, I went all over Brooklyn and Manhattan, trying to find as many bookstores as I could, since books are so expensive in Singapore; plus, I really just love indie bookstores. We were in this particular café one day just hanging out, and the story just sort of landed on my head, fully-formed. Luckily, I’d brought a notebook, and started scribbling notes as fast as I could, and set the first part of “Reality, Interrupted” in that very café; I decided to place the final scene in The Strand, the massive bookstore which we’d visited a couple of days before in the city.
As I said before, “In Jurong” was written after I visited Singapore for the first time; it was the trip where I actually proposed to my wife, who is Singaporean. We’d met at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2002 and had a long-distance relationship for almost two years before we got married. Anyway, in 2003, I came to visit, and she wanted to show me her country, and one of the places we went was the Jurong Birdpark, which is this massive zoo just for birds. There were all these really unusual tropical birds there, and some huge ones as well, and there was this waterfall that was supposed to be one of the tallest man-made waterfalls in the world [Jurong Falls], and as we walked around, that strange part of my brain kept thinking: what if this place took over Singapore? And maybe all of Southeast Asia? How cool would that be?
I found the dynamic between Blue and Dane very interesting. It seemed almost like a perpetual power play, and this power play seemed very contingent upon access to knowledge, and secrecy.
I think, especially in the second story, where Dane has lost his memory and doesn’t even know who he is, that Blue basically is the big power there—and it’s because she has all of that knowledge. I didn’t really purposefully conceive of this dynamic beforehand; it was a bit more organic and natural than that. But I think you’re right, that there is something to the notion that she’s the one in charge; she very evidently has all the knowledge, and she has the power over their relationship as siblings. From the start, I always thought of her as the leader and him as the follower.
So ... why Blue? Why female? She’s enigmatic, omniscient, and really attractive. Where does this female figure arise from, and do you as a male writer worry about exoticising women?
It’s something I worry about a lot, that I’m going to portray a female character in an exotic or unrealistic way. It’s a constant challenge, because women are so unknowable to men.
So why choose a female lead?
Traditionally, scie
nce fiction and fantasy have not featured strong female characters, especially as protagonists. For decades, the hero was always a man, although this idea has been challenged in SF since the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. But still, to this day, in many areas of SF literature and fandom, women don’t have an especially strong role. And so it was interesting for me to think: what if I put a woman in this role of incredible power? Since she’s one of the original elementals that arrived with the creation of the world, she’s basically god-like, but I also wanted her to be very human in these stories.
So you were consciously writing back to the genre? Or the tradition?
Yeah, to subvert that trope, and to play against type.
A motif of fluid identity and the potential for multiplicity is prevalent throughout the three stories in The Alchemy of Happiness, from the metamorphosis of characters into different stages of life, to more mundane details like just a change in outfit choices. Why the choice of this motif, and what are your own thoughts on the construction and destruction of personal identity?
I’ve always seen identity as very fluid; we’re different people depending on whom we’re around. I act differently whether I’m with my wife, or with my daughter, or with my female friends, or with my male friends, or with my parents. It’s just something we as human beings negotiate all the time. What’s interesting to me about speculative fiction is the ability to make it more concrete, to actually literalize this concept.
I guess that’s the power of the strange as well: we have the ability to see how far these changes can stretch.
The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay Page 12