Right. You can make things more literal so that we can actually examine them. If Gregor Samsa changes into a giant beetle, what can we find out about his family dynamics?
In “In Jurong” especially, memory is linked to identity, and the past is constantly seen as constructing us.
The past is what makes us who we are. Even if traumatic things happened in the past, even if things were really horrible or transformative, they make us into the people that we are. So I definitely see memory as linked to identity in that way, depending on how we think of ourselves and our memories. It informs how we act and react in any given situation.
In David Eagleman’s collection Sum, his speculations about the afterlife agree with your own stories about the afterlife not constituting a single place. Why did you choose the afterlife to write about, and what do you think of the potential to play with this concept and space of the afterlife?
It’s the biggest mystery there is, right? One of my favorite writers, Jonathan Carroll, has been very preoccupied with death and the afterlife over the last 15 years or so in his writing; I presume that as he’s grown older, he’s been thinking about it a lot, and questioning what the afterlife might be like. It’s the great unknown. What’s interesting to me is that he hasn’t formed a comprehensive view of it yet; he’s come up with many different types of afterlives, in order to explore all these “what-if?” questions. And that tactic appeals to me as a writer as well.
Asking questions about the afterlife also begs the question, what kind of death?
Exactly. I’m a practicing Buddhist (although my practice is a bit slack at the moment), and the typical Buddhist view is that there is no afterlife. If you don’t become enlightened, then you reincarnate into a new form and you do it all over again, with your new life determined by your previous karma. There are lots of different ways to look at the cessation of life, and part of the fun of writing this stuff is being able to explore big issues like that.
On that note, the stories in The Alchemy of Happiness seem heavily imbued with Buddhist philosophy and thought. What do you personally subscribe to, and how do you see your personal beliefs mixing with your fiction to create new beasts, so to speak?
I look at Buddhism more as a life philosophy than as a religion, and so even if I’m not meditating every day, or chanting mantras on a regular basis, I still try to keep the Four Noble Truths ingrained in my thinking, and to exemplify the core ideas of compassion, connection, and consequence in my actions.
For Red Dot Irreal, my focus was more on the strangeness of the Singaporean psyche, seen through the lens of a foreigner living in Singapore. But with The Alchemy of Happiness, I was thinking a lot more broadly, and the Buddhist mindset is definitely more prevalent. Especially in “Always a Risk,” where this weird realm deals with magic and demons, yet Buddhism still has a place there, and the fact that Lady White Snake is imprisoned in this place.
So is it a conscious choice, inserting these philosophies, or does it naturally arise just because of your paradigm of the world?
I think that with my older stories, it was more of the latter, but with “Always a Risk” and especially with A Fickle and Restless Weapon, the novel that I just finished writing, it was a much more conscious choice (the title even comes from the Dhammapada). I really wanted to put Buddhism front and centre. I don’t want to be prescriptive or anything, but I deliberately made the themes and ideas much more obvious.
So how then do you prevent yourself from being prescriptive? What would constitute prescriptive?
I think if I was saying: this is the right way to believe. So as long as I can prevent myself from doing that, I hope I’m not preaching in my work.
So just offering the view.
Exactly. Buddhism is not very prevalent in SF; it’s there, but maybe it’s based on cursory or incorrect information, used as this unconventional opposition to the Judeo-Christian tradition. There aren’t many writers using the philosophy or the core ideas of Buddhism in SF and fantasy yet, on anything more than the level of a curiosity. It’s something that’s important to me and I want to try to express that in my writing as well.
Singapore as a spatial character seems to pervade your recent stories. What is Singapore to you, and how do you see it play out as a backdrop or a setting for your stories?
First and foremost, Singapore is a culture that is not my own. So I’m always having to negotiate this culture with the background that I’m not from here. I’ve lived in Singapore for five and a half years now, but I still experience the occasional culture shock and the unexpected occurrence. And that’s an interesting way to look at SF as well. When you’re encountering aliens, you’re not really talking about actual space aliens, you’re talking about people from other cultures, races, religions ...
Everything is metaphorical.
Right, the alien is a metaphor for all of that. I’ve gotten a lot better at negotiating life here on a daily basis, but the first year was really rough. I would get really frustrated with people—unfairly so—because they were not acting how I thought they should act. It’s gotten much better since then, but I still have to think about these things a lot.
So is writing a way of thinking through these things?
Absolutely. I was on a panel recently at the 2012 Singapore Writer’s Festival, and Gwee Li Swee, who was moderating, asked all the panelists what writing means to us. And my answer to that was: it’s a way for me to make sense of the world, and to specifically make sense of this place where I’ve come to live. Whether it’s imagining a taxi driver who’s made of stone, or a magical talking red snapper in a fish head curry stall, the issues I’m looking at are a way to help me examine the strangeness of my adopted home.
If we’re looking at your writing as mediating a form of understanding about Singapore, how has your writing about Singapore changed from the time you started writing about it till now?
As I said, the first piece I wrote about Singapore was “In Jurong” nine years ago, and my attitude has changed quite a lot since then. At that point, everything was still very shiny and new and different. Singapore was unfamiliar and full of possibilities. But after moving here in 2007, I’ve tried to examine more of the everyday mundane existence, so my stories—especially some of the ones that are a bit more autobiographical in Red Dot Irreal—draw a lot from my real life experience of dealing with people in Singapore on a daily basis. It’s just like anyplace else: people work and live and die here all the time. My writing is now a bit more ... calm, maybe? It’s not so much about the differences, but more about the similarities.
As a Singaporean, I do feel that the represented space has been growing more comfortable in your work. I think Singaporean writers also aspire to become comfortable writing and working with the cultural landscape of Singapore.
I’m not sure if it’s a conscious thing, but part of it is that I guess I’m ballsy enough to use Singapore in a non-sacred way in my work. Maybe Singaporean writers, especially emerging writers, have a preoccupation about what to say and how to say it, and are waiting for permission. Maybe they’re worried that if they comment explicitly on Singapore they will get in trouble. I don’t have that worry. An example of this is “Lion City Daikaiju” in Red Dot Irreal; it’s a very very short story where Singapore is basically destroyed via the big iconic symbols of the country, à la Godzilla. Kenny Leck, who published the book through Math Paper Press, told me that as recent as five years ago, that story could not have been included in the collection because of the sensitivity of the subject matter. There would have been some serious concerns about it.
It’s refreshing.
It’s a form of bravery, I suppose, but maybe it’s also because I’m not taking the country completely totally seriously, as people who have been ingrained to treat Singapore as a sacred cow would. It’s just another subject matter for me, and I don’t have to treat it like crystal.
And has your writing always been rooted in spaces and places?
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sp; Yes, I think so. The earlier collection I mentioned, The Curragh of Kildaire, takes place in a fictional North Carolina small town. I just really like that we’re always informed by the kind of spaces that we live in.
So then do you feel a kind of pressure to keep moving, to keep finding these spaces to write about?
Maybe not anymore. If you find an interesting enough place, there’s going to be an infinite number of stories you can tell there, and an infinite number of characters that you can use. So I think it’s more of boiling it down to what the essential qualities of this place are, thinking about who lives there, who works there, all these kinds of things. You can set any number of stories in those types of places.
So is Singapore one of those found places?
It definitely started that way for me, although now that I’m living here, it’s developed a comfortable familiarity.
Does this mean that you can write more about it, or do the stories run out when you get bored?
Well, they thankfully haven’t run out yet. The novel I just finished doesn’t take place in Singapore, but the setting is this Singapore-like invented island-nation called Tinhau; the geography and history are quite different, but the culture and politics and demography are very much inspired by the real Singapore. And I do plan to write many more stories set there.
Singapore is often seen just as a cityscape, but you seem to also be quite familiar and sensitive with the world of plants within this world, and you invoke this to create “In Jurong.” What is your relationship with nature? What is it about plants that are so fascinating?
I’ve always lived in cities, but they weren’t big cities. When I was growing up in the US, I was living in Norman, Oklahoma, a suburb of the capital city, so there were places to play. We had a big field at the end of our block where we could shoot bows and arrows and fly kites and just roam around. Then I lived in Raleigh for nearly 20 years, and although it’s the capital of North Carolina, it’s a small city; I think there’s only 400,000 people that live there. It didn’t feel like a big city, like Detroit or Chicago or New York, so again there was more of a relationship with nature, more room to breathe. Sometimes in Singapore, I feel like I don’t have that room to breathe, it feels a lot more claustrophobic, and I don’t know what I can do about it except to occasionally get out of the country and visit other places. I can’t be completely in the city all the time; I don’t think any of us can and stay sane. As human beings we all need some kind of relationship with nature, at least every so often.
In “In Jurong,” all of Southeast Asia becomes this nature-infested place (although “infest” is not the best word to use here). And I like that, I like the idea of nature retaking the city. Especially when we just keep paving over nature, or trying to “manage” nature by finagling it into the form of our choosing, which Singapore does very well. A funny story: during one of my first visits, my wife’s father was driving us somewhere, and we ended up on the Pan-Island Expressway, and I was surprised and delighted to see all these palm trees along the side of the road that had grown uniformly spaced apart. I couldn’t believe it!
Organized Asia!
And my father-in-law said that the government had just planted them that way. It never occurred to me that they would actually have gone to the trouble to plant palm trees like that, that their level of control over the natural environment extended down to managing the spacing of trees along the highway. It kind of blew my mind. Which consequently led to the thought about: is that going to get us into trouble someday? Is that going to come back to bite us? Because nature very often finds ways to shake us up. There’s this History Channel series called Life After People that looks at this very idea, and what the world would be like in dozens and hundreds of years if people just vanished; this kind of thing is just fascinating to me.
What do you see as the role of speculative fiction in Singaporean literature? You mentioned its power—how do you see its power being wielded in this context?
I don’t see it really being wielded that much yet. There’s a large readership for science fiction and fantasy here, but in terms of the writing—again, like we were just talking about earlier—I don’t think enough people feel brave enough to write it yet. It could be the fact that so many students are drilled with the idea that SF is not “proper” literature. If you’re going to write a narrative, it needs to be a realistic narrative. When I was teaching at Hwa Chong Institution (High School Section), I was the only teacher in the entire English department that would allow the kids to write SF for their narratives. None of my other colleagues would; they wouldn’t even entertain the prospect. When it came to final exams, the students would be penalized if they wrote non-realist narratives. Even when they were doing them in class, I had to remind them specifically to treat it as practice since they would have to do more realistic writing for their exam. It’s really unfortunate, this idea that SF isn’t a legitimate form of literature. One of my missions since I’ve been here—first with Red Dot Irreal, and then with Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction (the anthology I edited, which just recently came out)—has been to promote speculative fiction as a valid literary genre in Singapore, one that people will pay attention to, one that is worth reading and worth writing.
What do you see as its power then, in Singapore? In the hybrid essay “Embracing the Strange,” you talk about how governments might fear literature in this form.
Right. I think that’s part of it. It’s a way to comment on society and politics in an oblique way. And you could do it very pointedly, but you’re not criticizing government directly. People know what you’re talking about and where you’re coming from, but you avoid getting into trouble with more literal-minded authorities, unless you’re really super-obvious about it. SF has incredible power as metaphor, and I think the biggest part of that is the ability to show a different reality from what the authorities want you to think is the only reality. That’s why it’s banned in China very frequently. And I think that there’s a lot to say about the government in Singapore that could be examined in speculative fiction, which you couldn’t really do with realist fiction because you might get slammed with defamation or libel.
What is it about the imagination that’s so threatening?
It’s a matter of control. I’m not a political scientist or philosopher, and so I don’t feel entirely qualified to talk about this, but the government here employs a soft authoritarianism. It’s not totalitarianism by any means, but there is a measure of control. You have to be careful about what you say in the public arena. In Orwell’s quintessential dystopian novel 1984, the Party of Oceania wanted to be able to control its subjects down to the level of thought; if you showed even the slightest physical indications that you were dissatisfied with the Party, you could be charged with thoughtcrime. Now, I’m pretty sure the government here doesn’t want to do that, but they still want Singaporeans to think in a certain way. They want you to keep buying stuff like a good consumer because it helps the economy. They want you to vote for the ruling power because it’s in their interest. They want you to feel grateful that they’re taking care of you.
But at the same time, I can’t discount the fact that Singapore is the safest, cleanest, and most organized place I’ve ever lived in. It’s a testament to their governance. I don’t have to worry if I take my daughter out anywhere at night. I don’t have to worry that we’re going to get mugged, or that something bad is going to happen to us. I feel very safe here, which wasn’t always the case in the US. I lived in a fairly safe place back home, but there were certain parts of Raleigh where I just could not go after dark. It’s interesting to look at that juxtaposition between peace of mind and freedom of speech.
What do you give up and for what?
Right. What is the cost of these freedoms that you are giving up, to have a very organized, very safe society? It’s a question I was wrestling with in 2007 when migrating from the States (when George W. Bush was still in power), and it seems
to be even more intensely present here.
Tell us about Anya, your daughter, and how she has influenced your writing, especially in “Embracing the Strange.” Have you read any of it to her?
No, no. She’s only three years old, so she wouldn’t really understand it yet, even the fiction chapters, which are geared closer to middle grade literature in terms of age appropriateness. She’s much more about picture books and Dr. Seuss at this point. She would probably need to be closer to her teenage years to comprehend the essay as a whole, and to handle the scarier bits in the fiction.
What would you hope for her to feel or learn when she’s old enough to read these passages?
I wrote “Embracing the Strange” specifically to show her how this genre I write in has influenced me throughout my whole life, and how it’s been such a wonder, at least for big key moments. To give her the idea that this type of literature that allows us to imagine different worlds, that allows us to look at different choices and what might happen, is definitely one to celebrate, and to think about, and to keep in mind when she’s making her own choices. To think: how will something affect me in the future? We should speculate about those kinds of things all the time.
I also hope the essay is a way for her to know why her dad writes the weird stuff he does. Maybe that’s all it is. You know, the fictional chapters were actually written separately, and long before the non-fictional parts.
I think they go really well together.
I was really happy with how it all came together. Two of the early fiction sections, the ones about the spider and the Olifanz, I wrote the night she was born. So they are always going to have a strong connection to that event.
I really liked the juxtaposition of the fiction with the more structured formal non-fiction prose. How did you decide on this format?
I actually conceived of “Embracing the Strange” first as just the essay, which I delivered as a plenary lecture at the Creative Arts Seminar earlier in 2012. After I was invited to give this lecture, it took me a long time to think: what the hell am I going to talk about? I’m not extroverted, so I have to think about exactly what I’m going to do in front of a crowd, else I get very flustered. So I decided I was going to write down exactly what I wanted to say, and deliver the essay that way. I chose speculative fiction as my theme, because like I mentioned before, the kids at CAP (and elsewhere, of course) are reading a lot of SF but the things speculative fiction can do as a genre have not been examined that much.
The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay Page 13