by Ng Yi-Sheng
You’ll pack your bags. Amazingly enough, your passport will work. Thuggish immigration officers will sometimes lock countrymen up and question them for hours, but mostly border controls will have decided it’s the sign of some special diplomatic club. They’ll usher you through the airport’s speediest lanes.
Then you’ll arrive at the hotel. A three-star affair: not exactly shabby, but the cabbie wouldn’t have known where to take you without an address. You’ll check in. You’ll check out the conference room. You’ll realise to your delight that there’s a table piled high with catered Malaysian food. You’ll go over and immediately stuff your face with satay, ketupat, sayur lodeh, laksa, bee hoon, chicken rice, teh tarik, red bean soup. You’ll admit to yourself, grudgingly, that the Malaysians always made it better.
Into your third helping, you’ll realise there are other people in the room, sipping rose syrup drink. They’ll be speaking Singlish: the kind of singsong broken tones with mixed-in Hokkien vocab that you won’t have heard since maybe the Jurassic. They’ll be reminiscing about public transport, 4D, The New Paper, Jack Neo films, the army, all the terrible things you never thought you’d miss. You’ll start to tear up. They’ll see you. They’ll make room for you. You’ll introduce yourself, awkwardly. And you’ll sit down in the circle, find yourself slipping into that half-forgotten patois yourself.
One of the guys at the table will be different. He’ll be white, really white. Blond hair, blue eyes, skin so pale you’ll be able to see the pink and violet veins in it. When the conversation moves his way, he’ll tell everyone he’s never actually been to Singapore. He’d thought about doing a semester abroad there in college, but went to Osaka instead. Backpacked around the Philippines once, transited through Kuala Lumpur.
He’s a journalist now, he’ll say, and he’s hot on the trail of this story, trying to understand what happened. You and the others will exchange glances. You’d thought you’d feel weird about this, like your inner sanctum’s been invaded, but instead it’s a relief. He’s outside confirmation. You’re not the crazy ones. He’s the proof.
Over Saturday and Sunday, there’ll be presentations by ancient professors, heritage hobbyists, wild-eyed activists screaming conspiracy. There’ll even be an experimental dancer who was stranded in Copenhagen on tour. She’ll show off her latest creation: an agglomeration of taichi, silat, bharatanatyam, hip-hop and the Great Singapore Workout, which you’ll personally think is in bad taste. Now and then there’ll be movie screenings by filmmakers you’ve never heard of. BS Rajhans, Boo Junfeng, Tan Pin Pin. You’ll note down their names.
The cleaners and waitstaff will sometimes stand by the doors, watching. You’ll notice they’re avoiding your gaze, even when you’re sipping brandy and scotch alone in the hotel bar. You’ll realise you must appear to them like a peculiar species of nutjob: Young Earth Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, millenarians. You’ll feel sick at their sight. You’ll decide to go up and order room service instead.
Then the white guy will come over, the blond guy you met on your first day, and ask if the next barstool is taken. He’ll be charming and comforting, and he’ll tell you he has a private stash of Tiger beers in his suitcase. You don’t normally do this kind of thing, but you’ll end up spending the night with him. After all, no one’s there to set the rules anymore.
When you get home, or what you might as well call home now, you’ll see he’s dropped you an email. It’ll be him, saying he’ll be in your city next month. You’ll go ahead and share your number, since it’s the polite thing to do, and because he was tender and considerate and passionate in a way it’s been hard to find lately.
You’ll see him again, a few times. Over Christmas he’ll invite you to meet his family. They’ll be lovely. You’ll be lovely. You’ll cook them fried rice and they’ll gasp at it, impressed, even though it’s burnt at the edges and not salty enough and completely devoid of sambal and green chillies. On his advice, you’ll tell them you’re from China. His little sister, the irritating grad student who speaks ten languages, will ask, Oh, what part of China? You’ll bite your tongue and say she wouldn’t have heard of it. He’ll squeeze your hand.
Now it’s years later. Geopolitically, it’ll have become apparent that the world is coping. The role of Southeast Asian financial hub will now be a contest between Bangkok, Jakarta and, to everyone’s surprise, Yangon. Private banking will centre itself again in Zurich. The world’s busiest port will be Shanghai, followed by good old Rotterdam. When the topic of 21st-century city-states comes up, they’ll talk about Dubai and Monaco.
You’ll be married to him. It’ll have been tricky finding a registry that’d do it, given that you didn’t technically have a nationality anymore. But he’ll pull a few strings and hire a lawyer he knows. Now you’re both Canadian citizens, which was something he’d been wanting for a while. You’ll be a handsome couple. Everyone’ll say so at the wedding reception.
He’ll have kept his promise, by the way. Publishing that story: his exposé on the disappearance of Singapore. He’ll even have put out a book about it: The New Atlantis, which will hover around the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for a year. It’ll be translated into Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Thai and, for some reason, Finnish. You’ll have travelled the world with him on a few book tours, sat in on a few public lectures in Ubud, Busan and Hay-on-Wye. You’ll often appear together in the press, him joking that you’re good for his street cred. Sometimes you’ll even be wearing something pan-Asian, approximating a national dress.
The Singapore Conferences will be bigger than ever. They’re not for survivors anymore, of course: they’re for fanboys and fangirls, all clustering together, united by the dream of this fabled utopia that somehow slipped out of existence. A few of the other survivors will have printed autobiographies, memoirs of their hellish experiences—one of them will claim to have been held in a Saudi refugee camp—and when they appear at these events, they’ll be immediate stars, signing autographs till their knuckles ache, so luminous with glamour that they could choose any eager young thing in the hotel to be their sex bunny for the night.
At first you’ll be tolerant. But then the cosplay trends will begin. You’ll rationalise to yourself that these are mere children: most of them not even born by the day of the vanishing, and yet there’ll be something in you that wants to scream every time you see a ginger-haired teenager in a Singapore Airlines stewardess kebaya, or a scrawny Rasta-man in all-whites and orchid garlands sporting a Lee Kuan Yew-style squint.
Then one day you’ll log onto the Internet and discover that they’ve been writing fan fiction. You’ll spend hours in front of the monitor, unable to stop scrolling through these mad vicarious fantasies of tantric sex on the Singapore Flyer and battles against fire-breathing vampires at Marina Bay Sands. Some of the stories will even have Singlish in them. It’ll be pretty convincing. When your husband gets home and asks what’s wrong, you’ll start weeping uncontrollably. He’ll see the site, look all solemn for a moment, then proceed to dictate an immediate edict to his followers, condemning their actions, alerting them to the distress they’ve caused you and your fellows, the disrespect to the unmourned victims of one of the 21st century’s greatest secret massacres.
But suddenly, you’ll realise you can’t bear to be in the same room as him. You’ll run into the bathroom and refuse to come out, not even to eat and drink. He’ll ask you why, and you’ll yell something stupid along the lines of, You don’t get it. It’s all because of you.
After that you won’t attend the conferences anymore. You won’t write that memoir he’s always bugged you to work on. You won’t help maintain his webpage and electronic newsletter. You’ll stop posing for cute interracial couple photos. You’ll stop cooking your fucking fried rice. You’ll stop speaking to him. You’ll put in more hours at the office. You’ll sleep on opposite sides of the bed.
One night, you’ll go through your drawers and find
that photo of your parents. They’ll look younger than they did before, yet more old-fashioned in their silly turn-of-the-millennium clothes. You’ll try and remember what they sounded like and what they would have made of you right now, freezing your ass off in this unholy Canadian winter. You’ll light up the fireplace and throw the photo in.
It’s rather beautiful, how it burns. How the canvas curls and melts and spindles, a cross between wax and paper. The faces of your father and mother will glow bright, then turn sepia and coal-black, crumbling their way once more into brightness.
You’ll undress for bed. Tomorrow, you’ll think, you will try going native. You’ll enrol in a French course, even though you don’t live in Quebec. You’ll stock up on back bacon and maple syrup. You’ll even have a go at making your own poutine.
But listen: that morning, at 4.30am, Singapore will reappear. At daybreak you’ll find your husband in the kitchen, munching coffee and cornflakes and grumpy over hate mail from your countrymen, who just don’t get the parodic genius of his mockumentary novels. You’ll find your inbox is full of birthday greetings from long-vanished friends, much older of course, annoyed that you haven’t written back for so long.
You’ll surf the Net, looking for info. Everything and nothing will be there: footage of the island over the last few decades will have magically materialised, representing the changes in politics, society, economy and architecture. You’ll pull up an image, bending your mind around how everything looks different and yet is unmistakably the same.
Then the phone will ring. It’s your parents, who’re calling to say hello to their grown-up baby. Your husband will put them on speaker and start chattering away with them like an old friend, which he must be, you suppose. You’ll brew your own coffee and pour your own cereal, then collapse into your chair, trying to digest it all.
We’re booking our tickets to come and see you again, your mother will say. How is Canada, my love?
And your husband will reply, Same old, same old. It’s like you never left.
Acknowledgements
Many, many beloved people helped me to create this book. Much of it was written during my MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where I gained invaluable help from my instructors Andrew Cowan and Trezza Azzopardi, as well as from all my classmates, especially my fellow Southeast Asians: Isa Lorenzo, Stephanie Ye and Dave Chua.
Further stories were written as part of The Substation Fairy Tales project, Post-Museum's CultureHackSG, and as part of my ongoing PhD course at Nanyang Technological University, with the help of my workshop leader Barrie Sherwood and my coursemates Balli Kaur Jaswal, Arin Alycia Fong, Hong Yuchen, Gautam Joseph and Jon Gresham. The text was further refined during Manuscript Boot Camp 2016, organised by Sing Lit Station.
Special thanks must go to my editor, Jason Erik Lundberg. His work as the architect of the anthology Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction and of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction has truly galvanised the Singaporean spec fic scene. He has been an inspiration both through his writing and editing, and a relentless supporter of my own fiction.
A number of my stories pay direct tribute to writings by other authors. “The Boy, the Swordfish, the Bleeding Island” cites its sources in-text. “Garden” borrows heavily from Singaporean history, legend and science fiction:
The character of Sri Tri Buana, aka Sang Nila Utama, is taken from Sulalatus Salatin, also known as Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, ed. Tun Seri Lanang, c. 1612.
Dang Anom is also taken from Sulalatus Salatin, where she is an unnamed concubine. She is named only in the film Dang Anom, dir. Hussein Haniff, 1962.
Hang Tuah is taken from the Hikayat Hang Tuah, c. 1700.
Pangeran Adipati Agung is taken from the legend of Raden Mas Ayu, which has various retellings.
The Peri is taken from the legend of Sultan Mahmud, recorded in the Tuhfat al-Nafis, by Raja Haji Ali, 1885.
Harry Lee is inspired by The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, 1999.
Akash is taken from Altered Straits by Kevin Martens Wong, 2017.
Jenny Quantum is taken from Wildstorm Comics, first appearing in The Authority #13, May 2000.
Melody is taken from the Danger Dan series by Lesley-Anne and Monica Lim, 2014-2017.
The Merlion is taken from “Sila”, published in Launch Pad by Shelly Bryant, 2017.
The Canopies, Mid-Levels and Voids are taken from Sofia and the Utopia Machine by Judith Huang, 2018.
The grey goo apocalypse takes place in “Big Enough for the Entire Universe”, published in The Infinite Library and Other Stories by Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, 2017.
The clones of Lee Kuan Yew are taken from “Auspicium Melioris Aevi” by JY Yang, in Uncanny Magazine Issue 15: March/April 2017.
The zombie bureaucratic administration is taken from “The Ministry of Zombie Advancement”, published in Track Faults and Other Glitches by Nicholas Yong, 2017.
Yva Yolan is taken from Star Sapphire by Han May, 1985. Said text briefly references the date 2243, but I have chosen to believe a non-Gregorian calendar is in use in the tale. Star Sapphire is Singapore’s first science fiction novel.
About the Author
Ng Yi-Sheng is a poet, fictionist, playwright, journalist and activist. He was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize for his debut poetry collection, last boy (2006). His other publications include a spiritual sequel to that work, called A Book of Hims (2017); a compilation of his best spoken-word pieces, Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience (2016); the bestselling non-fiction book, SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century (2006); and a novelisation of the Singapore gangster movie, Eating Air (2008). He also co-edited GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose (2010) and Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore (2013). He recently completed his MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia and is currently pursuing his PhD at Nanyang Technological University. Lion City is his first fiction collection.