I have the great fortune to lead a course in modern Southeast Asian Fiction in English this semester. This means that I get to read and critically evaluate a baker’s dozen of recent Southeast Asia-themed books, and also some classics. It’s a motley bunch, but it’s tremendous fun and I have learned a lot already.
What’s more, this is a special opportunity to think about the intersection of political science, Southeast Asian studies, and literary fiction. I’ll use this space to write short reviews of these books from the perspective of an eager reader, someone who is not a literary critic but who wants to think expansively about new fiction in its historical, political, and transnational contexts.* There will be spoilers. Read on if you’re curious.
Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation: Singaporean State-Building, Personified
Rachel Heng‘s The Great Reclamation is a very enjoyable read. It is an engaging love story set in a time of great political and social change in Singapore. The book is well-crafted and easily digestible, written with a welcoming and engaging prose that can lead you to miss just how smart and evocative it is. Anyone who cares about Singapore, or who wants to read some historical fiction on decolonizing Asia, will enjoy this book.
Spoilers from here on out. The Great Reclamation tells the story of a small fishing village in Singapore’s East Coast, located several kilometers from the urbanized center of late colonial Singapore. The central characters are fishermen and their families, Hokkien speakers who live a traditional lifestyle in their kampong (the Malay word for village**). The protagonist is Ah Boon: we meet him at the beginning of the book as a shy and nervous young boy whose father fishes for a living and whose older brother is set to follow in his footsteps. Ah Boon is fearful, not cut out for a hard life on the water, but early on—after being compelled to join a fishing trip with his father and brother—he discovers that he has an uncanny ability to detect islands off the coast that are invisible to others. These islands are not just magical, appearing and disappearing depending on who is looking, they are full of fish, which provide a rich bounty for Ah Boon and later for other villagers. Ah Boon’s discoveries make a hard life into a prosperous one, allowing his family and the villagers to fill their bellies, send their children to school to learn to write in Chinese, to purchase medicine to treat their basic ailments, and to live in some comfort as the world changes around them.
Those changes around them are substantial. First comes the Japanese occupation during WWII, which brings tragedy and trauma to the family. Then comes the return of the British, then impending independence first with and then without Malaysia. Amidst all this, we watch Ah Boon grow up together with his friend Siok Mei, a fiercely independent young orphan whose parents had joined the nationalist revolution in China and perished. They are fast friends; Ah Boon pines over her, but his love is unrequited, as Siok Mei becomes increasingly engaged with the Singaporean labor movement that was aligned with socialist and communist forces around Asia. In the end Siok Mei marries someone else, and Ah Boon discovers Natalie, who works for the new independent government (who are called, in Hokkien, the Gah Men) in a field that might best be called “community development”. Under Natalie’s tutelage, Ah Boon becomes a government employee too, learning the educated version of Singaporean English, wearing a crisp white shirt in the cool air conditioning, and convincing his villagers to use a new community center and eventually to move into new government-constructed apartments (Singapore’s famous HDB flats). The former fishing village is demolished, to become East Coast Park.
There’s a lot more to the story: the environment and the effects of development on the village community, the communist movement and the crackdown against it***, the legacies of wartime trauma for Ah Boon’s family, the twists and turns of Ah Boon and Siok Mei’s relationships with each other and with others. There is also a lot to say about the prose, the ways in which Heng evokes the sensory experience of things like food and sun and salt, the feel of slurping up steamed fish and greens and the sound of chopsticks clinking on ceramic bowls. But I’d like to pull on one specific thread, which is the larger meaning behind Ah Boon’s character in the context of a book about Singapore’s modernization.
My question is, does Ah Boon represent Singapore itself? I think he does. Ah Boon is Singapore.
Ah Boon is something of a magical character, someone who transforms traditionally minded people into modern citizens. It is he who discovered the hidden islands that made his village prosperous under the British. And it is he who could convince those villagers to embrace modernity after decolonization, to move into the HDB flats and to embrace the cement walls of the new community center. It is he who could teach those villagers to wipe their feet when coming inside to watch the TV, who would clean up after them to keep the public space presentable, and who could patiently listen to their anxieties over living on the fifth floor of a building. Ah Boon has some essence within himself that allows him to make progress against all odds. The through-line from shy boy to Gah Men is that Ah Boon is a low-key hero.
In this, Ah Boon also represents Singapore’s best perception of itself, as a self-made society. He is not the wealthy kid; rather, he is a poor Hokkien boy who made his own way, from the bottom of the class hierarchy to a cozy place within the postcolonial administration. He works hard, and his life gets better as a result, as do the lives of those around him. He knows that some people don’t like how the government makes hard choices for the common good, but he believes that these things must be done and he does not spend too much time looking backwards. The last words of the book are absolutely on point:
Ah Boon made it, and we root for him along the way. In true Singapore style, there are always costs to development and change, but as Ah Boon says, progress over stagnation. So, about the past: Bury it. Make it new again. He is cringe, but he is free.
NOTES
* What you read here are not just my own thoughts, but rather my thoughts in conversation with the student taking the course. That student will remain anonymous for now, unless they ask me to reveal their identity.
* And, incidentally, the origin of the English word compound, in the sense of a fortified camp.
** Almost certainly this was a reference to Operation Coldstore.
Tom Pepinsky 