Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

    This is the second in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.

    Previous review:

    1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation

    Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

    This is one of those books that you read about before you read. Gina Apostol is a giant of modern Philippine literature, and Insurrecto is a heck of a book.

    The early chapters, much like the reviews, hinted at just how many layers of meaning would be revealed throughout the course of the book, but upon encountering this passage I knew that Apostol was going to be throwing heaters with every pitch:

    This is wickedly funny stuff. There are levels.

    Rather than try to summarize Insurrecto‘s plot, or to explain what the book is about, let me instead just describe some of what’s “in” it. (It will be for you, the reader, to read and organize all of this for yourself.) At one level, it is the story of two contemporary women, one American and the other Filipino, who are writing—and not exactly collaboratively—a screenplay about a massacre of Philippine villagers by American occupying soldiers in 1901. They have different interpretations, different points of emphasis. The American, Chiara, is writing a screenplay based on a movie her father, Ludo Brasi, had made about the same massacre, in the 1970s. The Filipino, Magsalin, lives in New York but is enlisted by Chiara to help with her script. They travel to Samar, the location of the massacre, Ludo’s film, and Magsalin’s home region. This happens in the contemporary period, under the brutal Duterte administration.

    Questions of authenticity abound, and also questions of perspective, all intertwined. We read various scripts not as scripts, but as descriptions of the events, which are themselves invoking the broader questions of authenticity and perspective, as in a passage where an American photographer in 1901 describes the veracity of the images his camera takes to a Filipino counterpart who describes his own eyes as perfectly capable of capturing what the camera captures. Or discussions of a beach town as a trompe-l’œil, like a film set to conjure what a beach town is supposed to feel like, but nevertheless with real people, real flowers, real guns.

    So, as you can see, levels. Instead of reading my opinions you should just wade right in, splash around, and enjoy the whole thing. There will be bits that you get, and there will be bits that you miss (like me), and there will be bits that make you think differently, and then you’ll immediately second-guess those—and then, you’ll wonder whether or not you actually do get those bits that you thought you got. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in his back-cover endorsement, the book is “meta-fictional, meta-cinematic, even meta-meta.”

    One thing I found especially enjoyable about the book was the writing, how Apostol uses language and dialogue to conjure a sense of whimsy and humor in the context of a lot of heavy themes. Take this exchange:

    “the plate like petals, a corolla of carbs” is just excellent—the book is full of such expressions. But the dialogue here makes the whole thing even better. You can pay attention to no other part of the book and still really enjoy all the exchanges like this. You can even enjoy Apostol’s witty dialogue at otherwise difficult passages:

    Here again are those themes of authenticity and perspective. What’s real? Who decides? But also, LOL, “that’s the wrong texture. Meth is fine and bright.”*

    It’s not all heavy. You can also enjoy the parts that discuss how the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi speak Tagalog. You can enjoy knowing that Chiara is obviously Sophia Coppola, and Ludo is Francis Ford Coppola, and that Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines: a story about Vietnam that’s a retelling of a story about Africa was filmed in the Philippines.** You can even enjoy the parts that describe young American soldiers who are as naive as can be—sometimes attempting to be principled, oftentimes not, but never heroes. That said, there are no heroes in Insurrecto. No character is entirely sympathetic, no character is pure. Casiana Nacionales, the insurrectionist after whom the book is titled, is the only exception.***

    I take two things away from Insurrecto. Not themes exactly, but rather impressions.

    One is interconnectedness. No specific passage in the book does this, but I am left with the impression that we are to understand the massacre of 1901, the history of the Philippines, and our efforts describe it and narrate it to others, as being connected far beyond the islands themselves. There is no way to describe the Philippines on its own, from an aperspectival perspective. References to Magellan, to the similarities between lechon and porchetta, to American soldiers communicating with the village chief in a basic Spanish learned in Cuba… and of course, the fact of travel, of living abroad, of working across distance, both real and virtual, which is a constant theme for every character. Even the proliferation of terms and phrases in Tagalog and Waray, this reminds the reader that there is always translation of some form, and that we make our way through our connected worlds with, at most, an imperfect and incomplete view of those connections and how they made the world we inhabit.

    The other is honesty, about perspective, about history, about our ability to comprehend. The camera never captures reality, the script never records it, but our eyes don’t either. I truly appreciate how thoroughly Apostol establishes this point: we are never “inside” the history, we are always outside it. We have roles in history****, not places in it. Magsalin tells Chiara, who cries out for justice for two victims of Duterte’s drug war,

    do you think you will exact it in the middle of the road in a town where no one knows you, a woman in short shorts and bloody platform sandals, with even your continuity in question, do you think that is your role right now, to be the avenger in a time that does not give a fuck?

    Magsalin is speaking to us, yes, but I believe that she is also speaking to herself. Look how she breaks that fourth wall, right there without even making a big deal about it. Roles, not places.

    NOTES

    * One example of where I’m not sure if I get it, or if the levels are too subtle for me, is Chiara’s description of crack as meth. Crack is a cocaine product; meth is called crank. Is that another level? I am pleased to learn, however, that shabu means the same thing in Tagalog as it does in Indonesian. (For the of completeness, let me also note that shabu-shabu is something else entirely.)

    ** And if you click here and fast-forward to 2:45, you can hear 5-year old Sofia Coppola sing the Philippine national anthem. Hand to God.

    *** Read Apostol herself on this point, she might not agree with my view. I do agree that she is the character that we need to “side with,” because—indeed—“atrocity happens, this war happened.” That, if nothing else, pins the novel down as being more than just a literary exercise.

    **** Obligatory reference to how history comes from the same root as story goes here.

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation

    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.