The Chinese community in Singapore’s English-language fiction

An essay that looks at historical representations of Chinese culture in English-language fiction in Singapore quickly runs into a conundrum: given that the Chinese are the ethnic majority in Singapore and that the country’s burgeoning writing scene is so diverse, where does one begin to generalise on the ideas and themes that have emerged? Adding to this conundrum: surely any literature which reflects Singapore life would deal, at least in part, with the lives of the Chinese populace?

The way of life in realist tradition

For these reasons, this essay needs to be scoped in a more considered fashion. Firstly, the focus will be on titles which capture the way of life of the resident Chinese population since the first waves of immigration to Singapore. Thus, these will be primarily works of fiction in the realist tradition. Works penned by Singaporean authors set in other countries with international characters or in more fantastical locales — including outer space — will not be included in this scan. Also, the ethnic background of the Singaporean authors is not relevant given the number of significant titles written by non-Chinese authors which feature Chinese characters or capture the ethnic Chinese culture in their time.

Even then, a caveat still has to be made: given the sheer volume of published Singaporean works of fiction, not all noteworthy titles will be referenced if the essay is to keep to its intended length.

Arguably the first English novel from Singapore is Goh Poh Seng’s If We Dream Too Long (1972). We can start the discussion by looking at this seminal coming-of-age novel, which was reprinted in 2010. It is still discussed in literary circles today, even if it does not feel part of mainstream cultural discourse. The protagonist Kwang Meng offers an insight into the psychology of a Chinese youth in newly independent Singapore, and reminds us that even then, there were characters on the margins who marched to their own beat. The novel’s landscape set in the 1960s will be familiar to older Singaporeans — cramped Chinatown shophouses, new public housing flats, seedy bars downtown, and quiet beaches away from the city centre. There is also an early attempt to capture local English patois — not always successfully — given Goh’s own background and time spent abroad.

But even in this early novel, we see the negotiation between youthful individuality and the expectations of larger society and the state. This would be a theme that many other writers would cover in the decades to come. The non-conforming anti-hero, embodied by Kwang Meng who resists the pragmatic, progress-oriented ethos of his peers, would become a figure that would recur in many novels and short stories by different authors over the decades.

There is a long lineage of such characters, perhaps drawn from the Romantic ideal of the isolated artist breaking free from societal strictures to imagine a different world. They include the dreamer Ah Leong from Philip Jeyaratnam’s First Loves and the diffident Wing Seng from Daren Shiau’s Heartlander. Distinctive local colour animates these works, including National Service as a key rite of passage in the life of a young Singaporean male. In the various narrative arcs, we also encounter meaningful interaction among Singapore’s multi-ethnic cultures, including its attendant complexities. First Loves, for instance, features a romance between Ah Leong’s sister and Rajiv, a Malayalee boy. In fact, a few chapters are told from his perspective, and this narrative shift allows readers to understand the impulses and tensions of inter-racial coupling in the 1980s.

Dave Chua’s Gone Case is also worth a mention here. Yong, the first-person narrator, is younger than a typical bildungsroman character. But the 12-year-old shares the observant, questioning stance of many other fictional protagonists. Through his lens, we experience the small pleasures, disappointments, and tensions of life in a Housing & Development Board (HDB) estate, including clashes over religion in the family and the death of a beloved grandmother. Thanks to its popularity and the critical attention paid to this novella, Gone Case has been adapted for telemovie and a graphic novel.

Chinese community in post-1965 Singaporean literature

In the scans of representations of the Chinese community in post-1965 Singaporean literature, it would be remiss not to discuss Catherine Lim, whose fiction has captured the imagination of many Singaporean readers. Known for her prolific writings ranging from novels to newspaper opinion pieces, she is most celebrated for her best-selling incisive short stories. For many years, Lim’s short story collections such as Little Ironies and Or Else, the Lightning God & Other Stories were staples in the classroom, especially for English language and literature lessons. Accessible to Singaporean readers, her works showcased distinctively Singaporean settings, often with age-old Chinese traditions set up in opposition with a modern, more “rational” sensibility. Old wives’ tales and superstitions added to the cultural backdrop against which uncharitable, mean antagonists experienced their comeuppance and virtuous characters like mistreated maids got their day in the sun.

Many of Lim’s stories took a dig at Singaporean preoccupations and foibles: the avaricious man who longed for a landed property only to have his dreams realised in the paper house burned at his Taoist funeral; the unsympathetic teacher who tut-tuts over a student’s poor grammar but neglects to hear the child’s cry for help; or the unrepentant gambler who sees winning lottery numbers in the licence plates of cars involved in accidents. The use of authentic Singlish in a taxi driver’s complaint to his passenger also reminds us how the vernacular was already recognisable in the 1970s. (Little Ironies was first published in 1978.) In “The Taximan’s Story”, the narrator grumbles about girls hustling as social escorts for Western visitors, despite the irony that he is only too happy to accept their fares and the disturbing revelation that his own daughter is one of these “loose” girls.

Lim’s novels and short stories may not read as serious literary fiction and indeed there has been criticism about one-dimensional characters and the predictability of plot lines. But her works clearly have a place in the Singaporean literary canon, with Little Ironies often regarded as a classic. They offer a cast of memorable characters and a snapshot of life in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in reminding us of the darker face of modern, urbanised life and the challenges to Chinese cultural practices and beliefs. In many ways, Lim paved the way for the next generation of fiction writers. These include Claire Tham and Colin Cheong, with their memorable sketches of young Singaporeans on the margins, as well as authors like Jeyaratnam, Shiau, and Chua, whom we previously discussed.

It is also important to register that writers may not write about contemporaneous society or draw from their own lived experience. Well-researched and imagined historical fiction can bring a bygone Chinese community to life, enabling readers to time-travel. Stella Kon’s The Scholar and the Dragon is a good example. First published in 1986, the narrative kicks off in the early 20^th century. The protagonist Boon Jin, who hails from China, adapts to life in colonial Singapore by integrating his traditional schooling with the capitalistic ethos of the merchant class in the Straits Settlements. The Chinese diaspora’s attitudes towards their homeland are well-fleshed out, with expository debates about needed reforms and the direction that China should take, and the narrative closes with the Qing empire’s demise in 1911. In the novel’s coda, set years later in the modern city-state, descendants of Boon Jin commemorate their forebears’ establishment of the (fictitious) Wenguang Chinese Academy.

Kon’s embrace and expression of Confucianism in her novel has been questioned by critics, especially in multi-cultural Singapore. The narrative leans toward the didactic but elides over much of the horrors of World War II and Singapore’s rocky journey to independence. Nor does it interrogate the problems of colonialism, Mainland China’s fraught politics, or the realities of political self-determination. While eminently readable, The Scholar and the Dragon should be seen as a partial, selected sliver of the Singapore story. The worldview here is an Anglophile one: the Straits Chinese characters represent a specific social economic class which aspired to a Western education, and even possessed the resources to visit America. As interlocutors between the two cultures, there appears to be no interest in changing the ruling order in the Straits Settlements. One could defend this work as reflecting the attitudes of an elite group in colonial Singapore. Nonetheless, readers must work hard to plumb for relevant insights for today.¹

Probably more resonant for contemporary readers are works from Meira Chand and Suchen Christine Lim, two of the most lauded creative writers in Singapore. Their historical works set in Singapore include Lim’s Dearest Intimate and The River’s Song, and Chand’s A Different Sky. These offer portrayals of Chinese characters navigating a tumultuous period in a multi-ethnic society, and the emergence of the modern nation-state. The Singaporean reader can see, through their narrative arcs, how the national psyche and its negotiation of different ethnicities, with all its contradictions and compromises, was managed.

In The River’s Song, Lim gives voice to the disenfranchised Chinese squatters evicted from their makeshift riverside homes, and paints the government bureaucrats behind the resettlement exercise and the public housing department in a less flattering light. But the novel also seems to support the larger national story: the protagonists Ping and Weng, despite their impoverished beginnings, become a respected music teacher at Berkeley in the United States and a renowned musician by the end of the narrative. Even as he memorialises the generations before him that were profoundly affected by the eviction, Weng also acknowledges the “good life on this sunny golden island”, noting he has put on weight in his middle-age. Passages like this underscore the trade-offs made in the name of progress.

Dearest Intimate, Lim’s work in 2022, deals with the complexity of the human heart, its expansive capacity to love in the harshest of circumstances. Told from the perspectives of Cantonese opera artiste Kam Foong and her granddaughter Xiu Yin, the novel also poses questions about the deeper value of Chinese opera, and shows how the arts can nourish the soul in times of chaos and terror. Kam Foong’s journey chronicles the tough life in an opera troupe in pre-independent Singapore, while the modern narrative, told through Xiu Yin’s lens, points to the enduring potential of this centuries-old art form.

A Different Sky, on the other hand, has a more multi-ethnic cast of characters including Eurasian Howard Burns and Raj, an Indian trader, as Chand attempts to chart how Singapore evolved from a colonial port attracting diverse immigrants to a home for people with a shared imagination and vision of the future. The main Chinese character is Mei Lan, who falls in love with Howard. Through Mei Lan, we meet her grandmother with bound feet, get a glimpse into the life of the privileged merchant class in Singapore and follow her domestic servant or amah on a visit to her sorority in a crowded kongsi tenement.

Covering the period from 1927 to 1956, Chand shows the competing driving forces which shaped the island and created the conditions for the rise of political self-determination and an incipient nationalistic consciousness. These include the import of Communist ideology from China, the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, as well as the psychic damage left by the Japanese Occupation. The hybridised identities and the inter-racial romance between Mei Lan and Howard also presage the diversity of contemporary Singapore.

Nonetheless, it is worth highlighting that the novel is far from a simplistic tool of nation-building or the recounting of the official “birth of the nation”. For starters, the novel ends almost a decade before Singapore’s formal independence in 1965. Founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015), as well as the political party he established, the People’s Action Party, makes only a few appearances in the last few chapters. By the novel’s end, the thwarted lovers reunite and affirm their roots in Singapore, finding their happy ending as Howard proposes to his beloved. “We are not the people we were,” Mei Lan demurs, reminding him how the war transformed them. But echoing the larger teleological narrative in the novel, Howard quietly replies, “Burned forests regenerate.”

Lim and Chand’s works, while dealing with universal human themes of familial ties, migration, and romantic connections, also trace the evolution of the Chinese community in Singapore, even if this may not be the primary intention of the authors. Their novels certainly enable readers to develop a more nuanced view of ethnic identities and a contemporary sense of the Singaporean sensibility.

Other notable long-form historical fiction which deals with the Chinese community in Singapore include Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue, Lee Jing-Jing’s How We Disappeared, and more recently, Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation. These historical fiction works all revisit the trauma of World War II on the Chinese community, underscoring how the privations of the Japanese Occupation set in motion the move towards self-determination and left an indelible impact on ethnic and self-identities. They also offer a complementary, sometimes critical, lens to the master narrative of the nation’s founding.

The success of the modern nation-building enterprise has contributed to the mediation of lived experience through, first and foremost, national lenses. Not surprisingly, any communal themes are less insular and diasporic self-consciousness has all but disappeared. There is a clearer sense of a national identity, perhaps almost taken for granted, which translates to a greater confidence in the authorial voice, and a willingness to explore the local milieu while keeping an eye on the universality of the human experience. We certainly saw this in the works of Catherine Lim, Philip Jeyaratnam, Dave Chua and Daren Shiau. The international accolades that The Great Reclamation — published in 2023 — has received for its sweeping historical arc and vividly rendered characters attest to the possibilities of storytelling set in Singapore.

But where does our English-language fiction go from here? Younger Chinese Singaporean fictionists actively publishing today are the product of an education in the English-language medium and exposed to global cultural influences. They may be bilingual, more confident, and ready to reflect the world around them, including life in Singapore as well as the island’s history. There is no cultural cringe. But at the same time, these writers are also global in their outlook, with many living overseas. This generation of writers are more plugged into international markets and cosmopolitan trends than ever, whether it is K-pop, Hollywood culture, or the fantastical worlds created in gaming. Many of their interests reflect the expansiveness of imagination, with neither nationality nor ethnicity limiting authors from absorbing new cultural influences and aesthetic trends into their literary enterprises.