Friends

In Omaha, NE, saving the world again.*

In transit in Chicago Midway, there was a large, shaven-headed man with a faint air of Bruce Willis about him, quietly reading Stephen King in a wheelchair by the window. He had a protective boot around one foot, and various blocky bulges showed through the leg of his track pants on that side. A while later, airport staff brought over another large, bald man in a wheelchair, this one with metal braces along one arm, and an awkward baby face, nose too small for either face or body. They slung his USMC pack on the wheelchair handle and left, and that's when I realized. The two sized each other up for a moment, then started trading stories in a nasal accent that sounded like dirt roads and cornfields. Next to them, an amazingly clean cut boy in a pea coat and t-shirt eyed them and chewed his lip, clutching his pleather bible.

Ahead of me in the boarding line was a pale teenage girl with chestnut hair (I recently rediscovered the meaning of the word, after boiling chestnuts to peel them). Black stockings disappeared into arsekicker boots on one end and a shapeless crimson skirt on the other, beneath a long sleeved black velvet blouse with slightly puffed shoulders. On her head was a black hat pushed too far back - the womens' hat that's like a bowler hat but has a much fuller roll to the brim.** I couldn't tell if she was a Gaimaniac in the making or simply a very conservative Christian.

The flight into Chicago shows you just how different from NYC and Boston it is - tract after tract after tract of workingman's divisions, and the huge slashes of the downtown grid.

It is, true to type, very flat here. The towers of downtown are startling in this context, springing up from nothing like Ayers Rock.

On a whim, I asked my cab driver if there was a memorial to Omaha beach in the city. He told me that if there were a memorial it should be on whatever island the beach was actually on, and that there is an Omaha in every state of the Union. Also, all those codenames were abbreviations anyway.

* My job does not actually involve saving the world, but I have decided to henceforth refer to it as though it does. Perhaps this will make it more fulfilling.

** Anyone know what that's called?

Happy new year, everyone. May this year be better than the last in every possible way.

Wrapping 2009...

I used to think Pyr was a pretty decent small press, but between Kay Kenyon and now Mark Chadbourn's The Silver Skull, I have to seriously question their editors' taste. This one was so bad I couldn't even finish, and he's signed up for a trilogy too. Now to see if Justina Robson's going off the rails.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman was very decent, but I didn't think particularly outstanding in either the writing or the treatment of the superhero genre. Very well executed, but it was basically Astro City done as a novel.

The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen is a collection of many of the things I hate about MFA litfic. On the one hand, it had a semi-interesting premise, somewhat interesting characters, and pretty decent wordsmithing (I liked Larsen's restraint). On the other hand, it tried to be complex and open-ended, and failed miserably, mostly by degenerating into a bog-standard pathos bath in the last quarter, before collapsing completely in the lamest climax ever in the last 10 pages. Pretty pictures and neat infographics, though.

I've been trying to get round to reading Perfume for the last 12 years or so, and finally succeeded. Not bad, but it struck me as a wee bit juvenile.

In cover-to-cover cookbooking, I started reading the Momofuku cookbook simply because it was the book of Chang, but it's actually a really good book. Chang (or at least Meehan channeling Chang) is a very readable writer in the Bourdain school, and the techniques in the book are very, very solid, with a few fantastic tricks. Aside from everything else, the definitive book of ramen has yet to be written, and this is probably the best stopgap there is at the moment. Highly recommended unless you're vegetarian.

Also, Japanese Kitchen Knives is really, really phenomenal. Not useful or interesting unless you're pretty maniacal about knifework, but just as the Momofuku book is a stand in for the ramen bible, this could be a stand in for the sushi bible. Also, knife pr0n!

Those Left Behind is Firefly candy. I know I'm late to the party. Chew is a highly promising Image cop book that shows all the signs of going the way of every other promising Image book ever - up for a couple story arcs then straight down the tubes. Cannibalism and weirdass scientific phenomena, decent but not particularly awesome execution.

Also, I spent a lot of time reading the new Rogue Trader, the first RPG I've attempted to read in a long, long time. Those of you who'd be interested in this have heard my rant already.

I feel I'm missing a couple of titles here, which will come to me eventually, but for now, the count for 2009 was:

Graphic novels: 27
Novels: 21
Non-fiction: 9 (including Rogue Trader)
Cookbooks: 3
Too awful to finish: 1 (not counting The Dark is Rising)

Presented at the forum on 2009 Year in Review, organised by The Online Citizen, 29 December 2009

2009 was a return to history. Men in White, written by three Straits Times journalists, appeared noisily in September, purporting to tell the ‘untold story’ of the PAP, including that of the ‘losers’. It was, however, one of the ‘victors’ who made an eye-catching critique of the book the following month. Yoong Siew Wah, former Director of CPIB and ISD, complained on his blog, Singapore Recalcitrant, that the authors had taken at face value a statement by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on Yoong’s alleged mishandling of an investigation into lawyer Francis Seow in 1971. The authors hastily apologised and promised to withdraw the offending point from subsequent prints of the book. For Yoong, now 82, reading Men In White was about restoring his reputation.

Younger Singaporeans have also been reading Men in White for political errors and suspicious silences, although for quite a different purpose. Before the book’s official launch, film-maker Martyn See posted an entry on his blog, responding to a preliminary news report on the book. Martyn raised two questions on the book’s credibility: that the report made no mention of Operation Coldstore, in which over a hundred leading leftists in Singapore were detained in 1963, and that the authors had not contacted two of the PAP’s main opponents in the early 1960s: Dr Lim Hock Siew and Dr Poh Soo Kai. In responding to Martyn’s queries, the authors, well, defended their work, stating that they did approach Dr Lim but he refused to be interviewed. They of course used his oral history interview at the National Archives of Singapore which many researchers are aware of, but this, I think, was not Martyn’s point. And there were many other instances of ‘history watching’. In a subsequent column in the Straits Times, one of the authors, Sonny Yap, lamented that the numerous salvoes, many in cyberspace, fired in their direction were ‘factually off the mark’.

Regardless of whether the allegations were true, I believe Sonny Yap missed the point. He should have been happy, rather than flabbergasted, that so many netizens, especially young Singaporeans, responded so acutely to a book on Singapore history. This is a country where Singaporeans born after the 1950s and 1960s are periodically reprimanded by the state for not showing interest in the country’s past. The responses to Men In White demonstrate that this is not entirely true. What is important is not whether the allegations were accurate, but that they were allegations. They revealed what histories, and whose histories, mattered to the Singaporeans born after independence. In comparison to the former ISD Director, their concerns have greater import.

I wish to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of young Singaporeans reading our country’s history today. This is an enterprise which is crucially important but also perilous, both academically and socially. Writers of history, whether it is historians or the participants, inevitably select their facts, interpret their data and make their claims. The readers likewise: how they read will be largely determined by their views and values, by the social and political context, by their age.

There is a tendency for young Singaporeans to read our past for inspiration and vilification. This is not surprising and is part of the enduring appeal of history. Inspiration because the past provides positive precedents, or heroes, of an earlier generation of Singaporeans (also young and idealistic then) struggling to make Singapore a better, fairer and more open society. Vilification because history also provides what appears to be proof of what some present day young Singaporeans want to believe – that the government is repressive, manipulative and narrowly neo-liberal. In short, we read Singapore history for Lim Chin Siong and Operation Coldstore.

This is to some extent unavoidable. I have had my own ‘honeymoon’ with Lim Chin Siong, this formidable, yet humble, political and labour activist who could bring 40,000 people to their feet with a few choice words of Hokkien, whose work was destroyed in the making of Malaysia. Lim Chin Siong has passed into legend in Singapore’s cultural imagination, which makes writing and reading about him doubly difficult.

One of the first living leftists I met in 2005 left a lasting impression. Walking up to him in Toa Payoh MRT station, he looked no different from many other ah peh in the graying estate. He firmly grasped my hand and lowered his head in greeting. I never forgot that sense of humanity he conveyed in that single moment. He was Lee Tee Tong, a labour unionist in the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union, who in 1963 stood and won in Bukit Timah (the old constituency of Lim Chin Siong), but never took his seat as he was arrested and detained without trial shortly after for 16 years. I interviewed Lee Tee Tong on a later occasion for over five hours about his life, work and politics.

Writing history for me is about getting ‘inside’ the past, achieving empathy and then crafting an independent narrative and analysis. I have researched on different facets of the Singapore left: trade unions, university political clubs and rural associations. I find a good number of possibilities for writing the subject. We can frame the left as offering the alternative ‘paths not taken’ to a different (maybe better?) Singapore. Or as pathbreakers whose work made possible the PAP’s success, visionaries whose ideas enabled the making of modern Singapore. Or as nationalists who were outmaneuvered in the geopolitics of the Cold War and then forgotten. Still, I am concerned with what the left did for Singapore and how that contribution has for so long been ignored.

The possibilities are closely related to the pitfalls. The left’s history is far richer than the themes of inspiration and vilification. The left fought for a union of Singapore and Malaya – in fact, this belief was unquestioned to a point which most young Singaporeans born into a sovereign state would have difficulty imagining. The left’s ideology was socialist, although that some radicals were less doctrinaire than others. Socialism as a doctrine entails a belief in radical change and transformation, of both nature and human nature, no less radical than the development pursued by the government since the 1960s. Will Singapore be necessarily better, fairer and more open under a socialist regime? I believe deeply in the need for greater social justice in Singapore; much of my research has been on marginalised groups in Singapore history. But I doubt the road of socialism leads to a just society any more than the highway of neo-liberalism.

These are aspects of the history of the left which we should also read and consider. I recognise the complete history is yet to be written, but at the same time, we have a moral duty to be more creative, more rigorous in the ways we explore our history. Above all, we need to ask new questions. Lee Kuan Yew gave a grudging stamp of approval to Men In White but still deemed it necessary to repeat his charge that Lim Chin Siong was a communist. I think most of us here have no interest in reviving that question, much less the answer. Each generation writes its own history but this cannot begin until we first ask new questions, questions for a new era, for a new purpose. And young Singaporeans cannot simply inherit the perspectives of the older generation.

That generation of leftists is already writing its own histories. Men In White was quickly followed by The Fajar Generation, a book by former members of the University Socialist Club in the 1950s and 1960s (a subject which I have also been working on separately). The Fajar Generation is a collective biography, a classic example of a generation writing its own history. But it also significantly blurs the line between biography and history because, as far as I know, it is the first instance where the participants have relied not just on their own memories, but also the colonial archives, to establish their views. Young Singaporeans who seek only inspiration and vilification in history will find much of both in The Fajar Generation. My suggestion is we read the book as a collective biography, and then ask ourselves, why are the former leftists now writing their histories, and what else do we want to know?

The politics of age lies between generations of Singaporeans. Another plane of the divide is on social history. In my interviews with leprosy sufferers, kampong dwellers, fire victims, and British base workers, I have come to sense something of the collective psyche of ordinary elderly Singaporeans – what they feel about the breaking events of our recent history; about politics under the PAP government; about the regimen of life and work in a ferociously developmental state.

I bring up social history because it provides new insights into the past, because it allows us to explore ‘politics’ more broadly, but also simply because we really haven’t spoken enough to our elders about the past. Our nation’s history is not simply about the struggle between the left and the Lee Kuan Yew group. One thing which struck me in my interviews with elderly people is the ambivalence in their memories of life, housing, family, work, and change in Singapore. Leprosy sufferers tell me that ‘our lives are bad but our luck is good’; they have been forcibly segregated from society and relocated from their homes several times in their lives. One victim of the 1961 Bukit Ho Swee fire wanted to find a new attap house to live in and did not want to move to an emergency HDB flat, yet recalls Lee Kuan Yew as very hiong as the prime minister in tackling the country’s challenges at the time; young Singaporeans, she insists, have had it much easier. Many elderly Singaporeans firmly support the development of Singapore and the authoritarian government which has made it possible, but are also aware of the personal and social price that they – we – have had to pay in the process. They are also the keepers of memories of events and people which can serve as a valuable counterpoint to the Singapore Story, which will help us to bridge not only generational, but also mental, divides. In listening to them, we realise that history is not painted in black and white, that there are many more ‘untold stories’ to uncover. We will find new ways to look at our history in the last 50 years which will enable us to re-imagine the future.