Desarrollo de la parte experimental

An English-language Singaporean novel that incorporates no home in Singapore is a rarity.52 Singapore dominates the fictional landscaping of home in the texts primarily considered in this thesis: the vast majority of Singaporean protagonists in these novels reside on the island.53 An exception to this pattern is Chiah Deng in Mammon Inc. who lives abroad. Nevertheless, she does have a family

Singaporean home. In all the core texts, the central characters’ Singaporean homes are either specifically mapped or are simply referred to as being in Singapore (see below).

In this section, it is argued that Singaporean residences reinforce nationalist state discourses about ‘home’ being in Singapore. Nevertheless, passing social comments from home bases and their environs can offer some critiques of the nation.

52 A novel that exceptionally does not include a Singaporean home is The Immolation (1977) by Goh Poh Seng.

53 There are many other protagonists’ who are characterized as having homes in Singapore in additional English-language Singaporean novels that are not focused on this thesis. They include Ah Leng in Son of a Mother (1973) by Michael Soh; Angela Toh in The Serpent’s Tooth (1982) by Catherine Urn; Boon Yin in Scholar and the Dragon (1986);

Mui Ee in The Teenage Textbook or the Melting of the Ice Cream Girl (1988) by Adrian Tan;

In addition, historical novels set in Malaya that depict homes on the mainland Peninsular tend to include Singaporean abodes. For instance, Rex Shelley in his quartet tends to depict characters moving between Singapore and the Malayan mainland.

A Precisely Mapped Home and its Environs

Protagonists1 homes are set in specific Singaporean locations in several novels.

These include the abodes of Kwang Meng in Tiong Bahru (If We Dream Too Long); Holden Heng in Cuppage Road (The Adventures of Holden Heng);

Abraham Isaac in Katong, followed by Too, Payoh (Abraham’s Promise); Suwen in the Cluny Road neighbourhood (Fistful of Colours)] Foo Wing Seng in Ghim Moh (Heartland); and the married residence of Yin Ling in affluent Rochester Park (Following the Wrong God Home). Does such precise mapping have any political significance?

These clearly located homes have national significance. They often indicate housing type. As shown in the last chapter, such portrayals of housing can be related to the state’s management of land and to government housing policies. Precisely situated homes have other national significance. They are recognizable to readers familiar with Singapore and can provide the base from which journeys around the nation occur.

In this section, a novel that firmly grounds the protagonist’s home and escapades in recognizable areas and streets of the newly independent island nation is examined. In If We Dream Too Long (henceforth Dream), Kwang Meng’s home and his many jaunts from it are described in such detail that they can be traced on the Singapore Street Directory (2002). Yet, surprisingly, published literary scholarship about the novel has given little attention to the

textual references to Singapore’s landscape. In the following analysis, it is argued that location of Kwang Meng’s home and his trips around the island nation facilitate social and political commentary. It is also suggested that the variety of geographical reference points largely affirms the new national territory of Singapore in a novel published only seven years after Singapore become fully independent.

At the time of the novel’s publication, the Tiong Bahru estate was one of the recent 1960s high-rise constructions subsidized by the government. The flagship development’s national profile is indicated by its later inclusion in the memoirs of the former Prime Minister (2000: 119) and in Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh’s history of the national landscape (1995: 95). Kwang Meng’s response to his accommodation type is ambivalent. When he visits a neighbouring couple’s flat and sees their tasteful creation of a 'home’ (129), he recognizes such a flat’s

‘potential’ to be nice (Wagner 2005: 43). Yet he also feels that his family’s apartment is a ‘[pig]styJ (129) to which he can invite his neighbours. This

ambivalence, which can be identified through his different reference to ‘home’, is neither a ringing endorsement nor a critique of the state’s nationalistic home- building programme. It therefore presents a picture of the nationally typical accommodation without being nationalistic.

The location of Kwang Meng’s home, and some of his trips, are likely to be, to use Anderson’s terminology, ‘familiar’ to readers cognizant of Singapore.

The Tiong Bahru estate is even specified to be near the General Hospital, a recognizable landmark for people who have lived in Singapore. Kwang Meng’s

journeys from home to other parts of the island include Changi Beach (on the East Coast); MacRitchie Reservoir (to the centre); and the docks at Tanjong Pagar (south). These destinations, which situate the narrative on different compass points of the ‘national horizon’, are also ‘familiar’ places to any

Singaporean resident. The former two locations are popular leisure destinations and the latter is an economic hub. Such familiarity with the national geography may create a sense of national space.

Some of Kwang Meng’s itineraries are closely described, which is curious given the small size of the island and its consequent accessibility. The notion of distance, within a national framework that Moretti (1998: 22) identifies in the trips portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen, may have relevance to Dream here.

Moretti notes the measurability of the journeys in terms of miles and time, and relates them to national space. In Dream, a sense of distance across the

geographically small entity of Singapore is conveyed through the descriptions of Kwang Meng’s modes of transport and of routes detailing road names. In

addition, the widespread Singaporean locations in the text firmly ground the novel in the new island nation. The strong sense of Singaporean location in the novel helps to make the alienation that Kwang Meng cannot shake off at the end of the novel (Philip Holden: forthcoming) closely linked to Singapore as well as to urban modernization in general.

Kwang Meng’s meanderingsfrom home also facilitate descriptions of 1960s Singapore. These accounts can combine both social and political

observations. For instance, when he starts a trip to Changi beach he notices the

distinctive rods of washing hanging out of residents’ windows. Later, when on the bus heading for the coast, Kwang Meng becomes aware of political prisoners working in Changi Prison’s vegetable plot ‘in the blazing sun’. He sees the ‘tiny grey figures’ stop to watch his bus move past, and thinks:

those fierce young men, refusing to recant, sticking out six, seven years for some idea, some ideal; don’t they know it’s useless? Their people, the people whom they believe they were fighting for, going to prison for, have forgotten them, are on their way to the sea. (71-72)

Here he alludes to the imprisoned left-wing leaders and politicians who were arrested without trial in the 1960s, until they confessed to having Communist allegiances. By mentioning them, readers are quietly reminded of these

‘forgotten’, little-publicized, incarcerated figures. The text builds a sense of connection with the nameless prisoners as Kwang Meng observes them and they, in turn, stop to look at the bus. The description of them is ambiguous. The adjective ‘fierce’ could be read as meaning that the men are dangerous or that they are brave, whilst the adjective ‘useless’ might refer to their misguided belief in Communism or, conversely, justice, if their innocence is assumed.

When Kwang Meng has a day trip to the Malaysian coast, the national border of Singapore is described. Kwang Meng goes through the customs and

immigration ‘barriers’ after he crosses the Causeway (102). The vivid description of the landscape that he notices on the other side, including the ‘virgin land’ that gives off the ‘smell and sight of pioneering’ (103), indicates his excitement. This sentiment at the crossing resonates with Moretti’s description (1998: 35) of international borders as sites of ‘adventure’.

However, the ties with pre-independent Malaya are also conveyed.

Kwang Meng refers to the Causeway as the ‘umbilical cord connecting Singapore to the mainland of Malaya’ (102). This image of a nurturing mainland is at odds with Lee Kuan Yew’s image of the independent Singaporean house. It also goes against the idea of the birth of the Singaporean nation in 1965. Goh Chok Tong later (1986),54 later reflecting on Singapore’s unplanned sovereign status at Independence, uses metaphors that imply the severed umbilical cord:

Singapore's birth was ... a painful Caesarean operation done without anesthesia.

Older Singaporeans were convinced that the newborn Singapore was not meant to survive. But, like a Spartan baby left overnight under a cold open sky, it did....

it did.

In addition, Kwang Meng’s friend, Hock Lai, implies that Singapore is still joined to Malaysia when he refers to the jaunt as going ‘up-country’ (10).

In this analysis of Dream, it has been shown that the specific location of Kwang Meng’s flat makes the central home in the text recognizably Singaporean, thereby effectively affirming political metaphors linking Singapore with home. In addition, the detailed descriptions of Kwang Meng’s trips mark out recognizable national terrain from this home base. Nevertheless, some ambivalent

sociopolitical comments undermine various state nationalist discourses

concerning housing, the need to inter communists for national security, and the PAP’s independent management of Singapore. Thus, the mapping of home both affirms and gently probes a variety of state discourses through the lens of home and its environs.

54 The speech T h e Second Long March’ was delivered at the Nanyang Technological Institute, August 1986 and is reproduced in Alan Chong (1991:124).

Singaporean Homes Without Addresses

There are several characters’ homes that are emphatically set in Singapore but are not given addresses. These include the abodes of Ricky Tay (Ricky Star), Vincent Tan (Raffles Place Ragtime), Chris Tan (Peculiar Chris), Mei (Foreign

Bodies), Nick (tangerine), and Chiah Deng (Mammon Inc.). Can such vaguely located homes have political significance?

In many cases, homes that are set on the island without specified

addresses make pointed references to the Singaporean location. In this section, it is argued that homes generally located in Singapore can be used to raise nationally relevant issues. Although only tangerine is analysed immediately below, the Singaporean homes mentioned in many of the other novels are considered later in this thesis (for example, the protagonist’s residence in Peculiar Chris is analysed at the end of this chapter and that in Mammon Inc. in Chapter Five).

The national award-winning novel tangering5 is considered here because no scene is set in the protagonist’s home. There are only fleeting recollections of

‘home’ as the protagonist, Nick, travels in Vietnam. The actual locations of his various childhood homes, and his current abode in Singapore, are not specified.

There are more than forty references to the word ‘home’ in the novel.

Whilst, in a few instances, Nick refers to Vietnamese people’s abodes, he most

55 tangerine won the Singaporean Literature Prize in 1996.

commonly uses the term to refer to Singapore: be it his domestic life in the city- state, Singapore itself, or a dovetailing of his abode and nation. On the one hand, the frequent associations between home and Singapore resonate with state discourses of Singapore as home. On the other hand, the references that he makes to the national home can hint at disjuncture with public facilities and state policies. He recalls that ‘years ago’ as a teenager he would go to the beaches near Changi at ‘home’ (57). ‘But he had outgrowri sitting, listening, and watching the waves and jets coming and going ‘or perhaps he had not - simply not having the luxury of time anymore’ (emphasis added).56

More politically, a distinction occurs between Singaporean citizens and the state when he recalls watching national television news at home about the

bombing of Vietnam during the Vietnamese War. The national and domestic home materially intersects through his memory of the broadcast of foreign affairs through a domestic television set. In the Vietnamese War Crimes Museum, Nick reflects that the journalism he was exposed to from ‘reading dispatches from one party in the conflict, seeing things through the eyes of American media men and through the door frames of American-built helicopters’ (44). He also attributes his pro-American attitude to his failure to avert his eyes from the broadcast. With this recollection, he gently questions Singapore’s pro-American stance during the war and his own unquestioning attitude. Furthermore, he remembers his

grandmother’s unspoken dissent from it, for, as she watched the bombs being released from the crafts, she was ‘shaking her head in pity’ (40).

56 East Coast Park, on East Coast Parkway, is the largest park in Singapore on the east coast of the island.

In summary, the dominant fictional landscape of home is Singaporean in the principal novels considered in this thesis. This resonates with the territorial focus on Singapore highlighted by Shirley Lim (2003: 214). Similarly to Lim, this study finds that the location of many protagonists’ dwellings in the nation-state home indicates some concurrence with the government’s rejoinders that Singapore is home. However, whilst homes are often located in Singapore, social commentary about the home and its environs can put forward alternative viewpoints, be it about political prisoners or about the government’s support of America during the Vietnamese War. Having considered the mapping of home in some English- language Singaporean novels, the significance of remaining in or departing from the Singaporean home will now be considered.