Goh Poh Seng

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Goh Poh Seng: Margin and Centre

Written by Jamie Lin
Dated 28 May 2021

It is 1968, and the days are heady in Singapore. Barely three years after it is cleaved from Malaysia, the country is still finding its feet. In January, the British announce a total withdrawal of troops “east of Suez,” bringing forward their exit by four years (Omar), a decision with significant economic consequences for the young nation. [i] Singapore’s fledgling defense forces are also still learning to fend for themselves, with the military conscription policy only introduced less than a year earlier. Through the mid-1960s, the country also saw “a remarkable period of student unrest” that centered on conflicting political allegiances at Nanyang University (Frost and Balasingamchow 426), and memories of inter-ethnic tension are still fresh among the populace following two riots that killed 36 and wounded 560 (Han) in 1964.

For Goh Poh Seng (b. 1936), a young doctor, thirty two years of age at the time and recently back from eight years spent in England and Ireland, the situation presents an intoxicating mix of trepidation and liberation. Separated from Malaysia and under the diminishing influence of the British, Singaporeans are feeling a palpable sense of living in a decisive time, where one could almost taste the “urge for freedom” in the air, a desire visible in the “action in the streets and on the work sites,” as well as the “demonstrations and riots” taking place (If We Dream Too Long xl–xli). “There was something theatrical, but at the same time entirely authentic, about the whole thing,” Goh reflects (xli).

Amid the upheaval, as a young nation finds its way, a young writer finds his voice. This is the year that Goh conceives and writes If We Dream Too Long (1972), his very first novel and winner of the inaugural fiction prize from the National Book Development Council in 1976. It is a novel about dislocation, about the perennial tension between constancy and change. By Goh’s own admission in the preface to the book, If We Dream Too Long is about “a young man who did not quite fit into this new [Singapore]” (xlii). Goh draws a parallel between the experiences of Kwang Meng, the main character, and that of “the outsider” in European literature and philosophy. Goh would continue to pen three other novels, The Immolation (1977), A Dance of Moths (1995), and Dance with White Clouds (2001) over the next three decades, yet this preoccupation with the outsider would always remain. [ii]

Margin

What is an outsider? Simply, an outsider is someone who does not feel like he or she belongs. Not just to particular organizations or professions, but to society itself. If We Dream’s main character, Kwang Meng, is a lower-middle-class clerk, taking after his father who worked as a clerk his entire life. Trapped in a job without prospects, Kwang Meng distracts himself with bar-hopping and drinking, eventually falling for a bargirl, Lucy. He lives an upended life, sleepwalking through the day at work and only coming alive at night, in the shadows of the city. His good friends Portia and Hock Lai, who are doing relatively well in comparison, offer him unsolicited advice: 

“You must pull yourself together, man, if you want to make it in this rat race... Just take a look at yourself, man. No socks, creased pants, old shoes; you’re not going to make it like this. You must remember that we didn’t make the world, we must accept its terms, its conditions and conventions, or we opt out. It’s as simple as that, old buddy.” (31)

Goh’s outsiders are marked by their physical distance from society, signalled most evidently by their inattention to dressing, or more simply, a lack of desire to invest meaning in the way they look. But appearances are just the outward expression of something deeper. Outsiders like Kwang Meng see through society’s terms, values, and prescriptions of appropriate thoughts and behaviours. This makes them keen observers of the idols to which people subject themselves. “How strange,” Kwang Meng observes, “[s]ome men require a certain thing to set them right—alcohol, a woman, politics, sports, money—without which they are all awry, as if something basic is out of place” (56). However, finding this thing only feeds the obsession further. They become “[i]ntense, dreadful, strange, absorbed with their world, shutting other windows of life out. They are strangely complete, but utterly unwholesome creatures” (56). Kwang Meng sees through the false promises of the “conditions and conventions” of the world (31). He is sympathetic to the way people hunger for something to “set them right,” a yearning for something to order their days and make them meaningful (56). But at the same time, he sees that finding the solution only creates new problems of its own.

Goh’s depiction of Kwang Meng shows that, to an outsider, it is not as “simple” as either accepting the world’s terms or opting out (31). In fact, the outsider is in some sense not truly “outside”; they are trapped within that “either-or” and alienated from either position. On the one hand, they see through the hollowness of the material and romantic (and a thousand other) pursuits of the people around them, that “[the] answer was not to be found in books… nor in drinking, nor in anything that he knew” (98). Where people see meaning and solidity in the social order, and the world as “fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational,” outsiders see “too deep” and “too much” into the fragility of social conditions and conventions, perceiving the social world as “essentially chaos” (Wilson 18). And yet, on the other hand, these outsiders cannot help but want to similarly commit themselves—to know that, in Kwang Meng’s words, “everything that he did, had meaning” (Goh, If We Dream 98). Despite their ambivalence, outsiders are as invested in the quest for meaning as those around them. 

Being neither able to adhere to social conventions nor to reject them altogether, outsiders are trapped between this either-or, and their struggle is a struggle for freedom. This is definitive of the outsider experience, for their “problem is the problem of freedom… a man becomes an Outsider when he begins to chafe under the recognition that he is not free” (Wilson 129). Where then does this yearning for meaning and freedom leave Kwang Meng? “He only knew that he did not know” (Goh, If We Dream 98).

*

Goh Poh Seng was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, in 1936. When he was a child, his paternal grandfather, an illiterate immigrant and a firm believer in education as “the most valuable asset,” had him earmarked for university education (Tall Tales and Misadventures 3). In April of 1953, they sent a 16-year-old Goh across the ocean to Blackrock College, just outside Dublin, to earn the qualifications to enter University College Dublin as a medical student. Sending Goh overseas to study medicine made “a big dent” in the family’s savings, and it was no surprise that Goh felt “a grave and costly responsibility” (3).

Goh would spend the next eight or so years away from home, eventually attaining the qualifications as a doctor, but it was a journey not without detours. At Blackrock, an English teacher named Father De Vertuile, who often had Goh read his essays to students, pulled him aside one morning and said that Goh had a gift, “bestowed by God and rare,” and asked if Goh had ever thought of becoming a writer (If We Dream xxxviii). For Goh, that was the moment that he became a “marked man” (xxxviii). After two years at Blackrock, Goh successfully enrolled at University College Dublin as a medical student. In Dublin, he was one of a small group of “conspicuous and exotic” foreign students at the time (Tall Tales 49). This, coupled with how he considered himself a poet, made him feel different—a sense of himself as an outsider was already slowly taking shape.

Three years into med school, Goh made the dramatic decision of leaving his studies to focus on his writing. He spent a “disastrous year” in a Dublin garret, producing “pretentious and stilted” prose and poetry while struggling to find the means to feed himself (If We Dream, xxxix). The struggle forced him back to his studies, and he eventually earned his medical degree, interning first at a small hospital in London and then at Johor Bahru General Hospital (now the Hospital Sultanah Aminah) in Johor.

Moving from Kuala Lumpur to Dublin, London, and then Johor, Goh finally settled in Singapore after marrying Margaret, a Singaporean. He spent 25 years in Singapore, writing three plays, three collections of poetry, and two novels, If We Dream Too Long and The Immolation, receiving the Cultural Medallion for his work in 1982. For his plays, Goh took pains to reflect the language of society around him. Having been away from Malaya for so long, the local vernacular was alien to Goh. He confessed to eavesdropping “shamelessly,” “listening and absorbing the speech of the man in the street” to depict how “colorfully Singaporeans expressed themselves” (If We Dream xlii). When his second play, When Smiles Are Done, successfully captured the nuances of Singlish, it made him proud.

In 1986, a failed venture, Rainbow Lounge, Singapore’s first live music and disco venue, prompted Goh to leave for Canada. The government had closed the venue because of a risqué remark made onstage by a member of the house band. He left for Vancouver that year, “misunderstood and disillusioned with the authorities” (Goh, Who Let in the Sky? 10). There, he started over, obtaining upgraded qualifications that allowed him to practise medicine in a new country. He moved his family eastwards across the expanse of North America to settle in Cow Head, a small outport town in remote Newfoundland, the only province where doctors could practice while awaiting their final qualifications. In 1990, he resumed city life in Vancouver after receiving a job offer there. While in Canada, he finished his last two novels, A Dance of Moths and Dance with White Clouds.

Over his lifetime, Goh lived in at least seven cities across three continents. His journeys to vastly different places undoubtedly helped him see cultures from an alien point of view, a trait that sharpened his poetic vision. But equally, it offered him a lived understanding of the experience of an outsider and the quest for ultimate meaning and freedom, an understanding that can be grasped through his prose.

Centre: Creating

Goh’s first response to questions of meaning and freedom lies in his depiction of artistry. The Immolation is set in an unnamed country that resembles post-1960s Vietnam. Thanh, the protagonist, has recently returned from unfinished studies in Europe when he decides to join the revolutionary movement against the government, which is seen as being irredeemably corrupt. The novel tracks Thanh’s involvement in the movement as he undergoes training and takes part in various operations in support of the cause. 

Throughout the novel, Thanh is haunted by an encounter he has at the Thing Hoai Pagoda. One day, Thanh is passing the pagoda when he sees the monk seated on the floor in a lotus position wearing a “serene smile, which surpassed those on the statues of the Lord Buddha at the pagodas and museums” (2). In growing shock, Thanh watches as the monk douses himself with gasoline and, maintaining his placidity, proceeds to light himself on fire: “The flames shot up, leaping higher and higher. At last, a wail issued from the crowd as the flames began to lick the body” (2). As the monk burns, Thanh again glimpses that face, “serene and smiling” (2). Searching for answers, Thanh visits the monastery and learns that the monk’s name is Tran Kim. He is gifted a wooden flute, one of the few possessions that Tran Kim had in the world. 

One of the first serious tasks Thanh is given as part of the movement is to join a protest. It is clear from the outset, however, that his commitment is uncertain. In the heat of the protest, as he is “swept along by the impersonal force of the crowd,” he feels disconnected from the cause as if the “desired metamorphosis had not yet taken place, and he felt somehow still on the periphery, an outsider” (60). As Thanh continues his training, this ambivalence continues; he realizes that, unlike others, he does not seem able to fully give himself over to the revolutionary effort. 

Later on, in a village where he receives his training, Thanh meets Troi, a young boy who plays the flute. He offers Tran Kim’s instrument for him to play:

He was only nine years old, but in that early night, in Ky’s hut, Troi played the bamboo flute with great artistry. The plaintive music wove a spell that enchanted the listeners. Thanh felt so moved by the music that he almost wept, for joy or for sadness he was not sure; maybe for both. This was Man’s supreme poetry. It was Man who cut the stem of the wild growing bamboo and fashioned it into that simple, yet ingenious instrument… Troi was a marvel. Man was a marvel. Thanh was filled with immeasurable wonder and love for Man. (95)

Goh describes the music as “supreme poetry,” and it is clear from the scene that for the moment, Thanh’s hesitations about the revolution and his participation in it are suspended. For the moment, in the company of artistry and beauty, these outsider questions of belonging and commitment become less immediate, less definitive.

Could Goh be suggesting—somewhat elliptically, in the vein of Keats—that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (Ode on a Grecian Urn)? That the very power of a flutist's melody is sufficient answer? At the very least, Goh’s depiction overlaps with another scene in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, where the outsider, Antoine Roquentin, is seized out of his Nausea, or existential anguish [iii], on hearing Sophie Tucker’s Some of These Days in a bar: “When the [singer’s] voice was heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish. […] [The music] filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am in the music” (22).

The value of artistry is reinforced later in the novel in a conversation with journalist-turned-revolutionary Quang Tuyen. As Thanh reflects on his inclinations towards poetry, he realizes that although poetic words “do not expiate,” they do soothe “the real thing you’re suffering from: man disease” (Goh, Immolation 182). Words cannot expiate because they are unable to fully embody and convey the horrors of the revolutionary experience, including that of death, that Thanh and his comrades are living through. But when poetic art takes the world of sense experience and gives it form, it introduces a certain order, purpose, even beauty, not unlike how crafting a flute involves ordering raw bamboo into a specific, coherent form. In Goh’s work, artistry returns agency to the outsider, bestowing the liberating ability to shape meaning out of chaos, the “man’s disease” that they suffer from.

Centre: Being

Goh’s novels also present a second response to the outsider’s questions that is deeper, yet also more quotidian. At the end of Thanh’s journey, after completing rigorous training, months of planning, and even participating in a firefight where he takes a life with a shot to a man’s temple, Thanh finds himself in a bar back at the capital, waiting for the appointed time to begin his final mission. It is at this point when he arrives at a surprising conclusion about the cause. Seized by this revelation, he looks for My, his fellow revolutionary and romantic interest, and confesses:

“I’ve fought for them. I’ve fought many battles. I’ve done all that they’ve asked of me. Isn’t that enough? I’ve done my share. And you too. You’ve done your share. So why can’t we have our lives to ourselves for a change? I think we deserve that.” (245–46)

Close to the end of the novel, the root reason for Thanh’s ambivalence about the cause becomes clear—he realizes that it should not be the revolution that supports and gives meaning to life, but life that makes the revolution worthwhile. Giving everything to the struggle is meaningful only if one desires the life that is made better because of it. The struggle itself, while “laudable,” is “not enough,” he realizes—one “must also live” (246, emphasis added). Trying to fight and to live at the same time is possible, but not “fight[ing] alone, without living, without caring to live” (248); it is “human that [people] should try to have some life of [their] own” (246).

Unconvinced, My insists that Thanh speaks like someone who has “lost heart.” She refuses his advances, believing that such a person cannot know the “truth,” and goes on with the mission (246). At the end of the novel, Thanh is a fugitive, running both from government forces as well as his fellow rebels. He goes to My’s mother—whom My abandoned when she joined the cause—and spends the rest of his life caring for her. Finally, the outsider who left the center for the margins to journey for months has come full circle. The life worth living is the one he rediscovers in the center; by “losing heart,” he finds the truth.

Earlier on in the novel, when Thanh seeks out the abbot to explain Tran Kim’s act of self-immolation, the abbot refuses Thanh’s characterization of Tran Kim’s actions as suicide, which he defines as “self-destruction” (38). Instead, the abbot speaks of self-immolation as a courageous “act of construction”—to “open their eyes to the injustices” (38). The act may have been materially destructive, but it was accomplished to draw attention to what needed to change, to point to the possibility of a more humane social order. And this is the reason Tran Kim smiled as he was lost in the flames, a smile that Thanh understands once he realizes what his own cause, what all his struggle, is for—to renew and inhabit life once more.

To flesh out this return from margin to centre in greater detail, we can turn to If We Dream Too Long and A Dance of Moths. Throughout If We Dream, the thoughts and actions of Kwang Meng grate against social conventions, whether around work, status, or even family. But in a rare moment, Goh describes Kwang Meng as free of these pressures, yet paradoxically in a setting that is steeped in references to conventions:

Dinner that night was an almost gay affair ….  The close and good spirit was unplanned. It just happened …. Their mother hovered around, almost incandescent with her presence. She, the patient, strong woman who had brought them up, cooked for them, washed their clothes, seemed stronger than ever. This was what it was all for, she seemed to convey. Their father was relaxed and content, as if he too agreed that this was what it was all for, all his struggles and troubles. The children realized all this, and behaved with the real freedom of children for once. Even Kwang Meng, smoking afterwards, felt as free as the smoke that curled up and up to melt into the air. (106)

The glimpse of freedom that Kwang Meng gets to experience, even if fleeting, arrives around a familial scene, a dinner shared with parents and siblings. Communion around a table involving the most primordial of needs is what offers transcendence—Goh seems to affirm that it is life within the conventions of the everyday that offer, if just for a moment, access to true freedom. Goh even details aspects of the mother’s maternal role that would be familiar to many of Singapore’s generation of baby boomers, describing chores like cooking, washing, and bringing the children up, demands that are assumed to fall on female shoulders. Similarly, the father’s “struggles and troubles” are earlier described to be linked to his role as the family’s breadwinner, in which he served as an under-appreciated clerk for decades (all he has to show for it is a fading celebratory photograph with his boss) (106). Yet, around the dinner table that particular evening, the atmosphere of freedom does not come about by doing away with such conventions. Even Kwang Meng himself, who so often feels the pressure of expectations from acquaintances and friends, as well as from living in such close quarters with his family, feels a sense of liberation within these constraints. In such a reinvigorated familial setting, freedom, Goh seems to say, has nothing to do with the presence or the absence of norms and conventions, but the way one inhabits a life despite, or within, them. [iv]

We witness a very similar affirmation of the meaning and freedom of a life within limits in A Dance of Moths. One of the two main characters, Kok Leong, has always despised his father’s lowly occupation as a toilet attendant, seeing his unquestioning submission to the job as a weakness, a clear sign of a lack of ambition or temerity to fight for himself (and indeed, his family). To Kok Leong, his father is the “epitome of the universal small man,” “unbelligerent,” “unrebellious,” completely incapable of showing “full-bloodedness” (53). The single time he feels any respect for his father is when he witnesses his father in a fit of rage; weary from caring for Kok Leong’s mentally ill sister, his father loses his temper and sweeps all of the household’s religious idols, joss sticks, and candles to the floor, shattering ancestral tablets and breaking statues of Buddha and Kwan Yin to pieces.

But we are given an insight into Goh’s reading of Kok Leong’s father when we discover that the father himself perceives his inaction not as a weakness, but as a strength. His seeming indifference to his plight is not due to a lack of perceptiveness, for he knows that his occupation is thought of by some as “the lowest of the low” (217) and scarcely different from that of the downtrodden jamban men who used to clear excrement from houses before the days of public sewage treatment. Yet, this does not mean a life bereft of hope and meaning, for the deeper reality is that “it required an intact will, a certain unshakeable strength, to accept life the way he did” (217, emphasis added).

Here Goh again reinforces the possibility of his third way of dealing with man’s disease—avoiding the tired dialectic of either taking up arms against meaninglessness or helplessly submitting to one’s prescribed role within the social order, but actively inhabiting life with all that it enables and limits, without hardening into either violence or resignation. In his writing, Goh centres on a kind of fully conscious, fully inhabited life within constraints that is his answer to the outsider’s questions of freedom and meaning. 

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Towards the end of his life, Goh met with a number of health issues. He was diagnosed with depression, Parkinson’s disease, a brain tumor (which turned out to be a scare), and colon cancer. In Who Let in the Sky?, his son, Kagan Goh, describes a conversation with Goh on the day of his colon cancer diagnosis:

“I have something important to talk about with you,” he says with dead seriousness. He has the demeanor of a man facing his mortality.

“What is it Dad?”

“I may not have much time left.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Listen to me, I need your help. Will you help me finish my memoirs?” 

I sit up, hearing the urgency in his voice. 

“I need to complete my life’s work before it is too late.” (41)

The Canadian poet Jamie Reid, a friend of Goh’s, recalls seeing Goh working through his “large collection of unfinished and unpublished manuscripts” in his final years, putting “his life’s work into some kind of order” (Goh, Who Let in the Sky? 19). Goh would continue to do so “until the work finally became too much for him” (19). Face-to-face with his mortality, Goh sought refuge in the legacy of his artistry, just like Thanh in The Immolation, who found transcendence in a flutist’s melody. Goh left himself behind in his plays, his novels, and his poetry, transmuting worlds into words that his loved ones could remember him by.

The family was given a brief respite when the cancer was stayed with one round of surgery. Yet, the depression and Parkinson’s continued to take a toll on his family, who were his primary caregivers. Even though he was growing frail, he refused to use a wheelchair and experienced as many as twelve fainting spells a day because of his low blood pressure. As a result of his falls, he had to have numerous stitches in his head and also suffered a broken arm. With his condition deteriorating, the family sought to move him to a nursing home where he could receive round-the-clock care. But Goh was not at all receptive. His son recalls one of his outbursts: “I am not going to a nursing home. All of you will abandon me. I have nothing in common with those old people. I will waste away and die alone there. I refuse to go and that’s final!” (53–54)

While the fear of being stranded in an alien environment, away from familiar faces, routines, and communities might seem commonplace, the loss this change posed may have been particularly acute for Goh, a man who took particular delight in family and the community around him. [v] The Gohs were known for throwing all manner of parties featuring “richly multicultural” groups, with Vancouver culturati rubbing shoulders with the Gohs’ close neighbors (14). Both on the page and in real life, Goh believed in living fully and deeply, finding joy in the routines and complexities of life and its relationships. He would not have survived a nursing home. 

In 2010, Goh Poh Seng passed away at the age of 73. By the time, Goh was fully a part of the cultures he lived in—he put down roots wherever he went, rising to esteem as a member of the Singaporean artistic community [vi], and as a key part of a vibrant Vancouver literary community (among the poets and writers to his dinner parties was George Bowering, Canada’s first poet laureate). 

In the year he turned 65, Goh published his last novel, Dance with White Clouds. In the novel, subtitled “a fable for grown-ups,” a very successful old man decides to run away from home on his sixtieth birthday. He is very wealthy, has a prosperous business and good relationships with his wife, children, and grandchildren, but his days have started to feel “monotonous and dull,” and his future, “an endless train of daily routines, safe and happy,” yet without “thrill” (11). A short time later, he packs his belongings, leaves his family a letter, and sets off in search of a new life. Over the next few years, the old man creates another, somewhat similar, existence, marrying a widower, ably raising her two young children, and building another successful series of businesses from scratch. But this, unsurprisingly, fails to satisfy. Eventually, we discover that what the old man is running away from is the fact of his eventual demise, and the tyranny of human mortality—“it cannot be that we are born simply to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, fuck, shit, work, and then die! There must be a greater purpose!” (209). As he struggles, he comes to understand

. . . [that] all men, through all time, must accept this, although they might never comprehend, that life itself was the only meaning to life. Why it came to be, why it ends, unknowable. […] [He] had been wrong to feel that he had squandered his life, that it had been badly lived, that he had failed. Indeed, he had tried to love the whole world, and it was all right to live a life burdened with the love of family, children, friends, strangers. (209–10)

Just like the old man, Goh’s own life and work offer an understanding, however personal, of how an existence full of “burdens” of love, whether for artistry or community, is sufficient response to the dislocations and concerns of the outsider within each of us. 

Notes

[i] By one estimate, British military spending made up a fifth of Singapore’s revenue at the time and had an effect on tens of thousands of jobs (Abshire 136).

[ii] This essay discusses Goh’s four novels and excludes his three plays and posthumously published short story collection.

[iii] In his preface to If We Dream, Goh admits to falling for “the prevailing intellectual and philosophical fashions: existentialism and the absurd” (xxxix). I do reference Sartre here, but I do not specifically seek to read Goh’s work through these lenses. For an analysis of Goh’s work in that vein, please refer to Chew’s “Fear of Falling”.

[iv] Is Goh therefore reinforcing pre-existing relationships of inequality with such depictions? It does not seem to be the case, as his narratives are very sympathetic to outsider concerns that acknowledge the fragility and contingency of social norms. There is, however, a clear prerogative given to the individual’s ability to negotiate meaning and freedom within the limits they inhabit, a right which also extends to the individual’s assessment of whether this negotiation crosses the line into disempowerment.

[v] This does not mean that Goh’s relationships were free of tensions. In Who Let in the Sky?, Kagan Goh reveals how his father’s stubbornness was a source of strife. A particularly difficult episode saw Goh, wheelchair-bound at the time, break out of his own home by taking a hammer to a wooden fence. (He had been made to stay home as his wife was in the hospital and unable to care for him.) But despite this, it seems that Goh always knew the route to happiness and meaning were to be found in and through the messiness of human relationships, in being together rather than apart.

[vi] Among other things, Goh was one of the first chairmen of the National Theatre Trust and the vice president of the National Arts Council.

Works Cited

Abshire, Jean. The History of Singapore. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

Chew, Sim Wai. “Fear of Falling: Existentialism and Class Consciousness in Goh Poh Seng’s A Dance of Moths.” SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, vol. 50, no. 1, May 2017, pp. 711–82.

Frost, Mark Ravinder, and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. Singapore: A Biography. Editions Didier Millet, 2009.

Goh, Kagan. Who Let in the Sky?: A Son’s Tribute to His Father Goh Poh Seng’s Courageous Struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. Celestial, 2012.

Goh, Poh Seng. A Dance of Moths. Select Books, 1995.

---. Dance with White Clouds. Asia 2000, 2001.

---. If We Dream Too Long. National University of Singapore Press, 2010.

---. Tall Tales and MisAdventures of a Young Westernized Oriental Gentleman. National University of Singapore Press, 2015.

---. The Immolation. 2011.

Han, Jamie. “Communal Riots of 1964.” Infopedia, https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_45_2005-01-06.html. Accessed 6 Dec. 2020.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats.” Poetry Foundation,  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn. Accessed 3 Dec. 2020.

Omar, Marsita. “British Withdrawal from Singapore.” Infopedia,  https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1001_2009-02-10.html. Accessed 30 Nov. 2020.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New Directions, 2007.

Wilson, Colin. The Outsider: The Classic Exploration of Rebellion and Creativity. Reprint edition. TarcherPerigee, 2016.

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