Jeremy Tiang

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Gui Weihsin
Dated 28 May 2021

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, short story author, playwright, and translator. While his plays and translation work lie outside the scope of this critical introduction, it is fitting to begin with a brief discussion of Tiang’s thoughts regarding translation and drama because they may illuminate some important topics and concerns that appear in his prose fiction. In “Many Englishes, Many Chineses,” Tiang describes his state of mind when translating Chinese works into English as being “constantly on the alert, ready to challenge assumptions of what is ‘normal,’ including one’s own.” The discomfort arising from encounters with something outside his own “comfort zone of ‘standard’ Mandarin” is due to the side-lining and “erasure” of other non-Mandarin Chinese spoken languages or dialects such as Hokkien or Teochew in Singapore during the 1980s and 1990s. For Tiang, “the solution to re-centre, to re-familiarize” what has been obscured or side-lined, “and so to enlarge the range of my knowledge, rather than to stay within the familiar.” This is a far cry from the notion that translation is simply a matter of finding the best words in a target language to express the meaning of words in a source language. Tiang regards translation as a means of finding out and then sharing knowledge about people, places, and ways of thinking and being that may have been erased or pushed to the edges of public consciousness. Translation plays a part in bringing stories of those who may have been forgotten or ignored back to the centre of our attention. This in turn challenges our assumptions about what is normal or the status quo in both our use of language and, on a larger level, in our social lives.

In the preface to his play “The Last Days of Limehouse” (2018) about the original Chinatown in the East End of London, Tiang writes that “the archival materials” he and his collaborators found about this enclave “told of a vibrant, thriving community that had been an integral part of London’s fabric, yet there was virtually nothing left of it” (34). Determined not to let this important aspect of London’s multicultural history fade into obscurity, Tiang decided that “if the Chinatown had not survived in fact, we could at least tell the stories of its inhabitants” (34). By dramatising the lives of Limehouse’s Chinatown inhabitants during its waning days, Tiang uses both archival research and an empathetic imagination to craft characters who articulate multiple perspectives about the past, present, and future of this soon-to-be-demolished community. He re-creates their stories as testimonies to what once existed in Limehouse’s Chinatown, giving voice to unrealised possibilities that might have preserved some of the enclave’s cultural and architectural heritage.

Moving from stage to page, Tiang comments in an interview with Joanne Leow that he sees physical and social space as closely connected. Most of the stories in It Never Rains on National Day “involve people being out of place,” in situations where they “don’t feel they belong” that in turn raise questions about “who gets to belong, who decides who belongs where, and how wide can the boundaries stretch of things like community or country.” His fiction incrementally stretches these often unseen boundaries that define our sense of societal and national belonging. For Tiang, writing can be a way of critically examining “the spaces we’re in,” to “maybe enlarge them a little bit” even if it may not be “big enough to have major change.” What we gather from these remarks about translation and drama is that Tiang is interested in the connections between spaces and languages and memories; he also wishes to bring the histories and life stories of those who have been obscured or marginalised by the status quo back into the spotlight. In the process, Tiang moves both himself and readers out of our comfort zones so that we can think about social inequalities and hierarchies that may at first seem invisible or intangible.

Tiang’s It Never Rains on National Day (2015) begins with an epigraph by novelist Kate Atkinson: “Thresholds are safe, but unfortunately you can’t stay on them forever.” This gives us a clue that the short stories explore the idea of thresholds as physical and social spaces and the movement into and out of thresholds as comfort zones. While the stories are not tightly interwoven, there are a handful of recurring characters whose development can be traced. Three of the stories feature Sophia, a Singaporean woman who marries an Englishman, Nicholas. Two of her stories, “Sophia’s Honeymoon” and “Sophia’s Party,” bookend the collection, while the third, “Sophia’s Aunt,” appears near the midpoint and marks an important turning point in Sophia and Nicholas’s lives. 

The first story sees Sophia on her honeymoon in Zurich, a threshold period during which she recovers from her “flurry” of a wedding that seemed like “a machine that would not turn off” (2), and begins discovering more about her husband Nicholas and life as a newlywed. Marrying Nicholas, an investment banker whose career is ascending, means giving up her own job at Deloitte, which seems to cause Sophia to feel inferior and insecure: when introducing herself she “has to stop herself saying” she is “just a consultant” (4). Nicholas, insisting that they socialise with his business associates even during their honeymoon, no longer indulges Sophia as much as before because “he is no longer wooing her, and her function has accordingly changed” to being the junior partner in “a handsome couple” who “radiate[s] success” (3). Unable to bear a growing sense of helplessness and sullenness, Sophia runs away from a night at the opera and winds up lost in the Zurich streets before Nicholas finds her. Although Sophia is too panicked to realise it, this act of “losing control” and spontaneous rebellion “might be the last moment she is fully herself” (10). In the second story, several years after their honeymoon Sophia is in Beijing looking after an ailing Nicholas who awaits a heart transplant that he is unable to receive either in Singapore or Britain. In Beijing Sophia is out of her comfort zone both socially and linguistically and must rely on her aunt, a doctor who “knows someone in the heart work-unit” (71), to arrange Nicholas’s medical care. Both husband and wife are aware that “they could never, on their own, have negotiated their way into this hospital, not without the aunt to speak to certain people” (72) and translate complex medical terms from Chinese into English. Although Nicholas’s operation succeeds, Sophia is troubled to learn that her husband’s new heart almost certainly came from an executed prisoner, leaving her to wonder “How can someone in that position really consent?” (85). Their being complicit in and benefitting from state-sanctioned organ harvesting creates a persistent uneasiness, as if “a strange new animal has taken up residence inside Sophia,” which “only rears its head if looked at directly, but otherwise remains dormant, only noticeable from its cold weight against her gut” (89). Although it is not clearly stated, we may reasonably infer that this uneasiness about the heart transplant’s ethical and legal rectitude contributes to the couple’s existing marital unhappiness mentioned in the third and final story.

“Sophia’s Party” takes place on Singapore’s National Day; unlike the first two stories it presents Nicholas’s perspective as an outsider who finds the pomp and pageantry of the National Day parade “discomfiting, mawkish” (171). Sophia, on the other hand, has gotten into her stride as host and organiser, “decorating” their Tanjong Pagar flat with “red and white pennants,” “a large Merlion balloon” (169) and inviting friends over for a dinner party “run with the military precision of a parade” like the one unfolding on TV (173). Beneath the spectacle of the parade recounting Singapore’s national story, glimpses of other stories that have been left out of the celebratory narrative appear. Joy, a Eurasian, is sceptical of the TV announcer’s affirmation of “multi-racialism Singapore style” when Chinese, Malay, and Indian schoolchildren are performing because “the only category available to her on forms is ‘Other’” (180). Nicholas remembers that some years before his recent heart transplant he left Sophia and Singapore because he felt that “this country, it suffocates you, if you aren’t careful” (183). Despite their present reconciliation, Nicholas “wonders sometimes how long they will stay in this country, and how long they will remain together” (184), foreshadowing potential marital problems ahead. Yet the most important absence is mentioned almost casually early in the story: “their domestic helper Veronica has been given the evening off and instructed not to return before midnight—not just so the guests can be sure it was Sophia who cooked, but also because her windowless room off the kitchen is needed as a staging area” (168). Sophia’s dinner party, like Nicholas’s heart transplant in the second story, requires the removal of someone beneath the married couple in the social hierarchy. Sophia’s carefully staged appearance as a capable and consummate host and chef depends on the physical and social erasure of Veronica, although in the second story they depend on another domestic helper like Veronica who “comes round twice a week to clean” (86) their flat while they are in Beijing for Nicholas’s operation.

This erasure of labouring bodies is driven home in “National Day,” the story that precedes “Sophia’s Party.” Here we learn that Veronica, Sophia’s domestic helper, is dating a migrant worker who is going with some friends to watch the National Day fireworks from and stay overnight on St. John’s Island. The group’s reflections on their situation reveal the plight of these workers in Singapore. Their trip is an “escape” from their “dormitories, the noise and stink of eight bodies pressed into each small room” (151). One of them has recently lost a leg when a “high-tension steel cable snapped and swung free” (165) but insists on coming along although “the skin on his wound is so fragile still” (164). Even the momentary “flicker” of satisfaction “at having operated the cranes and laid the bricks” of Singapore’s waterfront buildings they notice on their ferry ride is undermined by the realisation that they could never “afford [the] admission fee” to enjoy any of those attractions like the Gardens by the Bay (153). On St. John’s Island the workers are rudely reminded of their marginal status when they are confronted by a Singaporean youth group leader from the adjacent campsite. He indignantly complains that his own group “shouldn’t have to put up with” the “illegal activity” of the workers “after paying for the use of our campsite” and threatens to call the police to remove them and revoke their permits (161). While the Singaporean man eventually backs off, his hostility sours the workers’ fireworks viewing as they are acutely aware that the country and its celebrations “are not for us, and we see now that we were mistaken in thinking we would be able to enjoy them, they are as foreign and untouchable as the gleaming buildings across the bay” (164-65). Unlike the Singaporean characters in other stories for whom threshold spaces offer some degree of temporary comfort and even mobility, the migrant workers are constrained to a social threshold that degrades their mental and physical well-being. They are not included in Singapore’s ascendant narrative of growth and development despite having literally built and “brought the great city into being” (153), just like Veronica and the other domestic helpers that keep Singapore’s households in order while their employers enjoy a cosmopolitan lifestyle. By placing “National Day” before “Sophia’s Party,” Tiang gives the migrant workers’ voices priority. Their narrative of toil and pain serves as a figurative foundation and framework for the conviviality of Sophia’s dinner party that closes the short story collection.

The toil and pain of other Singaporeans who do not enjoy the same middle-class stability as Sophia and her friends are also depicted sympathetically in some of Tiang’s uncollected short fiction. These characters’ internal struggles are often reflected in the physical spaces they inhabit. In “HOPE,” a pregnant and divorced mother of two children tries to earn some money by “thread[ing] pink plastic strings through” as many “clear plastic bags” as possible for the neighbourhood drinks seller, who “pays her $6 for every hundred bags” (71). This meagre income parallels the family’s meagre living quarters: at night “all three of them” are crammed “on mattresses in the living room” of their rented flat, “carefully laid out so they just fit into the available space” (75). Anxious to qualify for the government’s HOPE scheme that will give her a grant to buy her own flat provided she has no more children, the mother makes a hospital appointment for an abortion. Although “she tries not to think” about her impending operation, her sadness is expressed symbolically by the ringing bells of a nearby church that are “slicing right through her” (76).

“Terminal” is narrated by a cleaner assigned to Changi Airport’s meticulously designed Terminal 3. While he is apparently satisfied with his job, certain details hint at some uncertainty and ambivalence beneath his contentment. Tending to the terminal’s Butterfly Garden attraction, the cleaner muses that the insects are “trapped in an area even tinier than the two-room flat I share with my parents”; the butterflies are purely ornamental because “even the plants are sculpted and culled by the gardening team, so it’s not like they’re doing anything meaningful by spreading pollen” (158). When he beats other airport staff to win the annual Cleaning Incentive Scheme award, all he receives is “three hundred Changi dollars” that can only be spent at airport shops and a certificate printed “on thin paper” where even his name “was spelled wrong” (159). The narrator’s tiny living space suggests that he and his parents are not doing well financially. Like the trapped butterflies, his job as a cleaner is functionally cosmetic and does not offer any meaningful fulfilment nor room for advancement. The recognition he gets from the airport management for being an excellent worker is ultimately perfunctory and insulting. The space of the carefully manicured airport, where “everything is so perfect,” engulfs the narrator’s sense of self, such that sometimes on days off “I come and hang out here because Orchard is too far away, and where else could I go that doesn’t cost money” (160). Finally, heartbroken by a flight attendant who rejects his affection, the narrator shares some chocolate truffles (purchased with his Changi Airport dollars) with another cleaner, ignoring the manager’s calls on their mobile phones and “childishly thrilled to have stolen a moment from the day” (165), in a brief act of rebellion.

“Visit” is about an even more daring act of rebellion. A careworn mother narrates a sudden, night-time visit by her son who was most likely detained without trial under the Internal Security Act but has escaped and returned home briefly to make plans for fleeing the country. The son’s predicament is revealed through a subtle piece of dialogue. When a police officer confronts the mother after her son’s departure and calls him “a dangerous criminal,” she refuses to reveal his whereabouts and flatly responds, “If he’s a criminal why don’t you charge him with something?” (65). This hints that her son was being held without any formal charges or proper arraignment, possibly for long-term interrogation or until he made a confession that satisfied the authorities. Unable to speak directly about her fear and love for her son, the mother instead talks to him about physical spaces past and present, “the words forcing themselves out” (61) of her mouth as she draws out her remaining moments with him. She remembers the “chicken and duck farms” in the vicinity where she used to take him for walks as a boy and “the kampung” that was “near the causeway,” all since cleared out for urban development (61). Even “a field outside” their block that was there when he was detained, “a funny-shaped patch of green where the neighbourhood teenagers played football after school” (60), will soon be replaced by new residential blocks “growing like mushrooms” that “will be at least forty storeys” high (61). The mother’s memories of these places are an elegy for their previous life together as a family; she knows she will never see her son again after he steps out of their flat. Her resignation and loneliness are depicted at the end of the story also in spatial terms: “when the new flats were tall enough, they would block my view of Johor, filling my entire horizon, walling me in” (66).

Detention without trial happens to two characters in Tiang’s novel State of Emergency, which takes place in Malaysia and Singapore from the 1940s to the 2010s. The novel, as Tiang remarks in an interview with Jini Kim Watson, can be read as six interlinked short stories with relationships between some of the characters providing important guiding threads. Tiang’s novel shows that the state’s power to indefinitely hold anyone in custody without due legal process—a legacy of British colonial anti-insurgency laws—has the potential to be used unjustly and with impunity against individuals without ideological motivations. It is telling that the novel begins with an epigraph from the German philosopher Walter Benjamin: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Or, as one character mentions offhandedly, “there’s always an emergency somewhere” (148) justifying the continued use of exceptional measures by state authorities. Two characters, Siew Li and her niece Stella, are detained because of their desire to help those who are oppressed at different moments in Singapore’s history: the former in 1956 after the quashing of student unrest in Chinese middle schools, the latter in 1987 as part of Operation Spectrum initiated to suppress a supposed Marxist conspiracy. Despite a separation of thirty years, the similarities between their experiences of indefinite detention and those of their families reveal how little has changed in Singapore’s underlying social and political climate. Siew Li in the 1950s is moved by “the idea of actually making a difference,” that she and her fellow left-wing student activists are “part of a chain of progress, every link of which was vital” (46) and they have to seize the “chance to blaze through the world and make it fair again” (47). These sentiments are echoed in the 1980s by Stella, who through her Catholic church is “making a difference to the lives of others” (158) by helping the poor and needy. She is “aware that they all lived on a small island, and it was necessary to pull together and help each other out” (158). The fact that Stella’s “politics were socialist, not communist” do not seem to matter to her interrogators, who think that her aunt Siew Li, “a known terrorist,” could have somehow radicalised Stella despite her physical absence (181). Their individual detention and political persecution cause suffering for their families too. After Siew Li flees Singapore for Malaysia in 1963 to avoid being detained again, her husband Jason becomes increasingly withdrawn and cold towards their children. He does “nothing but lose himself in work each day, then the newspapers and TV afterwards”; “he put food on their table . . . and paid for their schooling” but “that was as far as duty went” (22). Jason, a civil servant, “had their future planned out, their fortunes set to rise along with the new country’s” (25-6) but his carefully planned world falls apart after Siew Li leaves. Even when she starts writing letters, they are “all addressed to the children, not a single one to him. As if he’d never existed” (28), compounding the family’s disintegration. Similarly, Stella ends up “admitting to all those things” she had not actually done and stunning her family and their neighbours with her televised confession about being a communist (200). Her coerced confession is the result of her prolonged detention that caused her father’s mental and physical health to deteriorate terribly and endangered her cousin Janet’s husband’s political career. Janet’s reprimand to Stella—“This isn’t just about you. We’re all involved now” (195)—drives home the human cost of detention without trial that immiserates not just the detainees themselves but also their loved ones, even leading to irreconcilable rifts within a family. 

Another important theme in Tiang’s novel is the need to bring to light histories that are in danger of being obscured or forgotten and to bear witness to the suffering of those who lived through those histories. While many Singaporean readers may be aware of Operation Coldstore in which Lim Chin Siong and other left-wing politicians were detained, fewer may know about Operation Pechah that also took place in 1963 several months later. It is this second round of mass detention that forces Siew Li to flee to Malaysia, because she learns that, this time, even legally elected Members of Parliament like her friend Lay Kuan have also been put away. No left-wing politician or activist will be spared or left to advocate for their release. Siew Li reflects with painful irony how “the Cambridge-educated lawyer who’d claimed to be fighting for them in detention was now leading the main party, and disposed to detaining people himself” (69), a reference to the political expedience of the man who would become Singapore’s first prime minister. A second tragic event the novel brings to light is the December 1948 Batang Kali massacre, where twenty-four men suspected of being communists or communist sympathisers were rounded up and killed by British soldiers in a Malayan village. Nam Teck, the protagonist of Chapter Three, lost his father in this massacre when he was a boy. He and his mother are relocated to a New Village designed by the British to prevent ordinary civilians from contacting or aiding the Malayan communists fighters in the jungle (the Ma Gong). Nam Teck only learns the truth about these killings from his mother after he has moved to Kuala Lumpur as an adult: “They were all thrown into a shallow grave just outside the town. . . . Twenty-four men shot, just like that, and all our houses burnt” (97). However, because “no one in the city had ever wanted to hear” (103) about what happened at Batang Kali, Nam Teck finds no sympathy for his family’s suffering and no means to hold the British authorities accountable for the massacre. This apathy towards the Batang Kali atrocity gradually leads Nam Teck to question whether he truly goal in life is to achieve the same things as his boss Mr. Chiam, the owner of an auto mechanic garage: “a modest business, a large family” (105). Nam Teck realises that a narrow focus on one’s own career and family would lead to him becoming like the other city dwellers who have faces “all hard and blank, no warmth behind any of them”; on a larger social level, with the end of World War II Malayans “had forgotten what it was like to work together” and “were turning on each other” because of race and class differences (106). Determined to be part of something larger than himself that will give his life a meaningful purpose, Nam Teck joins the Ma Gong in the jungle.

Several years later, in Chapter Six, there is renewed interest in the Batang Kali massacre and Revathi, a journalist who was born in Malaysia but grew up in Britain, goes to Malaysia to conduct interviews and cover the story. A former British sergeant tells her that the British troops “were meant to be protecting the natives, but the natives were in on it” (128) and helping the Ma Gong despite stringent preventive measures in the New Villages. Thus, his commanding officer believed that “it’s worth sacrificing some innocents if it means clearing the turf properly” (129), an attitude justifying the killing of any innocent men at Batang Kali for the sake of eliminating possible communists. Nam Teck’s mother Mrs Wong corroborates the callous mindset of the British soldiers when she tells Revathi that the British “didn’t need proof” that anyone in the New Village was aiding the Ma Gong, “they just did what they wanted” and “kept saying all of us were helping the people inside, none of us were good” (139). Revathi writes a story about the massacre that “burst into the world with the force of truth” (148), a “dynamite” piece with Mrs Wong as “a compelling voice” and “a human face for the tragedy” (149). But her hopes for redress for the Batang Kali survivors are dashed when the British government concludes that the military’s conduct was “above reproach” and quashes any official inquiry (152). Despite this setback, Revathi realises that “she had the leverage to make a little more truth come to light, and that would have to be enough” (153). Revathi’s sentiments effectively sums up one important purpose of the novel.      

In the final chapter of the novel focused on Henry, a professor of history and Jason and Siew Li’s son, the fate of former Malayan communists is revealed. When Henry visits them in their Friendship Village at the Malaysia-Thailand border while searching for traces of his mother, the ex-communists now still living there are “surprised he doesn’t know more about them” (238). This is because “much of the literature” Henry has read “is about the Emergency itself, not the decades after” and the communists in the jungle “barely figured in” newspaper reports (238). Tiang’s novel therefore joins recent documentaries, memoirs, and biographies in making a little more of the truth and history of leftist organisations in Malaysia and Singapore come to light. 

State of Emergency plays on the multiple meanings of the word “state”: it refers to a state or condition of perpetual emergency or crisis, to the exceptional state or government powers employed to deal with such emergencies, and finally to the act of stating or giving voice to obscured events and truths about the Malayan Emergency and its aftermath. Akin to his play about Limehouse’s Chinatown that combined archival research and creative imagination, Tiang’s novel in six stories examines an important period of Malaysia’s and Singapore’s social and political history from multiple perspectives, grounded in real events but dramatised through fictional lives. This translation of history into fiction is, to recall Tiang’s own comments about translation, an act of re-centring narratives that are side-lined or erased in familiar official accounts, enlarging our knowledge about the forces and people involved in the Emergency, and allowing a better understanding of this tumultuous and formative period in two countries’ histories to emerge.

Works Cited

“Jeremy Tiang 1: Clip 1.” Interview by Joanne Leow. Intertidal Polyphonies, 3 January 2018, http://intertidal.usask.ca/islandora/object/leow%3A724. Accessed 17 May 2021.

“Jeremy Tiang 3: Clip 3.” Interview by Joanne Leow. Intertidal Polyphonies, 3 January 2018, http://intertidal.usask.ca/islandora/object/leow%3A726. Accessed 17 May 2021.

Tiang, Jeremy. “Going Inside.” Interview by Jini Kim Watson. Singapore Unbound, 22 July 22 2019, https://singaporeunbound.org/blog/2019/7/20/pjwkdkl16g3l16rfv488iauuhodaz3. Accessed May 17 2021.

---. “HOPE.” Passages: Stories of Unspoken Journeys. Ed. Yong Shu Hoong. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2013. 

---. It Never Rains on National Day. Singapore: Epigram Books, 2015.

---. “The Last Days of Limehouse.” British East Asian Plays. Eds. Cheryl Robson, Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe. Twickenham: Aurora Metro Publications, 2018, pp. 34–85.

---. “Many Englishes, Many Chineses.” Poets and Writers. 1 March 2019, https://www.pressreader.com/usa/poets-and-writers/20190301/281556587057718. Accessed 17 May 2021.

 ---. State of Emergency. Epigram Books, 2017.

---. “Terminal.” In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel. Eds. Zhang Ruihe and Yu-mei Balasinghamchow. Math Paper Press, 2016, pp. 157–65. 

---. “Visit.” Balik Kampung 3A: Northern Shores. Ed. Verena Tay. Math Paper Press, 2016, pp. 57–67. 

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