Suchen Christine Lim

Suchen Christine Lim (placeholder).png

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Angelia Poon
Dated 6 March 2023

One of the most significant writers in Singapore’s Anglophone literary tradition, Suchen Christine Lim has published a total of six novels over the course of four decades and has been called “Singapore’s foremost historical novelist” (Holden 101). Besides her novels, she is also the author of a short story collection, The Lies that Build a Marriage (Monsoon Books, 2007); a non-fiction book, Hua Song: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora (Long River Press, 2005); and numerous children’s books. Born in what is now present-day Malaysia, Lim moved to Singapore during the 1960s when she was around fourteen years old. Here, she received a convent school education and graduated from the University of Singapore. Professionally, Lim was a teacher who taught Literature and General Paper before becoming a writer of curriculum materials at the Ministry of Education.

Through her body of work, Lim has always sought to expand the boundaries of what may be written about in Singapore fiction. The sub-title of her short story collection, The Lies that Build a Marriage: Stories of the unsung, unsaid and uncelebrated in Singapore, perhaps best encapsulates her affinity for those on the margins of society.  Literature, as Lim says, “has the power to honour all individuals as equals” (Quayum 151). In “Letter to a Professor on Living a Life of the Imagination in Singapore,” she discusses her motivation as a writer, insisting in particular how no one can ever control a writer’s imagination: “History has proven that no matter how restrictive the socio-political circumstances in one’s land, if one has to write, one has to write” (412). Lim’s commitment to her vocation and craft is evident in her fiction and many of her female artist characters in her novels express similar sentiments about the vital importance of art for self-expression and survival. In this critical introduction, I focus on three important aspects of Lim’s writing that appear as tightly interwoven threads in her novels—her keen sense of history, interest in gender politics, and investment in multiple cultural worlds.

Historical Consciousness

From her first novel Rice Bowl which appeared in 1984 to her latest, Dearest Intimate, recently published in 2023, Lim has used her fiction to illuminate important periods in Singaporean and Malayan history, always recognizing the limits of the official archive and historiography as these pertain to language, gender, ethnicity, nationality, or simply individual idiosyncrasies. If tangible, historical materials stored in official archives and repositories are ever only fragmentary and incomplete traces of the past, how much more is lost that will never even be missed or known is a question that pulses through much of Lim’s fiction.

In her debut novel, Rice Bowl, Lim explores the key ideological struggle between instrumentalist pragmatism and liberal idealism that has come to define not only the postcolonial nation’s modern history but its citizens’ individual conscience and moral identity too. Lim delineates the struggle as it unfolds against the immediate backdrop of a rapidly developing and modernizing Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s, and as it gains added resonance from its concurrent location within the larger map of Cold War geopolitics in the region and the Vietnam War. A Roman Catholic novitiate nun, Marie-Therese Wang, inspires and leads a group of undergraduate students in protests and civil action together with blue-collar workers to agitate for greater equity and economic justice. The politically-charged atmosphere of the novel stemming from the ideological conflict between Western liberal values and leftist, Communist views reveals an aspect of Singapore history that to a large extent has been obscured by the country’s subsequent development and modernization  under the post-colonial government dominated by the People’s Action Party (PAP)

Competing ideological views and versions of history also feature in A Bit of Earth (Times Books International, 2001), a novel set in nineteenth-century British Malaya and Singapore. Here, Lim explores the emergence of anti-colonial sentiment and increasing nationalism as she describes the struggles of the China-born coolie Wong Tuck Heng and his ascent from working in the tin mines of Perak to economic success. [i] The novel’s opening scene of a woman put to death by fellow villagers and her clansmen for a sexual transgression captures in vivid and arresting fashion Lim’s interest in forgotten histories. In an accompanying note, Lim explains how she had stumbled across this incident in a footnote of a history textbook and was never able to forget it. [ii] Lim’s curiosity about forgotten voices and invisible subjects of history also informs the premise of her most recent novel, Dearest Intimate, about a woman, Xiu Yin, who discovers the journal of her grandmother. The latter had emigrated from rural China to Singapore, disguised as a boy to sing in an opera troupe, and lived through the Japanese occupation. As Xiu Yin reflects:

Few women of my grandmother’s generation who immigrated to Southeast Asia in the early 1900s had left traces of themselves in written records. Thousands of women came to the Nanyang in their youth because of war, natural disaster or poverty in China, none of them were literate like Por Por who came to the Nanyang because of love. (35)

Thus in this epistolary novel, Lim uses the creative license of the literary writer to imagine a literate female character who pens her thoughts and expresses her emotions consistently, even compulsively. In so doing, Lim not only amplifies the silence of so many voices lost but also seizes the chance to underscore the fundamental importance of the act of writing as self-definition.

In Lim’s fiction, individual subjects are often depicted as being at the mercy of larger and contingent historical, social, and ideological forces, against which they valiantly struggle. In The River’s Song (Aurora Metro Books, 2013), Lim takes as her starting point the clean-up of the Singapore River which occurred largely between 1977 and 1987, a period of rapid economic growth and urban development in the nation. Widely regarded as a resounding municipal success and urban renewal project, the river clean-up was a central plank of Singapore’s transformation into a clean and green city, serving also as tangible evidence of the efficiency and foresightedness of the PAP-led government. Yet the massive operation also resulted in the forced relocation of the communities that lived along its banks and the many people—hawkers, boat men, farmers—who earned their keep from it. The human cost of the clean-up is precisely what the novel foregrounds as Lim gives a voice to the many silent, displaced victims, exploring their psychological scars of eviction: “How many former river men have drowned themselves in drink and depression?” (157). The tension between success and irredeemable loss is captured in the very opening page of the novel when the scale of the achievement factually rendered—“[t]en thousand tons of flotsam and jetsam, two thousand tons of rubbish and forty-one thousand cubic metres of putrid mud” (12) had been cleared—is accompanied by the plaintive strains of Weng’s flute protesting the price many had to pay for Singapore’s glittering urban image. In qualifying the idea of national progress, the novel, according to Samuel Perks, “inflect[s] the Singapore Story in such a way as to draw attention to the national production of space in the interests of global capital, situating the Garden City as a neo-liberal development policy that erases communal and familial histories” (676).

Lim often makes use of the split narrative and alternating timelines in her novels to juxtapose and interweave past and present, suggesting continuities, legacies, ruptures, and symbolic resonances. In Lim’s Singapore Literature Prize-winning novel, Fistful of Colours (EPB Publishers, 1993), the main character Suwen embarks on a quest to uncover the humble immigrant roots of her rich stepfather, Towkay Ong. She is repelled by the hypocritical pretensions of her family and their attempts to whitewash the past to burnish their present socio-economic status. At the same time, Suwen’s personal project also serves to oppose the state’s emphasis on Mandarin as a common language to homogenize the Chinese population in Singapore. To her, the complicity of family and state in convenient and expedient forms of amnesia risks the irreparable loss of rich cultural traditions.

Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Lives

Reading Lim’s novels, it is obvious that a strong feminist concern about the lives of women animates her work. Lim’s female characters often find themselves trapped in their roles as mothers and wives. In the lives of women from earlier generations that she chronicles, this entrapment is compounded by poverty and lack of education. Gift from the Gods (Graham Brash, 1990), for example, explores the hierarchical world of the traditional Chinese family with its multiple branches and extensions that result from the patriarch’s relationship with wives, mistresses, and concubines. Within this familial milieu, sons are valued over daughters and women are constantly pitted against each other since “maleness represents the dominant Other which gives women their definitive function and value, or lack of both” (author’s italics) (Leong 244). Bearing a male heir—tantamount to receiving a gift from the Gods—ensures a woman’s survival, status, and self-worth. More often than not, Lim’s female characters are also victims of sexual violence. In Fistful of Colours, Suwen is sexually assaulted by her stepfather and blamed by her own mother for allowing it to happen. In Dearest Intimate, the narrative unfolding in the novel’s temporal present revolves around the main character Xiu Yin who summons up the courage to leave her physically and emotionally abusive husband, Robert Palmerston, and re-build her life.

While women characters are seen in the private spaces of home, marriage and motherhood, Lim’s novels also foreground vignettes of women boldly rallying others to their cause in the public arena. In A Bit of Earth, Lim presents a scene in which Lai Fong, the China-born wife of the protagonist Wong Tuck Heng, rallies a group of women to march to City Hall in protest against the colonial authorities’ decision to deport her husband for his political radicalism and support for Chinese revolutionary activities. As the admiring narrative voice, appraising the incident retrospectively, notes, “No one to this day believed that the storming of City Hall was the work of one woman. One woman who rallied the amahs, the wives, and relatives of the imprisoned coolies” (419). This image of the strong, outspoken woman publicly asserting herself is evident again in The River Song when the character known as Yoke Lan, a pipa songstress, marches fearlessly through Chinatown with a bamboo pole to confront the man who had spat on her daughter, Ping, and told her that her mother was a “whore” (13). Well-aware of her reputation in the community, she nevertheless plays to the crowd, exploiting the theatricality of the moment to teach the male bully a lesson as well as declare her unwillingness to be cowed. As memorably charismatic as Lim’s female characters like Yoke Lan may be, however, they are also not unequivocally celebrated. Yoke Lan’s tenacious determination to reinvent herself into a socially respectable woman is matched perhaps only by her capacity for cruelty and violence as she subjects Ping to beatings and forces the latter to call her ‘Ah-ku’ or aunt in a bid to hide their true relationship. Similarly, for all her lofty political goals and idealism which had initially so inspired her former students, Marie in Rice Bowl turns out to be a flawed messianic character whose advocacy and activism are revealed as more self-centered than genuinely selfless. 

Lim’s investment in depicting the complexity of women’s lives leads her to explore the idea of intimacy in its varied manifestations, including queer desire and female homoeroticism, in her latest novel, Dearest Intimate. In this text, which is in significant part an epistolary novel, the main character Kam Foong professes her feelings for her village sister with whom she grows up together in China. When the object of her love who is addressed as ‘Dearest Intimate’ is betrothed to the son of a goldsmith and emigrates to Singapore, a married Kam Foong also finds an opportunity to leave her family and home disguised as a man to make the journey to the South Seas. In a series of letters that forms her journal, Kam Foong chronicles her quest to find ‘Dearest Intimate,’ often expressing deep longing as well as promising eternal loyalty. Lim shows that while intimacies can remain constant, they can also change under pressure of external factors like war, having children of one’s own, and other culture-specific familial obligations. As a result of their shared hardships as a re-united couple in Singapore, Kam Foong and her betrothed husband, Wah Jai, grow more intimate even as the former continues to harbour feelings of queer desire for her village sister and is later attracted to another young female opera performer. Having read Kam Foong’s journal, her grand-daughter Xiu Yin ponders over the nature of her grandparents’ relationship: “Theirs was a deep love. Not sex. Not passion, But an intimacy of the heart. Beyond others’ gaze. Beyond words” (333).

Multiple Cultural Worlds

In recounting her youth, Lim observes how as a teen newly arrived in Singapore, she found herself straddling two vastly different life-worlds: that of her Cantonese-speaking mother who spent much time at a temple with a medium and Taoist monks, and that of an increasingly westernized, English-speaking society which a convent school education ushered her into. Pondering over the “cultural barrier” between her and her convent schoolmates, she writes, “The cultural centre of my family’s Cantonese world was Hong Kong, not London; and my mother took me to shop in South Bridge Road and Chinatown, not Robinson Department Store where all the salesgirls spoke English” (“Letter to a Professor” 416). This insight into Lim’s background helps explain crucial strands in her work, namely, how people navigate multiple cultures, languages, religions, and world views as well as the possibilities for syncretism and cultural intermixture a plural, multicultural society offers. For Lim, the divide between English-speaking and Chinese-speaking characters is often deeply imbricated in the politics of recognition concerning the prestige of the Anglophone world and the privilege of being English-educated. The hegemonic place of English in Singapore despite the nation’s avowed multilingualism and official recognition of four languages frequently induces shame in Lim’s Chinese-speaking characters like Weng in The River Song and the opera performer Meng in Dearest Intimate. Yet the richness of non-English languages and cultural worlds is undeniable as a wellspring of Lim’s creativity. Thus the English language, pressed and stretched to express the multiple languages of a multicultural milieu, becomes, in Lim’s hands, “linguistic clay” (Letter 414).

In Anglophone Singapore literature, Lim is unique in seeking to translate the cultural worlds of the ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia and their world views. The transnational idea of the Nanyang or South Seas with its attendant geographical and symbolic valences is regularly invoked in novels like Fistful of Colours and A Bit of Earth. In alluding to or tracing the migratory journeys of the Chinese in the nineteenth century to Southeast Asia especially Malaya—“that wave of immigrants of Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka or Hock Chia origin, the impoverished and inarticulate […] thousands who famed and mined the land” (Gift from the Gods 53) —she draws attention to their heterogeneity. Such diversity is mainly expressed by their use of different Sinitic languages, now commonly referred to as ‘dialects’, and their practice of specific customs. Lim depicts intra-‘racial’ differences such as the historical struggle in the nineteenth century between the Hakkas and the Cantonese over tin-mining rights in the Kinta Valley of Perak as seen in A Bit of Earth but also mentioned in Gift from the Gods. The former, which opens in 1874, depicts the cultural pluralism and politics of the Malayan colonial world as British imperialists, Malays, Straits Chinese, and newly-arrived China-born workers or sinkeh jostle for political legitimacy and recognition. Amidst the conflicting interests and ideals of different individuals and groups in this colonial cauldron, Lim depicts cross-racial alliances between the Malays and the Chinese, the friendship of Musa Talib and Tai-kor Wong, and family splits as a result of ideological and linguistic differences. While all nominally Chinese, the Straits-born Chinese characters in the novel alignthemselves to the British while the China-born subjects retain strong attachments to the Chinese motherland. Lim attempts to capture the complexity of this contact zone especially its polyphonic and multilingual qualities while also showing how the liminality of this space affords an opportunity for hybridity and a widening of cultural horizons, thus refuting in the process the idea of race as the irreducible marker of difference.

In Fistful of Colours, Lim attempts to depict the ethnic intricacies obscured by the official Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others or CMIO model of racial categorization and managed diversity that has so defined colonial and postcolonial Singapore. The novel features a multi-ethnic group of friends with similar liberal and progressive views—“like-minded English-educated malcontents” (23)--who meet regularly to discuss politics. There is the main protagonist Suwen, a teacher and artist; Zul Hussein, a Malay journalist; his Chinese girlfriend Janice; a sculptor Nica Sivalingam of Peranakan Chinese and Sri Lankan Tamil heritage; and the Scotsman Mark Campbell. As Brian Bernards has noted in a comparison of literary texts from the region written in English and Mandarin, Fistful of Colours forms a “translingual bond” with other Sinophone literary texts in seeking to “de-racialize the cultural landscape of postcolonial Singapore” (163) and resist the forms of “cultural legibility” (162) allowed by the state.[iii] In the novel, painting offers Suwen the possibility of telling the “myriad histories” (10) of our “forefathers” (10) as encapsulated by her family’s own immigrant narrative, of rewriting the nation’s neat racialized history by deconstructing conventionally-understood color lines and categories of race. Suwen, according to Christopher Patterson, “reinterprets metaphors of color, reading them instead as hybrid histories and peoples unrecognized by the state” (44). In the end however, the bold and colorful abstract masterpiece she produces is the product of feelings of rage, jealousy, and betrayal rather than that of personal resonance and empathy or the scholarly detachment of a multicultural project intellectually conceived. Novelistic closure is hence impossible as the impetus for great art seemingly requires a ruthlessness that Suwen, long-suffering and emotionally vulnerable, simply does not possess.

If visual art offers a possibility for imagining cultural intermingling and recuperating the past in Fistful of Colours, other art forms also serve as vehicles for cultural identity in The River Song and Dearest Intimate. In these novels, literature as embodied in Lim’s own writing celebrates and co-exists with music and Chinese opera. In Dearest Intimate, Lim presents the culturally-distinctive world of Cantonese Opera as a high art form demanding in the disciplined movements it commands from its performers, its cultivation of master-disciple bonds, apprenticeship traditions, and its rigorous use of conventions. Lim performs a crucial act of cultural translation as she explains the intricacies of Cantonese opera—a sum greater than its parts of “singing, acting, music, poetry, movement and dance” (277) —to the Anglophone reader. Her act of translation is echoed in the text by other similar acts—Xiu Yin’s writing of English surtitles for the Cantonese opera performances and the bilingual love letters between Xiu Yin and Meng, “three years of intense epistolary bilingual conversations and courtship” (387). In The River Song, music serves as an alternative common language allowing the meeting and mutual embrace of disparate cultural worlds. After years of separation, the American-trained Ping and the Chinese-trained Weng’s collaboration on a project to create “a new symphonic poem for orchestra with pipa and dizi” (306) reveals the way art may offer an integration of past and present, and Anglophone and Sinophone worlds. Nevertheless, it is telling that in these later novels, Lim’s artistic characters receive validation for their art in institutionally-sanctioned ways, either as academics or state-approved performers. Despite their initial suffering, they eventually achieve public recognition and approbation for their craft, an outcome that eludes Suwen in Fistful of Colours.

Conclusion

Suchen Christine Lim’s fiction discloses aspects of Singapore’s past and multicultural life that the nation in its present incarnation as a cosmopolitan global city—a hub for transport, finance, technology, scientific development, research and education—too often ignores or suppresses. Insisting on the messiness of cultural relations and human lives, she invites readers to apprehend the silences that allow the articulable, the invisibility that allows the legible and the opportunity costs that pay for the present, always seeing in literature and the arts a potent, potential source of self-determination, cultural strength, and emancipatory energy.

Works Cited

Bernards, Brian. Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature. NUS Press, 2016.

Gabrielpillai, Matilda. “The Singapore Indian woman: A symptom in the quest for Chinese identity.” Daniel Goh, Holden, P., Gabrielpillai, M., Khoo, G.K. (Eds.), Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore. Routledge, 2009. 141-156.

Holden, Philip. “Writing historical fiction: A dialogue with Suchen Christine Lim.” Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 3: 2 (2009), 101-107. https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/ajell/article/view/545

Leong, Liew Geok. “Situating Gender, Evolving Identities: Women in Four Novels by Catherine Lim and Suchen Christine Lim.” Singapore Literature in English: A Critical Reader, edited by Mohammad Quayum and Peter Wicks, Universiti Putra Malaysia Press, 2002. 241-251.

Lim, Suchen Christine. “Letter to a Professor on Living a Life of the Imagination in Singapore,” Singapore Literature in English: A Critical Reader, edited by Mohammad Quayum and Peter Wicks, Universiti Putra Malaysia Press, 2002. 412-416.

Lim, Suchen Christine. Rice Bowl. 1984. Times Editions, 1991.

---. Gift from the Gods. Graham Brash, 1990.

---. Fistful of Colours. EPB Publishers, 1993.

---. A Bit of Earth. Times Books International, 2001.

---. The Lies That Build A Marriage: Stories of the unsung, unsaid and uncelebrated in Singapore. Monsoon Books, 2007.

---. The River’s Song. Aurora Metro Books, 2013.

---. Dearest Intimate. Marshall Cavendish, 2023.

---. Hua Song: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora. Long River Press, 2005.

Patterson, Christopher B. Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific. Rutgers University Press, 2018.

Perks, Samuel. “Here’s to the grass we step on!”: Complicating the spatial dynamics of the Garden City in Singaporean historical fiction. Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 53:6 (2017), 673-685.

Poon, Angelia. “Mining the Archive: Historical Fiction, Counter-modernities and Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 43: 3 (2008), 25-42.

Quayum, Mohammad A. “Keeper of the Creative Flame: Suchen Christine Lim interviewed by Mohammad A. Quayum.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 41: 3 (2006), 145-158. https://doi-org.libproxy.nie.edu.sg/10.1177/0021989406068740

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