ART CHOOSES YOU Wena POON

What does it mean to be an artist in the modern cities of Asia today? Singaporean author WENA POON, whose first short-story collection, Lions in Winter, was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted for the 2008 Singapore Literature Prize, reflects

THE STRUGGLE OF AN ARTIST is an age-old theme in literature. The struggle of an artist in the gleaming concrete jungles of New Asia, however, may be more extraordinary than that faced by his or her Western counterpart.

Singapore only became independent in the decade before I was born. The first instinct of newly-independent nations is economic survival. I was born into a family of traders, shopkeepers, labourers, the people that the British founders of Singapore brought in to help this port prosper. Almost all of my ancestors were illiterate. I was the first in my entire extended family to go to university. And what a university it was: Harvard, a glorious old pile of Georgian bricks on the banks of the Charles River in Massachusetts.

How did I get in? At age sixteen, living in Yio Chu Kang, I was as far away from Harvard as you can imagine. I still remember typing my college application essays on an electronic typewriter. (Those were the days.) I just sat down and typed it all out—no corrections, no cut and paste—it was done in one single take. I explained very carefully that I had been a writer since I was young, that I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen, and that I had been struggling to have publishers and adults take me seriously. I said that I had no role models and nobody could help me. I explained that I had a simple dream: I wanted to see the world and write about it.

Even at that age, I was aware of the odds. I was a Chinese writer, raised on a diet of British literature, and writing only in English. I was an accident of history. I scrounged around for mentors. My schoolteachers were discouraging, my parents worse. Books were meant for studying: they were not meant as an end in themselves. Publishers in Singapore ignored me when I knocked on their doors. I was naïve: I failed to realise that the major publishers located in Singapore were distribution offices. They did not publish original work. As a teenager, I read with chagrin of France, of America, where the latest hot novel came from someone barely older than myself.

In the end, after graduating with honours in English Literature from Harvard, I went on to Harvard Law School. To please my parents, I got a law degree. I worked for ten years as a corporate lawyer in financial capitals all over the world, running with the Wall Street banker boys, leading an expat life. I still wrote voluminously: in waiting rooms, on airplanes, late at night after long conference calls with Beijing or New York, when I couldn’t sleep.

I never wrote about my business life. I wrote about the interior life of people that I had met, or people whom I had only observed. Because—underneath all this hustle and bustle, the trials and tribulations of the Dow, the banker boys running hither and dither executing deals in New York and Hong Kong and Beijing—that is what we are living for, isn’t it?

I published my stories, but kept a low profile on my writing. I felt that being a writer was a childish dream, unsuitable in the business world where I was making a reputation for myself. Back in college, there were guys with long hair that played in garage bands. One day, they cut off their ponytails, shaved, stopped being penniless artists, donned suits and went to work on Wall Street. They “grew up.”

I skipped the garage musician phase. By age 24, I was already a lawyer in New York City working with European banks. But I never stopped writing. Writing was like breathing. Only later did I realise, when people took notice, that it was a gift. That it will never, ever go away. That despite being a responsible adult with a real job, I will never truly grow up and mature, unless and until I began to behave like a real writer and allow the world to view me as one.

In late 2007, at the suggestion of a British Malaysian teacher called Sharon Bakar, the editors at MPH Group Publishing in Kuala Lumpur contacted me. The gathered all my published stories from the last five years and put it in one beautiful volume. It was titled Lions in Winter—my love letter to my country, the Lion City. In September 2008, I found myself in Ireland reading a story—the story of a struggling artist—to an Irish and British audience at a literary festival in Cork, Ireland. People came up afterwards to talk to me. They had never heard from a Singaporean before. Perhaps they never ever thought we had stories to tell, in their language. It was a galvanising experience; they wanted to hear more from us.

So, to all of you writers and dreamers out there, whether published or unpublished, whether employed or not: remember, Kafka was an insurance salesman. The odds may be stacked against you, and you may have to run away from your gift in order to survive. Your friends, parents, and society may only define success as having a career as a lawyer, a banker, an engineer, a doctor.

But take heart.

Because in the end, you don’t choose Art. Art chooses you. And Instinct always wins, in the end.

Reproduced from the December 2008 Malaysian edition of Marie Claire