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

ON THE COUCH WITH ... Wena POON

SINGAPOREAN WRITER WENA POON is the refreshing new voice who is bringing Asian writing to a new place. She was born in Singapore, and has lived in Hong Kong and the U.S. She read literature and law at Harvard University, and is currently a deal lawyer in San Francisco, California. Her début, Lions in Winter (MPH Publishing, December 2007), is a compilation of short stories, some of which have been previously published in journals and anthologies around Asia. Her fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been widely anthologised and published in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Lions in Winter was recently longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Poon recently spoke to Eric Forbes and Tan May Lee in an e-mail interview from San Francisco, California.

*

How did you find out about the longlist?
My husband registered my name on “Google News Tracker” to alert me of any new articles about me. He then Blackberry’d me and said “FYI.” And I was like, Huh? What’s this?

What was the first thing you did when you found out you were longlisted?
I bought a bottle of Prosecco and some peach juice and mixed two Bellinis by myself to celebrate. Yes, it’s a disgusting drink, but I like it because it makes me think of sunshine and Venice.

What do you think of the other titles on the longlist? Are you familiar with any of them?
I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s work because she captures the pathos and pain of Indians coming to America, in the same way I try to do with my stories about Singaporean Chinese people. I haven’t read Unaccustomed Earth, but I saw Mira Nair’s movie of The Namesake. That movie captures some of the themes I tried to bring out in Lions in Winter, especially the scene of the new Indian bride in a brutal, snowy East Coast environment, struggling to bring laundry to the laundromat and shivering in her sari. I can totally identify with that! The longlist has introduced me to many writers and their work. I am keen to read Tubal R. Cain’s Dandaula and Other African Tales (Nigeria) and the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera’s Ask the Posts of the House (New Zealand). I loved Whale Rider the movie and would like to read more of Ihimaera. You can tell I love films—I cannot talk about literature without talking about films; to me they’re inextricably linked.

How familiar are you with the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award?
I’ve heard of it, as it is usually enumerated in an awards list in some famous author’s biography, but the editors of MPH Publishing told me it is famous for the large cash prize. Frankly, I would be thrilled to get any prize, cash or no cash, for my work. I’ve struggled for many years to get respect for my fiction, so to be recognised internationally alongside famous authors really means a lot to me.

What is the difference between writing short stories and full-length novels?
Writing a book of short stories is like taking a stroll through a zoo. You look into every cage and see the different animals, you pass through “Tropical Zone” and “Arctic Zone” and have all kinds of different experiences, but they are still related by the confines of a zoo. Writing a novel is like spending a lot of quality time with one particular dog and taking it on a long hike. In order for me to write a novel, I have to really love the material (or this hypothetical “dog”), as it takes a longer time. I didn’t write a novel for 13 years, and the first one I completed (I started out a few that I abandoned) was Biophilia in 2005 and I wrote its sequel, Cryptic Tonic, in 2007. It’s remarkable that I finished them both but that’s because I am propelled to completion by the sheer fun of the story. There’s also the pragmatic aspect. I started out by writing novels as a teenager, instead of short stories. Nobody took me seriously or wanted to publish them. Then someone told me it’s easier to get publishers to publish short stories because publishers don’t want to take a huge financial risk by bringing out a whole novel on an unknown writer. That turned out to be true in my case.

Short stories appear to be getting more popular. Writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Anne Enright published their short-story collections after their award-winning novels. What are your thoughts on this?
Actually Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake, came only after her first short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was published and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. This may prove my theory that it’s easier to début with a collection of shorts than début with a novel. I have a theory that short stories will indeed experience a comeback because of our escalatingly fast-paced lifestyle. For example, I never write an email that is longer than the Blackberry screen. A 10-minute phone call, to busy lawyers, is a huge investment of time, and we learn to get a lot of information through in those 10 minutes. Youtube movies are just a few minutes long. Our attention span is being crammed into smaller and more compact units. Short stories fit into our dense and abbreviated lifestyle. How many of us started reading a novel that we never finished? In order for busy readers to invest time in reading a whole long novel, it better be good—a gripping pageturner.

What is your personal favourite short story or short-story collection?
Most of the fiction I love are linked to the movies. If a story is very good and the characters come alive for the reader, the reader will be able to envision the movie right away and the material-hungry studios will definitely exploit it. Therefore, I love the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, who’s one of those authors that translate into film easily. I’m biased because he wrote about Singapore and I love reading about early Singapore through the viewpoint of British authors. I love the films of Alfred Hitchcock, many of which were based on short stories, such as The Birds (based on a short by another one of my favourite authors, Daphne du Maurier) and Rear Window (based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich). But the best short story of all—actually a one-act play by Noël Coward—that was ever made into a film was David Lean’s Brief Encounter. I adore that story. It’s about how two people accidentally meeting, have a brief experience that lasts a lifetime. For me, that is the quintessence of a short story—fleeting, but infinitely memorable.

The six-book shortlist for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award will be announced in mid-July 2008

A Singaporean Diaspora?

Impressive first collection of stories about leaving Singapore
By EDDIE TAY

Lions in Winter
Wena Poon
(MPH Group Publishing, 2007)

AMONG THE STEREOTYPES surrounding Singaporeans who leave the country, two are prevalent: someone who leaves the country is either an overachiever seeking greener pastures abroad, or a wastrel running away from responsibilities back home. In this respect, Wena Poon’s Lions in Winter, a collection of 11 short stories which largely portray the lives of Singaporeans living abroad, is important for the challenges it poses to such stereotypes. Here, a comparison can be drawn between Poon’s Lions in Winter and Simon Tay’s Stand Alone. While Tay’s collection is about the coming of age of Singapore as a nation, Poon’s collection, published 16 years after Stand Alone, tells the tale of the coming of age of a shifting, fluid and disparate group of people whom could be termed a ‘Singaporean diaspora.’

Poon’s stories are populated with characters living in cities in Canada, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Even as they negotiate the unfamiliar terrain of their respective host cultures, Singapore continues to loom large in their minds. A love-hate relationship between Singapore and the individual characters is a constant motif. The following question posed in Lions in Winter sums up this conflicted relationship: “Why do we constantly turn our prows to distant shores? When do we know when to leave, and when to return? Could we really, really bear to leave those we knew behind, even if we no longer loved them? … Too hot, too cold. One had to find a world that was just right …”

The volume’s title holds a figurative resonance: on the one hand, the tropical climate of Singapore, popularly known as the ‘Lion City,’ is felt by the characters peopling the stories to be uncomfortably warm; on the other hand, to live anywhere else, for example, in cooler climes, is to inhabit a foreign environment.

Poon’s stories are rich with ambivalence, which lends a thematic complexity to her writing. A personal favourite, ‘The Man Who Was Afraid of ATMs,’ explores the theme of xenophobia. Chang is a retiree living with his son’s family in Ontario. As a Chinese-educated former teacher, he has many difficulties adjusting to his host culture. When Chang is confused by the instructions on an ATM screen, a man behind him in the queue utters, “God, don’t you love these people?” in exasperation. Yet the story does not allow us to sympathise with Chang. Readers are told that back in Singapore, he was as critical of foreigners as the man standing behind him: “He used to say ‘these people’ when he was in Singapore. He used the phrase to refer to the Indian immigrant workers who lined the streets of Little India on weekends; the Filipino maids crowding the front of a shopping mall in Orchard Road. ‘These people are really too much,’ he used to say, whenever he drove past them. ‘So noisy.’ And now, someone was referring to him in that tone.”

The irony here would not be lost on the reader.

In many ways, Lions in Winter is a letter to Singapore from abroad, which also takes on the country’s emerging social issues. ‘Addiction’ recounts the story of Alistair, a homosexual male in London whose life is at odds with the familial and social expectations of upper-middle-class Singapore. As his cousin tells him: “You guys are the new generation that have to bear the burden so that more people like you can be accepted back home for who they are. You’re paving the way for future kids.”

These stories also demonstrate the generation gap between Singaporeans in their thirties who are based overseas, and an older generation of Singaporeans who have remained. In “Those Who Serve, Those Who Do Not,” Joanne, who has migrated with her family to Australia, muses upon what she perceives to be the provincialism of everyday life in Singapore: “She looked over the inky-blueness of Singapore in the twilight. Thousands of orange-white dots blinked in the endless kingdoms of HDB flats that stretched as far as the eye could see. Tiny people leading tidy little capsuled lives.”

In contrast, for Madam Teo, who has lived through World War II, the contemporary Singaporean ‘heartland’ is a haven compared to what she has experienced: “They were just relocating from one housing estate to another. They were getting a new flat. How could this be sadness? Sadness was war, was famine. Sadness was seeing your father-in-law in China lose all his rice fields when the Communists took over. Sadness was watching your father crawl home after being bayoneted by Japanese troops in 1942. Sadness was watching your pregnant mother contract malarial fever in occupied Singapore, not having any drugs to allay her fever …. Sadness was finding her drowned pregnant form by moonlight, and knowing that you had to be the one to run home to wake your father and tell him the news.”

Between the Madam Teos and Joannes of Singapore, between those who choose to leave and those who stay, there is a gap to be traversed.

In terms of technique, discreetness is Poon’s strength. She does not draw undue attention to her language; rather, the stories are mainly character-driven, and words are used with skill and economy. A good example is ‘Dog Hotpot,’ which manages to humorously convey through a series of dialogues the underlying anxiety of Chinese Singaporeans living abroad over being trapped within media stereotypes of Chinese people.

There are two moments in Lions in Winter I wish to highlight: first, when the story’s narrator Freddie uses the word ‘patois’ instead of ‘Singlish’ to describe everyday informal speech in Singapore; and second, when he refers to women in Singapore who “did not complete high school.” The choice of the word ‘patois’ indicates a glossing-over of the term ‘Singlish,’ implying that Freddie’s words are aimed at a non-Singaporean audience, while ‘high school’ bears relevance more to North American and Australian contexts rather than to the Singaporean. One may speculate whether these moments are illustrative of Freddie’s alienation from Singapore, or whether these were genuine slips on the author’s part. Poon’s stories would be much more poignant if the latter were the case, for this would demonstrate that her struggle as a writer is a function of the tensions which pervade her stories, in that she is negotiating multiple readerships much in the same way that many of her characters are negotiating multiple cultures.

Lions in Winter is an impressive first collection with much to offer its readers, sitting comfortably within an emerging constellation of works such as Fiona Cheong’s Shadow Theatre and Hwee Hwee Tan’s Mammon Inc., which explore the predicaments of individuals whose identities and allegiances are dispersed among various transnational locations.

Reproduced from Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Vol. 7 No. 2 April 2008