featuring
CHENG HIM
CHRISTIAN
YEO
DARYL LIM
WEI JIE
JAMIE UY
JY TAN
KEVIN MARTENS
WONG
KIMBERLEY CHIA
LUNE LOH
MICHELE LIM
MEIHAN
BOEY
MAX
PASAKORN
QAMAR
FIRDAUS SANI
YEO WEI WEI
and more
edited by
ANURAK
SAELAOW
LAURA JANE
LEE
THEODORUS
SPLOOSH • ISSUE 1 COVER ART BY JONATHAN AVINASH VICTORAs we write this editors’ note the mercury continues to climb in Singapore. It’s been a hot month – a hot year, in fact – and scarier than the heat itself is the palpable sense that things might never go back to the way they were.
In the same way our inaugural issue’s theme of RISE is fraught with tension and a slow – almost buoyant – sense of inevitability. David Qamar’s “before, above” turns on the image of a hamster spinning his wheel as a prelude to our own “tracks … of never-ending light”, while Euginia Tan’s “soursop” details deliberate, visceral consumption (“a straw, a stoma”) until “time is downed”.
Curating a selection like this has been dificult given the volume of submissions and distinctive voices we’ve received. We as editors (Anurak, Laura Jane, Theodorus) can only attempt to do justice to the poetry, prose, and art that has f loated our way – and look forward to future submissions by anyone who might have slipped through the process this time.
Until then, we hope the issue speaks to the same shifts of perspective – the rising camera angle, the peeking out over the ledge, the bird’s eye view – for you that it did for us.
The rapeseed fields are parsing through what belongs to memory and what to loneliness. I sleep with a turn of phrase, then awake reciting its name. The schools are welcoming back bicycle-bound children in this lung of a town. In spite of the year I hold my peace how a man holds a child, tremulous, not knowing he will break it in other ways. It is not as if we can speak any more about the disease, or coffee, or our great voracious antipathy.
All my friends have turned into screens suspended like angels. Unlike Lazarus I lie down behind the back gate seeking to become soluble, absorbed into the nightgales as sleep-eyed pathos. In place of language, the inchoate leaving spreads in the body, calls itself shame.
Oh god, oh love, oh new audacious turf. Now the blues have emptied the thing, turned it upside down and shaken the life out unexplained. The likeness of her says I have acquired a lack so deep it will not be filled by lyric.
The better view is I was miming our speech-acts the way men in my family have always mimed love, love, that thing, so small and so difficult to bear, survivable from habit
like water after fifteen shots, water under the bridge, water everywhere spraying like piss. A grandfather’s fourth grandchild steps on his feet, the mother shouts across the living room hoping in secret for toes to dissolve into pixels. The grandfather sees in the boy the first shape of cruelty, the boy ascertains the instinct firstly, hazards shrillness in the form of a woman.
Oh lord, oh god, oh love, oh lark, oh my lichened heart. The dark bear grows on my back like moss or self-loathing, asphalt growing into skin, this heavy snarling thing, the chimera clawing until it is named and not escaped. Oh lord, oh bright, oh my morning light, the tight weave, the tight weave of all these things.
Christian is a writer and actor based in Singapore. He has been featured notably in The Mays and Gaudy Boy’s New Singapore Poetries, among many others, and won or placed for a number of prizes including the Bridport Prize. Find him at christianyeo.com.
David Wong Hsien Ming discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch. His work explores the dualities, contradictions and absurdities of being, and has appeared on platforms like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Mascara Literary Review. His first collection, For the End Comes Reaching, is a meditation on the sense of loss that accompanies each having.
i.m.
Napkin on clouded jade & blue mould up from under, thin smile saying nothing stays white. Ponyboy's gold reasonable in hindsight. Easy to say it's the same doom but here 250 didn't get a couplet, let alone a catchphrase, didn't get let alone. •
Imagine putting a table on its side, plates on skirting, cups on legs; imagine it's a salesman that does it, with all the furrows of a toddler wondering where people go in the middle step of peekaboo, at the end of it a smiling administrator —& because it's peekaboo, imagine it happens again with the salesman's friends from the shipping company & the intelligent men in the Blue House; easier to harbour madness than a woman in a bedroom holding a plume of knowledge.
In times to come, will there be people who will have real faith in these teachings?
- The Diamond Sutraah seng ah, when you go to school remember hor, dont ownself own ownself. what the teacher say is what the teacher say. ask yourself: what is it ah seng wants to say? nowadays students very guai hor, nobody smoking at staircase. nobody fucking at staircase also. teacher say: times have changed, time to move on. ah seng ah, ask yourself: where is it you want to go? ten years after your highlight bo liao your teacher maybe still be here. ten year people cook fried rice you call master but ten year in school you call what? ah seng ah, dont ownself own ownself. what the teacher say is long time ago already. ask yourself: ten year later where are you? you can say lah, maybe time is like the staircase, full of cigarette butt and sex but ah seng ah, when you say this kind of thing, you got ask yourself not: ten year pass already why you still coming back to here?
Cheng Him is from Singapore. They write mainly about the people whose work is their body, in the language that they speak. Their work explores form and language, and has been featured in Strange Horizons, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), The Kindling, Tiger Moth Review, among others. They are part of the writing group known as the ATOM Collective.
Daryl Lim Wei Jie 林伟杰 is a poet, translator and editor from Singapore. His latest collection of poetry, Anything but Human, was a finalist for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize. He translated Short Tongue, a collection of poetry by the Singaporean Chinese poet Wang Mun Kiat. He co-edited and conceptualised the anthologies Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet, which received a Special Award at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, and The Second Link, a forthcoming book of Malaysian and Singapore writing.
A constant desire to be sure that an Alpha is present
Youth smiles without any reason
An unending supply of urban warriors crafted for the experienced wearer
You are what you love, not who loves you
Everyday fashion; forward style; style inspiration; horrible scam company
A heart without dream is like a bird without feathers
As a result we hope to gain your loyalty, you complete piece of trash
You attract what you are, not what you want
Stylish pieces for everyone in the globe to be bought and then disposed of
Time flies while learning about great American history
Our warehouse in China currently ships redefined traditional boundaries
This poem splices text from: 1
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/style/moroccan-trellis-rug.html https://www.topic.com/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-free-watch and various Instagram captions
Every moment is a fresh beginning as life becomes limitless
There’s always more we could do to tailor-make our planet for modern apparel stores
You will always be with yourself
We do not have any tracking system in place at this time and are working towards making one happen
an ear shaped fruit listening to pulses from wrists, twisting the thorny green harvest into baskets the depth of small tubs
it hears the slice of knife oozing guts of white pulp black beads of seed gleaming like eyes wide awake at the crack of dawn
a palm squishes its innards mushy curds frothing between blistered fingers the sluiced fruit plopped down an abyss of water served in a tall, clear glass
a straw, a stoma mouth meets fruitmeats tongue nudges seeds out the regime of a hot afternoon salved by its phlegmy sweetness another drink is juiced time is downed
Euginia Tan is a multi-disciplinary writer based in Singapore. She has experience in various forms of writing including poetry, prose and theatre. She also pens curatorial essays for visual artists. Contact her at eugtan@hotmail.com
@:
Not much of the ooziness left in my happy. am composed of shining, the faceted which is its own collapsible.
*:
All these chances not for granted, given that it's taken for. she finds am not in the dice; meaty numbers roll. Off our spines in cartographies: marks red and pulped and aware to.
Lune Loh is a core member of /S@BER, a Singaporean writing collective. She graduated from the National University of Singapore in 2022 with a BA in English Literature, 2nd Major in Philosophy. She is currently doing an MA in Creative Writing (Poetic Practice) at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her works have been published in PANK Magazine, Evergreen Review, SOFTBLOW, Cordite Poetry Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, among others. Find her at lune.city.
JY Tan is a student from Singapore. Her work appears in Salamander, Lunch Ticket and Rust + Moth among other journals. She also edits for Body Without Organs (on hiatus). She enjoys learning about love languages, and creating Spotify playlists. Visit her at jy tan.
She waters the purple wolfsbane and points at it and calls it a nightmare. You wake in the middle of the night to see her drinking black bile from your cup. You return home to see her on the home-phone and feel nothing but static. And you hear nothing but static. Her mouth is dark matter. Her hips are a coffin. She’s calling the funeral director, calling your estranged brother, calling your dead aunt. She’s calling all the hospitals and churches in the world and leaves no word for you. Some mornings you wake up with her lying on your chest like a clingy dog. Dried drool all over your white shirt.
You hate her because she steals your painkillers, holds up photo frames of people whom you promised to forget and laughs. She laughs, the kind of laugh you let out when telephone lines are breaking and roosters have forgotten how to sing. You hate her because of how she leaves handprints all over your bathroom floor, over your pillows and bath-towels. How she likes to strip you against your bedroom wall, exposing cellulite and pustule, skin and vein, all while never looking you in the eye. And you cannot blame her for it if you can barely tell between her and your own shadow. You cannot blame her when despite everything, she puts her hand on your forehead like a mother, wakes you up for breakfast, buys you fruits fresh from the market to cut up into neat little slices. The sun is never up when she’s around, but she slaps your clock face-down and cleans up after your fatigue. She arrives when your bones call once every 3 weeks, then returns home to make a nest in your heart.
On one of your walks alone, you end up by a river and see her sitting on the ashy rocks with broken glass in her hands. You ask doesn't it hurt? To which she does not respond. Silence washes the night out. You want to take her by the neck, throw her into water. But back at home, new peonies are blooming and your houseplants seem to be breathing again. The flickering lights almost feel like heartbeats.
Max Pasakorn
where i still live on the glaze of the ocean
& the sun shows up to work in a t-shirt that says something
meaningless like, “Go Slay The Day, Mama!!” & my home
is snug enough to house my obsession of seaweed paintings & i cash in
my daylight savings as an offering to El Nino & i bring the shaver
to my coconut cheeks, my jellyfish beard, my tadpole throat & my boyfriend
fills the laundry with seashells
& we twine our fingers like two lions’ manes criss-crossed into friendship bracelets & i sequence cheques into a flamingo pause & i nap into an octopus-spread, where cherries pick us up by our potato-pimpled hands and how likely we are to help them sprout
Max Pasakorn (he/she/they) is a queer, Thai-born, Singaporebased essayist and poet. Max’s writing, which has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is a finalist for the SFPA Rhysling Award, can be found in Speculative Nonfiction, Chestnut Review, Strange Horizons and more. Read Max at www.maxpasakorn.works
Kimberley Chia is Singapore-born and Parisbased. Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Clare Market Review and Sine Theta Magazine, among others, and she has performed at various spoken word events in France. When not writing, she is exploring movement, working at an international organisation or cooking elaborate soups.
In our haste to catch the bus I step on a snail, its crevice collapsing in on itself. A nomad murdered by a house it thought to be home. You laugh sadly and say this must be a metaphor, for us. The statement hangs heavy with ache. In the thick June air there are many words and never enough said. But you recover quickly, as you always do: is this why you became vegetarian? To atone for murderous slug sins?
I remember briefly all the reasons it took so long for us to leave. Our bodies like poles in the field of space, hands roaming—frantic for any place to rest save for each other. Between us, the snail starts to twitch, mucus claiming crannies. Shadows strobe feebly between shuffling feet, and something unfurls, swirling and violent, in my stomach.
The year I resolved to love you no matter, scientists achieved the first successful memory transplant between snails. That is to say, perhaps we can will our bodies to misremember; to pull reminiscence, spindly and cruel, by the slimy tail from the roots of veins. That is to say: forgetting was a most arduous task. I did it, anyway.
At dinner, you offer a closure I no longer require. It squirms, tailless, on a coffee-marked tray. I hold my breath and swallow, anyway, let it simmer
acidic in our gullets. Tell myself this is your last hurrah, say nothing of the residual ache I am still icing. The food was going cold, and it was always easier to digest my own pride to satiate yours.
Later, I catch myself flinching from you when I cry. Suddenly, I am nineteen again—enamoured by extroversion, a puppy waiting for nonchalant bone. Did you know? Contrary to popular belief, snails don’t turn to slugs when their shells get destroyed. Instead, they dry out. Life leaves glutinous being a figment at a time. The table between us stretches light years before a startling realisation: my mind and body are no longer captive to yours.
The curdling remnant of snail begins to fossilise, shards forming a potpourri shield. I look at you, a shrinking fragment of my youth, and smile. I am ready to unlearn smallness. To pry its weight off my back and hold the gaze of death. To deflate relentlessly, into rebirth. Abandon every stool by the front door, bolts unknotting fists. Doorstop unwedged, pulled past the cracks in our floors.
when the sun has set and my eyes are spared the sky’s streaming blindness you will still be the god that vanished upon being revered that i will must stumble back into one day though i know not how or when still adulterating even in your stilling absence making me a murk in my joy my sorrow some nights ago in a dream i stood in a vacant carpark and stared at glinting signs bearing your name in the black letters of legislation and the signs said all the lots were yours though there were no cars at all i stood and stared and thought you brilliant beyond belief quite frankly i understand little of this life much less the dream or the self from which it sprang like an unbidden child i suspect you would know the answer better than i ever could do you remember our sudden recognition scene you unlocking apologising for your lateness your mess when we spoke it was hushed with happiness in the same tongues and i knew the names on your walls your books also waiting to be laid flat and yielding i think life is about hoping to be read yes that is what i think as you weigh my words in your mouth with an anticipatory twang-tang of sticky supple cherries knowing exactly what i mean
Chua Jia Wen is currently studying English at Nanyang Technological University. She is especially interested in the work of James Joyce and Sylvia Plath.i think about cows and how you don’t eat beef for non-religious reasons. there is an after taste i can’t describe — when our tongues meet i remember
the twang of guitar strings, my shoulder dislocating from the weight of your head, my anchor, or our combined importance. everything was of utmost gravity, i was falling into orbit, your satellite, or maybe a meteor streaking away from its constellation. at the end you were ephemeral, like the wetness of the ground after a summer’s rain. there is something to be said about how you went or how, when it rains i still feel your chin digging into my shoulder. my arms are a flower un-blooming into your back. we are a bud; i am tilling your skin. we return to the field we spent our university nights — the glint of fireflies, the wetness of your lipstick glistening. some nights the stars watch me unhook every lock in your body, unpick these wounds. i bend your chest open to locate every vault. i am mining
for the nights we laid at the bridge, watching other satellites or maybe airplanes journey across the sky.
except this time, there is an ocean underneath us. this is not a metaphor, but a real sea brimming with fishes you can eat.
except this: gravity doesn’t anchor the way we are.
this time, the rain. we fall upwards instead.
Qamar Firdaus Saini is in the public service and is especially fond of Explosions in the Sky. He writes to remember. His recent poems are in Cordite Poetry Review, QLRS, and other anthologies by Singapore-based presses, and in works commissioned by National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum, among others. He was a volunteer organiser for Sing Lit Station’s Manuscript Bootcamp, and is currently a member of ATOM, a writing collective.
Jamie Uy is a M.A. English candidate at Nanyang Technological University researching environments in Singapore science fiction. Her academic and creative interests include ecocriticism, popular culture, and postcolonialism. Her creative writing appears in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, and OF ZOOS, among other publications.
Hakka Family (1939) by Georgette Chen displayed at National Gallery Singapore, Flickr/Choo Yut Shing
Jamie Uy you were born during hungry ghost month. in the basement a wet kitchen and buddha. a fat milkfish gutted for your first birthday, with one hundred and eighty translucent bones. while the radio cassette played the chanting of monks in their saffron robes, you were baptised in an alabaster church. your mother gave you the english name of an angel. you wore a tiny jade bracelet. years later, the fortuneteller wrote out the characters of your chinese name with the water radical. all over the country families gathered around smoke. bits of burned paper fluttering from one housing estate to another. the ashes of paper watches, paper cars, paper houses, and paper money commingling with the ashes of the dead. you were born during hungry ghost month. the first rice bowl you ate was an offering. you hold chopsticks the way you hold a pen. as if you can bite back into the past. the world a perfect peanut ball, swallowed whole. eat the word made flesh, duck blood and red bean bun. the ministry insisted on recording your mother tongue as mandarin. it is customary for the certificate to crumble like a country made of sesame. pussy willow, pear branches, and apricot flowers in your ah-ma’s house you wish you could name. when your granduncle died, shot by the japanese while drawing water from a well, he left no heirs. the temple recorded your father, the second son, as the son of a ghost. you are the granddaughter of a ghost, and this paper should be burned after reading to make way for the ancestors. steam the thousand layer cake. use the cinders of the letters to light the stove. to cook the water chestnuts. you were born during hungry ghost festival. in the belly of the sky. under clouds rolled like glutinous rice cakes. you must believe in something, fengshui or our lady of fatima or family trees, to write in this other tongue. you eat the eye of the fish carefully. your back nothing like bamboo. your hands carrying clumps of barley grass.
(with thanks to Han Sai Por’s ‘Shimmering Pearls’)
growing up I remember being stunned by how late Ma left the office (often we would have dinner without her after waiting in vain)
when we managed to get her it’d be after waiting near the office at Tanjong Pagar I am watching the water fountain the colourful orbs mounted on wavy steel poles are a cosmos of their own with a glorious multi-coloured sun an orange orb ink-streaked with green, maroon and navy blue I wonder what aliens & civilisations reside on each planet what produce and specialities they trade with each other what wasteful wars they are fighting what inter-species love stories ...
when Ma at last emerges she’s surrounded with an aura of briskness & I sense in her a coiled productivity we walk languidly to the coffeeshop near amoy market (Ma detailing the manifold micro and macro aggressions of the workplace)
the fish head curry comes an ochre stew (reminding me of the fountain’s sun) still bubbling fiercely in a claypot this fish head curry is quite unlike any other the spice and heavier flavours are cut by a citrus sweetness and pineapple so one doesn’t get too jelak the gravy lies between a thicker stew and a broth & is perfectly engineered to accompany white rice & as we eat I feel Ma’s tension melting away …
at the end there is the matter of the eye (a contest between Pa & me) it is a delicious jelly the flesh giving way to gelatin a tenderness found nowhere else on the fish ... after I am done consuming & extracting I spit out a pearl!
Daryl Lim Wei Jieham ham squeaks to let the night in. his hind leg’s upright, body pulled above the horizontal, wheel spinning, gathering the dark.
see how it washes and bogs this room. i lie. my body a spindle, our memories of seattle spooling –the park at kirkland, molly moon’s and the raking queues, ice-cream melting on your collar.
we leave on tracks of never-ending light, a sun dried with auburn leaves. the trees steer us into sunset hills, morning dew necking the stems. this is the space where lavender blooms and repels the mosquitoes nightly, where grandma rests and dreams she is still. your eyes close. i hear the murmur of a heart slowing, my name springing from your lips. yes, i am the one who draws the blinds each morning, who wakes besides your grand-daughter. i promise to shelter her skin from the singaporean sun, my body a bolster for sleep. we say a prayer for rain,
my hands
abstracting these weeds. nai nai, zou san.
the cantonese reflects off the mound. ngo oi lei it is time, i hear the wheel slowing, ham ham spinning. a tunnel, a light.
Ma says the shoe is always on the wrong foot with me. I have been trying to unravel this for a long time. Isn’t it the other foot? I say. Somewhere outside, a crow is shot from the sky.
I dislike the violence of aphorisms— dislike their arrogance, dislike their truth. Find them unnecessary, even dangerous. Keeled over contemplating something like we have children to have something to love, or, the world is ending because we wanted it to.
This is the pool of light created for the purposes of this exercise, how the Mediterranean curls in on itself like a cat gone to sleep but not to death. A rockhole fills with water, fills with spray, fills with dread for the interminable day.
Where you lay your head becomes your home. So it was that the art forms resembled gravestones.
There are no more raptors—not as ciphers, simply as raptors.
You wake beside world peace. It’s light streaming through the blinds and the hours are long and the day is getting away from you again. Did it happen or was it in the dream where you were an activist?
In the dream we started the experiment when the albizias began to blur, stalwarts blending into soundwaves. The figs had fallen directionless—so we were adrift, so we were alive, still amidst a terrible nowness.
I no longer want the sensation of flickering, how the crow is temporary and so does not need to live with itself for too long. In the absence of precedent, allow me to love you and believe in the world.
iii.
Within poems I can be untrue. I can run my hands along the smooth inside surface, implicate myself too little. It’s easy, this business of riding on instincts, lapping up ambiguity like salvation.
Earlier in the years we’d have gotten somewhere inverting Ashbery, inspired something better than ideas. I wouldn’t have written poems unable to escape poetry, in place of interceding for mortality. We are no longer talking of shoes, or feet, but we are still talking of wrongs.
Meihan is the author of The Formidable Miss Cassidy (Epigram Books Fiction Prize co-winner 2021, Singapore Book Awards Best Literary Work 2022), its upcoming sequel The Enigmatic Madam Ingram (shortlisted for EBFP 2023), and The Messiah Virus (2019). Her short stories have appeared in Fish Eats Lion Redux and Fright. She is Vice President of the Association of Comic Artists of Singapore; projects include The Once & Marvellous DKD and Supacross. She's still trying to go Super Saiyan.
I was born in 1595, because the Earl of Cumberland did not want to pay Queen Elizabeth I for one of her ships.
It was Queen Elizabeth who named me, when George Clifford (that is my owner, the Earl of Cumberland), like the overbearing, arse-licking, obnoxious fop he was, graciously gave her that pleasure. Now, some of you are young, and do not know her; Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I was a very fine lady, my friends. Not a nice lady, mind you - the Queen of England cannot be nice - but a very fine one, and her sense of humour was as sharp as the thorns evil gossipmongers like to claim lined her virgin cunny.
Anyway, as I was saying. My lord the Earl of Cumberland would not pay Her Majesty the Queen for a ship (and she needed the money), and instead chose to build his own, a 38 gun ship weighing 900 tons, a beast of a sea monster, to ride across the world and tame the savages. And when he had the temerity to ask Her Majesty to name me, as compensation for the four thousand pounds in hard cash she would much rather have had, she rose to the challenge, and named me The Scourge of Malice.
That is the name I was christened, my friends, and my lord the Earl of Cumberland had to like it or lump it. I suppose he liked it well enough, really. He had that sort of personality.
I was the largest ship that had ever been built by an English subject. I say built, but of course my lord Cumberland did not actually build me. Hundreds of ordinary folk put me together, from the lumberers who brought down half a forest for my beams (including the highest tree they could find for my mainmast), to the shipwrights who put me together nail by nail, to the weaving and sewing of my sails and ropes. My Lord Cumberland had the pleasure of wandering about the dock, ordering
fellows about, demanding this and that, and they all had to doff their hats and bow and pretend he knew what he was talking about. Then, fortunately, they ignored everything he said, and built me properly. It is just as well they did, my friends, or you would not be hearing my story now!
You perhaps might be wondering why my lord Cumberland had me built in the first place. Had he nothing better to do with his time and money?
In short, he did not. George Clifford launched me from Deptford Dock in 1595, and I became the head of his expedition, for the very fine and noble pursuit of raiding the Spanish Main. Why did he wish to raid the Spanish Main? Well, for something to do.
Ah, my friends, you should have seen us! I, and three others only a little less in tonnage than I, set sail on a warm morning. Quite apart from the posturing, grandiose fool excitedly making a nuisance of himself on my deck, I was filled with joy to be finally freed from my bonds, and launched upon the salty brine, and to fill my hungry sails with fresh wind. We made good time, my companions and I, as the men sang rude ditties to the rhythm of the waves, and the stiff and steady breeze granted us smooth passage. My lord Cumberland was very happy. He would be a swashbuckling hero, a dashing privateer, a name to be feared, on the Spanish Main!
However, as I have said, Her Majesty the Queen had a sense of humour. We sailed very happily along, and when we reached Plymouth (which is not, my friends, at all close to the Spanish Main), and my lord Cumberland was really getting excited... she sent word that she wished my lord to turn back.
What could he do? He turned back.
He cursed, he swore, he asked God to rain fire down upon that redbewigged bitch Queen; but he turned back. So I my lord and I returned to London, while the three other ships I was meant to lead, continued on their adventure without us.
Poor Georgie Clifford. Strike me blind but you would not believe itGeorgie Clifford did not get to sail properly on his favourite boat until three years later (he broke me, at one point, trying to get away in the middle of a violent storm, and had to turn back to repair me - this was not Queen Elizabeth's fault, but I have no doubt she must have laughed til she soiled her royal drawers).
But the Queen could not tease him forever. My lord Cumberland was, after all, one of her official champions; one of his duties, and the excuse he had used to build me, was to reclaim Brazil from the Spanish, in Her Majesty's name. In 1598, Her Majesty finally deigned to allow her champion to fulfill this duty, and off he went.
I sailed at the head of twenty vessels; and this time, I made it across the sea. It was a very expensive voyage, my friends, but my lord was so delighted to undertake it, he minded not the expense. After all, he was quite sure of his victory - what were the Spanish, but a bunch of filthy, ragtag, oily-haired ruffians? What could they do against the might of the English?
And so my lord sailed proudly, confidently, to reclaim the islands for his Queen. My lord also, I regret to say, proudly, confidently, nearly got himself drowned in the San Antonio channel, before he got within smelling distance of the land he was meant to liberate for the Queen. Now that would have been an excellent end to his ambitions.
Nevertheless! nevertheless, friends, we made it to shore at last, where my exhausted and annoyed crew and passengers spilled from my hold, and my lord Cumberland decided to besiege the castle of El Morro. It sounds like a prudent, wise decision; it was made because it was the only decision. The men were too tired to fight.
Fortunately, the Spanish were equally tired. They left.
Victory! Victory for my lord Cumberland! He occupied the town, in the name of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I.
Sixty-five days later, after six hundred men had died (two hundred died in glory, four hundred died in shit, my friends, for 'twas a plague of dysentry), my lord Cumberland hastened back to the safety of my captain's cabin, surrounded by my guns, and we turned right around, and sailed for home.
Oh, but it was not all in vain! No! We brought with us the loot of El Morro. Ah, a grand haul. Cathedral bells, which I suppose at least served as ballast, and eventually yielded some iron and tin; and a marble windowsill my lord took a fancy to. The marble windowsill was wrapped in straw and laid in my hold, where it took up a prodigious amount of space, and bewildered all the sailors who stubbed their toe upon it. There were also two thousand captured slaves, but since they were no less afflicted with dysentry than the men who had captured them, it was a futile entry into my lord’s ledger. He brought not a single soul home that was worth the price of their capture.
After this voyage, Georgie Clifford decided that a pirate's life was not for him (or a privateer, or a sailor, or an explorer, or an adventurer). Excessively out of pocket, my lord put my up for sale for four thousand pounds; when a fellow came along who was interested, my lord Cumberland let me go for thirty-seven hundred pounds, and was obliged to be grateful.
This man represented a brand new enterprise. It was called the East India Company, and I was to undertake the company's very first voyage.
Ah, my friends, it is the dream of every sailing vessel to be a part of history! I used to talk about it a great deal with a friend I saw often in Plymouth. A slender, hardy creature was she; like me, she longed for adventure. She, too, wished to travel across the world; to brave mighty storms, and seek new lands; to bring glory and fame to her captain. Her name was the Mayflower; her dream would come true; brave little ship, she reached the promised land, and gave up her life for the sake of her passengers. No nobler duty is there, for souls such as ours.
But my adventure began earlier than my friend's. In 1600, as I was saying, I changed hands, and became the first ship of the nascent East India Company.
The Scourge of Malice was felt to be an inappropriate name; I was renamed, with less bleak humour and more, well, direct aggression, the Red Dragon. I suppose it had something to do with the Welsh roots of some of the East India Company's stakeholders, but I was not fond of the name - I had been named by the Queen, how dare they presume to change what she had declared! - but I had no voice in the matter. The Red Dragonsometimes merely The Dragon - was my name, henceforth.
I cannot lie - I was a little apprehensive. The voyage my new owners intended for me, was not appropriate to a ship of my great tonnage. The idea was to forge a route all the way to the kingdoms of Indochina, to trade spices and silks and slaves, all the goods upon which Her Majesty's prosperity rested. It would have been better to be smaller, faster, lighter, and - a very pertinent point, and one which my lord Cumberland might have paid greater attention to - employ a far smaller crew, with the equivalant savings in salaries. But in the end, I won the day, for the very good reason that I was available to sail at the pleasure of my new owners.
I was given into the hands of Captain James Lancaster, whose references did not fill me with vast confidence, I must say — his last voyage to the East Indies ended in cannibals and plunder — but he was, after all, the first of Her Majesty's subjects to successfully make it to the East Indies and back to begin with. He only had twenty five men left (he had started out with three fully-manned ships) — but he made it back.
I could only hope he would manage, this time, to keep his men alive, for I was far too large to manage with a crew of twenty five.
We set sail in February, accompanied by three smaller ships - Ascension, Susan, and Hector - all of whom were very excited. The weather was fine, the sea was calm, and the men were in good spirits, including Lancaster himself, who was in the captain's quarters inspecting a box of lemons.
We were all ready for adventure, but my friends, adventure was not ready for us. First the winds would not cooperate, and we dawdled about the English Channel for two months, pissing into the wind. Hector and I became great friends, which was just as well, for even after we cleared the channel, we ended up falling into the Doldrums for a month, in that still and windless place that was the bane of all sailors.
You may imagine the confidence of the sailors was waning, somewhat; but Lancaster and his lemons were not done yet.
Lancaster's lemons were a bit of a sore point with my crew. Directly reporting to Captain Lancaster, they could not avoid his insistence upon dosing every single man and boy with the stuff. My hold was filled not only with lemons, but with bottled lemon juice - bottled at great expense, for it took a tremendous amount of labour to juice enough lemons to fill even a single pint bottle, never mind enough for an entire crew.
All aboard the Red Dragon were obliged to follow Lancaster's lemon regimen. This started every morning - when the bulk of the crew came on duty, they were obliged to do so hungry. This was a hard thing to impose upon a sailor, between the long days of largely monotonous labour, the deprivation of bedroom company, and the rationing of rum — to not even be permitted to have breakfast, and to instead have to dose oneself with three spoonfuls of pure lemon juice and wait til noon for a crust of bread, was apt to give rise to some mutinous muttering.
By the time we reached the Cape of Good Hope, however, Lancaster's lemons had demonstrated their merit.
The sea is full of dangers, but it is not drowning that sailors fear most; it is disease. I have told you about dysentry; I must now describe another unpleasant condition, commonly called scurvy. Dysentry makes you shit; scurvy makes you bleed. Teeth and hair fall out, skin breaks likes paper, and one dies in fever and convulsions. An inelegant, unheroic way to die.
It was Captain Lancaster's firm belief that lemon juice, taken on an empty stomach for full absorption, was an effective preventative to the disease.
He had all sorts of outlandish theories why this might be, which greatly bewildered the sailors; but the end result of the Lancaster lemon regime was beyond question.
Scurvy struck, as it often does on long sea voyages; but it largely struck the crew of Susan, Ascension and Hector. The sailors in my crew were, by and large, unaffected. By September 1601, as we arrived at Table Bay, we had lost 108 men to scurvy; none of them were on the Red Dragon.
After that, you may be sure my crew stopped grousing about Lancaster's lemons.
We arrived, at last, on the fifth of June, on the island of Sumatra. My Captain, Lemons Lancaster, promptly went off in search of the first King he could find willing to strike a deal; he did so with the fascinated and friendly Alauddin Shah, a handsome fellow whose warmth and hospitality did not, in fact, extend to him signing over all the wealth of his kingdom, as Lancaster was hoping. Instead, the shrewd fellow magnanimously waived customs dues, then waved us off with a few bits and bobs in "treasure" that did not even fill the hold of my much smaller friend, the Susan.
The Captain remonstrated; the East India Company's first voyage would be their last, if they did not return with enough goods to save all shareholders from bankruptcy.
Alauddin Shah, in a kindly and sympathetic tone, said "That is a pity. Goodbye, have a safe trip home.”
Well! What to do? There was no other option, my friends. Lemons Lancaster took a page from my lord Cumberland's books, and off we went privateering.
We headed down the Strait of Malacca in search of victims, and found one in the shape of a Portuguese carrack called the São Thomé. She was very large, as large as I, and very full. She had come from India laden with valuable textiles, spices, and other delectable cargo. After some
persuasion from my 38 guns, and the business end of Captain Lancaster's musket, all these good things were transferred to my hold.
My friends, Susan, Ascension and Hector, met with some success of their own in various ways. By the time the Captain decided to head home, all of us were well-laden with riches, and Lancaster had written promises of friendship from two Kings, besides, that he could bring back to the Queen. You might think it slim pickings, friends, but those two precious bits of paper, carefully sealed in oiled scroll-cases, were worth far more to my good Queen Bess than the uncertain results of all of Georgie Clifford's endeavours.
We were, therefore, in excellent spirits as we set off. But no journey of this kind can be called a success, my friends, if your end point is not the same as your start. And my end point was almost at the bottom of the sea in the Cape of Good Hope.
The storm that came upon us was so sudden and swift, that the Captain's frantic instructions to push hard to port! hard to port! only resulted in my rudder breaking off in the surging current. Without a rudder, I lost all sense of direction; I plunged, I lurched, I tipped my men and my cargo overboard, unable to control where I was going or what I was doing. My masts rattled and my sails tore; the men, desperate, begged to be transferred to Hector, who was close enough to paddle for, even as the ship's carpenter tried frantically to improvise a rudder.
I braced myself to be abandoned. Alas, alas, such a undignified end! To be brought down by the crack of a rudder, on the very cusp of a grand and glorious homecoming!
But Captain Lancaster would not abandon me.
"Nobody leaves her," he roared, as he seized hold of the ropes alongside his men. "We shall yet abide God's leisure.”
"But the Hector is leaving!”
"Let them leave. They have a right to save themselves. But we stay with the Dragon!”
And they stayed with me.
All night they struggled; every man still alive had tied himself to my deck, as I plunged and surged helplessly upon the waves. They scrabbled and scrambled, they heaved and ho'd, they cursed and screamed, they prayed and wept. I was very tired, and they were very tired, and Captain Lancaster was very tired, yet still we battled on, through the storm, through the night.
It was many hours later when I saw the first light of day break through the clouds. I felt the wind begin to abate; the wild churning of the ocean began to ebb away. But my crew and my captain were so exhausted they hardly noticed; their arms were still wrapped around the ropes, the first mate dizzy from too many bumps on the head, still gripping the helm, steering by instinct. I longed to tell them the fight was over; to thank them for their courage, in seeing out the battle and keeping me and my cargo in one piece. But I could not speak; I could only gradually begin to right myself, little by little, til finally the dawn broke over the horizon.
Captain Lancaster came to his feet; he looked out over the steadily calming sea. Outlined against the gleaming rays of the rising sun was the prow of another ship.
"The Hector," he said. "The Hector did not leave us after all.”
My friend Hector had not left. Hector, and Hector's crew, had escaped the worst of the storm; but they had not sailed home. They had waited, in case they might help us; in case the worst came to pass, and I was wrecked, and my brave crew were in need of rescue. They were almost as glad as we, that this was not necessary.
The ship's carpenter took wood from my mizzenmast to build a new rudder. The best swimmers and divers, from both Hector's crew and my
own, then went beneath the waves with it, and secured it in place. This done, amid other smaller repairs, Hector and I proceeded on our way home.
We had been away for such a long time, my friends, that by the time we reached safe harbour in England on 11 September, 1603, there was a new King on the throne, James I; good Queen Bess, who had given me my first name, had died in March. So by the time Captain Lancaster was securing the friendship of two Kings of the East Indies for Her Majesty, she was in fact no longer able to receive that friendship. I was sad; I had set sail to bring glory to Her Majesty, but she would never witness our triumph.
Captain Lancaster, however, reaped glory of his own; the new King knighted him, pleased with the tremendous success of his mission.
We were, in fact, too successful. Valuable things like pepper and calico, after all, are valuable because of their rarity. With four tremendous shiploads of the stuff all flooding the market at the same time, their value naturally dropped, and nobody made anywhere as much money as they thought they would.
Still, my friends, I had proven my seaworthiness. My second voyage for the East India Company was not with Captain Lancaster (sadly, for I had grown very fond of him and his lemons). Sir Henry Middleton was not as dashing nor as adventurous a man as Lancaster - and he did not believe in the lemon treatment, though Captain Lancaster freely shared that advice with any sea-captain who asked. So in the process of passing through the Cape of Good Hope, we had to stop at Table Bay because my crew was suffering with scurvy.
General Middleton, apropos of nothing, then decided to hunt whales.
All right, I will be fair. This was not such a bad idea, for whales yield oil for lamps and meat for eating; but whale hunting is not for the foolish or fainthearted. They are large, strong beasts, whose maneuverability and power in the water make a mere mockery of my many guns and sails; they certainly made short work of Middleton's harpoons. Instead of killing the beast he harpooned, Middleton merely enraged it, and the whale then led us on a merry dance, dragging the boats back and forth across the bay, while the whale's equally outraged (and equally enormous) companions attacked the rest of us. Such damage this ill-thought-out idea caused that it took three days to repair, and the only whale successfully brought in was too small to be of great use.
By then the native residents of Table Bay had had quite enough of Middleton, and chased us off at the business end of their sabres. We sailed on, failing to make much progress until, entirely by accident, we came upon an altercation between the ships of the kingdoms of Tidore and Ternate. The Ternate Sultan being upon one of the galleys, Middleton decided that assisting him would be a better business decision. Accordingly, he turned my guns upon the seven Tidore galleys in pursuit.
This was a terrible idea.
The Tidore galleys entirely brushed off Middleton's attack, caught up with the Sultan of Ternate, and slaughtered all his men (except for three, who wisely leapt into the sea and swam to me for sanctuary). Even in this moment of extremity the Sultan begged Middleton,
"Do not trade with these violent scoundrels - see what they are like! Come to Ternate - you may set up an English factorie, and there trade us English goods.”
Middleton, sensibly enough in that moment, said no.
We arrived in Tidore on 27 March, all hail-fellow-well-met with the same men we had attempted to cannonade out of the water. At Tidore, Middleton finally managed to drum up some decent trade in cloves, the great treasure of both kingdoms.
From here on, friends, things get a little complicated, between the lands held by Ternate and Tidore, and everybody wanting their cloves"everybody" meaning the Dutch, the Portuguese, and we, the English. Ships passed in the night - not quietly, for we had to sound our horns at each other, to mark that we meant no aggression. This, however, did not stay true for long. By and by, everyone (and I do mean everyone) converged upon the same fort, in a heavily-fought and bloody quarrel over cloves, resulting, eventually, in the fort exploding from the sheet weight of ordnance thrown at it.
The Dutch and Ternate pushed forwards into victory. The Portuguese retreated, spitefully setting fire to a factory in passing. The factory happened to store all the cloves everyone was fighting over.
The end result being, nobody got what they wanted.
Anyway, friends, we eventually made it home, with what I consider to be middling success; between the scurvy, the whales, and the war of the cloves, Middleton did not impress either the King, nor the East India Company.
So my third journey for the Company was with William Keeling. Under his leadership, we had a sensibly managed and monotonous time, with decent results, securing rights in several important ports. Keeling was a comfortable sort of man, likeable, reliable - very dull, I suppose, compared to the men who had taken my helm before him, but that was all right with me.
I was just getting comfortable with Keeling's general predictability, when he entirely threw me off, before a scheduled voyage in 1615. By then the East India Company was well established, as you can imagine. Keeling was preparing to go on a run-of-the-mill journey to restructure Asian trading links. All the arrangements were efficient, as usual - packing supplies, replacing and checking rigging, all that sort of thing.
I was dozing in the shipwright's dock one night, the night before we were to set sail, when I was startled awake by hushed voices. Two shadowy figures had come aboard, one of them heavily hooded. It was very late at night; nobody was about, but there was always a big, brawny sort of bastard at the shipyard gates ready for trouble, and I was astonished that someone had managed to get past him.
In a moment I realised how. One of the shadowy figures lit a lamp, to light the way for the other - it was Keeling.
The other figure clambered heavily aboard, with difficulty. "My dear, are you sure this will be all right?” The voice was a lady's. I had hardly ever heard a woman's voice, except for the old Queen's, in the early years of my service - women were not allowed on board ships of my kind, although many of us bore female names. I was amazed, as you can imagine, my friends!
"I will not leave you behind, heavy with child, and alone," was Keeling's fervent reply. "I cannot bear it. Who knows how long I must sail? How many months, before I return? And we cannot exchange so much as a letter! No; you must come with us.”
"But you know the sailors do not like women on ships.”
"What can they do, once we are out at sea?”
Well! Dull, staid, reliable old Keeling in love! And how! Love clearly made him a different man. I was curious to see what would happen; I was quite willing to hide the lady in the captain's cabin, although I had never hosted a lady before, much less one so heavily with child. The ship's cat, who hunted rats in my hold, had not been more swollen than good Mrs Keeling, when she dropped a litter of seven kittens in my crow's nest last month.
I was willing, as I said, but the East India Company most assuredly was not. Poor Mrs Keeling!
When we set sail, she hid successfully in the captain's cabin for but two days, before the crew found out. How could they not? Even on a ship of my size, there were no easy hiding places. A lady must eat, piss and shit, like all the rest of humankind, and this one, in particular, would also have to give birth (very shortly, if my experience with our cat was anything to go by).
The crew was very displeased - not with Mrs Keeling, whom they judged to merely be a poor weak woman, after all, obeying her husband, as she was meant to. No, they were annoyed with their unmanly captain. Keeling could not proceed with his plan; the crew preferred to return to port to get rid of Mrs Keeling, than sail on with her aboard, although we would lose precious time.
So we turned back; Mrs Keeling was put ashore, much to Mr Keeling's very great dismay. But his sense of duty was strong, and he proceeded with his journey, sans pregnant wife. He threw himself into his work, indeed, setting up factories, establishing new trade agreements, and new partnerships. By and by, he worked so hard that he became ill, and I was able to bring him home to his wife and new child in May 1617.
I was glad to see them reunited; and I never saw good Mr Keeling again afterwards. I hope he lived a long and happy life, dull and comfortable and predictable and content.
It has been two years since then; I am almost at the end of my tale, friends. Tomorrow I sail with my new captain, a young fellow named Robert Bonner. I know nothing of him yet worth knowing.
Don't ask me how I can possibly be sure of this, but friends - I believe this will be my last voyage, either as the Red Dragon, or as the Scourge of Malice. Perhaps that is why I am so garrulous tonight, telling all the stories of my youthful adventures. Ah, you new young vessels, with your fresh paint and clean sails! What a lot you have to look forward to!
Friends, if I do not return, be sure you keep your prow up. Sail strong, sail true, and trust in your captain, even if he be a bit of a fool now and then. Many a storm have I weathered now, but here I still am. Trust in your crew, and take care of your men.
May you find calm waters, swift winds, and in the end, safe harbour, when the time comes.
In October 1619, a Dutch fleet attacked and sank the Red Dragon, commanded by Robert Bonner, who died of his wounds.
Yeo Wei Wei’s fiction and translations have appeared in anthologies and journals, including the Best New Singaporean Short Stories antholog y, Brooklyn Rail, Mascara Literary Review, and QLRS. She is the author of These Foolish Things & other stories (2015). Diasporic and Clan, two volumes featuring her translations, transcreations and adaptations of Soon Ailing’s short stories, were published in Singapore, UK and US in 2023.
Auntie Bebe bathed the old-fashioned way using a bucket and ladle. There was a modern shower in her bathroom but she never used it. Before her husband passed away, he offered many times to have the shower removed, but each time Auntie Bebe retorted: ‘What about the taps? Are you getting rid of those too? And what will we do for water after that? Collect well water from public taps, is it?’ The last time she fetched water from public taps was forty years ago. After Cursed Thing made its presence known to them, they moved house. When that didn’t have the desired outcome, they moved again. They moved three more times after the second home but each time, Cursed Thing moved with them. After Auntie Bebe’s husband died from a sudden heart attack, for a period of time the taps behaved like ordinary faucets and Auntie Bebe could wash herself in peace in the bathroom. Then one day, Auntie Bebe woke up from her nap to the all-too-familiar sound of gushing water coming from the kitchen. Whilst she was trying to silence Cursed Thing at the kitchen sink, the bathroom taps turned themselves on. She couldn’t be in two places at once, of course, and so in very little time her home was flooded. She could see her reflection in the water.
A lull followed that day. But Auntie Bebe knew Cursed Thing’s tricks by now. So today when watery jets flew into her face in the bathroom, she wasn’t surprised. She had been scooping tepid water with the bath ladle over her naked self, wishing that her bathroom wasn’t this small and poky, when the shower hose grew taut and erect like a snake rising to attack. Many more bullets followed after the first shot, leaving Auntie Bebe spluttering and rubbing at her eyes. The ladle fell onto the floor as she tried to dodge the pelting at her body. Grabbing the ladle, Auntie Bebe brandished it like a cudgel at her invisible assailant.
‘够了!够了! Enough! Enough!’ she shrieked.
Cursed Thing made no reply.
Auntie Bebe threw the ladle at the showerhead. It clattered onto the floor. How could something so small make such a loud sound? The walls of her bathroom were uncomfortably close to her. She couldn’t stretch her arms out fully on either side. That was what it would have been like – she couldn’t stop the flow of her thoughts now. The watery grave of drowned girl infants crammed inside water jars back in her village – a sight she could never unsee although she was an old woman now, as far away as she could be from that fate. She inhaled deeply. She was here in Singapore, saved, spared. Familiar smells surrounded her – the sweet, floral scent of her soap, the damp fug of this tiny space – but nothing gave her comfort.
Auntie Bebe had sailed to Singapore from China when the war ended. She had expected Big Sis to be at the quay when she arrived, but no, only her aunt was there and she wasted no time in revealing to Auntie Bebe what she had not been able to bring herself to write in her letters to Auntie Bebe’s father who was still in China. Big Sis had not been seen since she was taken away by Japanese soldiers. Auntie Bebe refused to believe her. She went out every day to search for Big Sis, showing an old photograph to everyone she met, asking if they had seen the girl in the picture. To persuade her to stop, her aunt repeated the story about the night their street had been raided by armed Japanese soldiers. Big Sis was dragged away into the night and not seen again since then.
One evening, as was her custom, when Auntie Bebe got home at dusk after another day of futile searching, she carried a bucket of well water to the bathroom at the back of the shophouse where she stayed with her aunt in a rented room. She sat on a low stool to wash herself with that precious water. Ladling it over her head, she was enjoying that sweet relief on her clammy, grimy skin when she noticed bubbles coming up to the
surface in the bucket as if someone was breathing underwater. She sprang to her feet, knocking the stool over and backed away from the bucket until she was pressed up against the exit. Staring from a safe enough distance, she observed bubbles rippling into first a circle and then an oval shape. Curiosity overcame caution and she inched forwards, peering into the bucket.
There was a girl inside the water. The apparition wrinkled as if fingers were clawing at the water surface. It was Big Sis, wearing the same clothes in the photograph Auntie Bebe had been bringing around with her! There were cuts on her face, where she had been scratched; her hair was dishevelled and the buttons of her blouse were missing. Instead of eyes, the face had two small mirrors and Auntie Bebe glimpsed herself in them.
The next morning, she couldn’t get out of bed. Whether she opened or closed her eyes, the horrible vision in that bucket of water hovered over her. She flung a blanket over her head but it was no use. When her fever finally subsided after three days, she put Big Sis’s photograph away and never spoke about searching for her again.
‘Auntie, this is your room. Well, it’s Hugo’s room, but you can put your things in that cupboard and oh, before I forget, here’s the air-con remote. If there’s anything else you need, feel free to let us know,’ the baby’s father, Mr Lim, said pleasantly as he handed the remote to Auntie Bebe and went back to the master bedroom where his wife was nursing Hugo, their newborn son. Hugo, like other babies she had cared for before him, was a small defenceless creature who needed her to feed him and keep him clean. These would have been the responsibilities of his parents if they hadn’t hired her. Over the years, Auntie Bebe detected a change in the fathers. When she first started working as a confinement nanny some twenty years ago, there was very little interaction between her and the men. If her month-long presence in their homes was acknowledged, this was usually in the form of perfunctory nods and grunts. But these days, the husbands got involved from the start. When she had come to their home for the interview three months ago, she had met not only Mrs Lim
with her beautiful big belly, but also Mr Lim. The couple had sat on the sofa across from her, asking the sorts of questions that only first-time parents with western ideas could come up with.
Mr Lim had placed a palm on his wife’s bump and stroked it as if Auntie Bebe wasn’t there. She had looked away each time he did this.
‘Is there anything we should get ready for you? We want you to feel at home,’ Mrs Lim had said.
Auntie Bebe had enquired then about the attached bathroom for her bedroom. During her initial phone conversation with Mrs Lim prior to this in-person interview, she had already stated that an attached bathroom was a non-negotiable condition for her acceptance of the position. Mrs Lim reassured her that the baby’s room was en-suite and they moved on to discuss the other details of Auntie Bebe’s month-long stay. Just before she left that day, Auntie Bebe couldn’t stop herself from blurting out: ‘It’s a boy, you know.’ She could tell from the shape of Mrs Lim’s bump. A boy! She was so happy for them.
‘Oh,’ Mrs Lim said with a wan smile. ‘Boy or girl, we just want the baby to be healthy.’
Auntie Bebe nodded. They had said earlier on that they’d asked their doctor not to reveal the sex of their baby. How odd but also how wonderful that the younger generation had such liberating ideas, she thought. Gone were the days when parents’ happiness rested on one thing, that the infant was a boy. When she was little, a male infant missing a foot was better than a girl baby with no defects. That era was long gone, not just here but in the big cities in China too, Auntie Bebe supposed, suppressing her childhood memory of abandoned female newborns squashed like pickles into a waist-high water jar in her village.
Auntie Bebe’s prediction was accurate. Three days ago an elated Mr Lim rang her from the hospital and here she was, in baby Hugo’s room. She had to see the bathroom, this was always the first thing she did when she was alone in a new client’s home. The bathroom was larger than her
bedroom at home. It had a rainfall shower head over the bath tub, a separate shower cubicle, a toilet bowl, a bidet, and a washstand. She turned on the tap at the basin and waited for it to fill. The sound of the water made her pulse quicken, but she made herself count to a hundred and finally, when the basin was half full, she looked down and waited. Nothing happened. When she was satisfied, she splashed her face, patted it dry with her handkerchief and prepared herself for the start of her job.
An infant’s mewling next door brought a smile to her face. Auntie Bebe tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve, it was her must-have for dabbing at baby’s sweat or food stains and the countless other messes baby was bound to make. Her smile widened. But when she straightened herself and saw her reflection with its expression of maternal tenderness, she put the smile away and said out loud: ‘He is not mine and I will never be a mother.’ This, like her request for an attached bathroom, was a precautionary salvo. A newborn’s life was at stake, she must not take any chances.
In her thirties, after her second miscarriage, she and her husband had gone to see Old Cat, the famous tang ki at the Goddess of Mercy Temple. The medium was an auntie with short tight curls which clung to her head like a helmet. Her real name was Mdm Tan Lay Kuan but everyone called her Old Cat. As she listened to their woes, Old Cat’s face remained impassive. During the ritual, her mouth formed unusual shapes like putty until it settled into a pout and quivered like a child’s lips on the verge of crying. A small girl’s shrill voice flew out of Old Cat’s mouth like fizzy soda. It was nothing like Old Cat’s raspy two-packs-a-day voice. Old Cat slumped onto the floor at the end of the spirit’s incomprehensible tirade. The tea cups used for offerings at the altar were swept by an invisible force onto the floor. Old Cat walked around them like a detective at a crime scene. After one minute, she beckoned Auntie Bebe and her husband to go close to the broken ceramic pieces and tell her what they saw.
‘Is that . . .?’ Auntie Bebe’s husband stopped.
The shape the broken pieces made on the floor was a Chinese character. 安, meaning peace.
‘Peace is a woman whose head is a roof. Poor thing, cursed thing,’ Old Cat said.
‘Cursed Thing,’ Auntie Bebe said.
‘What happened to your Big Sis during the war was unforgiveable and her spirit continues to suffer. The men who hurt her have died, but she can’t have peace yet. Is your fridge Japanese? Is your TV a Sony? Throw them all away!’
‘Our car is a Toyota,’ Auntie Bebe’s husband whispered.
‘Sell it and buy a Kia!’ Old Cat hissed. ‘Never eat tempura or sushi again!’
‘Asahi is brewed in Vietnam, does that make it alright?’ Auntie Bebe’s husband asked.
‘Tiger. Chang. Carlsberg. Anything but Asahi!’
Auntie Bebe and her husband followed Old Cat’s advice. A few months after their temple visit, Auntie Bebe got pregnant. After their fourth and last miscarriage, like their fourth and last house move, they gave up. Age demolished what little remained of Auntie Bebe’s dream of motherhood. Her bleed stopped completely when she was fifty-five. Not long after that, her husband died.
Auntie Bebe secured her jobs through word of mouth. Most years, she took on no more than six postings and her earnings allowed her to treat herself to Korean barbeque, bibimbap and pastries from Paris Baguette (also Korean, she checked). Her most lucrative years were during the Year of the Dragon. She’d been through three cycles by now and each time, she was deluged by job offers, the dragon being the most auspicious creature
in the Chinese horoscope. That she was good at her job wasn’t something she gave too much thought to. She had a reputation among the first-time mothers and their friends for being exceptionally calm and patient with difficult babies. Mr and Mrs Lim were certainly relieved that Auntie Bebe was with them whenever Hugo clenched his tiny claw-like hands into impotent fists and bawled inconsolably. Like most inexperienced mothers, Mrs Lim often looked like she was ready to join Hugo in his fits. Auntie Bebe found it strange that anyone should expect a baby not to cry. They had been ejected from the sanctuary of the womb into this harsh life. Of course they should cry.
Her clients would never know that Auntie Bebe owed her unflappable, detached demeanour to her fear of something far more calamitous than an inconsolable bawling baby. But this time at the Lims, something had changed in her. Perhaps it was old age. Perhaps it was the irresistible cuteness of Hugo, abundantly blessed by the genes of his goodlooking parents. Whatever it was, Auntie Bebe grew more attached to Hugo with each passing day, despite reminding herself that she had to keep her maternal emotions in check if she didn’t want to provoke Cursed Thing.
One day during her third week with the Lims, Hugo was alone in his cot in his room and Auntie Bebe was in the kitchen warming up soup for Mrs Lim. She looked over disapprovingly at Mrs Lim who was playing with her phone at the kitchen table. If Hugo was hers, she would never let him out of her sight, not even for one minute. When Auntie Bebe realised the line she had crossed, she immediately babbled out loud: ‘He isn’t mine! I’m not his mother! Not mine, not mine!’
‘Huh?’ Mrs Lim said absently, eyes still on the screen of her phone.
‘Not mine, not mine! His mother is that one, over there, over there!’
‘Auntie Bebe, can you speak softer? Hugo is sleeping.’
The baby’s cries rose in the air.
‘See? He’s crying. Oh God, I’m so tired of drinking this stuff,’ Mrs Lim said to Auntie Bebe as the latter put a bowl of soup down before her. ‘And he’s crying again.’
‘Drink. Soup good for you.’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with that child!’ Mrs Lim pulled at her hair. ‘Why can’t he nap like a normal baby? He’s had his feed and his nappy was changed not that long ago. I think he hates me. That’s why he tortures me with this endless crying. Make him stop, make him stop!’ Mrs Lim started tearing.
From her many years of experience with first-time mothers, Auntie Bebe understood what was required of her at such times – she was to provide the affirmation and encouragement the mothers craved to receive from an auntie. Some of the mothers’ mothers were close in age to Auntie Bebe, so Auntie Bebe could picture these women as her daughters. But when they broke down in front of her, there wasn’t any need for her to suppress her maternal feelings because she felt nothing for them. They didn’t know how lucky they were.
‘My sister says I have post-natal depression,’ Mrs Lim said, pulling several sheets of tissue from a nearby box and burying her face in them.
Auntie Bebe didn’t have any views on these sorts of ideas which seemed to be western in origin and not quite comprehensible. What could be better than giving birth to a baby boy? Hugo had four limbs, two eyes, two ears, a mouth, a nose, and a nicely-formed male member which would bring forth more Lims in the future. What reason was there for his mother to be weepy? But showing sympathy was one of the easiest aspects of her job and not revealing how she truly felt about anything came naturally to her. ‘You stay here and drink your soup. I go take care of baby,’ she said in her most soothing manner.
Mrs Lim blew her nose and looked up. ‘So glad you’re here, Auntie.’
Seeing Hugo was like seeing a friend since Auntie Bebe spent most days alone with him as the Lims carried on with their busy lives. She spoke to him the way she always spoke to the babies she cared for whenever they were alone. ‘Your daddy has gone out to work and make money and your mummy doesn’t know how lucky she is,’ Auntie Bebe told Hugo as she leaned over his cot to pick him up. The Lims were most enthusiastic around Hugo whenever they had their phone cameras aimed at him or when one of them was in the frame with him. Auntie Bebe didn’t understand the need for two cameras but this was the way the young did things these days. She noticed that both Mr and Mrs Lim went everywhere with their phones, even the toilet. ‘One day you will have a phone too and you will be taking many photos of your handsome face,’ she said to the caterwauling baby. She said this even though she could see objectively that his features were distorted by his tantrum. Auntie Bebe cooed: ‘You are small baby but your temper and your voice, aiyoh, so-o-o big! You made your mummy cry,’ she said as she hugged him to her bosom. ‘Silly mummy.’
She felt the warmth of his head, that wonderful weight of it resting against her chest. She touched his downy fuzz with the tip of her nose. On an impulse, she pulled up her blouse, slid the strap of her bra off one shoulder and guided his little face with a steady palm towards her breast.
She had to stifle the urge to squeal when she felt his lips hoovering the skin of her areola, searching hungrily. Then it happened – he clamped his sweet bud-like lips onto her nipple – and Auntie Bebe yelped as much from pain as delight. The baby’s curiosity tickled her. She could see the questions in his eyes: Where was the food? Why wasn’t anything entering his mouth?
‘Peace, peace,’ she murmured. Gazing down at his insistent mouth, her lips began to mirror its suckling movements. This was how her
mouth had moved when she hid inside the pond behind her family home in China on the day the matchmaker came for her. Submerged and partially hidden by the weeds underwater, this movement of her lips helped her to stay calm somehow. She blew bubbles intermittently to breathe, but her father, the matchmaker and all the others who were searching for her hurried past the pond, casting flurries of shadows on the surface. Later on, the matchmaker would leave Auntie Bebe’s family home with Big Sis rather than Auntie Bebe. She would chaperone Big Sis first to Amoy and then to Singapore on a ship where a family waited for their child bride – servant and future wife to their five-year-old son.
‘I didn’t know they would make Big Sis take my place,’ Auntie Bebe whispered to the baby. ‘I was scared, I didn’t want to be sent away from my family.’
The baby leaned back from her and unleashed even louder cries than the ones before. Auntie Bebe squashed her breast into his face to make him take her nipple, but this time he writhed and even kicked his small useless limbs at her.
His crying grew fiercer by the second. It was like the taps in her home, starting softly at first before they became uncontrollable.
‘Enough! Enough!’ Auntie Bebe muttered at first before she too, like the taps and the baby, lost control.
Loud water sounds emanated from the bathroom. Mrs Lim’s voice came from the opposite direction, through the locked entrance to the baby room: ‘What’s happening? Is Hugo alright? Auntie, what are you doing to my baby? Open the door!’
Auntie Bebe shook the baby to make him stop. The water and the baby were combining forces. She was in their tempest, but she would keep herself safe, just as she had done so inside the pond of her childhood home all those years ago.
When firemen charged into the room, she surrendered the baby to Mrs Lim without any struggle. She would have sat down on the floor despite the water if the men hadn’t caught hold of her. Mrs Lim shouted at her, even as she guided the baby’s face towards her enormous, waiting breast. Auntie Bebe watched as the men talked, Mrs Lim scolded, the baby drank. She wished they would follow the example of the baby and be quiet. There was silence at faucets of the bath, the basin, the toilet flush, the bidet, the shower. But Cursed Thing wasn’t appeased, and so even though Auntie Bebe was silent, she told the rising waters that only she could hear: ‘Enough! Enough!’
Michele Lim is a fiction writer from Singapore. She writes about fractures, healing, and the strangeness of postcolonial and/or diasporic experience. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Prose) from the University of East Anglia, and has had her fi ction published by Ethos Books, Symbal, and The Sprawl Mag.
Yuxian first found the moss on the back of her bed post. She had been trying to move her bed from one end of her room to the other, thinking that a change of scenery, however small, might do something for her mental health. But all she gained from trying was a pair of sore arms and deep imprints on her palms where she had gripped the hard wooden edges of her bed—the room, which Yuxian had lived in for more than twenty years, turned out to be too small and oddly shaped to accommodate any other configuration. The bed could only be inched forward and rotated so far before its edges clashed against the opposite wall. Leaving there, Yuxian stepped into the empty space that had once been occupied by her bed. The floor beneath it was cool and felt almost damp, being covered in a thin layer of dust. Then Yuxian saw it.
This bed, which Yuxian had also laid in for more than twenty years, was peeling from behind. The bed post had always been against the wall, and now that the thin fabric that concealed the wooden frame was flaking away, Yuxian could see that the frame had been overrun by something dark and patchy. A small part of her reminded her that back when she was normal, a sight like that would have sent her screaming immediately. But it had been a long time since she was normal. So Yuxian reached out and touched the black thing.
The moss was soft but firm. She dug her finger into it in a peeling motion, but it did not give way. Its surface was cool but not wet, and when Yuxian rubbed her index finger against her thumb, her skin remained dry. Suddenly she was tired. Since the moss didn’t seem to be doing anybody any harm, she decided to leave it be. She pushed her bed back into place.
In her room, there was a clock running that only Yuxian could hear. Each tick brought Yuxian closer to the time when she would finally, eventually, have to tell her parents that she was in fact not on leave, but she had been let go. She had tried to imagine their reactions—anything from shock to anger to shame—but since a few years ago, she had had difficulty imagining their faces. It was not because they hadn’t seen each other in years; Yuxian had always lived with her parents. She saw them every day. When she was younger, and normal, they had talked more often. When she got admitted into the local university, they told her how proud they were that she would be the first among them to graduate. This was the last time that she could see their faces clearly in her mind’s eye. Since then, everything began to blur; as though her foot had slipped and caught an undertow, and whenever she tried to find the surface of any memory, it rippled away.
She had always lived in this room. The sun did not shine directly into it. Something about the way the adjacent and opposite flats were arranged made her room constantly dim and airless. She had two electric fans and two lamps, and when she was flying into a silent panic over being close to failing a university class, or googling ways to avoid a stalker, or working desperately through the night for a job that she knew she was going to lose anyway, the electric hum of all the machinery combined—the same sound she had heard every day for more than twenty years had reminded her that she could still maintain the illusion of normality, even if she felt that she was now two selves: the one floating and the one sinking.
After finding the moss, Yuxian found it difficult to leave her bed. While her parents were out at work during the day, she would sit upright, watching shadows cut themselves against the blocks of flats outside. Several days passed this way, with Yuxian only getting up to greet her parents when she came home, before retreating again, shutting the door behind her. On the fifth day, she rose to find that her shadow had imprinted itself against the wall.
There was, in fact, more than one shadow. Imprints of her body stretched against the wall, some yawning, some laughing, some weeping. They moved from west to east, then disappeared back into her bed post. Yuxian switched on all the lights, and when that didn’t seem like enough, she pulled the curtains off their hooks, sweeping them under the bed. Now the moss seemed to glisten, each small, bumpy surface catching the light like a tiny star. The sight was grotesque and beautiful and too much, so Yuxian simply lay back down on her bed, with the imprints of herself arranged above her like so many dark angels, and waited to be found.
Kevin Martens Wong is the last Merlionsman and fi rst Dreamtiger of the Republic of Singapore: a gay, non-binary Kristang / Portuguese-Eurasian Singaporean speculative fiction writer, independent scholar and teacher, and the leader of the Kristang / PortugueseEurasian community in the Lion City. Specialising in intangible cultural heritage revitalisation, indigenous archeoastronomy and accessible non-Western psycholog y, he is the developer of the the Kristang theory of the human psyche known as the Osura Pesuasang, the editor-in-chief of Kadamundu: The Spice Road Review, and Kabesa or director of Kodrah Kristang, the grassroots movement to revive the critically endangered Kristang language. A 2023 Poesiaeuropa Fellow under the High Patronage of the European Parliament and the 2017 winner of both the Lee Hsien Loong Award for Outstanding All-Round Achievement and President's Volunteer and Philanthropy Award (Individual–Youth, his fi rst novel, Altered Straits, was longlisted for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, and he has published three anthologies of poetry in Kristang and English: Relwe di Reinyang, Glow-Glow Dancer and Songs of a Young Startiger. He currently runs his own coaching and consulting initiative, Merlionsman, and writes new plays, poetry and prose in Kristang and English at Tigri sa Chang / The Tiger's Land.
It is night. Lest one forget, it is almost always night when it arrives, everywhere in the multiverse, everywhere else but on one, quickly tilting side of the Earth; but also only somewhat dark, very rarely stormy. (How hard it is, remember, for things to land safely in a storm, and in a space without moonlight, or starshine, or even the barest glimmering of the day yet to come.)
Who do you have to be, for it to come to you?
You have to be exactly that: you have to be a star. A sun. A wavering, flickering moon. A point of light. A heartbeat, dancing on the lines between here and there. A galaxy; an unidentified object; a shimmering, radiant neutron star. A constellation. You have to be everything. You have to be everyone. And because of that, you could be anyone.
Suppose it is you, then. How does it come to you?
And first – before anything – is it it? Could it be him? Could it be them? Did it always have to be her, no matter how much she filled our own engines with courage and strength, with serenity, with the wings of Pegasus herself, carrying the galaxy home?
Suppose it could be him, then. Why not? In the collective unconsciousness of an omniverse filled with the detritus of an octillion souls, blessed and
damned, wicked and divine, dead and alive – why couldn’t it be a him? Why couldn’t you be a her, or a him, or a them, or an it?
And why couldn’t you just be? And that is the question. That is the answer, sought for eons in the night sky.
That is how he comes to you.
This is how your great journey begins. For all your sins, and those of your mother, and those of your father, and their mothers and fathers, and the empires that came before, and the night skies that fell before them, and the worlds beyond that called to you, night after night, light after light burning away in the void.
This is how he comes to you, late at night, almost always night, almost always bright nonetheless, with light after light shining away in the void.
The Earth. You know it by another name, of course; the name after your own heart, after the beautiful, rolling expanses of your own islands and seas, your own mountains, your own maps and charts and towns and cities. In one universe, not so distant from ours, her name is Kharad; in another, Kobel of the Twelve; in another, Eden. In another, Shamsara. In another, Terra-3. In all the worlds, the name means the same thing; and in another set of all the worlds, it means home.
Where do you have to be, on this vast, rolling globe, for him to find you? Maybe sequestered in a pod in the rings, purple or blue or yellow or radiant orange, last survivor of the nineteenth apocalypse of the fifth and final city to fall, waiting to be awoken; maybe in the old forest, perched on the edge of a clearing, seventh child on the way. Maybe atop of a blistering
mountain, death finally dealt to the last machine god of the order of fire; maybe in the Library at the end of the frigid cold of the vast ecumenopolis of the South, your crutches laid across your lap as you search, increasingly in vain, for the spell-code that will give your ruined, battered, abused body life once more.
Maybe you could be anywhere. And so maybe this is where you are: on another island city, at the furthest end of the world at the dawn of the 42nd, or 84th, or 168th century of your time, waiting for history to begin, and for civilisation to end. Maybe history has already begun; maybe civilisation is already falling, and maybe, in you heart of hearts, you already know this. You studied the equations, the remaining data-stones that the Library allows restricted access to, the Thirty-Fourth Revised Edition of the Amended Seldon Plan, the legends left behind by the Seer Pit and the Oracles of the Garden and the Fifteenth Column; and beyond that, you studied the songs you sing to yourself, quietly and secretly, as the fires of the machine god begin to flicker back to grey, tumultuous life in the streets and in the souls of angry, careless men, and the ways you take to get home, every day, as things soar: crime, and injustice, and the price of bread and noodles and sweet potato and tapioca, and the cost of fear, and the cost of being who you are, in a time of uncertainty, and emptiness, and devouring, consuming solitude, and the knowledge that are terrified that you, in the end, deserve absolutely nothing at all.
Undo the ribbons that hold back the storms, and unleash the dogs in heaven that will rouse the asteroids to their faithful shower. The preacher, she calls for it in the street outside your house, and you know that the people will lie down and weep, silently and mercilessly to themselves, in their houses and their cars and all the places they have the sex and the tenderness they always wanted to have, but were too afraid of themselves to admit. Nothing is coming. No one is coming. Someone claims the dead are rising, imbued by a new, revived, fascist-evangelical Cult of the Thermodynamic, and someone else claims the volcanoes around the Ring of Flame, too,
have awoken too early. The seas are boiling, and the dream is become drama, and demiurge, and Deluge.
You are too young to remember the Deluge; everyone on your Earth is too young. But you know of it because you have found out how to read the data-stones in a new way, a very, very old way; from the restricted access log-counter in the Library, you know others have found out how to do this too, a few, here and there, maybe in the rings, maybe in the old forest, maybe in the Gated Domes of the North. You know it will come again. But remember, always remember, the cost of fear is far too high; and the terror that grips you every day, as the police claim they know nothing, and the old women in the park claim they do not know who to turn to, the Secretary for Light and Wind claims on the national Vox that enacted deviance was proscribed against by the First Republic, no matter how much it is allowed to thrive in the mind, and fester in the heart, and so goes against the bedrock of the very foundation of the nation, and of this good, orange Earth. And, she says, in full force, against the wind, and stone, and bedrock of your own soul, no matter how far away she is on the Vox, that it is people like you who are tearing this country apart, people like you who are refuse to let the Fourth Thermodynamic War be done, people like you who lie down and weep, silently and mercilessly to themselves, in their houses and parks and all the places they have the sex and tenderness they always wanted to have, because they know that there is something wrong with them. This is the 42nd, or the 84th, or the 168th century! This is Dominion, and this is our strange, broken, new world. This is how it will have to be. This is what it has come to.
And on your tiny balcony, one, blustery, lightless, starless night, as the clouds race its breadth, and the Senior Secretary for Justice and the Peace calls for a special session to discuss people like you, and you can hear someone almost like you being beaten up in the alley beneath you, wordlessly and delicately, as one of the Senior Secretary for Justice and the Peace’s ancestors might have dismantled, with care and strange, twisted
love, an Oracle of the Garden – something in your inner world gives way, at last. Is it a dam? A executable that finally cannot self-perpetuate a gaping, ragged hole? A caldera of the Ring of Flame, incandescent and spewing with rage? People like you, says the Secretary for Light and Wind’s voice in your mind, and all of the people who came before her, the people who took the island of your ancestors, and the islands to the East, and the great, vast continent to the West, and broke it, dismantled it, gave it their version of hope and love and progress and sweet, sweet fear – it is people like you who do not understand themselves. Whose own thought-process and mind- schema are inconstitutable in visual form. Whose song-drive and heart whispers whisper evil, and pestilence, and war, and death.
Something in your inner world gives way. People like me, you whisper, delicately, wordlessly in your inner world, quietly and mercilessly. People like me. The abuse goes on in the alley below you, and on the Vox, and across the city, and the islands to the East, and the continent to the West, and the entire world. The plague of abuse. People like me are a plague. Something is giving way. A mind, finally freed of Stasis and become Dynamic? An Oracle’s words, breaking through? A storm from the other side, says the Secretary for Light and Wind. A failure of the imagination’s barriers. A dream caught in the web of the Empty Beyond.
Something in your inner world gives way, and there it is: something in the outer world, given way, a way to find you at last.
In a flash, it is there, delicate and wordless, quiet, and filled with the limitless mercy of all those who have gone before. Sent by the elders, your mind says to you; sent by great-grandma. The gaping, ragged hole is there; the caldera of the Ring of Flame is alive; and yet, this has given way, the speed of light has given way, skipping, warping, slipping and jumping.
And he is there. He has come.
He is there in the air above the balcony, and you are filled with the voices of a people across the multiverse, another nation, another time. You hear their stories; you hear the ship’s words in an octillion tongues and times, spilling out into you through the gaping, ragged hole. You know this has happened so many times before, throughout history in your universe and in all the ones adjacent to it.
Not for you, says the Secretary for Light and Wind in your mind. Not for me, you repeat; but it is impossible for that to not be the case.
Let us go, says the ship to you; and you know in many, many other countries, many other cultures, many other worlds, the same thing is ready to be said in an octillion different ways, in the heart-language and the words refuse to bow in the face of the void to anyone but the stars themselves.
Join our Federation of Planets.
You, now, my leaf on the wind; how I want to watch you soar.
And for a moment, in your mind’s eye, your great-grandmother smiles down on you, from the Worlds Far, Far Beyond.
So say we all.
I am not a goddamn leaf on the wind, you whisper feebly. I am...I am...
One of the crutches scrapes against the grill of the balcony and starts to slide into a fall; you catch it, but then you yelp in spite of yourself. What a sound, from a person like me.
And she is there, in a flash, like lightspeed, the Secretary of Light and Wind in your mind’s eye, and the Senior Secretary of Justice and the
Peace, and the other boy, the lover, the monster who turned around and destroyed you, incinerated you, set you aflame, as you turned away from the blistering mountain and the last machine god of the order of the fire, and the men in the street, and those who took your island, and your world.
You are who you say you are, says the ship.
The caldera erupts, bubbling over. The stars fall. The tears shudder their way out of you, one by one, until all that you can hear is yourself and the ship’s gentle, humming song.
I am broken, you say. I am afraid.
You are who you say you are, repeats the ship.
I am not a pilot, you say. Lava, hot and wet, and searing. I am not a warrior. I am not a scholar. I am not anyone. I am a person like me.
Facts are facts, says the ship.
Then why are you still fucking here? you scream. Go away. Go to someone else who can save us. Go to someone who it makes sense to go to. Go to someone who isn’t like me.
The ship doesn’t move, no matter how long you weep, silently and mercilessly.
After a while, you tremble, and collapse. The crutches have both slid to the floor; you don’t care about getting them dirty or infected anymore.
I have to be everything. I have to be everyone.
Exactly, says the ship. And so I am here.
I am not everything, you say. I am not everyone.
But you are, says the ship. You are everyone.
I am no one, you whisper. No one at all.
As is everyone, says the ship; and again, within it, you see your greatgrandmother. The last person in your family to know how to speak the true language of the island, the Star-language. The only person in your life who recognised you, a person like you, and who still loved you for it no matter what.
You could be anyone.
I could be anyone.
Who do you have to be, for it to come to you?
This is the first step, the first time you learn how to fly, and soar, and skip, and jump. The first time you glimpse the magnificent, terrifying beauty of void-space and the Worlds Between, and the first time you learn how to dance with the universe on its own terms. You will crash; you and the ship will be lost, sometimes, a lonely voyager, islanded in a sea of stars, caught in time and space across far-reaching dimensions.
And you will find your way, as so many like you have across the multiverse, so that you can be a story to someone else. You will challenge all that humanity, in your space and time, has ever accomplished; a discovery, an endeavour, a new hope moving ever forward unto dawn.
With the ship, you will bring an end to the Thermodynamic Era, to the war of old men, and the stone skies within. A reconstitution of the data-stones, and a healing of the last Oracles in the Garden. A place for articulated deviants, and a new home for the Star-language. So say we all, little leaf on the wind; and what a mighty and magnificent storm you will bring to the edge of tomorrow, and the island city at the crossroads of yesterday, today and forever.
But first, you had to be a person like you. Whoever you are, wherever you are, in whatever space and time you are: you had to be a person like you. A star. A sun. A foundation. A vessel of daring, dauntless hope. An enterprise. A little gay brown boy, on the edge of the galaxy; a lonely, terrified creole girl, waiting to come home. Broken, abused, battered and empty; and still ready to be everything that you could be for the universes beyond.
You have to be everything. You have to be everyone.
And because of that, you could be anyone.
More on our cover art!
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 34” by 72”
In the artist’s own words:
The painting depicts a tumultuous sea, with blue waves crashing and swirling, representing the challenges and difficulties that we all face in life. Despite the turmoil around them, the two figures in the painting remain calm and serene, with their eyes closed in peaceful contemplation. They seem unmoved by the chaos, as if they have found a way to rise above it and find inner peace.
Jonathan Avinash Victor is a Singapore-based artist who works mainly with acrylic, ink and graphite. An art collector, he met veteran Malaysian artist Jeganathan Ramachandran in the early 2000s, who inspired him to paint. He apprenticed under Jega in 2019 before completing an advanced painting course at La Salle College of the Arts (Singapore). He won the Contemporary Art Category prize from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in 2020. The year 2022 was the first time his works were exhibited in New York (Van Der Plas Gallery), London (Boomer Gallery) and Singapore (Selegie Arts Centre). A principal theme in Jonathan’s work is the nature of the subconscious and the stories held within the mind. His works express a human’s search for meaning and beauty. Find his works at https://www.jonathanavinash.com/
Medium: Gouache on wood
Size: 30cm by 45cm
In the artist’s own words:
“Memento Vivere”, which translates to “Remember you must die, so remember to live”, is a phrase that I started trying to live by in my last year of junior college, which this painting aims to depict the essence of. The wreath in the painting represents the unstoppable passage of time, visualized by the metamorphosis of a butterfly, and the growth and death of a plant. The snake skeleton references the ouroboros— famously representative of the cycle of life and death, and the concept of infinity. Yet, despite our impermanence— our inability to slow down time, or immortalise ourselves in this grand universe— it is still in our nature to dream, aspire, and connect in the most human way possible. In the spirit of “rise”, the two reaching hands therefore represent this innate desire to live beyond surviving, and to be remembered even in our smallness. La Cueva de las Manos is evidence of this— a cave of colorful, stenciled handprints dating back to 5000 BC, seemingly created for no other purpose than to proclaim, “I was here. And I lived”. To be remembered is to live. Remember you must die, so remember to live. Expressing something that resonated so incredibly deeply on canvas, while being at an age where I’m in desperate search of life’s guiding principles, was so incredibly cathartic. And in a romantic way, it is also my attempt to etch my handprint on the walls of a metaphorical cave, to make a piece of art that proclaims, “remember me, for I was here.”
I am Gloria, a self-taught artist who picked up painting as a hobby during circuit breaker. I post my work on Instagram @gouachedaway. Art is an avenue of catharsis, and a love language to express my gratitude towards the life I’ve come to love in a tangible way.
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 20cm by 30cm
In the artist’s own words:
Rainbow sunrise depicts a sunrise scene in my colourful impressionistic style. To me, sunrise symbolises a new hope and a new day. The rising sun lights the sky in a multitude of colours, marking a celebration. The rising sun is seen as a joyful and hopeful scene.
Hi! I'm Ella, a part-time uni student & part-time freelance artist. The beauty of sunrise and sunsets have long since fascinated me, and I love to paint their colours. I hope my paintings can bring the same hope and joy to everyone :)
Brian Lee
Brian Lee is a (mostly) breaktime writer and poet from Singapore, who loves to tell people’s stories but hates being stuck in a crowd. He writes in an attempt to distill joy from the ordinary.
The opening poem of Jonathan Chan’s debut collection going home, “5 foundings”, traces the intricate and multilayered heritage of his ancestral families, traversing Asia and America, and following his forebears’ many journeys converging in Singapore. As someone who spent my childhood in three different countries, this complex expression of identity and a scattering of memory across nations particularly resonated with me. Born to a South Korean mother and a Malaysian father, Chan is equal parts poet and cartographer: mapping the emotional landscapes of his family from Seoul to Hong Kong, from Kuala Lumpur to New York—with Singapore as his epicentre.
The spirit of Chan’s collection is thus best encapsulated by its title: going home. The present continuous suggests that Chan’s process of searching for a place he belongs to is one that is never quite finished; as someone who has spent his formative years straddling continents, he is unable to pinpoint his belonging wholly to a singular place. Instead, Chan’s process of finding his identity is an amalgamation of his and his family’s travels.
As the place where Chan traversed many important milestones, Singapore features as the centrepiece of the collection. Indubitably, as a person with multiple heritages, Chan faces struggles to fully integrate himself into the narrow confines of the official ‘Chinese, Malay, Indian or Others’ (CMIO) model of Singapore’s racial policy. In “yellowface”, the sting of his difficulties to fully belong as an individual of mixed heritage is recounted as a series of parallel, repetitive questions:
[…] why you slang, where you learn Chinese, […] were you the only Korean in your class? your level? your unit?
The poem, in the form of Chan’s recounting of blunt and insensitive questions about his multicultural heritage, succinctly sets up the age-old societal dichotomy of the Self-Other, where the poet is relegated to the outsider and thus undesirable status of the Other. The process of “othering” based on racial differences sets up an unequal power dynamic whereby the “self” or in-group possesses more power based on certain characteristics deemed desirable, to which the “other” or out-group is denied, on the basis of the lack of said characteristics (Brons, 2015). The series of interrogations in “yellowface”, intentionally or not, reduce the poet’s multifaceted and complex identity to an undesirable status. The interrogative form “why you/ slang” seems to invalidate the poet’s use of language by questioning its necessity. In a similar fashion, “where you learn Chinese” levels an attack on Chan’s appearance; the subtext is that his physical features do not hint at his being proficient at the language of the in-group. Faced with the incomprehension of “furrowed brows”, Chan’s emotional response is that of resignation: he “stop[s]/ trying, settle[s] with unease”. Yet, the othering process does not end here. Chan
is further isolated as the singular “only Korean”, against the daunting majority of the in-group: the overwhelmingly Chinese “class”, then “level”, and culminating with the implied brutality of the military “unit”.
In his personal essay “My time in the military” (Chan, 2020), Chan opines that “the ethics of learned violence are always complicated”. Herein lies another dimension to Chan’s difficulties at complete integration with Singaporean identity: the quintessential Singaporean male experience of mandatory two years’ service. In “real violence”, he details his personal distaste for the “learned violence” of the military:
it was the bite of a different evening [...] i fought the crawling fear, the revolt in my stomach
The choice of “bite” is a double entendre—Chan recalls the physical chill of the “breeze” that evening, while recounting the memory of being presented with a rifle brings back an indelible emotional pain. His “fear” viscerally “crawl[s]” through him, as though an insect; his feelings of “revolt” are so acutely felt that they manifest physically, in the “stomach”. Juxtaposed against his sensitivity are the reactions of less thoughtful “game boys”, who “drea[m] of/ disassembled bodies”. The idealism and hope of a “dream” combined with the sheer grotesqueness of the “disassembled bodies” produces a jarring effect on the reader. It is the poet’s protest against the trivialisation of such violence, as though it were an enjoyable activity, part of a “game”. Yet, ultimately, Chan finds solace in the catharsis of writing, as portrayed in ‘do it for your nation’:
in the months i learned i couldn’t march to the Singapore beat, the inky flurry became an opiate
Chan’s comparison of his creative process to an “opiate” indubitably speaks to the angst that necessitated writing’s diversionary presence in his life to begin with. Instead of a deliberate act of creation, poetry takes on the role of a phenomenon he seemingly cannot control; it is illustrated as a prolific, unrestrained “flurry”. Chan continues to portray his work in a self-deprecatory manner with “indulgent/ smog”. Perhaps it is this selfproclaimed inability to “march to the/ Singapore beat”, due to his complex and multifaceted identity, that propels him outward—in search for a new place for nestling.
Chan’s relocation to Cambridge as a mature college student births a kind of complex attachment to his previous homes, and almost paradoxically, Singapore. Despite Chan’s evident discomfort and even occasional alienation at his difficulties to belong in Singapore, the subsequent loneliness he faces as a tertiary student can only be counteracted by a bittersweet homesickness. Indeed, in “two dovers”, there is a sense of Chan lingering in his memories, belonging fully to neither place—the epigraph reads “Between Dover, Kent, and Dover Road, Singapore”. The use of “between” truly creates the impression of the poet as wanderer and globetrotter, stationed in neither of the locations mentioned:
the eye forgets the koi pond benches and the stolid ferns by trees; the hands entwine with coarser grasses, enclosing wildflowers and sainsbury seeds
Despite the image of the eye “forget[ting]”, it is that which is left unsaid by the poem that speaks to the nature of memory; it is clear that the heart remembers the vivid detail of the Singapore schoolyard scenery. Chan’s
use of the definite article to refer to himself, “the eye [...] the hands” as opposed to the pronoun (“my eye” or “my hands”) creates a distancing effect between himself and memory. It is as though the poet is a disembodied, passive observer, floating through time and space. This idea of dislocation is expanded upon in “i have lost track of the days”, where the tautological use of negative forms indeed reinforce the sense of “los[s]” as laid out in the title:
the warmth of feigned festivity [...] no flashes of red nor ornamental oranges [...] deflated, vacant stares
A bleak picture is thus painted of Cambridge during the festivities which Chan’s family celebrates. The entire poem hinges on a notion of absence, or falsehood: nothing can recreate the true “warmth” of being physically present with his family. Instead, he is forced to settle with the unsatisfactory, ironic alternative of “the warmth/ of feigned festivity”. The poet’s sentiments towards his new environs then give rise to a bittersweet homesickness, illustrated by the juxtaposition of the past and present in “i celebrated chuseok”:
eyes fixated on the round, shimmery moon [...]
i looked to the sky.
i couldn’t see the moon.
The Korean festival of Chuseok, typically referred to as Korea’s Thanksgiving Day, dates back to the nation’s past as an agrarian society. Chuseok is celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, when a full harvest moon would appear and families would congregate to give thanks for the bountiful harvest (asiasociety.org, n.d.).
As with all other festivities, the poet views Chuseok as an occasion for reunion and familial bliss, and this is reflected in the underlying emotion of contentment in his childhood recollections: “round […] moon” —as opposed to “half” or “crescent”, symbolising incompleteness—and “delicious”. The homesickness of the present is a far cry from the happy picture of his childhood, with the negative form “nothing more [...] couldn’t see” underscoring the poet’s deprivation at Cambridge, despite a “feast with friends”. In essence, Chan’s concurrent longing for home and unease at belonging in Singapore appear to be reconciled in the final lines of “dad stands at the gates of wolfson college”:
for the sake of those you love: here, there, and everywhere.
Here, the poet seems to find acceptance and comfort in the seemingly permanent rootlessness that comes with having multiple heritages, a phenomenon that is portrayed as a natural coping mechanism for third culture individuals who face identity struggles. The term “global nomad”, coined by academic Barbara Schaetti, applies well here. Chan as a third culture individual appears to embrace the constancy of movement in his life and his family’s history, expressing a broader concept of home than a single physical location (Halme, 2019).
A significant portion of going home also reveals Jonathan Chan as his family’s own historian. Besides recounting deeply personal feelings of angst and discombobulation as a third culture individual in Singapore, the other thread running through the collection shows Chan as a tender (and sometimes reverent) observer of his family’s many emigrations. In a world where he has yet to find a home in which to settle, Chan’s attachment to
familial history vaguely resembles his own Noah’s Ark—a safe haven amidst the turbulence of a multinational childhood.
Chan’s formative experiences are rendered all the more complex by his personal intertwinement with both his maternal and paternal grandparents’ emigrations. “another life” reads almost like a travelogue, as he meticulously recreates his paternal grandparents’ shift to New York and Houston. He illustrates the former with broad yet precise strokes, painting New York as “the haven of low-tax suburbia, the ballast of private equity”. Beneath the materialistic veneer of New York lies the poet’s tender musings about his grandparents’ struggles as immigrants, “would melancholia have crept into knowingness on the trains to the city?” The subtle, gradual quality implied by “crept” also speaks to Chan’s acute observational skills: he surmises from personal experience that the emotional weight of “melancholia” seeps in quietly. In Houston, the immigrant couple’s difficulties at assimilating are rendered through the juxtaposition between the clamour of the “road rage and southern baptism, tomahawk steaks and oil money and strip-mall Chinatowns” and “the quiet forbearance of Mah Mah”. The use of “forbearance” evokes the image of his grandmother silently enduring the discomfort of her “every winter’s transit”. In a way, Chan’s identification with his grandparents’ suffering is a source of comfort for his rootless wandering in search of home.
In a similar fashion (also employing the tripartite form), “farewells” explores emigration through the perspective of his maternal grandparents. In Seoul, Chan recollects a heartfelt moment of grandmotherly affection upon his departure: “Halmoni gives us firm pats on the back (and slyly on the rear)”. The strength of his grandmother’s “firm” touch mirrors the intensity of her affection, while the somewhat cheeky “on the rear”, rendered in parentheses, encapsulates another aspect of his grandmother’s love: its tenderness. Yet, Chan’s poetic eye never fails to notice the suffering engendered by departure; through his Halmoni’s
“pale, emaciated hands”, the reader is offered a glimpse into her underlying sorrow and pain at sending her grandchildren off. His grandmother’s frailty and vulnerability in these lines contains echoes of Chan’s own struggles at assimilation in Singapore, as well as homesickness at Cambridge. This longing is once again evoked as Chan recounts his departure from Singapore at the end of the summer break as he “hold[s] the few, stymied chapters of summer in [his] hands”. The metaphor of Chan “hold[ing]” his truncated summer speaks to an unwillingness to leave; the longing for home has already begun before his actual departure.
The final sequence of Chan’s collection shifts his sights to the ultimate expression of his identity and self, through the love and tolerance espoused by his Christian faith. Chan’s Christian poems read like a creative synthesis of all his prior works, thematically unifying his central poetic concerns of identity, belonging and love. In “patience”, we see the poet seeking refuge in his faith, abiding by his God’s commands to exhibit the titular virtue, rather than constantly agonise over unresolved questions surrounding his identity, home and belonging:
i tried to tame the errant flickers of a wandering mind, to quell the fidgeting of anxious flesh [...] i learned that waiting was in the becoming and held the words that were never my own.
Here, Chan’s rootlessness as a globalist is characterised as a state of being that plagues him instead of empowering him. The dominant image here is one of restlessness: “flicke[r]”, “wande[r]”, “fidge[t]”, “anxious”. Chan’s status as a third culture individual is a source of doubt and insecurity, something duly explored in Chan’s Singapore poems. This constant feeling
of not belonging compels the poet to “wande[r]”, both in body and in spirit. Yet, the penultimate line of the poem seems to subvert his earlier struggles; he “learn[s]” and grows wiser with the help of his Christian faith. The religious exhortation to patience is promising for Chan—it engenders a “becoming”, allowing him to find himself amidst the disorienting chaos of emigration and relocation. The “words that were never [his] own”, presumably uttered by God or Jesus Christ, become a cherished refuge for him, compelling him to “h[old]” onto them.
In “geylang garden”, the poet also seems to be truly at peace with his return to Singapore after returning from Cambridge amidst the pandemic. In the locale of Geylang, Singapore, Chan discovers an uncommon wonder and spirituality amidst the seemingly inconsequential activity of gardening. Viewed through the lens of his ardent Christian faith, Chan finds the beauty in the ordinary as his Master’s creations:
Jesus has a green thumb.
i have felt it knead this loamy soil […]
Yet, no other poem expresses the notion of completeness more than the final “epistle”, carrying with it a beautiful and exquisite message of selflove that reads like a doxology.
i write a letter to myself.
i write a letter to my future self.
i write a letter to the self i thought i knew. [...]
i write a letter to cosmic love.
i write a letter because cosmic love loves me.
Here, Christianity truly allows Chan to embrace all aspects of his multifaceted identity as they are, without judgement. The collection ends on a note of synthesis and completion, as Chan’s memories and struggles,
as well as his family’s, are set aside for the poet’s communion with his God, from which he derives self-compassion and strength.
Brons, L. (2015, January). Othering, an analysis. ResearchGate. Retrieved April 23, 2023, from
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/LajosBrons/publication/273450968_Othering_An_Analysis/links/ 550234690cf2d60c0e62b678/Otherin
g-An-Analysis.pdf
Chan, J. (2023, April 21). My time in the military. Varsity Online. Retrieved April 23, 2023, from
https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/18503
Chuseok: Korean Thanksgiving Day. Asia Society. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2023, from
https://asiasociety.org/korea/chuseok-korean-thanksgiving-day
Halme, K. R. (2019, May). Belonging everywhere and nowhere: The struggle of Third Culture Kids and their need for support in early childhood education and care. Laurea University of Applied Sciences.
Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/172220/ Halme_KirsiRebekka.pdf
The year is 2018. Tonight, the viral internet music sensation Phum Viphurit will perform for the first time in Singapore. To say I’m excited to hear the twenty-three-year-old Thai-born, New Zealand-raised indie folk singer-songwriter perform in person is an understatement. I’ve been bothering my mom for days by singing Viphurit’s easy-breezy, heart-onthe-sleeve lyrics at the top of my lungs in the living room, and by trying to explain on multiple grocery runs just what it is about Viphurit’s mellow,
Image: Scout Magazine
homegrown acoustic melodies that are so soul-pangingly endearing to me. To put it lightly, I’m hyped.
On the night of the concert, I carefully choose my outfit—a rainbow pride crop top, washed-out jeans, vintage suede teal mid-top Nikes, and a bangle bracelet with a daisy charm. I make my way downtown to Kilo Lounge, a hip nightclub near Chinatown that my brother dubs “a classy place with good gigs” and “where you go if don’t want to get trashed.” I meet my Hawaiian-shirt-clad best friend and fall in line with the many artists and queer folk in Singapore who have come out of hiding to see Phum Viphurit live. It strikes me that everyone in the crowd is young, wearing 80’s-90’sinspired or ironic-rad-kitsch fashion to match with Viphurit’s own retrogaze aesthetic. There must be over one hundred and fifty of us waiting outside the bar’s back entrance in the sticky summer heat. In true alternative gig fashion, the venue boasts just one freshly-plastered Phum Viphurit poster, the artist’s name in bright yellow font.
Being the kiasu fan that I am, I’ve already purchased my advance ticket online. I’m waiting for a third friend, who works part-time at a pottery studio, and I start to worry that he won’t be able to snag a ticket at the door. True enough, he is turned away. He messages me sadly, “why must Phum be such a popular dude :(”, which is pretty terrible, but also quite phenomenal for an indie artist. You see, Phum Viphurit is the kind of musician you discover by trusting the tides of what one of his interviewers, Karen Gwee, aptly called “the uncertain musical waters of YouTube”. If you’re already deep into what I affectionately call “artsy hoe shit” music (e.g., if subcultural subgenres like vaporwave, shoegaze, or dreamcore ring a bell) you’ve likely stumbled into Phum Viphurit from the recommendations these algorithms drum up based on your past preferences. What’s funny is that perhaps directly because of Viphurit garnering over 23 million views on the music videos posted by his label, Rats Records, he’s viewed as a digitally native artist without the respective merch-collecting, poster-making, airport-greeting fandom following.
I get the sense that everyone in the crowd is sort of surprised to see each other, as if we’re lowkey wondering, oh, damn, I was the only indie music lover in my school who knew this guy, there’s more of us? (a lot of Snapchat stories are being posted right now to document this turnout). Back high school, I was never part of the cool crowd, but standing amongst everyone rocking platform shoes and edgy graphic tees and trendy beanies, buzzing to see this guy perform, I get this inexplicable wow-I’m-in-the-Cool-Kidsclub feeling that only the weird, off-filter camaraderie an indie music gathering can deliver.
So what makes Phum Viphurit so popular? Like most Phum Viphurit fans, I discovered Viphurit’s music by happy accident. I was playing some of my favorite Japanese 80’s disco music in the background and the next song that YouTube queued was Viphurit’s first viral hit, a groovy, blissful, summery song called “Long Gone”. I looked up from my Chinese homework after jangling my foot to the tune for a while and thought, okay, I need to know who this artist is, and then listen to everything they’ve ever created.
I couldn’t look away from the music video, which was directed by Viphurit himself, a Bangkok film school graduate. It’s the stuff of MTV dreams, filmed old-school like an AV home video, with nods to the delightful colorcoordinated symmetry of Wes Anderson. A Thai girl wearing dungarees and Converse pops a cassette tape into her walkman and the first sunny notes of “Long Gone” start playing, with the title stylized in nostalgic bold WordArt as “a loop song”. The setting is school recess in the 80’s, with neon green-yellow-pink stadium seating, and Phum Viphurit, clad in dungarees and firetruck red Converse as well, crooning into a karaoke box set up on the soccer field. The 3-minute, 37-second video sees the quirky pair in various locations around school (the playground, basketball courts,
classroom exits) jamming out and dancing in that chilled-out way only the coolest of the cool can pull off. The relaxed vibes—with the gentle shower of cymbals, carefree guitar riffs, and shimmering synthesizer—is the 1980’s-esque 2018 hit you never knew you needed.
It’s mid-tempo, kick-back-and-ease-into-it, the perfect funky dorm party song for unwinding. Viphurit’s earnest, boyish voice sounds smooth and honeyed through his braces. Finally, the feel-good video closes out with a montage of pining-for-the-past photographs shot using 35mm film cameras —all that starry-flared, saturated, soft goodness. This is Phum Viphurit doing the equivalent of Huji Cam for music before Huji Cam was a thing, recycling the flower power aesthetic before Harry Styles’s “Sunflower, Vol. 6” burst on the scene and mainstream pop artists started really milking 70’s vibes like nobody’s business.
As a literary scholar and fumbling poet, I adore Viphurit’s whimsical lyrics, charmingly honest about the bread-and-butter of young person insecurities ("You hate the odd gap between my teeth / I love your curls"). But while Viphurit may sing of wistful subject matter like “The Art of Detaching One’s Heart” (the title of his song co-written with Jenny & The Scallywags), playful lyrics like “You love your bags of potato chips / I love them too / Who'll make the next refrigerator trip?/ It's always you”, “If we meet at the rendezvous / Take me away, sunray”, and “I've been hanging about on cloud-nine / Sippin' on ageing fine wine” make Phum Viphurit’s debut crowdfunded EP, Manchild, a much more uplifting album than the work of his peers (compare, say, with fellow internet favorite Mac DeMarco’s soft rock/lo-fi sadness in Salad Days).
And then there’s Viphurit’s global reach. When I told my Costa Rican friend over Skype that I was seeing Viphurit live in a few days, she gave a half-shriek, half-bark, “THE Phum?!”. Perhaps because of Viphurit’s own
transnational childhood, his use of English as musical lingua franca, and YouTube fame, his audience spans countries around the globe. He’s gone on tour around the United States, Europe, Southeast and East Asia, filling hole-in-the-wall bars and nightclubs and tentpole music festivals. Over the course of October 2018, he will play in Poland, Germany, the UK, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In November 2018, he’s slated to play at the two-day music and taco festival, Tropicalia, in Long Beach, California alongside other cult indie artists like boy pablo, Kero Kero Bonito, Summer Salt, No Vacation, Peach Pit, and, of course, the psychedelic pop/slacker rock king Mac DeMarco himself.
It was at New York University Abu Dhabi that I first pondered the amusing surreality of a Filipino-Chinese Singaporean in Abu Dhabi (me), forcing my Russian, Slovenian, and Indian-raised-in-the-UAE suitemates to sing along to a song by a Thai/New Zealand artist during one of our many Thursday night karaoke-and-movie sessions. Viphurit, who moved to New Zealand at age nine and returned to Bangkok at age nineteen for college, has been nicknamed Thailand’s “lover boy” after the title of his latest hit single, which quickly amassed over 16 million views alone on YouTube. The tongue-in-cheek moniker is quite fitting given Viphurit’s handsome babyface and his numerous songs on the elusive nature of millennial generation romance, but I’m also fascinated by how Viphurit presents a very different kind of “Neo-Soul sweetheart” in the English indie music scene, by virtue of his Thai heritage. It’s hard to say where he fits in: the Bangkok music scene doesn’t seem completely home for him, although he has mentioned that the cheesy aesthetic “Long Gone” was in part inspired by the music videos of Tata Young, a late 90’s Thai pop singer.
I’m fascinated by Phum Viphurit because before I discovered him, I had never followed a South East Asian musician so closely. Phum Viphurit’s real name is Viphurit “Phum” Siritip. After some digging, when I learned that Phum Viphurit had grown up in-between New Zealand and Thailand, I felt like singing. Like Phum Viphurit, I grew up in a country (Singapore)
that was not my parents’ country (Philippines). My mother tongue is English, not Tagalog, Hokkien, nor Kapangpangan (the languages my Filipino-Chinese parents spoke growing up in the Philippines) – a privilege that has granted me numerous study opportunities, but also means I cannot converse freely with my grandparents and cousins at holiday parties.
I sympathize with Viphurit, who is always being asked in interviews whether he will write songs soon in Thai. He carefully stylizes himself in artist biographies as a “Thai-born, New Zealand-raised” musician, and I think about how those hyphens tug at my heart. I, too, am hyphenated and often lost: Filipino-Chinese heritage, Singapore-raised. I read an interview in which Viphurit recalls that the cheerful albeit wistful vibes of “Long Gone” (“So tonight, we'll dance, let's pretend we rule this town / In tomorrow's dawn / I'll be long gone”) were inspired by the realization that he would leave his friends and his hometown of Hamilton, New Zealand to go back to Bangkok. I’m struck by how Viphurit’s songs float, buoyant across the seas of information on the World Wide Web, and defy passport categorization.
To me, the Phum phenomenon is inextricably tied up with transnationalism. Part of it is personal. In 2011, my father got a new job, and my family moved to Bangkok for about three years. I cannot claim any further roots in Thailand, other than I lived there for a while, found people to be awkward and laugh with in middle school, and cried when I left to return to Singapore, but I still remember my time there with utmost fondness and clarity: the sizzling of the 24-hour Took Lae Dee restaurant by our apartment, the green mango snacks my brother and I would buy at school, the aroma of floral garlands sold on the street, the Loy Krathong banana-leaf boats we would set adrift in Benchakiti Park, and the comforting rhythms of my friends speaking Thai in the cafeteria. I started
writing poetry seriously in Bangkok. When I moved to university, oddly, the two foods I missed the most were sinigang, a Filipino tamarind soup, and tom yum goong, a hot and sour Thai soup with shrimp which I hadn’t had the authentic version of in years. Phum Viphurit, who sings in English with adolescent sincerity, who declares in his interviews he wants to show the world what “Thai kids can do”, is my odd connection to the Thailand I lived in as a preteen. In other interviews, Viphurit says his debut EP Manchild was borne out of “reverse culture shock” and the awkward process of becoming an adult in a country he hadn’t lived in for a decade. Viphurit’s music, bittersweet as mangos, is also inextricably linked to nostalgia. It reminds me of the dizzy jig of placemaking.
When Phum Viphurit and his band finally come onstage, all the phones whip out (I surreptitiously notice there’s a lot of Huji Cam and LOMO cameras). The cheers are utterly raucous. He goes straight into “Strangers in a Dream”, and without prodding, the whole crowd is bobbing along as best we can in a jam-packed space, shouting all the lyrics word-for-word. I can’t help but be cognizant of the fact that this is one of the first concerts I’ve gone to for a Southeast Asian music talent, which I immediately feel ashamed of – why do I know Mitski’s discography, but not a single Southeast Asian up-and-coming singer? At the same time, I wonder how “Asian” one has to be to represent your ethnicity. Phum Viphurit, with his strange cross-cultural musical beginnings, represents a rare note of Asianness in the English indie mixtape. I wonder if the entire room, filled with Singaporeans from various backgrounds (Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasians, Filipinos, and so on and so forth) feel the same way as I do to see a Southeast Asian, one of our own, killing it on stage.
Of course, Viphurit isn’t read as a groundbreaking Asian talent by everyone--for example, my childhood Thai friends say that he’s not really seen as a Thai musician within Thailand; besides that, his accentless
English and pan-Asian good looks afford him a precious global mobility that few Thai, or even Singaporean kids can attest to. But Viphurit is good, the sort of good that makes you want to claim that he was raised back in your ASEAN neighborhood. Years later after this Collective Minds sold-out show, he will release his 2023 album The Greng Jai Piece with folk bops like “Temple Fair”, Lady Papaya”, and “Greng Jai Please” slyly winking at Thai society from a kaleidoscopic local and foreign lens (“Welcome to society / member of the land of smiles / be sure to brush your teeth”, “You’ll say anything to save your face / this is how we all survive / what a time to be alive”).
In person, his voice is much thicker, but still tender and passionate. It’s an intimate performance, and impossible not to like. Once, he fumbles the intro to one of his hits and, at the sight of his sheepish expression, the room peals into bell-like laughter. He banters about unfortunate first loves and cringey first song-writing attempts and congratulates Singapore on our recent 53rd birthday, which makes the crowd go wild. He apologizes for drinking water mid-set, and every time the crowd knows the lyrics to one of his songs, he gives a delighted, “hey, thank you” and appears genuinely dazed, smiling even wider. At one point he asks if there is anyone from Thailand in the crowd and a gaggle of girls feverishly wave their hands. Viphurit bows respectfully and says hello in Thai. Tonight, at a Phum Viphurit concert in 2018, transcendental tropical songs go on forever, Asian kids and the culturally confused sway to the guitar, and everything will be alright. Phum sings, "My international mystery/I let you in" in “Strangers in a Dream”. Joy needs no translation.
This publication would not have been possible without all our writers and artists who submitted their works:
BRIAN LEE, “A Review of going home by Jonathan Chan”
CHENG HIM, “Eh Cher”
CHRISTIAN YEO, “A Pandemic Philosophy of Things”; “Where do you go when your house is on fire?”
DARYL LIM WEI JIE, “fish head curry”; “Something from Nothing”
DAVID WONG HSIEN MING, “Photo of the MV Sewol Sinking”
ELLA LINE, “Rainbow Sunrise”
EUGINIA TAN, “SOURSOP”
GLORIA TANG, “Memento Viviere”
JAMIE UY, “The Year of Daughters”; “On Phum Viphurit, Third Culture Kids, and Joy”
CHUA JIA WEN, “Glimpsing The Future”
JONATHAN AVINASH VICTOR, “Transcending the Tempest”
JY TAN, “SADNESS PERSONIFIED”
KEVIN MARTENS WONG, “The Ship”
KIMBERLEY CHIA, “Confessions of a Snail Murderer”
LUNE LOH, “Post-Construction #1”
MAX PASAKORN, “for a future”
MEIHAN BOEY, “Rise & Fall of the Scourge of Malice”
MICHELE LIM, “Moss”
QAMAR FIRDAUS SAINI, “the wound is where light enters”; “before, above”
YEO WEI WEI, “Peace Is A Woman Whose Head Is A Roof”
ANURAK SAELAOW and LAURA JANE LEE, for editing written works
THEODORUS, for selecting visual art works and for designing and publishing the magazine
BRYCE, for handling administrative tasks
NICHOLAS YEO, for continuous guidance and advice
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