Eternal Summer of the Homeland: Agnes Chew talks about writing a story collection and being the Asia Winner of the CSSP

Courtesy of Author

Book Synopsis

The stories in Agnes Chew’s first fiction collection illuminate the complexity of choice when duty and desire collide, and what a person is willing to sacrifice. A daughter grapples with an unexpected discovery in the aftermath of her mother’s death. A husband struggles to understand his wife’s reaction to her pregnancy. An adolescent and a domestic worker exchange secrets whose weight they find they cannot bear. And in a corner of Changi Airport, a nondescript office cubicle, a patch of open forest, others strive to find meaning and home.

Courtesy of Author

Author Bio:

Agnes Chew is the author of Eternal Summer of My Homeland (2023) and The Desire For Elsewhere (2016). Her work has appeared in Granta, Necessary Fiction and Litbreak Magazine, among others, and her story, ‘Oceans Away from my Homeland’, won the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia Region). She holds a Master’s degree in international development from LSE; her prize-winning dissertation, which examines inequality and societal well-being in Singapore, was featured in Singapore Policy Journal. Born and raised in Singapore, she is currently based in Germany. 

 

 

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EC: Agnes, welcome to Asian Books Blog, and congratulations on being the Asia Winner for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the publication of Eternal Summer of My Homeland. Let’s start with this: what draws you to the short story? 

 

AC: Thank you so much, Elaine, for your kind words and for this opportunity! I actually started out writing creative nonfiction, and when I ventured into the realm of fiction writing, the short story form felt like a natural (and conceivable) choice. The more short stories I wrote, the more I found myself drawn to the form. I appreciate its requisite focus on purity and intensity—the way it compels you to distil meaning within a compact space. It’s also a thrill to be able to write a short story within a feverish span of hours or days, especially when I compare it to the far longer process of writing a novel, which I’m now working on.

 

Play the Red Queen - A Vietnam War Crime Thriller

Saigon 1963 – multiple American military advisers and South Vietnamese Army officers are gunned down by the mysterious Red Queen, a deadly Vietnamese assassin. Two MP detectives, Ellsworth Miser and Clovis Robeson, are called in to investigate but find themselves stumbling into a mystery that's much deeper with international implications.

Singaporean writer Soon Ai Ling's stories are translated, transcreated and adapted by Yeo Wei Wei. An interview with Nicky Harman

 

Diasporic and Clan are two volumes of short stories by the sinophone Singaporean writer Soon Ai Ling, translated, transcreated and adapted by Yeo Wei Wei. Yeo has done a translation of Soon stories in Diasporic, and then transcreated and adapted them in Clan. As a translator myself, I was intrigued by this adventure in story-telling, so I asked Yeo Wei Wei to tell me more.

NH: could you tell me how you came across Soon's stories and what attracted you to them? 

WW: I received an email from Ailing one day out of the blue whilst I was in Norwich doing my MA in Creative Writing. She had asked Eva Tang about my translation of the subtitles and song lyrics for Eva’s documentary The Songs We Sang. She liked my translation very much and wished to approach me to ask if I would translate her fiction. After I finished my MA, I returned to Singapore and I looked for Ailing’s book of short stories in the National Library. I read them and I also watched Eva’s short film that was based on Ailing’s story “Chef Tham”. Ailing’s stories are set in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. The Chinese diasporic contexts in these different countries are the basis of the rich story worlds found in her fiction. She is unique for this reason, amongst Singaporean Chinese authors. I was also attracted to the predicaments of her protagonists. Very often, her stories deal with the private struggles of men and women in traditional Asian family settings. They are individuals torn between personal desires and family history, hierarchy, family values and expectations.  

Ghost Girl, Banana: Elaine Chiew Chats With Acclaimed Debut Novelist Wiz Wharton

About the Book:

Set between the last years of the “Chinese Windrush” in 1966 and Hong Kong’s Handover to China in 1997, a mysterious inheritance sees a young woman from London uncovering buried secrets in her late mother’s homeland in this captivating, wry debut about family, identity, and the price of belonging.

Hong Kong, 1966. Sook-Yin is exiled from Kowloon to London with orders to restore honor to her family. As she strives to fit into a world that does not understand her, she realises that survival will mean carving out a destiny of her own.Thirty years later in London, having lost her mother as a small child, biracial misfit Lily can only remember what Maya, her preternaturally perfect older sister, has told her about Sook-Yin. Unexpectedly named in the will of a powerful Chinese stranger, Lily embarks on a secret pilgrimage across the world to discover the lost side of her identity and claim the reward. But just as change is coming to Hong Kong, so Lily learns Maya’s secrecy about their past has deep roots, and that good fortune comes at a price.

 Heartfelt, wry and achingly real, Ghost Girl, Banana marks the stunning debut of a writer-to-watch.  

About the Author:

Wiz Wharton, Courtesy of Author

Wiz Wharton was born in London of Chinese-European heritage. She is a prize-winning graduate of the National Film and Television school, where she studied screenwriting under the filmmakers Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Kenith Trodd. Ghost Girl, Banana is her debut novel. Adaptation rights have also been optioned by a leading UK production company. She lives in the Scottish Highlands. Her twitter handle is @Chomsky1and Instagram is @wizwharton 

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EC: Congratulations on your debut novel, Ghost Girl, Banana, which has just launched to much critical acclaim in the UK. In your acknowledgement, you mentioned the story’s inception as ‘the discovery of some old-fashioned floppy discs in a box’. Can you tell us about how a whole novel was borne out of this discovery? 

WW: Yes, so this happened back in 2020 when I was moving house and discovered the discs in a box of my late mum’s possessions. Initially, I had no idea what they were, and it was only later that I discovered they were transcriptions of her diaries, kept since she arrived in the UK in the early sixties as an immigrant from Hong Kong. Although painful to read in parts, they were also transformative in revealing so many of her experiences which she had never really spoken about during her lifetime. That stoicism is germane to many women of that generation, I think, as much as it’s also a cultural thing, but I remember wondering how many other hidden stories there were out there, and what a tragedy it was that they weren’t more represented in the British fiction space. As much as a novel is always an ambitious creative project to embark upon, I had a whole wealth of information in front of me to draw upon, so I was very fortunate in that respect.

Now Boarding: Experiencing Singapore through travel 1800s–2000s

T.A.Morton gives a sneak preview of Now Boarding, an exhibition opening on May 27 at the National Museum, Singapore. 

In 1956, writer W. Somerset Maugham permitted Raffles Hotel to use his words for their latest marketing campaign. His words were, 'Raffles Hotel stands for all the fables of the exotic East.' Such a testimony from a well-known writer was priceless and Raffles promptly used them in their advertisements, on their menus and matchboxes. 

Elaine Chiew Interviews Khanh Ha, author of prize-winning short story collection All The Rivers Flow Into The Sea.

About the Book:

From Vietnam to America, All the Rivers Flow into the Sea is a short story collection, jewel- like, evocative, and layered, brings to readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In “The Yin-Yang Market,” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming- of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book.

Sensing Visual Forms: Tse Hao Guang’s 'The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association'

Editor's note: We're delighted to feature a review of Tse Hao Guang's latest collection by another gifted Singapore poet, Mok Zining. Tse was previously featured on the blog here, and has also written for us here. Thank you both for gracing our poetry column! 

“The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association is a real place,” read the epigraph. “Please come in and touch everything.” Turning the page, I stepped in, finding a miscellany of things hanging suspended in the shifting light: a dragonfly wing, the words of Simone Weil, a landfill of folded plastic triangles, a Chinese idiom unstrung and reworked, rust disappearing at the oxidation of starfruit juice.

Such was my first impression of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press, 2023), a collection rendered with lightness and light. This second full-length collection by Tse Hao Guang contains poems composed in a visual form that evokes fluidity and looseness; rather than verses of lines, each poem looks more like a constellation of words and phrases bounded by the page. Seen through the lens of the collection’s title, the visual form of these poems evokes the brushstroke movement in certain styles of Chinese calligraphy, in particular the cursive and semi-cursive scripts.

At the same time, these visual forms also call to mind such modernist poetic interventions as erasure and collage, as well as the Fluxus experimentation with concrete poetry, of which John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’ is a precursor. Notably, Tse does not seem interested in the practice and idea of Chinese calligraphy as a “traditional” art form or pinnacle of Chinese classicism. This decentering of a uniformly defined Chinese cultural inheritance is evidenced by poems like and ‘is Chinatown your burden? limitless like the universe?’ and ‘two minute Buddha Jumps Over the Wall’. Rather, Calligraphy seems more interested in the possibilities that can be opened by rendering these found objects and languages in the intermediate spaces Tse occupies. A poem that demonstrates this generative stance is ‘this moment’, a free translation of the Chinese poet An Qi’s 《此刻》(cike), excerpted here: 

I was struck by how naturally the syntax of this poem, though very much inflected by the Mandarin, fit in Calligraphy. This free translation also brings a visual dimension that isn’t found in the original, lineated text. In their delightful mirroring of the sunlight “threading/ through” the rooftop, the words “17^th floor/ 16^th floor/ 15^th floor” themselves seem to direct the eye to fall, as light, upon the architecture of the poem. Like ‘this moment’, Tse’s two other “free translations” of An Qi’s poems, ‘so & so’s terrace’ and ‘hands part when day is not yet light’, are certainly highlights of the book.

Calligraphy signals quite a departure from Tse’s first full-length collection, Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press, 2015), which featured the poet at ease in a range of formal poems. Revisiting Deeds for this review, however, I was struck by the pertinence of its epigraph, taken from Goethe’s Theory of Colours: “Colours are the deeds of light, its deeds and sufferings.” What carries over from Deeds is Tse’s visual sensibility – his careful attention to the quality, color, and movement of light falling on an object or a landscape.

In Calligraphy, this sensibility is heightened and made performative. Images mutate and transfigure effortlessly. Reading ‘this morning I woke up w/ a quick laugh like the sun’, for example, I found myself thinking it read almost like a script or storyboard for a video poem:

In the space of a page, Tse weaves together a poem that morphs effortlessly from the image of nails (intimate, mundane) to the sun and moon (celestial, symbolic, grand) and back to dust (infinitesimal). Facilitating this cinematic effect is the loose visual form, which enables an image to shape-shift by unsettling the fulfilment of the poetic line.

The visual effect is more impressionistic in other poems, with their abilities to craft a sensation of visual form. A good example is ‘which is when charcoal was passed from her body to mine’:

While reading this poem, I felt as if images that rhymed visually – “chalk-lines,” “a solitary stroke,” the land “between river and river,” “that narrow stroke/ of road,” and the very action of paring – were rising to the fore of my mind. Unlike ‘quick laugh’, ‘charcoal’ uses few transitions and connecting words to create visual development. Tse instead pares each fragment down to its visual bone before composing them in a stream-of-consciousness logic. Indeed, the experience of reading Calligraphy feels like we are following the speaker’s mind as it moves about the world, picking up on and stringing together a range of found languages and images – including AlphaGo, Stephen Chow films, the work of artists like Ivan David Ng. The book’s title is in this sense less an overarching representation of the project than one of the many found poems gathered for this collection, as Calligraphy takes its name from an organization in Katong Shopping Centre that supports left-handers who wish to learn the art of Chinese calligraphy.

Something could probably be said here about how the collection exhibits a sort of “lefthandedness” in its occupying of the space between media, between Sinophone and Anglophone poetic traditions, and between languages. However, this was also where I, a maximalist, found myself wondering if there was an opportunity for the collection to experiment more with visual form in this intermedia space. What might a visual composition that plays with the type of typographic research undertaken in the concrete poetry movement and Chinese calligraphic scripts (which include not just cursive and semi-cursive scripts, but also the oracle bone and seal scripts) look like, for example? What are some possibilities between typographic poetry and the work of artists like Wu Guanzhong or Lim Tze Peng? What if the collection took its own epigraph at a more literal level and referenced not just the name of the organization, but also its locale in Katong? Still, The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association contains many moments of brilliance, beauty and whimsy, and I would be interested to see how its experiments with the visual might shape poetic practices in Singlit. 

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Mok Zining is obsessed with random things: orchids, arabesques, sand. Her first book, The Orchid Folios (Ethos Books 2020), was shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry. Currently, she is at work on an essay collection, The Earthmovers.