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Migrations and Diasporas

Day 2, 18 February | 12.45PM - 2.15PM
Moderator: Jamie Uy

The one who stayed and the one who got away: Wong Phui Nam and Wong May
Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Tse Hao Guang

This paper compares the linguistic, poetic and psychic displacements of Wong Phui Nam and Wong May, two figures that unsettle simplistic narratives of the development of Anglophone poetry in Southeast Asia. 

 

Wong May, born in China, raised in Singapore, published largely in the US, and settled in Ireland, frustrates attempts to be read through typical contemporary categories of nationality, ethnic identity and political affiliation. Instead, she articulates an almost idealistic faith in poetry as a means to live through the unremitting inadequacies and erasures of such categories. Her style, often described as elusive, light or quirky, shows a deep and continual refusal to be fixed by the gaze of others.

 

Wong Phui Nam, born, raised, educated, published and laid to rest in places once called Malaya, later Singapore and Malaysia, experienced his own severe dislocation even while remaining in place, writing in English even as the cultural establishment(s) could not be convinced of the authenticity or importance of doing so. His lifelong attempts to nevertheless seek poetic authenticity constitute an Orphic descent into the seemingly hardened soil of Malayan (later Malaysian) culture, hoping to retrieve a Eurydice, which seemed to vanish once gazed upon.

 

In different ways homeless and adrift, both poets have produced bodies of work that build shelters out of their second tongue: that inadequate but oddly generous language, English. Their poems make belonging out of the material of their exile, and demand a broader, stranger view of the relationship between place and poetry.

Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, translator and literary critic from Singapore. His latest collection of poetry is Anything but Human (2021), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His poetry was awarded the Golden Point Award in 2015, by the National Arts Council, Singapore. He is working on putting together an anthology of Malaysia-Singapore writing, The Second Link. 

 

Tse Hao Guang (谢皓光) is the author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press 2023) and Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press 2015, shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize). He is a 2016 fellow of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and the 2018 National Writer-in-Residence at Nanyang Technological University. His poems appear in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Entropy and elsewhere.

Examing the "Virtuous Pioneer Plays" of Yang Wenzhong
Hee En Ming

This paper analyses the three plays by Yang Wenzhong, a first-generation China immigrant dramatist from Singapore and his contribution to post-1980s student theatre as a drama teacher and a playwright. A post-“reform and opening up” immigrant to Singapore, Yang found work in one of Singapore’s most prestigious secondary schools: The Chinese High School (now known as Hwa Chong Institution). These three plays utilise Brechtian and documentary theatre techniques to enact biographies of three key figures associated with the school. The figures are Tan Kah Kee, the school’s founder and pioneering Singapore philanthropist; Lee Kong Chian, Tan’s son-in-law and a famed philanthropist in his own right; and Ong Teng Cheong, an alumnus who became Singapore’s first elected President. Through a performance studies angle, I examine the artistic qualities of these plays in relation to Yang’s own career as a dramatist and educator.  These plays, in front and behind the scenes, tell a story of intra-Asian and intra-Chinese cross-border movement of talent, culture, ideas and ideologies, showing how new immigrants continue to reimagine Singaporean history and their place in it by the creation and re-enactment of a transnational narrative network. How does Yang, for example, as a Chinese immigrant to Singapore, conceive the Singaporean-ness and Chinese-ness of Tan Kah Kee, a man who lived most of his life and made his fortune in Singapore, but chose to die in China, versus his son-in-law Lee Kong Chian, who was born in China and died in Singapore, and the Singapore-born-and-bred Ong Teng Cheong? Examining these plays show how viewing the development of Singapore culture, must consider its nature as a porous immigrant society and the effect of the wider world upon it, and opens up greater discourse to the study of artistic contributions and productions by first-generation Singapore immigrants and residents.

Hee En Ming has spent time in the government, private and voluntary welfare sectors throughout his career, and is currently pursuing an MA in Literary Studies. He was a presenter at the seventh conference of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO) at NTU in 2010. A lifelong history and literature buff, he has a Bachelor’s Degree in History and a Graduate Certificate in Applied and Public History from the National University of Singapore.

Migrating from National Memory: Evolving Transient Indentured & Migrant Bodies in 19th and 21st century Singapore
Tejash Kumar Singh

An interesting article titled “Clement Scott on Indian Servants” appeared on 14 December 1897 in The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (Weekly). Scott berates the attitude of Indian indentured servants and calls for a more brutish treatment of the Indian body, utilising ethos: “… they are really slaves … never so happy as when they are beaten … who love you if you are severe and despise you if you are mild, and literally serve you best when you treat them worst” (“Clement Scott on Indian Servants”, 376). Termed as a “chatty contribution” (376), Scott’s reduction of the Indian working body from “servant” to “slave” juxtaposes its tangibly brutal treatment with a disappearance in its humane qualities. However, such a British contribution within The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (Weekly), with substantial readership, normalised oppressive attitudes towards the liminal Indian migrant workers’ body which has mutated over the centuries upon principles of exploitation over transient migrant bodies, consistent Othering, and an imagining of one’s own separateness from them. 

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The transient Indian worker without roots in modern Singapore often vanishes from imagination, an issue which Singaporean writer Leonora Liow investigates in her “Rich Man Country”. Tracing an Indian migrant worker’s unstable psychological narrative due to excruciating pain from a workplace accident while having flashbacks of his journey to Singapore, his broken, non-financially productive body is silently dumped by his company. Such a disappearance is echoed by Kwek on migrant workers and past labouring bodies being historically underrepresented despite their sizable contributions to Singapore, seen through a “prism of foreignness” (Kwek, para. 3). In a recent article “Migrant workers in Asia: Far from home amid the Covid-19 pandemic”, an Indian migrant worker Rethnam’s concerns regarding loss of income, infection worries, and overcrowding are briefly alluded to and summarised into 7 lines. Using Anderson’s perspective of the nation “as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, 7), such separateness and dehumanising of the worker’s body is reified and excluded from such Singaporean “comradeship” through media outlets. I posit therefore that historical attitudes towards Indian migrant working bodies from the late 19th century normalise and reflect their ongoing exclusion from the 21st century imagined community of Singapore due to their perceived and inconsequential liminality.

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Works Cited: 

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983, Verso, New
          York. 

“Clement Scott on Indian Servants”. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (Weekly), 14 December 1897,
          Pg 376, http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/singfreepresswk18971214-1.2.70. Accessed on
          28 November 2022. 

Dharani, Bava. “Migrant labour in Singapore: Indentured servitude by another name”. Routed Magazine, 2021,
          https://www.routedmagazine.com/omc21-1miglabour-singapore. Accessed on 29 November 2022. 

Kwek, Theophilus. “A History Worth Remembering: Forced Labour and National Identity in Singapore”. Singapore Policy
          Journal, 2016, https://spj.hkspublications.org/2016/04/11/a-history-worth-remembering-forced-

          labour-and-national-identity-in-singapore/. Accessed on 29 November 2022. 

Liow, Leonora. “Rich Man Country” in Hook and Eye: Stories from the Margins, edited by Holden, Philip, Ethos Books,
          2018. 

“Migrant Workers in Asia: Far from Home amid the Covid-19 pandemic”. The Straits Times, 2020,
          https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/migrant-workers-in-asia-far-from-home-amid-the-covid-19-pandemic. Accessed
          on 24 November 2022.

Roots. “A group of Indian labourers”. National Heritage Board, National Museum of Singapore, c. 1870,
          https://www.roots.gov.sg/Collection-Landing/listing/1072473. Accessed on 29 November 2022. 

Vernon, Cornelius-Takahama. “Indian convicts’ contributions to early Singapore (1825–1873)”. Singapore Infopedia, NLB,
          2018, https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_39_2005-02-02.html. Accessed on 28 November 2022.

Tejash Kumar Singh is a postgraduate research student finishing up his Master of Arts in English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English (Distinction), before directing a pioneering dedicated English & Literature lecturing centre (The Arts & Humanities Tuition Services), along with app developments. His research interests include 19th century American literature, slavery narratives, and the study of the depiction of marginalised bodies across historical narratives in Singaporean literature.

Jamie Uy

Jamie Uy is a MA English Literature student at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her research interests include ecocriticism, science fiction, popular culture, screen media, postcolonial theory, and Southeast Asia. She has published in the New Review of Film and Television Studies, Spectator: The USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism, SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, and Transformative Works and Cultures. Her MA thesis explores technocracy and the environment in Anglophone Singapore science fiction.

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