Judith Huang's Blog: Jud: The Blog, page 5

In a Singapore full of crazy rich foreigners, inequality is becoming ingrained

It’s 2018, and Kevin Kwan’s Austenesque novel Crazy Rich Asians is now a summer movie blockbuster, launching a thousand op-eds about representation. But the book is not about race, it is about the impenetrability of class. Like Pride and Prejudice, it is about an intelligent, ambivalent young woman landing the most eligible bachelor and being initiated into high society. Only this time, it’s Singapore high society.

The movie is opening in Singapore at a time when the hottest topic on the island is inequality. Kwan’s trilogy tops the fiction bestseller lists, but the unexpected sleeper hit on the non-fiction lists is sociologist Teo You Yenn’s This is What Inequality Looks Like, a book of lucid, compassionate essays distilling a three-year ethnographic survey of families with monthly incomes of S$1,500 (US$1,100) or less living in rental flats – Singaporeans on the completely opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum from those satirised in Kwan’s novel.

Singapore’s People’s Action Party is one of the longest-ruling political parties in the world today, behind the Workers’ Party of North Korea and the Communist Party of China. The belief that meritocracy is operating well in our society is a large factor in the PAP’s continued success and legitimacy. However, widening inequality as a result of a particular brand of neoliberal economics may be its greatest challenge yet, and Crazy Rich Asians is just its latest manifestation.

In 2004, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong proposed the building of casinos in Singapore during his National Day Rally speech – our State of the Union Address. Despite fierce public opposition, Singapore now has two casinos to explicitly attract foreign gamblers – one of which, Marina Bay Sands, features prominently in Crazy Rich Asians.

The casinos were part of a wider vision to make Singapore a cosmopolitan metropolis to rival London or New York. In just 10 years, the skyline was completely transformed. Two enormous air-conditioned glass domes were filled with exotic plants foreign to our climate. Sentosa, the island which hosted the Trump-Kim summit, was transformed into an enclave of exclusive waterfront residences that cost tens of millions of dollars.

Singapore has no capital-gains tax, and income tax is capped at 22 per cent. In 2008, estate duty was abolished. Also politically stable, Singapore positioned itself as a haven for the rich.

The strategy seemed to work. High-net-worth individuals flocked to the island, most notably Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder. And yet the consequences of the inequality were also making themselves felt. In 2012, a Ferrari driven by a rich mainland Chinese crashed into a taxi driven by a Singaporean, killing both drivers and a passenger. The crash was a metaphor for the collision course wealthy foreigners and working-class locals were on.

In Singapore we have a habit of using acronyms to erase the true meaning of words. Casinos become integrated resorts, which become IRs. The one bandied about in the debate about inequality is SES – socio-economic status. But I would like to use an older, more dangerous term: class. Kwan’s novel is about why money is not the same as class.

One of the defining moments in my mother’s life was when the government forcibly acquired the land my grandmother built her house and investment properties on. My mother and her maiden sister were left almost destitute. The amount of compensation for four terrace houses and a bungalow was only enough to buy a small flat. That land had been the result of my grandfather’s successful bumboat business – he had worked his way up from a cowherd and ferryman with no formal education.

In a 2015 lecture, entrepreneur Ho Kwon Ping warned that the education system, “the original social leveller”, may now “perpetuate intergenerational class stratification”.

My grandparents sent all their children to elite Chinese-language schools, but my mother, the youngest, went to the exclusive Singapore Chinese Girls’ School – their bid to enter the English-educated Straits Chinese elite. My mother did not understand why she did not belong despite coming top almost every year. But I understand now. She, and I, were pretenders. Her classmates looked down on her the way Singaporeans now resent the new arrivals from mainland China.

When I decided not to go to my mother’s alma mater, I was unconsciously rejecting a marker of the upper class – a class which my grandmother had longed to join, and where my mother did not belong. A class which I, with a Harvard College degree and a career in the arts, am not part of.

When I stood before the grave of Lee Kuan Yew’s grandfather in Bukit Brown, I was struck by its modesty. It was flanked by grander graves that traced their lineage to Confucius. And yet the famous grandson was the reason why many visited the site, not the famous ancestor.

This was supposed to be a country where this was possible. Every morning in schools throughout the island, children take our national pledge, promising to build a democratic society, based on justice and equality. Do we still mean what we say?

Judith Huang (@trueboat) is a Singaporean author whose debut novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, a futuristic dystopia story set in Singapore, was a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2017. She is a tutor at Yale-NUS College

This article can be found at the South China Morning Post international online edition.








This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Growing inequality the next challenge for Singapore

Second Letter to Mama

Second Letter to Mama

Second Letter to Mama (c) Tan Keng Chiew

Dear Mama, you are standing by the stove

and I am standing on the chair by the stove

as the rice rises warmly in the clay pot

the soy sauce stains it a chestnut brown

shiny as enamel with oil.

And the rain outside and the trees outside

are papaya trees, and their tiny flowers,

male, female, let out a scent

honey in water, with the swift

hard breaths of rainwater darts.

The puddles on the ground are Earl Grey tea,

Mama’s tea, taken with condensed milk

in a pot in the fridge, unstuck with the

pluck of the magnet. My hair is short,

glossy like the rice and the rain.

This poem has been translated into Chinese, inspired a painting by my mother (above) and a music composition for voice and violin by Koh Chengjin (debuting at the Loke Cheng Kim Foundation Scholarship dinner 2018)

给妈妈的第二封信

妈妈：你站在火炉边

我站在火炉边的椅子上

米饭在温热的煲锅里泛起

酱油把它染成栗棕色

油油的，闪亮如珐琅

外面下着雨，窗外的

木瓜树开着细小的花，

雄的，雌的，发出微香

如水中蜜糖，雨箭那

迅疾而硬朗的气息

地上滴着伯爵灰茶水珠，

就像妈妈的茶：拔开

磁体吸上的门，从冰箱里取出奶罐

倒进炼乳。我的短发

光滑如米饭，如雨滴。

(self-translated, edited by Chen Bo)

Second Letter to Mama score by Cheng Jin Koh

Two months after publication…

OK, so a lot has happened since I last blogged here. I’ve been pretty active generating Sofia-related content on my Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/judithsyhuang, so if you want to find out more about the book and promotional events, please do like the page!

First off, the book is now in bookstores! It is in Kinokuniya, Times, some Populars, the indies like Booksactually, Grassroots, Littered with Books, etc. But you can still get it from me (and I greatly appreciate getting direct orders because I get to make more money from them) and I will make sure you get a signed copy. The best way is to contact me through my contact form on this site, or on my Facebook Page.

So, what does it feel like to be a published author? Definitely better than an unpublished author, that’s for sure. All of my fears about not being able to take criticism or my anticipation that I would be disappointed at the reception of my book have been swept away. It has been an overwhelmingly positive experience so far. I love hearing from the early readers of the book, about both what they liked and what they disliked about the book. I am particularly fascinated at how absolutely everyone has a different take on it. Death of the author is something I can definitely get behind.

I’ve gotten some press! Here is the Straits Times interview and review of the book by the lovely Olivia Ho. I have a few reviews on Goodreads now, and going strong. I’ve also given an interview to the Harvard Ichthus, though that’s still in the works.

I’ve done a few events for the book, from the launch at Bakery and Bar, to Book Jams with the National Library and school visits. I did a reading at Booksactually where I talked about the books that inspired this book and read an excerpt.

My next event is with City Book Room on August 26 where I’ll talk about the cinematic influences on Sofia. I’m really looking forward to that one.

One of the cool things about publishing a book is that suddenly a lot of people who I knew from school, like teachers and classmates, come out of the woodwork and want to catch up. I met with my teacher from primary school, Ms Kwok, and my teacher from secondary school, Mr Lin. I’ll be meeting more of my ex-teachers, I’m sure.

I’m also writing the next book. I feel far more confident about this one than I did with the first. I also feel like I have gotten a lot of the most pressing issues I’ve always wanted to write about in the first one, and I’m more relaxed and exploratory with this second one. These are all good things.

There’s much more to say, but for now, let me leave you with Sofia’s official soundtrack. Read the book to it, and follow the updates on my facebook page as I talk about the music I wrote the book to, and also why the playlist mimics the plot.

 

Listen to my 938Now Radio Interview about Sofia and the Utopia Machine!

So I went live on 93.8FM today with Eugene on the Scene to talk about my novel! I even read an excerpt, when Sofia creates the new universe in the Utopia Machine. You can check it out and listen to the interview here. Let me know what you think!

First look at Sofia and the Utopia Machine paperbacks!

I was so excited to receive this photo from Epigram yesterday! My books are back from the printers and I’ll be seeing them in person very very soon! Thanks to everyone who has been on this journey with me, and I’ll definitely post again when I know about the launch! The books should be available in Singapore bookstores in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, if you want a copy, pre-order from Epigram here and be sure to add it to your Goodreads queue here!

Creative affirmations and the artist’s way

Today I took a special day off to go to Fremantle, the wonderful port city near Perth, where I spent a soul-nourishing day reading the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and browsing the indie bookshops along the way to Moore and Moore’s, a cafe with eclectic decor.

It might seem a little counter-intuitive that I’ve escaped down under just as my book is about to launch in Singapore, but I find that having an escape hatch is helping me deal with all the anxiety about the reception the book will have when it finally drops. I’ll be back for the launch, of course, date still TBD.

The Artist’s Way is a classic that has defined my artistic recovery from the depths of writer’s despair several years ago. I was recommended it by my friend Oke back in 2013, and I used it a couple of times since getting it. It has never failed in getting my artistic mojo back, and I’m hoping that reading it now will help me jumpstart my next project and also get me writing poetry again, something which I haven’t done meaningfully in a while.

Just re-reading the first chapter today reminded me of how much my inner censor creates a lot of negative self-talk in my own head – the feelings of inadequacy, the inability to admit one is an artist/writer, and especially that one is a good and prolific one. They plague me even on the eve of publication! Just as they plagued me when I was in my office in China, unpublished and anonymous in the huge, unknowing city of Beijing.

I need to allow myself to be an artist. I need to nurture my inner artist child and be kind to it. It’s alright if I don’t measure up to my idols. It’s alright that I’m still learning the ropes. Here are the creative affirmations that Cameron recommends we write out during the first week. I’ve always found them to be incredibly moving to recite aloud or write out in longhand:

1. I am a channel for God’s creativity, and my work comes to good.

2. My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.

3. As I create and listen, I will be led.

4. Creativity is the creator’s will for me.

5. My creativity heals myself and others.

6. I am allowed to nurture my artist.

7. Through the use of a few simple tools, my creativity will flourish.

8. Through the use of my creativity, I serve God.

9. My creativity always leads me to truth and love.

10. My creativity leads me to forgiveness and self-forgiveness.

11. There is a divine plan of goodness for me.

12. There is a divine plan of goodness for my work.

13. As I listen to the creator within, I am led.

14. As I listen to my creativity I am led to my creator.

15. I am willing to create.

16. I am willing to learn to let myself create.

17. I am willing to let God create through me.

18. I am willing to be of service through my creativity.

19. I am willing to experience my creative energy.

20. I am willing to use my creative talents.

I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to be creative, and who feels blocked in some way. The tools seem simple and even rudimentary, but they worked for me, from taking that first step to reading again on the circuit in Beijing (the first time I read at Spittoon poetry) to becoming a published author (almost!). I’m glad to be reunited with my copy.

Join over 100 pre-orders for Sofia & The Utopia Machine!

I received news from my publisher, Epigram, today that Sofia and The Utopia Machine has received over a hundred pre-orders! I am pleasantly surprised and also gratified that so many people are interested enough in the book that they have already ordered it. You can, too, if you head over to this link at Epigram Books. The book is going to drop pretty soon, in the next month or so, although I don’t have a date right now yet. Of course, I’m thrilled that there are this many people interested in the book, though a part of me is also worried about what they’ll think of the book when they finally get it! It’s just pre-release authorial jitters, I suppose.

In separate news, here is how the cover looks at present, with a peek at the back cover as well! I am very pleased that the designer, Qinyi, decided to incorporate my suggestion to have Milton the tiger on the back

I’m at the last lap of the publication process and I’m both exhausted and relieved! It almost seems surreal that this book is going to be out in the world for real, and the news that people have already ordered it drives this home for me. I just re-read a favourite essay of mine by Zadie Smith today “That Crafty Feeling”, collected in Changing My Mind, in which she says,

I find it very hard to read my books after they’re published. I’ve never read White Teeth. Five years ago I tried; I got about ten sentences in before I was overwhelmed with nausea.

She speaks frequently of that sensation – nausea, upon reading past work. I’m afraid I kind of feel it too, especially in the revision process. I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to crack open the book when it’s finally in my hands and read it from beginning to end like the way I would any other book. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to enjoy it as a book, in that sense. Perhaps the nausea is a the literary equivalent of morning sickness, except something which never goes away. One of the reasons why I like the Zadie Smith essay so much is to know that I’m not the only novelist in the world that feels like this about the book I’ve written.

For friends, especially those overseas, wondering how to get hold of the book when it comes out, I promise I will find some kind of arrangement to get them to you when it’s out. Til then, keep spreading the word – just because I don’t think I can read my book from beginning to end doesn’t mean I don’t want more people to!

Three poems about mental health published in COG

Three of my poems on the theme of mental health and the goodness of support from friends and family during trying times of mental illness were published in COG, the Cogswell College publication, here. Check them out. I’m especially happy to address these issues in my poetry because it sheds light on what it feels like to struggle with depression, a debilitating condition that affects nearly a quarter of adults.

My translations of Xiao Shui’s poetry on LA Review of Books!

I had a lot of fun translating Chinese poet Xiao Shui’s wonderful little vignettes – they are a kind of short prosepoem, almost flash fiction like. And they just got picked up by the Los Angeles Review of Books! I’m so happy to see them up here. Click this link to read them!

Sofia & The Utopia Machine available for pre-order!

My first novel, Sofia & the Utopia Machine, is now available for pre-order from Epigram Books! This means you’ll get it shipped to you once it drops in May 2018! A great option for anyone who wants to get it as soon as possible.

Click here to purchase. I’m so excited about the cover as well! I think it looks wonderful. Thanks to Epigram for the lovely design.