Seeds of Hope

Review of In This Desert, There Were Seeds edited by Jon Gresham and Elizabeth Tan (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2019)
by Priscilla King

“An anthology expressing challenges, hopes and joy for the future” was the plan. The editors at Margaret River Press, in western Australia, and Ethos Books, in Singapore, prompted writers to submit stories that faced their fears, specifically mentioning “geopolitical, social, and economic anxieties” for “imagined futures.” The result is an interesting mix of the mundane and the fantastic, of “futures” for our planet, nations, individual lives and personal relationships. No two writers face quite the same fear. Each places characters in an unhappy situation and gives them some hope of surviving, enduring, changing, or perhaps transcending it.

Often the protagonist’s current struggle is in the foreground; often, as in the story that furnished the title for the collection, hope for a better future is present only as “seeds,” like the watermelon to which the title refers. In Diana Rahim’s “Minor Kalahari,” Singapore has become a desert, literally and culturally. A single watermelon sprouts, without permission from the bureaucracy, and grows and dies, leaving common people to marvel at seeds that previous generations carelessly left on the ground. Where there’s been one melon, there may soon be more. We don’t see the seeds germinate; we leave the story, hoping that they will. Similarly, in Rajkumar Thiagaras’ “White Lotus,” we don’t see how a daughter will either transcend or escape her father’s home; we leave her at the first stage of liberation, acknowledging that her father’s home is not her own. In Jay Anderson’s “Flies,” we don’t even see the first step toward the two young men’s recognizing a certain commonality in their dissatisfactions. In Arin Alycia Fong’s “Walking on Water,” we leave a couple trying to bake a traditional cake while their home washes out to sea; the odds seem to be against them. Each story sets up the possibility of a happy ending, but ultimately leaves it to the reader’s imagination.

The Singaporean and Australian stories are mixed in their settings; in some stories it is not obvious in which country a story is situated. For good measure, a few stories are set in other locales: two are set in India, one in San Francisco, one in London. The publisher’s stated goals for this collection include “bringing our communities closer together” by showing how fear and hope are common to humankind, not defined by ethnicity or nationality. To this end, a collection of stories set across a variety of countries and continents seems to be their answer.

When asked specifically about differences between the Singaporean and Australian stories, I had to write out a list of observations. Then I did notice a difference. Two of the three stories for which I find it hard to imagine a satisfactory ending are Australian; four of the six stories that didn’t work for me are Australian. All of which is to say that more of the stories I like are Singaporean. All of the stories are well crafted enough that I hesitate to say whether my preference implies anything about culture or is an effect of chance. I can say that Leslie Thiele's “The Slaughterman” and Arin Alycia Fong's “Walking on Water” set up futures that are grim enough, and that David Whish-Wilson's “Vigilance Security” leaves the characters in a bleak enough situation, that I had to remind myself that some sort of hope is at least implied by the stories’ inclusion in this collection.

I can say that I, personally, don’t like the first-person emotional regression in the stories “Dark Mulberry” and “Purple Flowers,” or the dreary carnality of the relationships on which “Contentment,” “Wave,” and “Glass” focus, or the addiction to thrill-seeking that forms the narrative structure in Marylyn Tan's “Blue Leopard.”. It’s not that these are badly written stories. They’re prize-winners; they do work for some people. They’re not great enough to overcome my personal resistance to their material. I find myself reflecting on the inevitability with which any attempt to compare these stories is likely to highlight the reviewer’s personality. Why is “White Lotus” my favorite, and why do I find “Flies” annoying? Because I’m at an age where the generation gaps between adults seem like an intriguing, fresh theme, whereas the self-focus of a young character... well, you know.

In “White Lotus,” a young widow reflects on the way her “modern” father allowed her choices that would have been unthinkable for her aunts, yet still discouraged some of her interests and continues to keep her “trapped in a patriarchal society.” She was free to take dancing lessons until her teacher praised her talent too highly. She liked Tamil, the language in which a schoolmate is now writing, but her father pushed her to concentrate on English instead. She was free to choose a husband from a lower caste, and to choose whether to stay with his parents or come home after he died. Ironically, her father obviously worked hard to give his family the enlightened, liberated home that becomes her “trap.” Her father’s home is not her own. She finds some liberation in merely stating the problem this way; having sat down by the river, she sees herself as a flower sinking to the bottom, but as she stands up to leave, she sees herself as a flower still in bloom. I’m convinced that she’ll find ways to escape or transcend her sense of entrapment, or both. I’d be interested in reading more about what she finds in modern India, how it’s similar to and different from the choices that young widows find in other countries.

In the first section of “Flies,” an unnamed boy breaks the rules by fighting in defense of a friend, and the grandmother who talks the principal into letting him stay in the school cautions her grandson that he’ll “catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” In the second section, the boy is a young man who feels choked with anger when another young man, a miner, complains about hiring quotas. I find myself losing sympathy for the main character before the last paragraph, in which he’s still feeling “sick of choking on flies.” Not because homosexuality is his cause; not because he’s privileged. Maybe because he’s angry about the mere unpopularity of homosexuality in Australia, rather than thinking about its criminalization in countries like Brunei, or because he sounds like one of those young ineffectual activists whose self-focus, and inability to imagine how others are worse off than they are, become a liability to their movements? Those things do spring to mind, but on reflection, I think my dissatisfaction with “Flies” may be that it’s a short story about a topic that could be fresh and worth reading as a long story. How much of the young man’s resentment comes from an attraction to the miner? Will these guys grow up in such a way that they can recognize the intersection of social oppression that might give them some common ground? Such details can only be disclosed in a longer format.

Each of these stories contains the seeds of a novel about how the main character might achieve self-actualization. However, some stories also seem fully complete in their current form, like Cyril Wong’s “Harihara,” where a couple of “plump, affectionate aunties” who have “never been religious” reconnect with their Hindu roots toward the end of their lives. If read slowly and mindfully this story is likely to elicit tears. It could be shorter than it is, but not longer. Heather Teo’s “Gently Burns the Crescent Moon,” an old woman’s love letter to her house, and Rashida Murphy’s “Death Lilies,” in which joining a support group has unintended consequences for some members, and Yisga Gelaw Woldeyes’ “Maqdala 1868, London 2018,” in which a museum guard gives up his job as a statement of belief, also seem as long as they need to be.

Choo Ruizhi’s “Aviatrix” is probably perfect at its current length. It’s both a time-travel fantasy and a tribute to a real person. Amy Johnson was one of a group of young women from different countries whom sponsors paid to learn to fly airplanes, urging each “aviatrix” to be the first to try some new feat. Johnson’s plane was shot down; her body and an ivory elephant she carried as a mascot were never found. Choo imagines her as really having come from thirty-first-century Singapore, the little elephant really being a “Bio-Translator” that converts animal pheromones into English speeches. If we’re not quite convinced, at least it’s a delightful fantasy. Still other stories are satisfactory at their current length but might become prologues to further, longer stories. Chen Cuifen’s “Reunion Dinner” is such an instance. One Chinese daughter has annoyed her mother by marrying an American who’s not even rich, then divorcing him, and the other daughter flies to California so that her sister won’t have to dine alone or with strangers on the eve of the Chinese New Year. The dinner they eat—in San Francisco, yet!—is an extravagant affirmation that it’s not the food, it’s the family connection that must be celebrated.

As a collection, these stories become an affirmation of the human potential for survival, even transcendence. There’s enough variety of styles, and of hopes and fears, to offer something for everyone. Readers who enjoy fiction will finish this book with a few more names for their lists of writers to watch.


In This Desert, There Were Seeds edited by Jon Gresham and Elizabeth Tan retails for S$22. To order a copy for S$17.60, go to Ethos Books’ website and enter “MIRACLE" on checkout before 21 February 2020.

Priscilla King is a writer and bookseller. She reviews older books at priscillaking.blogspot.com.