Art Is + Zining Mok

SP Blog’s series "Art Is +" is an attempt to view art through the eyes of artists and writers themselves. In wide-ranging interviews with vital new artists and writers from both Asia and the USA, the series ushers these voices to the forefront, contextualizing their work with the experiences, processes, and motivations that are unique to each individual artist. "Art Is +" encourages viewers and readers to appreciate art as the multitude of ways in which artists and writers continually engage with our world and the variety of spaces they occupy in it. Read our interviews with Symin Adive, Geraldine Kang, and Paula Mendoza.

Zining Mok is obsessed with random things: orchids, arabesques, sand. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, and Witness Magazine, among others. The Orchid Folios is her first published book. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She spends most of her free time dancing.

Zining Mok’s debut The Orchid Folios (Ethos Books, 2020) renders the Vanda Miss Joaquim, Singapore’s symbol of postcolonial hybridity, a document of the personal and colonial. The Orchid Folios is truly a hybrid text, all at once poetry, documentary, and fiction. Mok’s poems take the orchid—the symbol, the living organism, the narrative object—and turn it carefully to expose every angle to the light. Amanda Lee Koe calls The Orchid Folios “a fertile and kaleidoscopic meditation on hegemonic mythmaking.” Mok’s linguistic excavations and lyric articulations defy conventional rules of narrative, harnessing their power to an unflinching examination of the myth of the Singapore Story, and the enduring legacy of colonialism in Singapore. Described by Marylyn Tan as wrestling “with uneasy histories, only to pivot into unexpected beauty,” The Orchid Folios challenges its reader to reimagine the function of hybridity.— Janelle Tan

“I imagine this book less as a representation of
a subjectivity, and more as an attempt to map
a small part of a sprawling rhizomatic network.”

Janelle Tan: This is your debut. How did THE ORCHID FOLIOS begin?

Zining Mok: My interest in Singapore’s hybrid orchids began in early 2016, when I was in a poetry workshop at my university. I shelved the project in the spring of 2016 and returned to it only in early 2019, when I was taking a course on docupoetics in my MFA program. Initially, I had wanted to write a collection of speculative poetry. When I realized it wasn’t working in March 2019, I changed my approach—that’s when the current form began to emerge.

JT: How long have you worked on this book?

ZM: If we’re talking about the act of writing, I worked on this book for a few months in 2016, a few months in 2019, and a few months in 2020 when I was collaborating with my editors, Divya Victor and Arin Fong, on revisions and edits.

JT: How long did it take for the book to find a home at Ethos Books?

ZM: I believe that I submitted my manuscript in June 2019 and received a letter from Ethos in October or November.

JT: I want to talk about the book’s central investigation by asking: What is a poem, and what is documentary to you? What do you perceive to be the differences and similarities in the way they interrogate and investigate? How do you decide what finds its form in a poetic line, and what can only be said in a sentence?

ZM: These are certainly challenging questions. I’ll limit my answer to how I have come to understand the concepts “poem” and “documentary” in this project. So far, I have come to understand a “poem” as a piece of writing and “documentary” as a mode, a way of approaching things. The documentary mode figures—as Philip Metres writes in this essay—the poet as a documentarian or alternative historian. In the process of writing in this mode, I’m the one who has been given a new way of being in this world. Thus, for me, the documentary is also about the role I aspire to take on in this world: I would like to be a writer-citizen deeply and ethically engaged in civic life.

As a piece of writing, a poem is in conversation with the traditions, modes and conventions that exist in the genre of poetry. There are many ways to approach poem-writing; rarely does a poem engage with only one. In this way, a poem is a space where different ways of being and thinking meet. For instance, some of the poems in this project provide the space for the lyric, the documentary, the elegiac, and the narrative to meet.

As for lines and sentences, one consideration is how it looks. The Floristry Basics sections, for example, simply would not work if the words were compressed into sentences. Those poems would lose the quietness and careful pacing. A second consideration is stability. Something I enjoy about the line is its ability to perform instability: often, the meaning of each line or word turns with the unfolding of subsequent lines. In contrast, the sentence creates the illusion of stability and wholeness. In A Little Book on Form, Robert Hass characterizes the sentence and the line as such: “the sentence is being, enjambment is excess of being, or being in process, reaching toward itself. Which is its basic characteristic. Excess and instability and movement and change. The sentence moves and it arrests movement.” In the prose poem sections in the voice of the florist, the sentences work because they “arrest movement” and create stasis. At the same time, there are often significant leaps between sentences, which suggests that the florist is withholding an unspoken inner life from us. The sentence is great for dramatizing the tension between apparent stillness and the movement of thought.

An excerpt from The Orchid Folios (reprinted by permission of publisher).

JT: This book has hybrid verse and prose sections, but also more specific forms like erasure, or a sample exam question. Like the Vanda Miss Joaquim is hybrid, so is Singapore, and so is the speaker, and so is the book. What interests you about form, and what drives your investigation of form?

ZM: That’s an interesting observation. I can see how one might read this book as concerned, fundamentally, with hybridity. This would certainly be the case if we situate it in conversation with Homi Bhabha’s theorization of hybridity in a postcolonial Third Space, Anthony King’s idea of a colonial third culture, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideal, and a book market that segments literature into the three genres of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. All of this would be in line with our official mythos, which employs Vanda Miss Joaquim and the horticultural practice of hybridizing orchids to situate Singapore in the narrative of celebratory postcolonial hybridity.

However, what interests me more are the questions: what do we really mean by hybridity? What do we value about this hybridity? What exactly is being hybridized, and on whose terms? In the case of Vanda Miss Joaquim, which Agnes Joaquim cultivated by crossing two orchid species, hybridity is horticultural. This hybrid orchid began to circulate within hegemonic power structures when Henry Ridley registered it with the Singapore Botanic Gardens, an institution that supported the British imperial project by providing both the botanic elite at Kew Gardens and the colonial masters with the knowledge required to exploit the “exotic” resources of the colonies.

In London, Vanda Miss Joaquim would receive a First-Class certificate from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). This sounds like a symbolic triumph for those on the margins, until we realize that 1) celebrating the RHS’s recognition means accepting that the center and its institutions get to decide what has value; and 2) rather than recognizing Agnes Joaquim, the RHS had awarded the certificate to a Sir Trevor Lawrence, who won the award only because his gardener had succeeded in propagating the orchid in Europe for the first time. Later, the imperialists and neocolonialists would attempt an even greater erasure of Agnes Joaquim by claiming that she never hybridized the orchid, she only chanced upon it. Joaquim herself never got to set the terms. The same questions must be asked about Singapore’s national flower narrative and orchid hybridization project: what do we value about hybrid orchids? To whom is it valuable? Who are the arbiters of that value?

In the book, the florist offers an alternative relationship to horticulture, one that differs from both the colonialist’s and independent Singapore’s conceptions of plant life. For her, horticulture is neither a tool for gaining power, nor a way to capture cultural hybridity in a symbol. Instead, horticulture is a practice of home-building. What concerns her is not hybridity, but cultivation.

In terms of form, I don’t generally begin writing with a form in mind. Instead, I spend a significant chunk of my writing process exploring how best to think about my subject matter, and that’s what form is to me. Sometimes the form that emerges is a recognizable “poetic form,” at other times it’s an exam question or, later in the book, an ad. There are so many ways of relating to and thinking about information in contemporary life—why limit myself to forms that are recognized as “conventionally” poetic? 

“There is linguistic pleasure in the repetition
of the sounds and rhythms of ‘poetry’ and ‘luxury.’
Both are lush words . . . It almost makes me want to say
‘poetry is a luxury’ over and over again.”

JT: It seems a lot of book-length lyric nonfiction owes a debt to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. With its threads and themes branching outwards from a single obsession with orchids, THE ORCHID FOLIOS seems very much in those traditions. What are some other books you relied on in the making of this one?

ZM: Bluets is definitely one, although I would also like to take this opportunity to clarify that the florist is a fictional character. Among the most important include: Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Shawn Wen’s A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause, Anne Carson’s many experimentations, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, Philip Metres’s Sand Opera, Langston Hughes’s many poems, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde’s many poetic experimentations, Teo You Yenn’s This is What Inequality Looks Like, Alfian Sa’at’s A History of Amnesia, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive, Chaun Webster’s Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, Natasha Tretheway’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City, Cherian George’s Air-Conditioned Nation, Huang Jianli and Lysa Hong’s The Scripting of a National History, Richard Drayton’s Nature’s Government, Timothy P. Barnard’s Nature’s Colony, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World, Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc. and many, many more.

JT: You did your MFA at the University of Minnesota. What was your experience as a Singaporean writer in the Twin Cities? Were you working on this project then?

ZM: Yes, I worked on this project in the first year of my MFA. I’ll be entering my last year of my MFA program in August. The Twin Cities have treated me well. I love my house, my housemates, the greenway, the lakes, the seasons, the literary community, my life there. Of course, I occupy positions of privilege. Since my primary community is the university and the friends I’ve met through my program, I have been relatively isolated from certain realities of living in the Twin Cities. This is not to say that I haven’t experienced microaggressions, but I must point out that one reason why my experience has been predominantly positive is because my body (read as “Asian,” “Chinese,” “Asian American woman,” or “model minority”) is not the target of policing and violence in the way that other bodies are.

JT: What was it like to workshop a book that delves deeply into a very specific cultural history?

ZM: The Orchid Folios is certainly a book specific to Singaporean history, one that must be grounded in the Singaporean landscape—ecological, political, cultural, or otherwise. However, tracking the subjects of this book—the Vanda Miss Joaquim, botanic gardens, garden cities, multiculturalism, global cities…— brought me everywhere: from ancient Greece to Singapore, from England to Hawai’i. In the process of writing and researching, I’ve come to realize that this book is also about how language, ideas, things and real lives circulate in systems, such as the colonial and the global capitalist.

As for workshop, I enjoyed and learned a lot from my professors and fellow workshop members, truly. I never felt like I, or my drafts, should expect to feel out of place because I was writing about Singapore. Nor would I ever want a fellow workshop member to feel out of place because they might be writing about something that others may not be familiar with.

An excerpt from The Orchid Folios (reprinted by permission from publisher)

JT: What was the reason for the ultimate decision to publish the book with a Singaporean press?

ZM: I wrestled with several questions in the first year of my MFA program: who am I writing for? Where do I want my work to live? Am I, or have I been, marketing and exploiting cultural difference for the benefit of those who see me and “my culture” as a novel, perhaps even exotic, perspective? How do I write about Singapore on its own terms? It is in this context that I wrote The Orchid Folios, whose primary audience, in my opinion, is Singaporean. Whether Singaporean readers agree remains to be seen, but for now, I am humbled and overjoyed that The Orchid Folios has found a home at Ethos Books.

JT: I know you consider yourself a Singaporean writer. As somebody who has wrestled with that term, I want to ask: do you think being a Singaporean writer is a matter of identity (being born into it and unable to ever shed it), or a matter of writing about Singapore?

ZM: I see myself as a Singaporean writer because I am a Singaporean citizen, and I am a writer. Singapore is where I can, and want to, participate in civic life.

JT: You’ve lived in the U.S., the U.K., and Singapore. Is there any place you consider home more than the others?

ZM: I’ve also lived in Beijing, which I’d like to mention because it was a very formative experience for me. I struggled with questions of identity and belonging when I first moved away from Singapore, and still do, but only periodically. For me, home is where I live.

JT: Did your experience of having lived in the U.K. shape the book’s postcolonial investigation? How did it feel to write the book in the U.S., removed from both colonial master and subject?

ZM: The research I did for my degree certainly did. I’m sure that the place itself shaped me as well, but because my time in the UK was very short, I didn’t have much time for reflection while I was there. A year after leaving, with a grant from my MFA program, I got the opportunity to return to the UK for archival research in Kew Gardens and the RHS. It was then that my abstract understanding of archives—as a tool used by the imperial state to position itself as the center of knowledge consolidation, retrieval, and production—became concrete experience. Later, the following questions would come to guide my revision: what might decolonizing and building a more democratic archive look like? How can this book participate in the reimagination and rebuilding of an archive? In the coming months, I’ll be experimenting with building an online space, which I hope will invite more people to participate in the collaborative work of constructing an archive.

I never felt removed from colonialism in the US, since my very presence as an expat in the nation is made possible by settler colonialism, which is not a thing of the past, but a system that continues to shape the present. In the current global order, when neoliberal multiculturalism continues to displace and marginalize indigenous peoples, I have a hard time thinking of a place where I would feel removed from colonialism in its various forms.

JT: THE ORCHID FOLIOS is partially an investigation of Singapore’s colonial past, and its legacy on the individual. I like to think that many young Singaporeans have learned to question the way colonialism was presented in our national narrative. I have to ask, when did that learning come for you?

ZM: Pretty recently, actually! In many ways, The Orchid Folios is a sort of “textbook” I needed to read. In the first year of my MFA, I felt disoriented because it felt like I was more educated in the narratives and discourses of the US than in Singapore’s. I wanted to participate in the civic discourse of Singapore in some way, but because I have been away from Singapore for such a long time, I didn’t have many people to talk to. So research became my way of not only educating myself, but also socializing and participating in the discourse.

“I see myself as a Singaporean writer because
I am a Singaporean citizen, and I am a writer.
Singapore is where I can, and want to,
participate in civic life.”

JT: I noticed that throughout the book, there are some Singlish phrases, or other turns of phrase used commonly by Singaporeans. To use a policy term, this feels like a “glocal” book, firmly rooted in its interrogations of Singapore’s history, while looking outwards at the English-speaking world at large. In all of your other work, do you find yourself circling around Singapore? How did you decide that your debut would be a book that is thoroughly Singaporean in its DNA?

ZM: It’s interesting that you described this book as rooted in Singapore and looking outwards at the English-speaking world. This seems to suggest that there’s a subject looking out from the vantage point of Singapore. I imagine this book less as a representation of a subjectivity, and more as an attempt to map a small part of a sprawling rhizomatic network.

I write about whatever interests me: sometimes it ends up being about Singapore, at others it doesn’t. This is one thing I like about writing: I can write and learn about whatever interests me at a particular point in time. It’s nice to know that I don’t have to be limited by field or discipline. This project became my debut because my interest in Singapore’s orchids got unruly in its proliferation and took up more pages than I’m used to.

The “Singaporean DNA” is an interesting metaphor. That could perhaps be the subject of another project.

JT: In the opening sequence, the verse sections use floristry as an extended metaphor for writing. When you ask, “is floristry frivolous?” at the end of the sequence, it feels as if you are also answering the question often asked of poets, especially in Singapore: is poetry frivolous? I’m curious what your answer to that question is.

ZM: I used to feel quite bothered by the sentence, “Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford.” But the funny thing, I’ve realized, is that this sentence persists in our consciousness because it uses poetic devices successfully. Just say it out loud and listen closely: “Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford.” There is linguistic pleasure in the repetition of the sounds and rhythms of “poetry” and “luxury.” Both are lush words: note the round vowel sounds, the almost crunchy consonants. It almost makes me want to say “poetry is a luxury” over and over again. The sentence then proceeds to land with perfect technique: on a stressed syllable, signaling finality, firmness, authority. All of this is couched in the extended metaphors of pragmatism and economic development, which fit flawlessly into our national narrative. I could go on and on with my close reading, but I think there’s no longer any need: clearly, poetry is not frivolous.

Preorder a copy of The Orchid Folios at bit.ly/theorchidfolios from now till 30 October. As part of the preorder, readers will receive the following bonuses:
- A personal letter written by Zining
- A unique pressed flower bookmark handcrafted by Ethos Books
- Complimentary ebook


Janelle Tan is a Singaporean poet in Brooklyn. Her work appears in The Southampton Review, Nat. Brut, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from NYU, where she was Web Editor for Washington Square Review. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow and Assistant Interviews Editor at Singapore Unbound.