Hell Is Not Punishment, Is It?
Review of This Side of Heaven by Cyril Wong (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2020)
By Stewart Dorward
Cyril Wong is usually described as Singapore’s first confessional poet and that is how he is best known. However, fiction is a burgeoning part of his corpus. He has published three short-story collections, The Boy With The Flower That Grew Out Of His Ass (2007), Let Me Tell You Something About That Night (2009), and Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014), and a novel, The Last Lesson of Mrs. de Souza (2013). This Side of Heaven is his second novel. At 170 pages, This Side Of Heaven is slightly longer than Mrs. De Souza, but in structure it is closer to a collection of stories. This novel also fits into a subset of explicitly Buddhist works, namely, the short story “The Bodhisattva Makes Her Case” (2014) and the chapbook-length poem Satori Blues (2011). This Side of Heaven can be seen as a development of Wong’s thinking and writing about religion and the self.
The novel begins with what seems to be familiar territory, “In the beginning, there was the light,” a reference to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. However, this light turns out to be that of a nuclear explosion over Beijing at the start of a world war. It is the beginning of the end, not an act of creation. By the end of the war, half of humanity has been wiped out. Flooding the afterlife, these souls find themselves in an ad hoc and vaguely European town. The town is created and supervised by a group of beings called the Architects. The new arrivals try to make sense of their surroundings. They quickly note how it differs from a usual town: the sky is never blue, but grey or dirty yellow; the trees are always bare but seductive enough for some to embrace, caress, or even have sex with. The constantly shifting layout of the town and its buildings directs the souls to a central garden. From all sides this garden slopes down to a bandstand where faceless musicians constantly play. The grass strokes the feet of the listeners, encouraging them to move closer to the band, where, when they are ready, the ground opens under them and they are reborn as a barren tree.
The inhabitants that populate this afterlife are many and varied. Some arrive in groups, such as the Choir that keep singing in the wrecked fuselage of their plane, which appears to have been shot down over Ukraine. Most arrive alone and many are confused since they don’t know the circumstances of their deaths. Some of them, like the Vagrant, who has lost her baby to leukemia, are sympathetic. Others are repellent. For instance, the Priest is a predatory pedophile who was retired from his ministry to an obscure Spanish village where he passed the time painting. When the inhabitants gather in the central garden, they take turns to share about their previous lives. In telling his story, the Priest is unrepentant and self-justifying: “I never saw myself as a criminal. I miss the kids I used to visit. They must miss me too. I am not deluded, merely misunderstood.” That he speaks an obscure version of Spanish does not matter; in the afterlife, everyone is intelligible. Understanding him perfectly, the Matriarch, a Peranakan widow, attacks him physically, saying, “I am not sorry I struck that pompous Spanish priest, you pedophile! Why are you here? Who said you could hang out here with us? Get away! Stand up and walk away now before I hit you again—I will not be in the same company as the likes of you! We are nothing alike!” The underlined words, part of the text itself, underscore the Matriarch’s rage.
Despite the Matriarch’s assertions, all of the inhabitants are alike in sharing a deep longing for something. Therein lies the ‘hook’ of Wong’s novel. In an interview for Epigram Books, Cyril explains that the town is inspired by the bardo of Tibetan Buddhism. This is traditionally thought of as a forty-nine-day stay in a form of purgatory in which the reactions of the deceased determine their next birth into any of the many hells; heavens; ghostly, animal, or human realms; or even an escape into nirvana. For the characters in Wong’s novel, they will not escape the wheel of rebirth unless they are able to accept and give up their desires. Unfortunately, the Vagrant still wants her baby, the Priest his boys, and the Matriarch her social status.
They are in dire need of a bodhisattva, according to Mahayana Buddhism, and in Wong’s novel, that role is performed by the character simply named the Girl. According to classical texts, the bodhisattva who works in the hellish realms is Jizo, who has sworn to help all beings escape hell. Although the Girl is not identified as Jizo, there are strong similarities between them. Like Jizo, who can change his shape to suit anyone’s need, the Girl has gone through various transformations. In the past she has been an old woman, a grandfather, and a young boy, and to help the town’s inhabitants, she can be whomever they need.
Appearing in the garden, the Girl addresses the crowd: “… there is a different way. There is a silence—a stillness—within yourself that is its own beginning without end: a separate sort of movement, a symphony more encompassing than any music that orchestra behind us is playing, or ruining—that music now drawing you to itself. You must stop this—stop now—this gathering, this chatter, these justifications of the self.” The Girl is trying to get the people in the garden to put a distance between themselves and their emotional entanglements so that they can rise free from the noise and escape rebirth. The reader realizes that the orchestra is an anesthetic provided by the Architects to pacify the people so that they can be ushered into a rebirth.
The Girl’s work, however, is not limited to the inhabitants of the town. It also encompasses the town’s creators, the Architects. They are usually shown as a group of three, though they can merge into one being if they experience a deep harmony with each other. These beings are incisive, self-aware, and unsentimental. The town is not the first realm that they have created. Of a previous creation—a jungle with red moons, howling wolves, and white snakes—they said wryly to themselves, “It was the nineteenth century after all.” When they created a disaster, a tundra in which souls were turned into towering fungi that spouted their confessions as spores, they were unsparing about their failure. Wong is obviously having fun here. In the narrative, a Banksy mural inspires the black balloon that tugs at a character’s wrist. These small flourishes add a welcomed whimsy to the proceedings.
The Architects regularly comment on how banal, tedious, and repetitive the inhabitants of the town are. Letting the reader experience the same tedium runs the risk that the reader will give up before the truly delicious banter between the Architects that the book ends on. There is minimal interaction between the town’s inhabitants, who speak mostly in monologues. To make things worse, most of them forget what happens to them and so they learn little and slowly. The Architects compare their frustration with observing these souls to watching a group of corpulent dictators slowly dying through small shaving accidents.
At first, the Architests are also derisive of the Girl’s efforts. But their curiosity gets the better of them, and they descend to the town to spy on her through the eyes of the musicians. However, the Girl then turns to face the Architects, unnerving them. They realize they are facing a superior and more powerful being whose love will reach them at some point in the future. This is possibly the most intriguing aspect of the novel, as we realize that the Architects are trapped in their own creation, unable to see beyond it.
In the Epigram Books interview, Cyril concedes that the biggest challenge he had writing This Side of Heaven was maintaining a sense of compassion for his “sushi-conveyor-belt” of characters, and that “many of them can be quite unlikeable, even as their existential challenges can also seem familiar or even universal.” The main weakness of the novel is that the way in which Cyril frames his characters works against his attempts to humanize them. The characters do not develop nor achieve satori but remain stereotypes, as indicated by their capitalized names, such as the Comedian and the Stewardess. A Jungian interpretation is not supported by the text. When a character shows some idiosyncrasy, such as the Farmer, who paints large murals on the walls inside his house, the reader is left to speculate why. As Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen pioneer in the USA, taught, “Hell is not punishment, it’s training.” Training implies progress, but This Side of Heaven presents a cast of characters who make little progress.
Although Wong’s thirty characters are given short monologues only, the juxtaposition of their stories could have provided entertainment and enlightenment. That effect is achieved in at least one instance. When the Farmer speaks about his quiet, patient life, he seems a ponderous but pleasant soul. However, the Wife, who is married to him, comes along and explains how she tries to shoot herself in sight of his house every other day as revenge for the way he treats her. It becomes apparent that the Farmer is not a reliable witness, and that the marriage is not a simple affair. Unfortunately, this kind of skillful juxtaposition is not exploited throughout the collection of stories. Without this earthly link, of comradeship or conflict, we are left with thirty people and three supernatural beings justifying themselves on a repeat loop.
Stewart Dorward is a British-born teacher trainer living north of Tokyo. He has multiple degrees in law, education, and religion, and a long-standing interest in traditional Asian spirituality in modern popular literature. He also runs a bed and breakfast and tries to grow vegetables.