Taking Cuttings, Untangling Roots
Review of Mok Zining’s The Orchid Folios (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2020)
By Genevieve Hartman
My small apartment has plants in every windowsill, most grown from cuttings that I’ve propagated myself. The lone orchid that sits in the window belongs to my roommate, though I care for it more often than she does. Orchids are notorious for being hard to care for; I’ve accidentally killed one before by repotting it in a too-large container with too little drainage. As it turns out, orchids like to be rootbound, their tendrils preferring to creep higher out of the pot when other plants would rather spread out underground.
As I read Mok Zining’s debut poetry collection The Orchid Folios, it too seemed rootbound, its varied themes circling around and around each other, so densely grown together that they became nearly indistinguishable. The history of Singapore’s colonization, the fictionalized tale of a second-generation florist, the poetic explanation of orchid growth patterns, images of the orchid’s use in beauty products, and commentary on school lessons wind together to form the braided roots of this book. Initially these themes might seem unrelated. The book opens, and the different tendrils of ideas spike outward in all directions, much like the roots of this book’s namesake do. But by the end, Mok’s careful artistry has followed each branching thought back to the flower blooming at its center.
Throughout The Orchid Folios, Mok unfolds the origin story of Vanda Miss Joaquim, Singapore’s hybrid national flower. Contention arose around who exactly created this famous hybrid. Numerous figures cloud the narrative: Henry Ridley, the director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens (SBG), was the first to send Vanda Miss Joaquim cuttings to London; Sir Trevor Lawrence received the first-class certificate from the Royal Horticulture Society for the hybrid’s successful recreation in Great Britain; W. H. White, Lawrence’s gardener, actually propagated the orchid that Lawrence was awarded for, and Humphrey Morrison Burkill, later director of the SBG, claimed that the orchid was an accident of nature. But none of these men created the hybrid—that honor, though unthinkable to colonial minds, belonged to Ms. Agnes Joaquim, a Singaporean Armenian woman, who would not be credited for her work until 2016.
It is no accident that Mok lays out this story of colonization and erasure alongside Singapore’s embrace of the Vanda Miss Joaquim as its national flower. In 1981, when Vanda Miss Joaquim was named the national flower, it was meant to symbolize Singapore’s multiculturalism, an idea directly fed to the people of Singapore by the government, although tied up in the country’s colonial history. Mok explores this history of colonization primarily through sections titled “Exemplary Arrangement.” These excerpts piece together the history behind the landing of British colonist Sir Stamford Raffles in Singapore in 1819. Many of the “Arrangement” sections are formatted like school assignments, which are annotated with additional context that expose the text’s racist recounting of British colonization in Singapore. Others feature excerpts from speeches by Singaporean dignitaries, revealing the ways that Singapore has been shaped by colonialism. One example is the government’s emphasis on creating and maintaining a harmonious multi-racial, multi-religious society, while commissioning figurines of Thomas Raffles, the ‘founder’ of Singapore, and thus effectively idolizing British colonization. Over and over, Mok reveals the carefully curated, color-blind story that Singaporean officials would like its citizens to embrace.
Mok uses the poetic technique of erasure against historical quotes from Raffles as well, taking literal cuttings of the British text and presenting them on the next page to create a commentary. For instance, when Raffles recounts to his patroness his planting of the British flag in Singapore, Mok redacts “the site of the ancient maritime capital of the Malays,” showing that Raffles was totally unruffled by his act of violence against a place of importance for the Malay people of Singapore. By fragmenting the text through this method of erasure, Mok is able to quote the colonizers and to criticize them at the same time.
The theme of cuttings has yet another application in The Orchid Folios—alongside the textual cuttings, Mok’s collection also includes a narrative centered around the fictional character of a florist, who questions how her job as a florist adds to society. At one point, the florist responds to a misogynist customer with stony confidence: “Yes […] I play with lives for a living.” This jolting statement points to the deeper power dynamics at work in the book—not only does the florist hold power over her cut flowers, the Singaporean government plays with lives for a living, exerting power over the narratives it teaches to its citizens. Even Mok herself plays with the life of her fictional character and exerts power as she shapes and reforms textual arrangements in order to present her arguments about Singapore and multiculturalism. This layered presentation of power, in different forms and contexts, reminds readers to critically examine the ideas we ingest.
Of vital importance to the florist is the figure of her mother. The first prose section recounts the fall of the young florist’s oldest orchid plant to the ground, its pot smashing, unleashing a flood of emotions and initiating a story told in fragments. When the florist receives shamefully poor grades in elementary school, her mother says kindly, “Come on, didn’t you say you wanted to learn how to repot an orchid?” Although many Asian parents are hung up on high marks in school, the speaker’s mother offers an alternative path from the beginning, teaching her daughter a skill outside of the traditional trajectory. By avoiding emphasis on the destination, the florist’s orchids and her mother’s wisdom tell the speaker to care for herself by doing what she loves, despite the condescension of others for being “just” a florist.
Some of the most interesting pages of The Orchid Folios feature arrangements of text to resemble orchid growth patterns. Orchids grow in either monopodial (growing a single stem) or sympodial (extending sideways like a creeper) structures. Mok’s texts do likewise.
excerpt from “Orchid Basics: Growth Habits”
and
excerpt from “Orchid Basics: Growth Habits”
In a mixed media work, we may find drawings and diagrams, but as Mok is a writer, she opts to recreate growth structure with words instead. This creative approach continues throughout the book, with words floating across the pages or pulled down by gravity to land in a heap at the bottom of the page.
Towards the end, the non-fiction vignettes give way to poetry. These short, fragmented poems are accompanied by visual elements such as roots that flow and join from one page to the next, sending up pseudobulbs like a sympodial orchid. Mok’s poems take on an ethereal quality as the pages turn black and the white words float untethered in the darkness. This reversal of colors comes directly after the fictional florist reveals the loss of her mother, and the feelings of hopelessness and immobilization that her mother’s death causes. Once-beloved pastimes and professions become overrun with grief. The florist experiences recurring dreams, where she becomes an orchid, and “the waking/ comes wrapped/ in sheets/ sepaled/ about me…” The very thing that has been a source of income and comfort turns into a nightmare. By the end of this sequence, the speaker has become an orchid cutting, removed from her source of nutrition.
As any amateur gardener knows, taking cuttings of a plant is a small act of faith; once snipped, that piece cannot be reattached to its former plant body. Instead, it must try to grow its own roots, become a new and independent plant. In the same way, the death of the speaker’s mother cuts the florist off from her source of life, requiring her to begin anew. Mok signifies this shift towards independence by inverting the page colors again. When the speaker is not plagued by sinister dreams, the roots swirl across white pages with black text. The speaker recalls her mother’s advice for potting orchids, the long-ago words that comforted her in her shame, and sees that “the ends of my shattered phalaenopsis were white and shrivelled from neglect.” The act of planting/repotting the orchid is an act of self-care and renewal. The dehydrated root-ends will be given water, the rotten parts will be sliced away, and the whole plant given a new environment where it can flourish on its own.
The final section of the book “Trimmed Affixes & Discarded Roots” is evidence of the collection’s thorough research. As much of the book is concerned with nonfiction—Singapore’s past and present—these further notes help to ground and validate what Mok is presenting to readers. Rather than including her research as a more typical and generic “Appendix” or “Notes” section, Mok ties her notes directly into the book by giving it a themed title. Her exhaustive research is no afterthought; Mok intends for her readers to engage with the background of her book in the same way that they have engaged with the book itself. The Orchid Folios does not exist in a vacuum, and “Trimmed Affixes & Discarded Roots” firmly roots the book in the distinct history and identity of modern-day Singapore.
In the penultimate page of prose, Mok quotes Singaporean sociologist Teo You Yenn, who writes,
If we can […] face up to how we are all implicated and entangled, confront how the narrative we hold onto upholds our own privileges at the same time that it maintains the disadvantages of some of our fellow residents in this country—then we can really begin talking about solutions.
It is here that the many themes and ideas that crowd this book come to a head. The orchid represents hybridity, but orchids are more than that. They are also a symbol of colonization and its subsequent maintenance of racial hierarchies. Furthermore, the orchid is a source of love and beauty for the florist, working through the loss of her mother. Just like orchids, people are part of a narrative, one that they have been given, and one that they continue to build out of their entire lives.
From the vibrant cover to the discarded roots at the end, The Orchid Folios by Mok Zining is a beautiful book that offers much to its readers. As a Korean American reader, I have been given valuable insights into the cultural history of Singapore that are at once fond and self-critical. I imagine, for the Singaporean reader, this book’s honesty and thoughtfulness would be welcome, as Mok probes and untangles the complicated ethos of Singapore, exploring how people manipulate, control, and deconstruct their cultural narratives.
Genevieve Hartman is a Korean American poet based in upstate New York. She is the Director of Development & Communications for BOA Editions and reads poetry for VIDA Review. Her poems and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Brushfire, Stone Canoe, Meniscus Journal, EcoTheo, and others. Find her reading, doing calligraphy, or buying another plant, and follow her on Instagram at @gena_hartman.