Art is + Jonathan Chan

Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor of poems and essays. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and a South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He is the author of the poetry collection going home (Singapore: Landmark, 2022). More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com.

Jonathan Chan’s poetry debut going home (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2022) is an excavation of a personal and familial history shaped by migration. His work answers the eternal question: “Where’s home?” with a multi-dimensional, cross-cultural complexity, in a deeply introspective voice. In his book blurb, poet Aaron Lee describes Chan’s voice as “[exhibiting] the stillness of attention,” every poem having “a well-woven vitality, yielding an extraordinary sense of life’s continuity across memory, borders, cultures and the ages.” At its gleaming center, going home asks us to consider the precise location of home within ourselves. On June 29, Chan and I met for lunch at Kopitiam, a Malaysian restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, before Chan returned to Singapore after completing his M.A. in East Asian Studies at Yale University. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. —Janelle Tan

“To trace my family’s history was an attempt to think about 
the particularity and peculiarity of my own situation 
as a naturalized Singaporean, as well as the ways that language 
such as “third culture kid” or “immigrant” felt either insufficient 
or loaded as ways of describing my life.”

Janelle Tan: In going home, the opening sequence, “a brief history of movement,” sets up the rest of the book’s many movements. So many of these poems are marked by movement between different cities and locales. Your own academic career is shaped by an interest in migration. What fascinates you about migration – its colonial legacy, its interpersonal legacy, and its legacy on your identity?

Jonathan Chan: Over the last couple of years, I was involved with SingPoWriMo (Singapore Poetry Writing Month, an online poetry forum), and I would write these scattered, individual poems that touched on different facets of my family’s history and my identity. I began to understand that people weren’t understanding what I was writing about in these piecemeal pieces, and that the only way to weave them together was in a project, like a book. Even then, I felt it was still necessary to provide that context so that the book would make sense. A lot of that feeling emerges from this instinct or impulse to explain my family’s background and history, to explain where I come from. So, when people ask, “Where is home?” or “where are you from”, my answer is always “How long do you have?”

That helps to get at why so many of my poems revolve around these questions of origins and of home – like me, my parents also grew up in places that were not where they were born or where their parents were from. Even for my parents, the question of “Where is home?” is not an easy one to answer. To trace my family’s history was an attempt to think about the particularity and peculiarity of my own situation as a naturalized Singaporean, as well as the ways that language such as “third culture kid” or “immigrant” felt either insufficient or loaded as ways of describing my life. 

JT: I am thinking about the line in the poem “malaysian-american”: “here are the tears of an uprooted/ mother” – do you think migratory personhood/migration is a kind of inheritance? 

JC: That line in particular is a reference to my paternal grandmother, for whom a move from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Houston, Texas, was especially jarring when there were few people of East Asian descent in 1980’s Houston.

I am shaped by the crisscrossing and overlapping histories of migration, and I am interested in the question of what remains after the process of migration: the way that identity is reshaped in that interaction between the cultures that migrants bring with them and the assimilating force of a new culture; what changes in linguistic or cultural terms, in spiritual  or political terms; and what remains stable enough for a claim about personhood and belonging. All the sacrifices, shifts, and changes my grandmother had experienced when she moved to Houston went into that line.

JT: Your book has a clear chronological arc: we begin with family history and an establishment of the lineage of movement, and with the poem “farewells,” which ends with a stanza set in Singapore, you start telling your own story of movement. The poem “five foundings” establishes that there are five key movements/five homes in the book’s chronology. How did you land on the structure of the manuscript? 

JC: This manuscript has existed in some shape or form since 2017. I’d been engaging with SingPoWriMo for some time by then, and “five foundings” was actually written in response to a SingPoWriMo prompt about imagining the establishment of cities. “five foundings” was an attempt to imagine my family establishing itself five times in different locales across time and space. In thinking of the desire to turn back to my familial history, I’ve often turned to Li-Young Lee, who almost mythologizes his father’s history. There are so many ways that our collective pre-histories almost determine our concerns. This is not to say that we lack agency, but I felt the need to contend with the questions of roots, belonging, home, and culture before I could make an adequate turn in the collection to myself. 

The manuscript of going home went through the SingLit Station Manuscript Assessment Scheme, back when the collection had a different name and different framing metaphor. The manuscript received a report from a British reviewer at The Literary Consultancy. He offered lots of feedback – some remarks on organization like where to place certain poems, others with regard to line breaks, lineation, punctuation, and the capitalization of proper nouns. The feedback also helped draw my attention to particular verbal tics I had, especially in the recurrence of certain phrases and images. It also flagged flaws in certain poems that led me to remove them from the manuscript altogether. When the shuttering force of the pandemic kicked in, I felt that the manuscript at that stage was self-indulgent – not necessarily trivial in its concerns, but too inward-looking. 

The manuscript underwent several more revisions when Landmark Books picked it up. The editorial process was both helpful and necessary – working with my publisher Goh Eck Kheng, a third of the poems were cut. The collection became lithe, which is not how I would have described it before. Eck Kheng moved the poems around in a way that made sense, but he was also very pointed in asking me directly, “What is the big organizing theme of the collection?” For me, it came down to the question of home and its various manifestations: cultural, national, ecological, spiritual.

“Sometimes people describe poetry as “just navel-gazing,” 
and so I was interested in the question: 
how do you participate in this creative act 
without drawing too much attention to oneself, 
without veering too much into the abstract?”

Reena Kallat - Woven Chronicle 1 (2015), circuit board, speakers, electrical wires and fittings, 10 min Single Channel Audio, Installation view, Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite
Photography: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery
Image description: A wide-angle shot of a woman in a large room looking at an art installation of the world map constructed out of blue, red, and yellow electrical wires, fragments of circuit boards, and black speakers. The electrical wires, draped across the wall, link some of the countries on the map. They also unravel into tangled balls on the floor just below the artwork. 

JT: That’s how I saw the movement of the manuscript: this is where I come from, this is what shaped me, and this is where I’m going. I feel like your work doesn’t just inhabit a confessional space, there’s a sense of excavation and engagement with political history too through the lens of family history.

JC: In 2017-2018, I was thinking a lot about family history, and poetry as a way of digging into that. I was also wrestling with this idea that writing poetry is necessarily a self-indulgent act – how can one write in a way that doesn’t make it feel like you’re just unsaddling yourself onto the reader? Sometimes people describe poetry as “just navel-gazing,” and so I was interested in the question: how do you participate in this creative act without drawing too much attention to oneself, without veering too much into the abstract?

That is perhaps an animating question of the collection and of now, when I write: Why do I write? Who do I write for? Even if it is just for myself, there’s a hope that there’s something in there that will resonate with someone, or lead them to reflect on something on their own. One of the things I hope the collection will inspire people to do is look back on their own family stories. People say they’re boring, but if they go back 3-4 generations, there’s always some fascinating stuff there.

So many Singaporeans can trace their ancestry to some form of regional migration, both within and beyond the Malay Archipelago, and so many people who trace their origins to East and Southeast Asia can identify some factor that induced their ancestors’ movements. Asia in the 20th century was riven by war, colonial politics, ideological ferment, and massive material transformations. 

I see that in my paternal family’s story, especially with the enshrinement of Ketuanan Melayu, or “Malay overlordship”, in the newly-constituted Malaysia, which relegated those who were not Malay to a position of structural marginalization. It was that in part as well as their disgust with state corruption that shaped my family’s decision to leave. I see that in my maternal family, especially given that my grandfather’s decision to move to Hong Kong from Seoul was informed in part by the general atmosphere of suspicion that had arisen over whether individuals were communists or sympathetic to Kim Il-sung’s government. It was almost inevitable that the early part of the manuscript would deal not only with these questions of postcolonial politics, but the legacies of British and Japanese colonialism that shaped them. 

JT: I’m curious about your thoughts and feelings about SingLit and the Singaporean publishing scene. Has it been easy for someone with your background to situate yourself in the ecosystem?  

JC: In many ways, I am indebted to SingPoWriMo, as it is the community in which I started writing more intentionally. My having started writing poetry in Singapore shaped my desire to submit my first collection primarily to Singaporean presses. I wanted to be very intentional that my preference was for it to be read in Singapore. That felt truer to the vision of the work and the version of self. I’m a Singaporean now, although there is a contest of citizenship in my head, since I used to be an American citizen. I grew up in Singapore, thinking of myself as an Asian American in Singapore, until I had to make a very tangible and concrete decision as to which citizenship I wanted to keep. Now I’m part of this polity, there’s this question: to what extent does my own story fit or cohere with this bigger rubric of Singapore?

“For a Medieval Literature exam, I was learning Middle English 
and how to translate it into contemporary English, 
and I kept wondering, ‘What were my ancestors doing in the 14th century?’”

Reena Kallat - Woven Chronicle 2 (2015), circuit board, speakers, electrical wires and fittings, 10 min Single Channel Audio, Installation view, Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite
Photography: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery
Image description: A closeup of the artwork which shows the details of the colorful wires designed to replicate barbed wire and the countries designed to look like metal fences. The fragmented circuit boards and black speakers can also be seen more clearly. 

JT: To think specifically about the movements at play in the manuscript, there is a canon of poets – British and Singaporean – writing about their time at Cambridge and Oxford. Do you see this as a kind of lineage? How do you see your own work interacting with that canon?

JC: I studied English at Cambridge, and my undergraduate education was very much a deep dive into English literature from a deeply Anglo-centric position. A lot of that engagement was with English literature written in Britain: Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, and so on. The way that English literature in the UK was taught also felt to me to be a nationalistic project, almost as if to say, “this is your heritage” to a British undergraduate. 

Coming in as someone who grew up in an Anglophone country, especially a former colony, I felt a curious disaffiliation from this sense of heritage being propagated in my classes. For a Medieval Literature exam, I was learning Middle English and how to translate it into contemporary English, and I kept wondering, “What were my ancestors doing in the 14th century?” They were still in China and Korea, probably, with no conception of Europe. I remember asking myself what was the point of me learning all this Middle English when I couldn’t even speak to my halmoni in Korean. 

To delve into the question of why the UK retains its gleam as an attractive place to study, is to reckon with the question of what maintains that prestige and allure – the violence, the material acquisition, the epistemicide – especially to those who are from, or whose parents are from, former British colonies.

JT: I see the poem “yellowface” as the book’s anchor poem: in some ways it grounds and connects your and your family’s narratives. The ending seems to me to be a perfect encapsulation of the book’s central question: “it is one thing to be asked where you’re from in Britain and another, to be asked the same question, within weeks, in the place that will always, almost, feel like home.” In thinking about the multiplicity of your identities, where do you find the feeling of home? Is home a place?

JC: “yellowface” was written, in some ways, in response to the controversy surrounding e-payment advertisements in Singapore that featured the use of brownface, as well as the rap written and performed by Preeti and Subhas Nair in response to those ads. “yellowface” is a catalogue of moments of my upbringing in Singapore when I was made to feel foreign, whether in school, in the military, or as an intern. There’s also a stanza in the poem about meeting other Korean Singaporeans, who were both more Korean and more Singaporean than I was. The question in the last line, in particular, came after I had thought I had moved past the impasse where I felt like I was never going to belong in Singapore. It was a reminder that to people in Singapore, there will remain a part of me that seems foreign.

The question of home, for me, is always a fraught one. Sometimes people say that home is the place where they don’t have to explain themselves. My friend Tan Jing Min, a writer and poet, said this: home is where your interiority and external surroundings match. If I go by those definitions, the only setting in which I don’t have to explain myself is when I’m with my immediate family. If I go by that formulation, then home is just my home in Singapore, with my parents and siblings, who have all gone through this very particular life with me.

The adage I have for myself is that I’ve learned to be at ease with unease because I know I’m never going to fully fit in anywhere. Yet, I have all these connections to different parts of the world that in turn become points of connection with others who share similar affections for other places. That becomes a mode of being everywhere I go. 

The other thing I will say about how I’ve resolved the question of home is that I’ve found it in the kind of ontological grounding that is religious: I find a kind of security of the self in my faith and in the theological vision of the person I hold to as a Christian. That has been the anchoring force that has brought together the elements in my life that would otherwise feel disparate and fragmentary.

“To delve into the question of why the UK retains its gleam 
as an attractive place to study, is to reckon with the question 
of what maintains that prestige and allure – the violence, 
the material acquisition, the epistemicide – especially to those who are from,
or whose parents are from, former British colonies.”

JT: A few of these poems put themselves in conversation with other poets: Derek Walcott, Ross Gay, Celina Su, Wendell Berry. You begin the book with an epigraph by your great-grandfather. Do you see yourself as belonging to a particular poetic lineage?

JC: In terms of poets who’ve been particularly influential for me early on, one of them was Langston Hughes – his warmth, musicality, and cadence, how he brings the vernacular to the forefront and makes it the substance of the poem. Reading him helped to give me a sense of how the voice can operate in poetry as well as the confidence to think that what mattered was finding a voice capable of representing myself and my family. R.S. Thomas, too, has been influential – he was a Welsh poet, priest, and person of faith, but so much of what animates his work is the question of doubt, and an absent divinity – the feeling of alienation from the divine and the transcendent. For a long time, it was Hughes and Thomas whose voices were in the back of my head when I wrote. 

In terms of contemporary writers who are still active, I think of Christian Wiman, who has a particular singularity to his style of poetry as he wrestles with doubt. I have also often thought back to  Li-Young Lee, who I see as religious in his orientation and who has similarly contended with an extraordinary family history. Lee’s Rose is important to me, particularly with respect to its question of “How do I make sense of what happened to my family before I write about what happened to me?” Other writers who I continued to look to include George Herbert, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I also see myself in the lineage of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Min Jin Lee, Joan Didion, and Marilynne Robinson. Robinson’s novel Gilead was incredibly formative to me. 

In terms of Singaporean writers, the first Singaporean poets who gripped me were Boey Kim Cheng and Arthur Yap. I was particularly struck by Boey Kim Cheng’s collection Clear Brightness, which provided a deep sense that we shared similar concerns and anxieties. I also came to deeply appreciate the depth of Yap’s attentiveness in his poems. I’ve been influenced by the work of Aaron Lee, especially his collection Coastlands. In recent years, he’s also become a friend and mentor to me. I’ve also been shaped by Tse Hao Guang’s Deeds of Light and David Wong Hsien Ming’s For The End Comes Reaching. I must also confess to a shock I felt when I first encountered the poems of Chandran Nair, who was most active as a poet in Singapore in the 1970s. I’d like to write about his work at some point. 

Reena Kallat - Woven Chronicle 3 (2015), circuit board, speakers, electrical wires and fittings, 10 min Single Channel Audio, Installation view, Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite
Photography: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery
Image description: An image of a man looking up at the art installation of a world map constructed out of blue, red, and yellow electrical wires, fragments of circuit boards, and black speakers. The electrical wires, draped across the wall, link some of the countries on the map. They also unravel into tangled balls on the floor just below the artwork. 

JT: What struck me this afternoon, talking to you, is how much of what you say is influenced by your academic studies. Your poems engage so much with your knowledge of national and colonial history – I am thinking about the year you just completed at Yale. What are your main impressions and biggest takeaways? How have your studies shaped your work?

JC: One of the dissertations I wrote as an undergraduate at Cambridge was an attempt at thinking about literary portrayals of migration within Asia. I wanted to argue against the preponderance of narratives in English about Asians who migrate to the UK or US, and I was interested in models of understanding migration within Asia.

I looked at writing by Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore – the laborer-poets Zakir Hossain Khokhan and Shromik Monir – and the schema of circular migration that has shaped many of their lives. It’s an idea advanced by Brenda Yeoh, a geographer at the National University of Singapore. When you come to the US, it’s a kind of linear migration: you arrive, and you stay, and you make a new life. Circular migration is predicated on the idea that you go to one place, work, and then you go home, a kind of back and forth movement. It’s the kind of precarity faced by foreign workers in Singapore, especially laborers, domestic workers, and construction workers. I looked at that in relation to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire. 

After having dipped my toes in the British canon, I wanted to do something that would help me understand my own philosophical, cultural, and literary lineages, on an inherited level. My studies at Yale gave me more confidence in the claims I’d been making in my writing about my family history and how I understand it, and the exposure I had in graduate school will give my writing more substance going forward when I return to similar questions pertaining to generational histories and migrations. I like to think that with a greater sense of regional context, my writing about Singapore will also begin to shift, hopefully in a way that is more attuned to the complexities that continue to shape it both as a physical place and as imagined by the many Singaporeans who have left it altogether. 

---

Janelle Tan was born in Singapore. Her poems appear in Poetry, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Split Lip, Muzzle, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

---

---

If you’ve enjoyed reading this article, please consider making a donation. Your donation goes towards paying our contributors and a modest stipend to our editors. Singapore Unbound is powered by volunteers, and we depend on individual supporters. To maintain our independence, we do not seek or accept direct funding from any government.