By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

March is Women’s History Month! But instead of putting a spotlight on women authors (who’re included in every column anyways), I thought it’d be fun to put the focus on women readers—i.e. to celebrate genres specifically targeting a female audience in the realms of romance and chick lit.

Here in Singapore, the biggest example of such a work is Kevin Kwan’s bestselling, blockbuster-inspiring and notoriously problematic Crazy Rich Asians. (Seriously, check out my hashtag #crazyrichasiansmistakes for all the factual errors Kwan makes while pretending to be an informed authority on his birth country.)

But what’s fascinating about this novel is that it isn’t just a love story: it’s a novel of manners, in the tradition of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, specifically written to portray a gilded sector of Asian society for a curious international readership. There’s a game of self-exoticisation at work, but also self-representation, selectively amplifying and dismissing national stereotypes for fun and profit.

All this month’s books are doing the same thing. They’re stories focussed on women and their intimate, passionate relationships, but they’re also meticulously crafted portraits of Asian societies—Malaysia, Singapore, post-war Hong Kong, nineties Thailand and the Philippines—with all our glitter and squalor, all our injustice and drama, all our avarice and heartbreak.

Not all their authors are women—hell, I’m not sure the works could all be called feminist. But they all walk this line between sensationalism and social commentary, between the personal and the political, between the vulgar and the literary, that’s fascinating as hell.

The Accidental Malay, by Karina Robles Bahrin
Epigram, 2022

This is the winner of the 2022 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, and I can see how it clinched the gold. It's got a heckuva premise—Jasmine Leong, Chinese-Malaysian CEO-to-be of a family ba kwa business, discovers that she's technically Malay Muslim—that's both goofy and political, promising a romp through the world of local elites. Yet when you crack open the pages, the prose brims with lyrical intensity. It's a work that straddles both pop and literary: a romance that's also a searing insight into the quandary of contemporary Malaysians.

Surprisingly, the big crisis only erupts in the middle of the novel. Before that, Jasmine's busy trying to consolidate power in her company and navigating her turbulent, culturally complicated love life—and as a fortysomething myself, I do appreciate how at the age of 41 she's still worthy of a love triangle. Will she choose her university boyfriend-cum-extramarital lover, Iskandar, a member of the Malay elite who drinks alcohol and compares the muezzin's voice to Thelonious Monk, but who can't refuse his dad who wants him to enter politics? Or Kuan Yew, a homeboy from Ipoh who rose from working-class origins, hence the embarrassing name, to become a big-time investor? Both men give her deliciously fulfilling sex and proposals of marriage... and (SPOILERS follow) actual emotional and financial support, once the shit hits the fan.

But here's the heartbreaking thing. After the crisis erupts, the Chinese guy ends up as the only option. Though there are cool, secularised Malay characters—like Iska, like her old family friend Tunku Mahmud—they're only faces within a rage mob of racial-religious chauvinists who insist on claiming Jasmine as one of their own. Even her own birth mother, when she meets her, gives her no closure, no compromise. And while the story doesn't quite break with the romance novel convention of happy endings, Jasmine has to make sacrifices, even leaving behind Malaysia, the country she loves so much in spite of its chaos and refusal to love her back.

Her connection with Iska allows her to rationalise why this is happening, because of the insecurity of Malay cultural pride and the politicisation thereof. But the author refuses us the interracial reconciliation that a National Day Parade-indoctrinated Singaporean reader might long for. Not in today's Malaysia. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

As a half-Pinay, quarter-Malay, quarter-Chinese Malaysian, Karina's in a pretty unique position to be able to deliver commentary on her country's racial policies while avoiding accusations of racism herself. I'd wondered if she should've sold this to a more international press—then realised that most Westerners don't know or care a fig about Malaysia's ethnic policies. As she was a first-time novelist, Epigram's prize might have offered her the best way to get her ideas and voice out there.

Mind you, there's part of me that feels like she didn't quite stick the ending—maybe cos I'm still Team Iska? But that's what sequels are for, no? I think this might deserve one.

The Fraud Squad, by Kyla Zhao
Berkley, 2023

Ah, here's yet another Singaporean romance novel glamorising the world of Asia's billionaire elites, scurrying in the footsteps of Crazy Rich Asians!...but I'm not here to tear it apart, I promise you.

You see, this story's really quite grounded in a contemporary Singaporean lived experience. The protagonist, Samantha Song, comes from a solidly working-class background, frantically shuttling between her socialite parties in borrowed Ferragamos and her HDB home life with a prematurely aged manicurist mother struggling to pay off her dead dad's debts... all with the very familiar aim of actually getting the job of her dreams, despite her lack of connections. So she's faking it till she makes it... but will she lose too much of herself in the process?

Other cool things. The cast's got at least token diversity: e.g. Raina, Sam's Indian lawyer best friend; Daisy, an Indonesian Chinese socialite who gets shade for being too dark-skinned; even Munah, a hijabi Malay intern at Elle (though she doesn't turn out to be as important to the plot as I'd hoped). Even Sam's specifically described as having naturally curly hair, pushing against stereotypical Chinese-girl-beauty templates. Actual brands and institutions are namedropped aplenty—Her World, Tatler, Singapore Repertory Theatre, Capella Hotel, Ku Dé Ta. And I've gotta admit, I did not foresee the big twist that's revealed at the gala dinner climax.

What's less awesome is that Zhao hasn't yet cultivated a very charismatic literary style: the first pages feel banal, quite unlike the high-energy camp of Kevin Kwan's prose... and I daresay this makes me a little more critical of the moments the characters display their sophistication, which turn out to be very shallow: referencing Dadaism or Greco-Roman myth. And I don't understand why the sexy loaded love interest, Timothy Kingston, is half-white on his dad's side—this doesn't just retread colonial clichés of Western male beauty and economic power; it also doesn't quite make sense re: how the family would be so entrenched in the local aristocracy.

And of course, the socialist in me is frustrated by how often the story reveals that the neoliberal system isn't working—producing out-of-touch Tesla-driving playboys whose dads are the Minister of Finance vs. families who have to hide from loan sharks, go broke paying for medical bills, get pay docked when their untreated carpal tunnel syndrome makes them spill varnish on tai-tai's handbags—and then avoids all discussions of serious reform. I know Zhao's a debut romance author, so it isn't her place to get all Bong Joon Ho about the genre. But the happy horny ending of a kopitiam kaya toast kiss still leaves you wondering: is it really a happy ending if you only find a place in the system, rather than doing anything to change it?

A Many-Splendoured Thing, by Han Suyin
Jonathan Cape, 1952

Crazy that this novel is out of print. First published in 1952, it became a 1955 Hollywood movie starring William Holden (and Jennifer Jones in yellowface!) with an Oscar-winning theme song, plus a 1967-73 soap opera… yet I had to buy a second-hand copy off Ebay.

On one hand, it’s first-hand documentation of unfolding history. Set in Hong Kong and Chongqing from 1949 to 50, it captures the shockwave of the rise of the People’s Republic of China, seen through the eyes of expelled American missionaries, British civil servants, Chinese refugees (rich and poor), middle-class Hong Kongers… and our main POV character, Han Suyin herself (it’s a pen name), a Eurasian doctor with ties and sympathies to both the Communists and the Western(ised) community, treating the innumerable tuberculosis patients in between scrimping for her adopted daughter and attending parties with the glitterati at night.

On the other hand, it’s a romance. No, the word is insufficient: this is an account of a love affair of universe-stopping passionate intensity between Han and the British journalist Mark Elliott. Both are spellbound by each other’s beauty, but not through the rose-tinged glasses of adolescence—she’s 31 and he’s 36 with a wife and kids back in Singapore—and though they have mind-blowing sex in a Macau hotel room and on the sands of Lantau, they’re also a meeting of two minds, engaging in deep intellectual conversations about Tang poets and 19th century French novels by the mortuary at moonlight or among their multi-ethnic friends on a restaurant boat at the Mid-Autumn Festival.
And you must understand: this is an autobiographical novel, following Han’s first work Destination Chungking, in which she recounted her World War Two experiences with her late Kuomintang general husband. In this work, written in the wake of Mark’s death in the Korean War (his real name was Ian Morrison, and he was Australian!), she’s literally the oft-reviled racialised other woman, the Oriental temptress, seizing the pen to write her own version of history, political and sexual, immortalising the man she knew and loved for just 1.5 years, against the wishes of the white community, especially his wife.

And she does so with eloquence (the prose approaches the purple but I cannot fault it) and with searing intelligence, locating the Communist Revolution within the context of decolonisation (she has whole chapters which are basically political essays!), and also great humanity (she doesn’t crow over the expulsion of the American missionaries; she shows them to be often self-aware in their contribution to the rise of Chinese intellectualism and Marxism, and also pitiful, for they love a China that will no longer have them).

So it’s both epic and intimate, subaltern and fearless, and so, so gorgeous. Anachronistic, even: it feels like she can only get away with this because she’s got this mid-century vintage glamour of verbose English peppered with quotations in French, this modernist lack of cynicism, this pre-sexual revolution awe at the power and momentousness of falling in love.

Yet so much of it flies in the face of our assumptions about the 40s and 50s—the very fact of her being a thriving bicultural WOC professional and intellectual; the community’s broad acceptance of this interracial, extramarital affair (the movie seems to have made up this story of her getting kicked out the hospital for it); the very existence of a straight white man in Hong Kong who happens to be sweet and cosmopolitan and so handsome it makes her physically sick—even his looks, slim and blond and hairless, reminding her girlfriends of her late Chinese husband, feels like it belongs to the contemporary era of the twink more than the broad-shouldered 50s. (Yes, she probably wrote him as being a better man than he was, the two-timing deadbeat. But it’s a love letter, reminiscent of The Story of O, which this work predates by two years!)

I’ve chatted to my dad about this book, and it turns out he read it ages ago. Lots of Singaporeans did, cos she and Pearl S. Buck were providing the closest thing they had to classy popular Anglophone local lit. Surprisingly, my dad criticises Han for only writing about privileged Chinese, which isn’t quite true: in this novel she occasionally inserts third-person sketches about folks like the runaway slave girl Oh-No and the sex worker Lily Wu; a precursor to the diversity of perspectives in her later novel And the Rain My Drink. Less appropriative, by today’s standards. Of course, their agendas are altogether different: Han’s intention is to tell her own story, before her nation’s.

And this might be one reason the book isn’t in circulation: it doesn’t fit into the canon of any national literature, except arguably Anglophone Hong Kong. A little too long to fit into a postcolonial lit syllabus, anyway. But I do think a Penguin Classics edition will emerge sometime soon; that universities will have courses and conferences on Han Suyin Studies, because she exemplifies so much of what interests us today: the tensions between rising China and the retreating West, of écriture féminine, of the cosmopolitan intellectual who’s both deeply romantic and unapologetically horny. Go read this, guys. You won’t regret it.

The Other City of Angels, by S. P. Somtow
Diplodocus Press, 2001

The premise of this book sounds ridiculously Orientalist. "In this exotic retelling of the fairy tale of Bluebeard, a New Age thirty-something from California is swept off her feet by an enigmatic Thai millionaire and soon finds herself in Bangkok's brave new world of shamans, shopping malls, and high society serial killers."

But what that pretty apt summary fails to convey is how utterly camp this work is. Judith Abramowitz, a quadruple-divorcee Jewish American Encino princess with a 12-year-old son and an Yiddish-spouting first-person narrative voice that's alternately ditzy and self-aware, is no blushing virgin bride—she gallivants, first through the highways of Los Angeles, then through the mansions of Sukhumvit and the seedy alleyways of Patpong (though she's still confined to a castle of sorts, it's vast and has many soi), both seduced by and terrified of her short, fat and handsome bridegroom Cricket (it's kinda nice to affirm that you don't have to be Henry Golding to be a sexy Crazy Rich Asian, but how much of this is a self-insert for Somtow, who seems just as dangerously eccentric?), plus his mother the Khunying, her friend Emily from Vassar, plus various psychics and nativised farangs (Bob Halliday from Somtow's SFF stories is here for no obvious reason)...

And it works. This was first published in The Nation in the 90s as a serialised novel, and I get that, with its page-turning chapter-by-chapter suspense and magazine-reader sensationalised silliness; with these heightened descriptions of a Bangkok of that era that doesn't quite exist anymore: sex workers who can pop ping-pong balls and razor blades out their vulvas, traffic jams so bad you need a portable toilet in your Mercedes.

And of course, this being Somtow, this goes into the realm of fantasy, with ghostly and godly encounters and kumanthongs and syncretised Ashkenazi-Theravada transcendental visions that overlap with a leitmotif of Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, cos classical music's another of the author-conductor-composer's manias, doncha know. Yup, he's shamelessly selling his culture, but don't so many of us, who aspire to the international literary stage? Plus he's doing it with more complexity and contradictions than any farang could.

Ah, but CONTENT and SPOILER WARNINGS—sadly the dénouement comes with a big ole transphobic cliché, way more offensive than anything in Hogwarts Legacy... though even that's surprisingly waved away by the epilogue, being attributed to the machinations of the gods, who are themselves subject to karma. The 90s, man. So much liberation, so much cringe.

I Was the President's Mistress!!, by Miguel Syjuco
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2022

Oh yeah, this is hell of a ride. Written in the form of interview transcripts from a scandalous tell-all celebrity memoir, this novel centres on Vita Nova, a Filipina singer-actress-philanthropist-influencer who rises from her small-town origins to become the dead centre of a political maelstrom following her exposé of the dictatorial President Fernando V. Estregan's misdeeds. (He's inspired not just by Duterte, but also Marcos Sr. and Manny Pacquiao.)

What's extra-cool is that Vita's segments are interspersed with interviews with each of her twelve lovers and sexual partners, working back through her life from the President to the Press Secretary to an expat to the Leader of the Opposition, all the way down to her childhood sweetheart Loy Bonifacio, who just so happens to be facing the death sentence for an attempted assassination of said Prez. And the interviews take place amidst the brewing of the political storm, with impeachments and Mindanao terrorist attacks and snap elections and scandals happening week by week, so the story moves both backwards and forwards simultaneously, with a whole plethora of variegated voices representing the diversity of the Philippines today—Muslim, Chinoy, Indian, white Australian, Black American, former Communist, conspiracy theorist, ilustrado aristocrat and overseas foreign worker, bishop and society journalist, immigrant and emigrant, all complementing and contradicting Vita's account till you're left wondering, if, maybe she is the monster all along... and the twists don't stop till the very last sentence.

And everything's told in first person, full of the characters' distinctive idiolects of Philippine slang (CR, baduy) littered with Spanish or Arabic or malapropisms. and the POV interviewer (supposedly Syjuco himself) is inaudible in the recordings, so the tales are told unparagraphed, almost stream-of-consciousness sometimes, punctuated by silences, lighter clicks, cigarette smoke exhalations. So it really is an epic cantata of the nation, mourning the failure of its democracy, the cycles of revolution and oligarchic takeovers that keep the land so desperate for change, while also gyrating its hips to the sexy-sexy dance of its pop culture.

And there's so much to say about the role of gender in the book—it reminds me of YB Mangunwijaya's Durga / Umayi, also about a beautiful and unvirginal woman caught in the crosshairs of history, violated and prosperous, both victim and agent of corruption—because while it's both archetypal and patriarchal to have this parade of men circling this one charismatic woman, it's made clear there are plenty of other empowered women in this society: her inspiration the poet and politician Rita Rajah, her rock-climbing transgender BFF Jojie, influential wives and daughters and fellow film stars. Why aren't their voices in the book? Flipping back to the preface, "Syjuco" actually makes it clear that these are Vita's stipulations.

Meanwhile—and I'm afraid this is a bit of a SPOILER—"Syjuco" falls deeper under Vita's spell, so that by the end, this muffle on the microphone is the thirteenth of her lovers, by her side and extinguished in the same moment when a bomb explodes at the Plaza Miranda on the night of her final political rally. This last detail is, in a way, told from the very beginning, but it's only through the course of the book that you realise what a gaping loss this represents, what an intelligent and complex and sympathetic (but possibly Machiavellian) woman this social-media seductress is.

Plus, if we compare this to the end of the author's only other novel, Ilustrado, it's once again a bait-and-switch situation of the young male narrator being revealed to be ultimately voiceless, insignificant, practically a creation of the supposed subject of the book, doomed to annihilation. (This is set in the same universe as Ilustrado, by the way. Crispin Salvador, the Nick Joaquin pastiche who's the subject of that novel, actually provides a blurb!)

So yeah, this work is thoroughly recommended—though far less easy to read than I'd initially expected from its potboiler title. The ludic language of the characters trips you up, forces you to slow down and process everything they're saying. Settle down with this story; there's a whole archipelagic universe within its covers.

Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

#YISHREADS March 2023

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

About
Singapore Unbound

#YISHREADS March 2023

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

About Singapore Unbound

About
Singapore Unbound