By Kelly Sng

Abstract

Official state narratives that describe Singapore’s relationship with neoliberal globalisation are frequently couched in the language of pragmatism. Acknowledging its position as a small and open economy with few natural resources, Singapore envisions its active engagement with the global capital economy as an economic imperative, one that has strategically fostered tremendous economic growth since the city-state’s attainment of independence. Singapore’s globalisation-enabled economic transformation is often articulated in terms that are buoyant and optimistic. In contrast, Tan Hwee Hwee’s two novels, Foreign Bodies (1997) and Mammon Inc. (2001), assert a more complex relationship with the city-state’s dependence on neoliberal globalisation. In this essay, I argue, through a comparative analysis of Foreign Bodies and Mammon Inc., that Tan resists the sanguine view of globalisation that exists within Singapore’s national consciousness. Instead, Tan critiques the parochialism of the Singapore polity, satirises her culturally-hybrid expatriate characters, and makes references to the Christian concept of original sin to raise provocative questions about the limits of transnational capitalism and cultural fluidity in a modern, globalising world.

Introduction

A stalwart advocate of neoliberal globalisation, Singapore has always explicitly courted the foreign dollar. At the 1999 Commonwealth Business Forum, then-Prime Minister of Singapore, Goh Chok Tong, declared: “For Singapore, globalisation is not a choice. It is a necessity.” (“Making Globalisation Work”). Having adduced Singapore’s vulnerability as a small city-state bereft of natural resources, he adamantly underscored the importance of harnessing the “new markets, increased investments, and opportunities” immanent to a newly globalising world. He also postulated that it was the “wave of globalisation” that must be credited for the “[eradication of] poverty” and the material improvement in the “standard of living of [Singapore’s] people” (“Making Globalisation Work”). In other words, Singapore would simply be “too small to function economically” (Baildon and Sim 81).

Despite the numerous benefits that have accrued to Singapore’s felicitous exploitation of the affordances of the global capital economy, the experience of nascent globalisation produced feelings of consternation and anxiety in the Singapore polity. Within Singapore, social friction emerged when the confluence of cultures wrought by globalisation precipitated fears of Westernization (Chua 988). Moreover, the increasingly mobile cosmopolitan subject was met with general ambivalence and viewed as a profoundly divisive and disloyal figure. While then-Prime Minister Goh had averred in his 1999 National Day Rally speech that “cosmopolitans,” who “were comfortable anywhere in the world,” were indispensable to Singapore (“National Day Rally Speech”), he later provocatively declared in 2002 that mobile Singaporeans were “quitters” who deliberately “[left] the tight geographical, social and political confines” of Singapore for “greener pastures overseas” (K. Tan 86). It is thus likely that the cosmopolitan Singaporean existed, within the national consciousness of Singapore, as a vexed figure in the early years of the city-state’s embrace of economic globalisation.

Tan Hwee Hwee’s two novels, Foreign Bodies (1997) and Mammon Inc. (2001), arguably reflect the mood of ambivalence that characterized the zeitgeist of Singapore at the turn of the millennium. Wrestling with themes of cultural dislocation, alienation, and immutable prejudice, Tan’s oeuvre elucidates the plight of cosmopolitan characters who find themselves ironically displaced in a culturally fluid and borderless ‘global village’. I argue that Tan’s novels often frustrate the triumphalism imputed to state-sanctioned discourse on neoliberal globalisation. Their facetiously blithe, tongue-in-cheek style of writing notwithstanding, Tan’s oeuvre pessimistically casts a pall over the looming spectre of globalisation at the turn of the millennium.

Tan’s first novel, Foreign Bodies, carefully examines the response of the local community to the interloping Caucasian foreigner. The events of the novel are articulated by three narrators: Mei, a straitlaced Singaporean lawyer grappling with trauma; Andy, a manifestly unreliable young man from Britain with no clear ambitions in life; and Eugene, Mei’s well-travelled and cosmopolitan childhood friend who moved abroad a young age. The novel chronicles the debacle that Andy finds himself in when he is arrested as the purported head of an illegal gambling syndicate. When it becomes apparent that Andy was been framed, Eugene beseeches Mei to investigate Loong, an intelligent but morally reprobate government-scholarship holder. However, Mei stumbles upon the complex truth. Eugene had fabricated evidence in a bid to incriminate Loong, but inadvertently implicated Andy as the unwitting victim of his scheme. Eugene persuades Mei to refrain from publicising the truth: as a result, the novel withholds justice from Andy, who is made to languish in a prison cell.

Tan’s second novel, Mammon Inc., concentrates on the figure of a Singaporean abroad. Witty, sardonic, and loosely farcical, the novel revolves around Chiah Deng’s experience of being recruited by the multinational conglomerate, Mammon Inc. Chiah Deng, a Singaporean attending Oxford University, has been asked to interview for the role of an Adapter. The Adapter enables Mammon Inc.’s wealthy clientele to “go anywhere in the world” (64) by teaching them to assimilate into a diverse range of cultures. The logical corollary would thus be for Chiah Deng to prove her mettle with three tests: first, she must convince the patrons of Generation Vexed, the multicultural but excessively materialistic seat of fashion in New York City, that she belongs there; next, she must help her bumbling Singaporean sister to fit in with snobbish and sophisticated undergraduates at Oxford; finally, she must render her British friend, Steve, socially acceptable to a group of critical ‘Aunties’ and ‘Uncles’ on the first day of the Lunar New Year. As the novel progresses, Chiah Deng wrestles constantly with the breach between East and West, the conflict between personal fulfilment and her obligation to her family, and the struggle to carve out a sense of belonging as a liminal figure in a rootless, globalising world.

Scholars have demonstrated a tendency to interpret Tan’s overt interest in globalisation and the tensions it engenders in the context of her personal history. Having completed her secondary education at Raffles Girls’ School in Singapore, Tan moved to the Netherlands with her family before pursuing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of East Anglia, a Master’s of English Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at New York University. The eclecticism of her schooling years, coupled with the fact that Tan has lived abroad for most of her youth, has been the impetus for critics like Robbie Goh to declare Tan the putative “poster girl for the ‘global’ generation of writers” (R. Goh 240). Nevertheless, I argue that it is equally important to locate Tan’s oeuvre within the historical context of Singapore in the 1990s, which crucially illuminates the impact of globalisation on Singapore’s polity at the turn of the millennium, to enable us to grasp the socio-cultural contexts that Tan’s novels sensitively respond to and critique.

Globalisation and its Discontents: Implications for Singapore

Globalisation is not a novel phenomenon. Arjun Appadurai writes that scholars have “long been aware that the world has been a congeries of large-scale interactions for many centuries” (Appadurai 584). This is especially apparent in Singapore, where cultural and economic transactions between diverse nations have always existed. Chua Beng Huat writes that Singapore’s national history is “inextricably tied to global capitalism” (985). The city-state was “never a Third World location, culturally and economically isolated on the periphery of capitalism,” but a port city “essential to international trade between Europe and Asia” (ibid). Additionally, the legend of the Indonesian prince Sang Nila Utama and his discovery of the island of Singapore, which constitutes one of Singapore’s most significant origin myths, may be considered a translocal tale that charts the movement of people and culture across different spheres of influence.

Traditionally, Singapore has exploited the affordances of a globalised world to further its trajectory of economic growth. Kenneth Tan describes the economic strategy of the Singapore government as that which is, essentially, “outward-looking” (70). Since its independence, the state has chosen to “accelerate the course of economic and industrial development” by enticing foreign investors and multinational corporations (MNCs) with a series of “generous tax incentives,” “industrial infrastructure,” and “political stability” (ibid). Consequently, within a mere three decades, the city-state of Singapore had achieved tremendous economic growth.

Nevertheless, Singapore’s economic ascendancy, which was accompanied by a concomitant rise in the affluence of the populace, resulted in the emergence of a “culture of consumerism,” for Singapore had progressed from a state of “material deprivation” to that of “material excess” (Chua 981). The materialism and decadence that was perceived to be rampant in Singapore produced a “general discomfort with the rise of consumerism” and led many in Singapore, especially the older and more conservative generation, to inveigh against the materialism of society (991). Moreover, Singapore was increasingly alarmed by the ostensibly execrable influence of Westernisation. The youth in Singapore were fervently consuming an extensive array of “American-produced consumer goods and entertainment” (987), which was received as a cause for concern. The American media was met with wary suspicion in Singapore as a proponent of the “moral ‘laxity’ of liberalism,” where “individual rights and self-interests rule with disastrous consequences” (985). This was because the “high divorce rates”, “strong legal rights”, “protection for criminals over the rights of crime victims,” and “promiscuity in sex and drugs” which commonly featured in American television and film were frequently misinterpreted as an accurate depiction of the lives that Americans led (988). As a result, the clamouring of Singapore’s youth for American pop culture produced anxieties over “liberal individualism,” eliciting fears that it made “inroads into the cultural sphere of the local population” that not only led people “away from ‘traditional’ values,” but also compromised “local social cohesion” (Chua 988).

Hence, to countermand the purportedly inimical impact of Westernisation, the state introduced the ‘Shared Values White Paper’ in 1991 (Baildon and Sim 84). Informed largely by the “Confucian values of hard work and harmony,” the state conceived the ‘Shared Values White Paper’ as a counterpoint to the supposedly depraved and corrupting influence of Western decadence.

Tan’s novels are especially satirical in their ridicule of Singapore’s anxieties over materialism and perceived Westernisation. Chiah Deng ironises her family’s unbridled enthusiasm over her return with an Oxford degree, which they believe will secure a bright and prosperous future, by comparing it to the “fanatical anticipation that crazies in Jerusalem reserve for the second coming of Christ (Mammon Inc. 24). Farcically recasting herself as a Messianic figure “descending through the clouds on a silver jet, with a pocket full of platinum cards that [her family] could charge to their hearts’ content” (24), Chiah Deng pokes fun at the shallow avarice of the quotidian Singaporean and dismisses their acquisitive and mercenary ways. Additionally, Tan alludes to fears of Westernisation when Loong disingenuously blames his role in the murder of his friend, Charlie, based on the argument that he was “ripped from the shelter of East Asian values” and “thrown into a decadent Western society” (Foreign Bodies 117, my emphasis). The sense of excess conveyed by the hyperbolic underpinnings of “ripped” and “thrown” not only intensifies the comedy of the scene, but gestures at once to the clear insincerity in which Loong’s declaration is couched. Yet, in a mind-boggling turn of events, Tan writes that Loong’s parents “swallowed Loong’s myth completely” (117), satirising the ludicrous ease with which Singaporean society embraced its apocryphal view of Westernisation as a depraved, corrupting influence.

At the same time, Tan remains equally wry in her mockery of the shared values intended to curtail the proliferation of materialism and Westernisation. In both novels, Tan frequently explores the Confucian expectation of filial piety through the graphic imagery and baffling stories captured by the exhibit of the ten courts of hell displayed at the Haw Par Villa Hell’s Museum in Singapore. In Mammon Inc., Chiah Deng facetiously recalls how a woman “suckled her toothless mother-in-law” and “left her own baby to starve,” which culminated in her being “extolled as a paragon of virtue” (37). In Foreign Bodies, Mei is subject to lurid tales of an exploding water torture, where unfilial children are “pump[ed] full of water” and have their “heart, kidney and intestines sprayed across the walls of Hell” (19). Amusingly, Mei further describes an anecdote she heard from her grandfather on how to reduce one’s time in hell, where a boy “runs to the graveyard and hugs the grave [of his mother]” in a thunderstorm and cries “Don’t be fearful, Mother, I’m here to protect you” (20). Tan’s humorous but disconcerting portrait of filial piety frames the Confucian shared values as absurd, refracting it through the lens of derision and contempt. Sensitive to the zeitgeist of the 1990s, Tan’s novels underscore the anxieties that emerged in Singapore’s early embrace of globalisation, but also illuminate the inadequacies of the nation’s recursion to Asian values.

Reading Tan’s Oeuvre: Foreign Bodies and Mammon Inc.

An exploration of scholarly criticism on Mammon Inc. and Foreign Bodies reveals an emerging trend in research on Tan’s oeuvre. Scholars have shifted away from an exegesis of the implications of a modern, globalising world, insofar as it is presented in Tan’s novels (R. Goh 2008; Wee 2008), to focus on how the novel instrumentalises its cast of culturally-hybrid and cosmopolitan characters to comment on issues that are germane to the national context of Singapore. A survey of existing literature on Tan’s oeuvre also illuminates a more basic gap: few have engaged in the explicit comparison of Foreign Bodies and Mammon Inc. Most scholars (Wee 2008; Tay 2011; Naruse 2016) have concentrated on the analysis of Mammon Inc., which was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize in 2004 and is, arguably, more eminent than Foreign Bodies.

Nevertheless, I argue that a sustained comparison of both novels elucidates important similarities and differences between the two texts. Foreign Bodies concentrates exclusively on Singapore’s response to the White foreigner in its midst and is careful to unearth the wary suspicion with which Singapore views the Caucasian Other; in contrast, Mammon Inc., which deliberately recasts the Singaporean as the jet-setting global nomad, vexes and satirizes triumphalist narratives associated with globalisation and cosmopolitanism. This has been accomplished through Tan’s harnessing of two divergent styles of writing. Foreign Bodies, which attentively employs verisimilitude in its portrayal of the social realities of life in Singapore at the turn of the century, locates itself within a tradition of early Singapore writing that privileged social realism. However, Mammon Inc., which imagines a completely fictive, almost fantastical conglomerate firm, is distinctive because it is untethered to an immediately recognisable form of reality. Instead, the text introduces a loosely speculative, even dystopic dimension that unsettles the celebratory discourses of globalisation.

Despite their differences, it is crucial to recognise that the two texts demonstrate a profound ambivalence towards the emergent phenomenon of globalisation. Being especially circumspect and pessimistic in their portrayal of the consequences of an increasingly borderless world, the two texts are attentive to the prejudice that can be directed towards culturally diverse Others (whether Caucasian or Asian, respectively, in the two texts) and suggest that it is the inevitable, though ironic, outcome of living in a deterritorialised global village.

Reading Foreign Bodies: The (White) Stranger in the Village

Tan’s first novel demonstrates an uncanny sensitivity to emergent anxieties over the impact of globalisation on the Singapore polity. At once incisive and sardonic, her prose elucidates the cautious mistrust with which Singapore apprehends the figure of the Caucasian foreigner, delivering a subtle but nonetheless excoriating critique of the parochialism of the city-state.

Freighted with double meaning, the title of the novel explicitly recasts the white foreigner as an interloping, inimical influence that metaphorically infects, or vitiates, the body politic. By imbricating the stranger in the village – or the eponymous foreign body – with a virulent disease-causing pathogen, Tan felicitously harnesses wordplay to embed within her chosen title a tongue-in-cheek reference to the anxiety and hostility that the inhabitants of Singapore direct towards the foreigner in their midst. Foreign Bodies further exploits the slippage between a foreigner and a pathogen when the novel reframes the miniscule fish bone, which culminated in the death of Mei’s grandfather, as an overarching metaphor for the state’s view of, and relationship to, the figure of the Caucasian stranger. Just as the pathogenic fish bone swallowed by Mei’s grandfather “stuck in his oesophagus,” “pierced [it],” “cut into his heart,” and eventually “killed him” (Foreign Bodies 15), so Andy’s presence in Singapore is received with suspicion and animosity by the state and its citizens as a threat to the welfare of the polity. Andy wrestles constantly with the tension between his personal innocence, and the state’s insistence on framing him as the culpable “head of a multi-million betting empire”. As the disbelieving young man avers, he does not know whether to be “flattered or outraged” that his woefully hapless and unreliable self has been deemed capable of running such an organisation. In fact, Andy is ludicrously caricaturised as an “octopus” with grasping “tentacles all over the place, in Asia”, which imputes a sense of farce and absurdity to Andy’s arrest (Mammon Inc., 3).

Crucially, Andy’s predicament in Mammon Inc. is resolved in an unsatisfying manner. Andy is incarcerated on particularly flimsy circumstantial evidence and is made to suffer a “deterrent sentence” (266) on the unconvincing and clearly discriminatory basis that Andy is a foreigner, and foreigners were purported to be disproportionately responsible for misdemeanours in Singapore. As the prosecutor argues:

In the past year, seventy per cent of the murders in Singapore were committed by foreigners.

Foreigners caused the crime rate to increase in Singapore for the first time in seven years.

There were 3119 foreigners arrested in the first half of this year compared with 2492 for the same period last year. (267)

Tan utilises the prosecutor’s comments to satirise the mistrustfulness with which Singaporeans frequently viewed the Caucasian foreigner in the 1990s, insofar as the White Other remained prominent in Singapore’s national consciousness as a promulgator of Western decadence and a disruptive perpetrator of crime in the 1990s. This may be interpreted as a byproduct of the specific historical moment in which the text was published. In 1994, the flogging of Michael Fay, who committed teenage vandalism and was duly punished under Singapore law, attracted extensive local and international media coverage that was deeply polarised. While the international media protested the sentence and vilified Singapore for its draconian and excessively severe punitive measures, many in Singapore felt that the punishment meted out was justified. Nevertheless, the highly publicised incident, which attracted much attention at a time when globalisation was still a nascent phenomenon, may have embedded within the consciousness of Singaporeans a profound suspicion towards the figure of the White foreigner. In Tan’s first novel, the prosecutor’s insistence on the amoral nature of the Caucasian Other serves as a metaphorical rehashing of the sense of duality encapsulated by the title: the foreign body within the nation is conceived of as little more than as a pathogenic force that is perceived to compromise the integrity and stability of the body politic. Despite the Singapore state’s official embrace of neoliberal globalisation at the turn of the century, which was demonstrated in its explicit courting of foreign capital and foreign talent, the startling incarceration of Andy in the novel reveals Tan’s view that Singapore is still firmly in thrall to an inclination towards cultural insularity and narrow-mindedness.

The Problem of Cultural Hybridity

Interestingly, Tan also frequently problematises her cast of culturally syncretic expatriate characters. In Foreign Bodies, the surprising characterisation of Eugene and Loong as morally suspect and unscrupulous seems to trouble the idea of rootlessness in a borderless world. Both Eugene and Loong embody the figure of the mobile cosmopolitan in a multicultural, globalising world. Mei describes Eugene as “one of those people with those intricate, exotic backgrounds that most people like me would kill for” (2). Likewise, Andy is stunned by the ease with which Eugene shuffles between English, Singlish, Hokkien, and Dutch in a single conversation: “How am I? Can do, lah. Classes haven’t started yet so I’m very eng, just sit in my room and shake leg and eat waffelstroop… Ja, lekker.” (88, my emphasis). However, as Robbie Goh argues, the novel’s exploration of Eugene’s morally complex response to Andy’s arrest brings the “discontents of cultural hybridity” (253) to the fore. Having been traumatised by Loong’s deliberate murder of his friend, Eugene contrives a morally ambiguous plan to put him behind bars: he plants incriminating evidence in Andy’s house in a bid to frame Loong for being the mastermind of the illegal betting house. To accomplish this, Eugene allows Andy to fall victim to the xenophobic prejudice of the court. At the end of the narrative, Eugene finds himself suspended in a kind of selfish, remorseless abeyance, betraying a wretched cynicism that renders him unsympathetic:

I did feel guilty. But not guilty enough to go back to Singapore and spend three years in jail. I liked Andy, but not that much. I didn’t like anybody that much. But then, who does? (168)

Similarly, Loong is portrayed as a cunning and manipulative savant who is distinctively amoral. Eugene suspects that Loong maliciously deceived Charlie, another Singaporean expatriate living in Holland. into drinking “[o]range juice and methylated spirits” (116), which eventually caused Charlie’s death. After all, he was “doing A level chemistry” –– “[o]f course Loong knew that methylated spirits could kill” (117). The startling ruthlessness of Loong and, to a lesser extent, Eugene seems to problematise the cosmopolitan, globe-trotting figure, pessimistically ascribing a sense of fallenness and depravity to the culturally fluid, globalised world they inhabit.

In Mammon Inc., Tan satirises cultural hybridity and foregrounds its untenability through her presentation of Tock Seng Edwards, the progeny of an “American-German” father and a “French-Irish” mother who was born and raised on Singapore soil. Tock Seng Edwards’ name, with its confluence of Western and Asian influences, underscores the eclecticism that underpins his ethnic identity. Nevertheless, the unusual moniker that Tock Seng’s family has bestowed on him is incredibly comic. Having watched their child suffer relentless harassment over his name, Tock Seng’s parents “decided to change his name to a Chinese one, to help him fit in” and better assimilate into Singapore society (41). This proves to be self-defeating: “[t]he kids made fun of his Chinese name even more” because “Tock Seng looked really white” (42). In fact, the wry humour which Tock Seng’s name invites seems to crucially undermine Tock Seng and deride the sense of globality that he embodies. As Steve exclaims: “What kind of weird name is Tock Seng Edwards?” (41, my emphasis). Mammon Inc. appears to trouble the figure of the expatriate to draw attention to the displacement of individuals who occupy culturally liminal spaces. Tock Seng bristles with anger and frustration over the prospect of “[being] treated like an ang mo gwei,” or a Caucasian foreigner, despite having lived in Singapore all his life. As Tock Seng puts it, society insists on disregarding “how Singaporean I might be in my soul” (49). Through her intricate portrait of Tock Seng, Tan seems to suggest that the culturally-hybrid subject continues to suffer the crucible of cultural alienation, even in a borderless world of shifting allegiances.

Exploring Mammon Inc.: The Culturally Dislocated Subject in a Globalised World

Mammon Inc. extends Foreign Bodies’ portrayal of prejudice against the white stranger in the village by framing it not as one of many small-minded foibles of the inhabitants of Singapore, but as the inevitable response of every community to the alterity of the foreigner. The University of Oxford, as it exists in the literary imagination of Tan, crucially functions as an exclusive site that reinforces a gamut of hierarchized dualisms, namely the social fissures between the elitist and the uninformed, as well as the cultural divide between the British and the ethnic Other. It is amusing that Chiah Deng states that she is unable to assimilate into Oxford because “I’m always conscious that I clash with the Oxbridge décor” (Mammon Inc. 9). As she hyperbolically declares, “[w]henever I enter those pale English monuments, I radiate a bright yellow Chinkness” and “stand out in rooms filled with a blizzard of white people, and when I go out into the winter air, the snowstorm continues to surround me” (9). Chiah Deng’s anecdote wryly exaggerates and satirises her marginalisation as an ethnically-Chinese student. Within the “ethnoscape” of Oxford, a term coined by Apparadurai (589), the Asian foreigner confronts only the harshness and severity of the aptly chosen “snowstorm” and “blizzard” (Mammon Inc. 59), which function as metaphors for her discomforting experience of xenophobia.

Having recognised that racism is immutable and assimilation impossible when Chiah Deng’s sister, Chiah Chen, tries to assimilate into Oxford society, she liberally exploits her alterity to infiltrate a snobbish British clique and weasel her way into their good graces. With clever ingenuity, her sister argues that “you know more about Singapore than them,” and “[i]f you tell them all the interesting things about you and Singapore, then they will become interested in you” (194). Nevertheless, Chiah Chen’s answer to racism remains problematic because it grounds itself on self-Orientalising behaviour. This explicitly recalls Graham Huggan’s asseveration of the postcolonial exotic, in which the culturally-diverse individual makes recourse to “[v]arious exoticist maneuvers,” such as the “construction of the representative foreign writer” and the “appeal to local color,” in order to “search for, or [assert], an ‘authenticity’ not normally ascribed to one’s own culture” (26). Through the self-exoticising behaviour of the postcolonial subject, “‘Other’ cultures are made available for consumption” and “wrapped in the exotic aura of the cultural commodity fetish” (27). In her exaggerated performance of national identity, Chiah Chen arguably exoticises herself: she animatedly retells national myths in an exaggerated and patently inauthentic manner, “wave[s] the plastic Merlion” souvenirs she had brought from Singapore, and prepares rice dumplings for the Oxford students. The satirical implications of this episodic fragment seem to suggest that, for the subjects of discrimination to thrive in an Anglocentric global economy, they must strategically uphold the Orientalist images that have been instrumentalised by the West to further the oppression of the subaltern.

The “Apple in Eve’s Eye”: The Role of Christianity in Tan’s Oeuvre

At the end of the novel, Chiah Deng belatedly realises that the Gen Vexers, the “smart and hip international set” (Mammon Inc. 274) unified by their excessive materialism and affluence, is the “only tribe [she’s] met that [she’s] loved and that loved [her] back” (274). Chiah Deng’s embrace of the Gen Vexers suggests the fetishisation of “commodified, globalized culture” (Wee 201) and, perhaps, supports Wee’s view that only “transnational capitalism has room for the transcultural person” (203). Nevertheless, I argue that Tan felicitously harnesses Christian references to original sin to complexify the novel’s ostensible celebration of a “commodified, globalized culture” (Wee 201). The narrative explicitly identifies Chiah Deng with Eve in an ominous premonition of the biblical Fall. Alluding to the fall of man in the book of Genesis, Chiah Deng observes that “I could see his plans for me, to be a mother of a generation of tainted children” and the “spreader of original sin” (Mammon Inc. 277, my emphasis). Additionally, Tan weaves wordplay into the final lines of the novel to adroitly conflate the “Big Apple” –– New York, on which Mammon Inc. is sited –– with “[t]he apple in Eve’s eye” (278), offering a pointed indictment of capitalism as a corrupting, even iniquitous influence. The novel thus seems to undermine the capacity of global capitalism to mediate cosmopolitanism and transnationalism.

Instead, the two novels seem to proffer Christianity as an alternative form of globalisation that ameliorates the ills of transnational capitalism. In Foreign Bodies, Mei describes her Uncle Cheong, a Christian missionary who “spent his life travelling around the world” and “[did] missionary work for Operation Mobilisation, or TEFLing, teaching English in Third World cesspits,” as an “angel roaming the universe, going where good needed to be done” (21). In Mammon Inc., Professor Ad-Oy, who specialises in Christian mysticism, is the only successful embodiment of cultural hybridity in the novel. Intriguingly, Professor Ad-Oy “[sits] beneath an African crucifix” made by the “Balongo people of Zaire,” with “Christ hanging on a bronze cross,” with “monkeys” humorously “perched on each outstretched arm” (21). Furthermore, Professor Ad-Oy’s “special blend” of tea involves an eclectic mixture drawn from “Polynesian Kava Kava, Rooibos, Dong Quai and Black Cohosh from the native Americans” (22).

Nevertheless, Tan’s valorisation of Christianity as a salvific force seems abrupt and unpersuasive. Foreign Bodies does not offer a solution to the parochialism that Tan perceives in Singapore’s approach to the White foreigner. Instead, the novel concludes only with Andy’s experience of salvation and personal redemption, which is unsatisfying and problematic because it completely elides the novel’s exploration of the unimpeachable cultural divide between local and foreigner, as well as the prejudice directed towards the stranger in the village. The novel’s evasion of the problem of parochialism implies that society will persist with and languish in its complicity with xenophobic ideals. Mei looks forward to the Day of the Lord, where Christ, the salvific “pale white rider,” will “return to claw the guilty out of the black earth and lift them against the ruby sky” and that the land will “groan its vengeance like it did that day for Abdul, the murdered boy” (279). Besides the more explicit asseveration of the hope of vindication, Mei’s interweaving of the Book of Revelation and Singapore’s myth of Red Hill seems to suggest a yearning for a future marked by cultural syncretism, which collapses the local-foreign, East-West binary. However, it remains sobering that the utopic ideal of a globalising world, free from suspicion towards culturally-diverse Others, can only be deferred to the ever-distant Day of the Lord. Meanwhile, Mei has no choice but to remain in an “unsettled state,” resigned to the stasis of “‘waiting’ in a kind of abeyance” (R. Goh 252), with the promise of redemption always just out of reach.

To sum up, this essay has explored the ambivalence that characterises the literary representation of globalisation in two novels by Tan Hwee Hwee. Although Tan raises many interesting and insightful questions about globalisation, her novels refrain from providing any answers to the cultural tensions that have emerged in a newly globalising world. Perhaps the inconclusiveness of Tan’s oeuvre underscores the complex nature of the problems accruing to a modern, globalising world at the turn of the millennium. Ultimately, however, this essay has attempted to underscore Tan’s suggestion of the inadequacy of the global capital economy –– which the novel incessantly refracts through the prism of the biblical Fall –– in surmounting the intractable problem of discovering a place where the “in-between people of the world can belong” and “no longer be considered exotic” but be “truly international” (C. J. Wee 202, writer’s emphasis). Instead, Tan’s characters encounter friction and resistance as they endeavour to assimilate into different communities, illuminating the limits of cultural fluidity in an increasingly borderless world.

(4953 words)

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Kelly Sng recently graduated from the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU-NIE) with a double major in English Literature and Education. She now teaches at a local secondary school.