By Gan Chong Jing

Abstract

Kuo Pao Kun’s experimental theatre invokes an aesthetic of marginality through the construction of liminal spaces that emerge uneasily between reality and dreams, the literal and the allegorical, and blend across genres, ideologies, and languages. I will examine how Kuo’s use of marginality arises in response to material and cultural dislocations caused by the rapid modernisation of Singapore into a nation-state. In conjunction with Kuo’s own cultural theories, I will explore the progression of his theatre from The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole to Learning to Speak and finally Mama Looking for Her Cat. I will argue that across these three plays, Kuo creates a uniquely fluid form of allegorical theatre by infusing experimental, non-realist English language theatre with Chinese Xiangsheng performance techniques. By transgressing the boundaries of genre and language and creating an interlingual mode of performance, Kuo expresses a profound belief that intimacy, joy, and connection is achieved not in spite of but in embrace of difference, and articulates a way of being together that is located between cultures, languages, and people, located instead in the untranslatable spaces between one person and another.

Introduction: Dreaming in the Margins

The year is 1985. Before the audience gathered for Kuo’s The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole is a bare stage, dressed only with a single chair. A lone middle-aged man enters, sits, and begins to narrate to the audience:

“I don’t know why, but it keeps coming back to me. This dream.”

(1)

I have always been struck by the opening line of Kuo’s seminal one-man monologue. The entire play unfolds in the narrator’s retelling of his uncanny recurring dream about the day of his grandfather’s funeral, when it is discovered that the deceased patriarch’s grand and massive coffin cannot be laid into regulation-sized burial plots, thus inciting a farcical argument among the narrator, the undertaker, and the cemetery manager over how to complete its burial. By situating the play within this oneiric retelling, the story gains a bizarrely vivid, even comical scale, and hovers in a state of narrative indeterminacy peppered with intrusive asides and hazily forgotten half-gaps, charging the tattered, thin narratological surface of the story with symbolic potential.

The exaggerated sensorial world of the dream we enter into is bound by two opposite poles: on one end, a haunting, vast excess, and on the other, a small, carefully standardised uniformity. Imagery of excess fills the setting of the scene, beginning with the narrator’s description of the throng of mourners at the funeral: “There were so many people that I couldn’t even say for sure who was a relative and who wasn’t” (1). The death of the patriarch is ostensibly what undergirds the funereal scene, yet the integrity of his lineage seems to be collapsing beneath its own onerous weight as the mourners become undifferentiable from and to each other, signalling fraying familial connections. We learn, in fact, that the family is slowly estranging itself: the old house, massive enough to fit fifty people, is now emptied but for the narrator’s own family. The obsolete opulence of the house resonates with the grandfather’s massive, oversized coffin, which can be barely held up by sixteen coolies. The specific historical invocation of coolies (lit. arduous labour) binds the grandfather’s familial legacy of intergenerational wealth to its profiteering from settler colonisation and exploitation of the working classes. This extravagant burial ceremony of the deceased patriarch, an enactment of Confucian filial piety, is thus revealed to be both morally bankrupt and semantically hollow, tarred by colonial complicity and the untenability of ethnic tradition and familial genealogy in Singapore’s shifting diasporic landscape.

Conversely, the small grave hole that the coffin cannot fit into establishes an opposite and contradictory symbolic vocabulary of authoritarian uniformity and bureaucratic standardisation. When the narrator desperately tries to negotiate, first with the undertaker and then with the officer-in-charge (Kuo’s choice to name the character as an ‘officer’ further underscores the bureaucratic analogy) to expand the burial hole, both deliver an identically worded, eerily dogmatic response: “Row upon row of graves. As far as the eye can reach, do you see anyone grave sitting on two plots? There is no room for exceptions!” (5) Throughout their conversation, the officer-in-charge responds to the conundrum in a stiff scientific tone, “According to the data you have provided . . .” (6), but his postures of rational intelligence belie his inability to proffer anything but comically ludicrous suggestions. The officer’s final watchword, “One man, one grave, one plot . . . the standard size” (8), encapsulates this single-minded, authoritarian fixation on absolute regulation in the name of pragmatism. Yet, the illusion of perfect, machine-like control exerted by the cemetery’s state bureaucracy is shattered by the immovable, ominous weight of a single coffin.

The play’s ironic staging of a confrontation between Confucian ideology and modern state bureaucracy reveals both to be fundamentally empty. This emptiness is mirrored not only in the literally hollow images of the coffin and the hole, but also in the bare stage, a blank canvas upon which the narrator projects the insubstantial, ephemeral story. The play’s weighty spectacle is thus reduced to a hollow, ritualistic performance of language—a lone man, narrating a haunting, recurring dream. Much like the carefully worded rhetoric of the cemetery manager, or the grand facade of the coffin, it is through rituals and signs that such ideologies are constructed, and in revealing their contingency, the play strips them of their potency. In Coffin’s staging of this immaterial dreamscape, nothing is solid nor fixed, and meaning becomes fluid and malleable. As the monologue concludes with the narrator in a state of unsettled ambivalence, Kuo forces the audience to dwell in the metaphorical space between the too-large coffin and the too-small hole, in between the two contesting, oppressing forces of tradition and modernity. In many ways, this reflected the experience of those living in Singapore amid rapid state-driven transformation and development, as its shifting material and social landscape seemed to also acquire a dream-like plasticity.

Throughout his life and artistic practice, Kuo Pao Kun inhabited this ambivalent space between the coffin and the hole. Prior to the explosive success of Coffin, Kuo was best known for his plays performed in the early 1970s: ensemble cast Chinese melodramas that dramatised how working-class families suffered at the hands of capitalist overseers. These plays ended with scenes of protests and rousing calls to action by which he urged working-class audiences to resist their subjugation. In March 1976, Kuo and his wife, dancer and fellow educator Goh Lay Kuan were arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act, accused of being part of an underground cell plotting violent Communist insurrection. Goh was released after delivering a scripted and televised confession, but Kuo remained imprisoned for another four years (Peterson 39). His citizenship was revoked before his release in 1980, and he would spend the next twelve years of his life stateless, unable to leave the country or exercise the political rights of citizenship (Quah 76).

In 1979, while Kuo was imprisoned, the government officiated English as a national first language and relegated ethnic languages to second languages that were homogeneously categorised and regulated within three ‘mother tongues’: Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. In particular, the use of non-Mandarin Chinese dialects was slowly and steadily reduced and all but eliminated. Chinese theatre in Singapore declined and English theatre rose as the dominant commercial genre. In Kuo’s essay Uprooted and Searching, he describes this cultural shift to be part of the “continuous uprooting of peoples” produced by modernisation and globalisation to feed capitalism’s developmental model (172).

Kuo would come to describe this condition of socio-cultural and historical dislocation as a nationalised emigrant consciousness: ‘The Orphan Complex, The Marginal Psyche’[1] (128). He argues that this state of being ‘culturally orphaned’ is defined by ‘permanently [inhabiting] a floating, searching spiritual landscape’ (And Love the Wind and Rain 112). Kuo suggests that the lack of a felt and affective connection to culture and history causes one’s self and sense of belonging to become unstable, conveyed through the metaphor of floating, being untethered to anything. Despite originating in a psychoanalytic lack, he suggests that this instability can be a generative tool: yearning for an origin produces a kind of ‘seeking,’ or an ‘anxious chasing of one’s self’* (112). This outward pursuit for selfhood, an endless searching and wandering, is itself able to catalyse further action and movement.

This libidinal desire energises the loose dream-like staging of Coffin and threads through other experimental non-realist plays that Kuo would embark on after his detention. I believe that these plays document Kuo’s attempts to a literary and theatrical aesthetic out of conditions of dislocation and liminality. He sought to express a state of marginality that he had experienced his whole life: throughout his emigrant upbringing, in his fervour as a revolutionary activist, in his incarceration, and in his reckoning with the forces of modernisation that alienated his society from the artistic and cultural traditions that he drew from. Writing of his life’s journey, Kuo describes how it was “at the margins of all these individually brilliant experiences that I found the most enlightening of spaces and moments”—spatial-temporal pockets in which one had to “invent vocabularies” to describe these “uncharted… unexperienced… unfathomed images at the margins” (Images at the Margins 8). In his work, marginality and displacement are transformed into the generative forces through which newness can emerge—new languages, and new articulations of identity and relation that refigure the traumatic dislocations through which the margins were first created.

In the rest of this essay, I attempt to articulate and describe this literary, political project, first through unpacking its relationship to the performance genre of Xiangsheng that inspired Kuo, then by reading Kuo’s development of his project from Coffin to Mama Looking for Her Cat, where he identifies the untranslatable and the interstitial, marginal spaces in language as a space in which intimacy and connection can be built. In this, I argue that Kuo finds a counter-idea to nationalism, in the notion of an identity not built on power, nor on jingoistic, exclusionary definitions of nationhood but rather on a shared condition of being displaced from oneself, of being haunted by a dream of a place wherein one does not quite belong.

A Profusion of Voices: Imitation, Misdirection, and Xiangsheng

Two years after the debut of Coffin, Kuo invited the Beijing Traditional Theatre Company to Singapore for a special performance, and in his introduction of the group, wrote of his deep inspiration from the genre:

Xiangsheng is a linguistic art form, and is fused together with Chinese theatre like flesh to bone. . . The creative, wondrous skill of Xiangsheng’s language, and the rich abundance of Xiangsheng performance’s techniques. . . from content to form, Xiangsheng is a wellspring of artistic tradition for us to drink from. . . *

(Volume 6 208)

The performance medium of 相声 —transliterated in this essay as Xiangsheng— literally means face (and) voice, although it is more commonly translated as ‘cross-talk.’ It is a comedic performance genre which centres around a dialogue, often between two actors, who skilfully toggle between performances of multiple exaggerated, caricatured characters, often based on particular tropes and archetypes. The genre originated in streetside performances and plays off of bawdy humour, puns, and other forms of eye-winking language play, parody, and satire. Vernacular, everyday, imitative and subversive, performative and ironic—all these traits inspired Kuo to identify Xiangsheng as a parental source of tradition for the uprooted, orphaned cultural landscape of Singapore.

It was in the late 1950s, in the Rediffusion Mandarin Play Group—a radio broadcast and performance group that Kuo was a pioneer of in his teenage years—that he first discovered Xiangsheng. In an oral history interview, his close friend and colleague, Tan Poh Han, recalls how their manager once handed them a Xiangsheng script and instructed them to perform it. When their performance was met with an uproarious response from the crowd, their manager tasked the two of them to begin writing their own Xiangsheng scripts. Xiangsheng became a regular genre that Kuo gradually grew adept at. Some fifteen years later, when Kuo had returned to Singapore and began his own theatre group, he would frequently organise theatre nights that would consist of several dramatic performances, at which he regularly wrote and performed in Xiangsheng skits. Han Laoda, dramatist and Xiangsheng writer, attributed Kuo as a key mentor in his development of a Xiangsheng piece. When he wrote his first Xiangsheng piece in 1973, Kuo both helped him totally rework the script; notably, Kuo chose to write portions of the script in Malay, introducing non-Sinitic languages into the foray of linguistic play within the performance (Han 91).

His formal innovations would extend beyond Xiangsheng into drama as well. When Coffin debuted in 1985, rather than simply performing in conventional black box theatres, Kuo also toured the show in community centres around Singapore— hearkening to the vernacular setting of Xiangsheng street performances. One could even see Kuo’s approach of one-man monologues as an attempt to pare down the Xiangsheng formula of two performers to a single performer—retaining the satirical strategy and comedic vernacular performance while simply having a single performer reproduce a multitude of voices. The next year, he wrote a Xiangsheng-drama fusion titled Learning to Speak in the same year that he performed a special series of Xiangsheng evening shows. Just like with Coffin, he toured the play in both theatres and community centres.

When asked in the interview to describe the genre, Tan Poh Han distils the craft of Xiangsheng down to a single principle: misdirection. To establish an expectation in the audience, showing them an innocuous item, and then subvert it by revealing it to be something else. Tan illustrates this via the iconic technique of “打/抖包袱” (lit. exposing the wrapped bundle, fig. cracking jokes) — ‘So just wrap something up, and then you misdirect the audience to think that it’s something really fragrant, which is why it’s wrapped up nicely, and you keep reminding them of this. Until, eventually, you open it up, and it’s actually something really smelly, and everyone laughs.’*

In his recollection of Kuo’s performance of a Xiangsheng piece, Han wrote of his particular skill at this technique: ‘His… reinterpretation of the work made the script’s jokes resonate one after the other’* (Han 91). Central to this formal construction is the audience’s easy, subconscious indexing of the thing that wraps an object to the object itself, and the Xiangsheng performer’s exposure of the unreliability of this indexicality. At its heart, Xiangsheng challenges language and its meaning-making, playing on the confusion of meaning through puns, double entendres, comedy of cross purposes and errors. In each of these techniques, Xiangsheng performers shift fluidly between using language as something representational and figurative, constantly misdirecting the audience.

This view of Xiangsheng is shared by Paize Keulemans, who, in Sound Rising from the Paper, relates the linguistic transgressions of the genre to a political effect of subversive criticism: “This use of dialect speech, or what I call cross-talking, is, like cross-dressing best understood as a performative act that involves the creation, subsequent destabilisation, and final reaffirmation of different identities” (196) —a blend of “comedy with political taboo” (198). Much like how drag troubles gender via an ironic and playful deployment of its tropes, Keulemans suggests that Xiangsheng’s play across languages—particularly in Xiangsheng’s specific origins from Chinese dialects rather than Mandarin—undermines an essentialist understanding of language. As a Xiangsheng performer alternates between executing a convincing mimicry of a particular vernacular voice that the audience recognises as authentic, and a subsequent undermining of that recognition with linguistic jokes and satirical transgressions, they blur the line between authenticity and imitation in language. This leads the audience to a destabilising understanding of all language as imitative, all language as merely the wrapping around a thing rather than the thing itself, which can obfuscate rather than index, confuse rather than clarify—language as a fluid, malleable, and subversive agent.

Learning dramatises and heightens this mobility of language by staging a conversation between two Chinese men, one of whom claims to be raised by a Malay man, the other who claims to be raised by an Indian man, who struggle to figure out how to speak in a locally authentic, Singaporean way, puzzling through a freeflow interplay of languages, dialects, and slang. One of the key comedic sections of the script comes in the repetition of the same word in two languages—with one language using the word as a loanword from the other—where humour is derived from the closeness and yet distance between the pronunciations of the two words. Following that, the two men reenact this within a single language with words that are contracted into shorter exclamations in vernacular speech, contrasting the more formal and standardised register with the far more accented, rapid, and everyday idiom of speech. This play of sameness and difference, or proximity and distance between and within languages, not only reveals the histories of migration, contact, and exchange between languages but also satirises the state’s attempts to officially delineate and separate the polyphony of the nation into official languages.

Keulemans suggests that a crucial component of Xiangsheng as genre is “the profusion of voices” through a variety of “regional accents” that enable a single storyteller to “recreate the liveliness and linguistic plurality” of a locale (218). In Learning and beyond, Kuo no longer holds those multiple voices and languages as separate, but lets them them bleed into each other. This movement was situated in the state’s establishment of a model of multiculturalism that consisted of four national languages, a bilingual education system of English and one of three mother tongues, and four rigid racial categories. Merely representing linguistic plurality was no longer adequate as it had already been contained within nationalist ideology. Kuo’s profusion of voices needed to overlap, clash, collide, and merge—both voices of vernacular, everyday speech as well as official, bureaucratic languages. In doing so, he could create a representation of difference that destabilises categorisation, destabilises the process of meaning-making itself, and thus destabilises the myth of the nation as a discrete, containable entity.

Untranslatable Intimacies: My Cat Says Meow / Miu

Kuo’s transgressive, marginal movement reached an artistic apex in the 1988 experimental play Mama Looking for Her Cat. Often heralded as the first multilingual play in Singaporean history, this play confronts us with an interpretive problem before we even begin. In Cat, the script begins to simply designate many, if not a majority of the lines of dialogue, in being performed in another language other than how they appear on the page, if not in multiple languages at once: many lines are spoken by a chorus of people who are described to be speaking in a scattering of Mandarin, English, and Chinese dialects like Teochew and Hokkien. Cat is a play whose unfolding literary production is also an act of literary translation—fittingly so, since translation (or its failure) is a key thematic and dramatic conceit of the play.

What this accomplishes is an unmooring of meaning from the written surface of the dramatic text in a way that requires one to reconfigure how to approach reading it. Like linguistic imitation and misdirection in Xiangsheng, language in the script is not representative but rather gestural and performative: directing one toward something other than what is being directly signified. In other words, I want to read Kuo’s language as gesturing toward the misdirected thing that it is trying to but cannot fully convey, and perhaps can only obfuscate—the marginal spaces between languages. “We found silence seemed poignantly louder, and the expressionistic more beautiful than the representative,” said Kuo about the process of rupturing ‘realistic’ acting and performance in the play (Volume 6 262).

Cat takes this attempt to manifest the space between languages literally, opening with a scene in which ten young people (who are referred to only as Children), encircle the titular mother (referred to in the play as Mama) while singing the alphabet song, moving closer and closer and singing more and more aggressively until they suddenly stop and fall silent, trapping her in a “wall” of bodies that remains “tight” and “refuses to budge” to let Mama out (81). The scene’s figurative nature recalls the surreal dream setting of Coffin, except its symbolism, rather than remaining fixed, metamorphosises constantly. The many bodies of the children fluidly morph into the letters of the alphabet that they sing, and then assemble and transform into a single, gigantic cage constructed out of language. The image of children playing and dancing turns abruptly violent, and the sentimental, cliché trope of a mother teaching language to her children is bent and transmuted into its opposite. Instead, an uncomprehending, infantile, and vulnerable Mama is trapped by her children, and language, rather than facilitating the affective bond between mother and child, becomes a barrier that separates and alienates Mama from her social world.

Kuo has attributed his inspiration for Cat to two encounters he had with elderly women who spoke to him of their sadness that growing linguistic barriers meant they could no longer communicate with their children and grandchildren. Kuo was horrified by the way in which this intergenerational linguistic severance “gradually removed” these women from their family (Volume 6, 262). To Kuo, the space between languages is fraught with state-engendered violence that enforces and widens it, as performed in the play’s opening images. But that space also opens a gulf for intervention, where Kuo embarks on his aesthetic project in Cat.

As with the other plays I’ve discussed, Cat is a subversive allegory constructed via ironic rewriting and reversion of trope, archetype, and sign. After Mama finally forces her way out of the cage formed by her children in the beginning of the play, the rest of the scene consists of a litany of language acts being performed and then subverted. First, the children play a series of children’s games that involve collectively chanting words (often nonsensical in meaning) in Hokkien. Then, they demand that Mama sing a song to them in Hokkien, and she chooses a Hokkien lullaby. Then, they demand that she tell them a story, and reject both the story of the three pigs and the Monkey King before agreeing to Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare (81-83). After the story of the tortoise and hare ends, the children begin to re-enact the story by imitating the tortoise, crawling on all fours while singing in “chorus” the moral that Mama speaks at the end of the story over and over: “Work very hard. Persevere on and on”. Then, at one child’s urging, they begin to imitate the rabbit instead, and in a perverse retelling of the story, violently bump each other over until they are all knocked to the ground on their backs, stuck and struggling to rise (85).

From repeating the alphabet, to playchanting, to singing lullabies, to telling stories—all the above speech acts are ritualistically performed, with the repetitive structure of each performance act taking precedence over its content. Which is to say, then, that the fundamental structure of language, and more generally meaning-making, is identical to trope—formed by imitation rather than inherent or essential meaning. Playing on this, Kuo destabilises the apparent stability of these different rituals via a reversed, ironic repetition—untethering the sign from its original ritualistic context and re-coding it. In this way, the moralistic fable of the tortoise and the hare, repeated with a twist, becomes a perverse commentary on the failure of the myth of meritocracy (as signified in the moral of “Work very hard. Persevere on and on”) and the suffering of the working class under the state’s project of rapid and unfettered development (the hare toppling the tortoises). For Kuo, the theatre aspirationally became a site where language could be reinscribed precisely by intervening in the space between languages—a formula for what he called “The Theater that Transcends”: “Most people in the audience would not have understood either [language], but they all understood the action” (Volume 7 177).

This radical potentiality in the play is embodied in the figure of the titular cat, whose absence lies at the core of its dramatic tension: in the rest of Cat, Mama is constantly searching for her cat, while her children (now adults) blame the cat for her recent disappearances, report the case to the police, and resolve to hunt it down and kill it, invoking the Housing Development Board’s ban on keeping cats as pets in public housing flats (88). Kuo’s dramatisation of ubiquitous policing and regulation—extending to the granular scale of pet ownership in flats—serves as a veiled critique of the state’s policing of language, and the elusive cat, now lost and gone stray, becomes a symbol for a mode of language that eludes regulation and control.

In perhaps Cat’s most poignant scene, Mama encounters an old Indian man who is also looking for his cat, and they proceed to converse with each other about their missing cats, one in Hokkien, the other in Tamil, neither understanding the other’s language, instead using “the most expressive mime gestures” to converse in a “painfully but joyfully gruelling process” (89-90), mediated by the absent sign of the cat that is suspended in the space between both languages. Rejecting the state’s model of multiculturalism that relies on the imposition of English for universal understanding and permits cultural difference only within autocratically delimited boundaries, Kuo demonstrates a model of communicating and translating across language that acknowledges the difficult space between languages without trying to first erase that difference. It is, in fact, Mama and the man’s mutual non-understanding that makes their moment of effortful connection all the more sincere and poignant—a marginal movement from distance to intimacy that is both painful and joyful.

In the difficult task that Mama and the old man attempt in Cat, their language practice is imperfect and marked by childishness and error: their speech is rendered ungrammatically, and they speak only in repetitive and simplistic syntax: “My cat has short tail…My cat also has short tail” (90). The conversation between the duo is not about the failure of translation, but rather one which uses mistranslation to gesture instead toward what is unsaid—that which cannot be said. In a brief and tender moment of levity, the old man comments “Your cat ‘meow, meow.’ My cat ‘miu, miu’” (90). Acknowledging linguistic difference even on the level of onomatopoeia—language which purports to be directly mimetic and representative, meaning nothing but the sound of the word itself—reveals how all meaning falls inevitably within constructed and socialised semantic systems, and moreover points to us that this ungraspable cat lies somewhere between meow and miu.

In yet another archetypal inversion, the moralising device of anthropomorphized animals in fables and children’s stories is turned on its head: Mama and the Old Man expressively mime and imitate their lost cats, and in so doing move toward an animalistic, inexpressible, and yet substantive anima. In that mode of linguistic in-betweenness, they create the play’s schematic for a mode of marginal translation that attempts to find common ground through difference, rather than in spite of it.

In eulogising Kuo Pao Kun after his death in 2002, Chinese writer and critic Yu Qiuyu described him as possessing ‘a massive temptation: he was tempted by the world, and yet tempted the world’* (Yu 50). His choice of the word temptation is apt—for Kuo’s theatre lures his audience with misdirection and mistranslation into a desire for transgression: a pull to go across the boundary of difference to the space between, in the silences, the empty coffins, the missing cats. This evocative yearning excites movement away from the normative toward a mode of alterity found in the free interplay of different cultures and languages. Kuo’s theatre thus moves us toward an anti-national image of togetherness: not the neat governable bodies and borders of the nation-state, or the purist singularity of race or language, but the expansive and infinite possibilities of connections that are created by those who share the space of the margins.

Works Cited

Han, Laoda. “宝崑和新加坡相声.” And Love the Wind and Rain, edited by Kwok Kian Woon and Teo Han Wue, Crucible, 2002, pp. 90-92.

Keulemans, Paize. Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction

and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination. Harvard UP, 2014.

Kuo, Pao Kun. Introduction. Images at the Margins. Times Editions, 1995, pp. 8-9

–––. “Mama Looking for Her Cat.” The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume 4, Plays in English, edited by Sy Ren Quah and C. J. W. -L. Wee, The Theatre Practice, 2012, pp. 81-98.

–––. “MaMa Looking For Her Cat: The “MaMa” Process” The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume 6, Commentaries, edited by Sy Ren Quah and C. J.W. -L. Wee, The Theatre Practice, 2007, pp. 262-263.

–––. “The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole.” The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume 4, Plays in English, edited by Sy Ren Quah and C. J. W. -L. Wee, The Theatre Practice, 2012, pp. 1-10.

–––. “Uprooted and Searching.” The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume 7, Papers and Speeches, edited by Sy Ren Quah and C. J. W. -L. Wee, The Theatre Practice, 2005, pp. 172-179.

–––. “《北京相声》北京的厚礼群英的聚会.” The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume 6, Commentaries, edited by Sy Ren Quah and C. J.W. -L. Wee, The Theatre Practice, 2007, pp. 208.

–––. “孤儿情结边缘心态：新加坡表演艺术的独特性格.” The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume. 7, Papers and Speeches, edited by Sy Ren Quah and C. J. W. -L. Wee, The Theatre Practice, 2005, pp. 128-134.

–––. “文化孤儿.” And Love the Wind and Rain, edited by Kwok Kian Woon and Teo Han Wue, Crucible, 2002, pp. 112-113.

–––. “学说话.” The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume. 3, Plays in Chinese 2: The 1980s, edited by Sy Ren Quah and C. J. W. -L. Wee, The Theatre Practice, 2005, pp. 128-134

Kwok, Kian Woon and Teo Han Wue, editors. And Love the Wind and Rain. Crucible, 2002.

Peterson, William. Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore. Wesleyan UP, 2001.

Quah, Sy Ren, Lim Soon Lan, and Tan Beng Luan, editors. The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Volume 9, Life and Work: A Pictorial Record. The Theatre Practice, 2012.

Tan, Poh Han. Oral History Interview conducted by National Archives of Singapore. 26 Oct. 2009.

Yu, Qiuyu. “世纪典范：悼念戏剧家郭宝崑.” And Love the Wind and Rain, edited by Kwok Kian Woon and Teo Han Wue, Crucible, 2002, pp. 48-50.

Endnotes

[1] Kuo has translated many of his theoretical writings into English, but in this paragraph and elsewhere I cite his essays written in Chinese and use my own translations to capture the imagery of his metaphors that he often did not exactly translate. All other instances of my translations are written in single quotation marks and followed by asterisks.

Gan Chong Jing graduated from Brown University with a degree in Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies. Reading Singaporean literature is how he finds a way to belonging.