#YISHREADS July 2024

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

Since it’s shorts season, why not a column devoted to short stories? Too often, they’re sidelined in favour of the prestige and heft of the novel form. But the genre’s hugely innovative, with massive potential for experiment and subversion—as well as a heritage that reaches back into antiquity.

Featured here are five short prose collections, all radically different from one another. There’s realism and non-realism, classics and emergent indie works, authored by folks in Singapore, Malaysia, China, Germany and Nigeria, and dated from the early medieval period to the 19th century to the 2020s.

Sure, not every tale’s perfect. But so what? One of the great virtues of the short story form is that there’s room for failure. Move on, flip the page, and start reading the next.

Nine Yard Sarees, by Prasanthi Ram
Ethos Books, 2023

Of course I'm biased about this book: I was the author's course-mate at NTU, with both of us getting our Creative Writing PhDs at the same time—which means I've seen different drafts of the tales of this short story cycle, and take delight in how they’ve morphed over time, finally fitting together like the items in a bridal trousseau.

But there’s been some drama surrounding this title. Last year, when Ethos Books announced the launch on Instagram, one critic vehemently objected to its premise—a portrait of a Tamil Brahmin family—interpreting the work as an enshrinement of caste privilege.[i] This isn’t the case at all, as people who’ve actually read the book will know. Though all the stories are told from the POV of women connected to this Kalakad-born, Singapore-based Brahmin family, many of the protagonists are outsiders. "Agni's Trials" centres on Sivagami, an Indian foreign domestic worker who works for the family in Singapore (and suffers unkindness and exploitation); "Loose Threads" on Fiona, a Korean-Australian girl who dates a grandson (the title refers to his discarded poonal); "The Perfect Shot" on Mira, a lesbian Singaporean who courts one of the granddaughters.

What emerges is a portrayal of a community that's not self-congratulatory, but complex: the hero of one story (e.g. Padma in "The Panasonic") may end up being revealed as a bigoted antagonist in another. Tam-Brahm culture is treasured for its textures—e.g. the madisars, the nine-yard-sarees of the title—but also revealed as oppressive, full of hypocrisies, internal oppressions and little cruelties. There's never a tirade against casteism, but whenever someone speaks out about the need to be exclusionary in tradition, they just look silly and mean. Even the matriarch of the family, Rajeswari, ends up dating a lower-caste man in her twilight years.

And here's something else that makes the work important: I think this may be the most unapologetically Tamil work I've read in English-language, Singapore literature. Words are left untranslated—clever, I realise, to place the flashback tale "Before the Rooster Calls" near the end, so that readers are accustomed to understand that "Mama" means maternal uncle, not mother—and neither white people nor Chinese Singaporeans are held up as the default for comparison. Plus, the saga sprawls across India, Australia and Singapore—it's a diasporic family, like so many of our families today, unified not by nationhood or ideology, but only blood and double-edged love.

Much else comes to mind—the descriptions of ailments of the body, whether they're menstruation, psoriasis, sinus trouble, Alzheimer's, pregnancy, barrenness, arthritis; legacies of grief and mourning; the grand arc building up to the night of a 2019 wedding; the breadth of portrayals of men in the community as stoic, sexy, tender, toxic. Read this if you can!

Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping Guangji, eds. Alexei Kamran Ditter, Jessey Choo and Sarah M. Allen
Hackett Publishing Company, 2017

Hmmm, this is interesting: I've always had the impression that there's a paucity of literature that survived from China's early dynasties, leaving us only with a few classical poems and historical records. Turns out there's works like the Taiping Guangji (太平广记), a 50-volume  compilation of 7,021 tales from the Han Dynasty to the early Song, itself a systematised distillation of the huge quantity of writing surviving from the period.

What's also fascinating is that these stories—the twenty-two in this volume, anyhow, all plucked from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE)—are wild and wonderful, direct inspirations for the wuxia genre and Pu Songling's classic wonder-tale collection Strange Tales of Liaozhai (1740). There are tales of ghosts, weretiger wives, fox fairies (even a woman indignant at being mistaken for a fox fairy!), ascendant Taoist immortals, magical elixirs, divine stomach parasites and rainbow pearls, voyages to the underworld and back.

Also recall that Confucian patriarchy wasn't as hardcore during this period, which means that among the more mundane tales of scholars, eunuchs, officials and their wives, there are also descriptions of surprisingly liberated women—female knights-errant (this is how they translate the term xia/侠, because these are heroines of the wuxia genre with superpowered agility, effortlessly leaping to the top of the Wild Goose Pagoda), rain-summoning shamans, revenant poets, even a farmer's wife who ascends to heaven to become an immortal, revered by people and even consulted by the Emperor upon her return.

But how much are these tales to be believed? A number include real-life historical figures, but it does seem that a lot of them are fictions—these are literally where the term xiaoshuo/ 小说 (meaning novels or short stories today) originated. Would love to read more—though maybe the substantial academic intros aren't that necessary.

The Painted Cat, by Uthaya Sankar SB
Self-published, 2023

I've known this Malaysian author since 2012, but this is the first time I'm actually getting to read his stories, now that he and his band of friends have gotten together to transcreate them from Malay to English.

And damn, these are a strange bunch of tales, spanning his career from 1992 to 2020. Some are straight-up social realist works, like "Nayagi: The Mistress of Destiny", about a Tamil girl in the 1950s discovering she's about to married off to a man she doesn't love; while others are anarchic experimental/magical realist takes, like the titular story, originally titled just "Cat" (which means "paint" in Malay), about manically sexist parents who burn down the house and quote feminist theorists, and a nine-lived polyglot cat who qualifies for a place in the senior civil service.

Plus plenty in between. There's really no telling how a story will end, e.g. "A Tale of Paurnami/Cerita Paurnami", which is mostly a description of a full-moon festival which suddenly concludes with a miracle, or "An Epic Ride/Perang Dalam Minda", which appears to be a moralistic retelling of the Mahabharata/Bhagavad Gita transposed onto a rideshare—until it unexpectedly ends with the destination of a psychiatric clinic. Uthaya’s definitely got a thing for both the transcendent and bathos. My fave's probably "Strange Things/Yang Aneh-Aneh", about a corporate fixer who happens to have detachable limbs.

Mind you, this book does tend towards the sentimental and directly critical a little too much, and the presentation—loads of unnecessary literalist illustrations, endnotes explaining Tamil/Sanskrit terms, pages of earnest praise quotes—gives the collection an air of amateurishness that honestly doesn't charm me.

Still, this is a fascinating entry point into the world of multiethnic Malay-language literature, in which ethnic minorities both celebrate and challenge their culture, just as folks do in English. That's kinda what Singapore lost out on with our language policy—our mother tongue literatures of Mandarin, Malay and Tamil end up in ethnic silos rather than emerging as cosmopolitan conversations. 

Tales of Hoffmann, by E. T. A. Hoffmann
Selected and translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Penguin Books, 1982

I’ve been curious about this writer ever since I saw his short story “The Sandman” (the basis for the ballet Coppélia) cited as one of the first works of science fiction—published in “Nachtstücke” in 1817, it predates Frankenstein by one year!

Fans of Mary Shelley may be pleased to learn that, IMHO, she can keep her crown as the Mother of Sci-Fi. Hoffmann’s tale, about a young man who falls in love with a mechanical girl, is clearly inspired by alchemy and clockwork rather than the scientific revolution. It’s also a surprising inversion of certain Gothic conventions: while the young man goes stark raving mad, his human lover Clara consistently gives him rational advice, survives his violence and ultimately lives happily ever after in marriage to someone else.

The rest of the tales—while rambling and verbose, taking forever to get started—are awesome leaps into the German Romantic tradition, often centering around a doomed love triangle of a handsome young man, a beautiful and virtuous young woman and the creepazoid dirty old man who wants to stop their marriage from happening. Lotsa exotic locations: “Doge and Dogaressa”, set in medieval Venice (the protagonist’s a German nobleman lost as a child during the Plague, making a living as a sweet-voiced gondolier); “Mademoiselle de Scudery”, set in 17th-century Paris (he’s a jeweller who discovers his mentor—and father of his beloved!—is a murderer, and an elderly female aristocrat novelist has to crack the case and save the day); “The Mines at Falun”, set in Sweden (he’s a sailor with the East India Company—did you even know Sweden had an EIC?—who becomes a miner, seduced by the ghost who tells him of an underground paradise of minerals).

Also assorted genius artists and revelations of dark secrets… and even comedy: “The Choosing of the Bride” ends in a Merchant of Venice pastiche where a miracle-working alchemist saves the day by giving rival suitors gifts greater than the bride they were seeking: a book that turns into any volume the reader desires and a file that generates golden ducats… plus at assorted points a politician’s face gets turned permanently green and a businessman’s nose stretches Pinocchio-style. And at the end, when the lovers are reunited, and the young man tearfully leaves to study art in Rome, the narrator acknowledges that his letters are getting fewer—but it’s OK, his girlfriend is sure to find another husband. Surprisingly mirthful stuff. But this is the guy who wrote The Nutcracker, after all. Nightmares and daydreams spring from the same womb.

Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology, by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga
Caezik Books and OD Ekpeki Presents, 2023

To close off, here’s a combined fiction and essay collection by two authors, published with an ambitious aim: "to capture the gamut of African works which, though having fantasy elements, are traditionally imbued with African spiritual realities." Whereas Western SFF plays with gods as mere fictions, and Indian SFF distances itself from gods for fear of heresy, Afropantheology sets out to organically extend oral mythology through fiction, reaffirming indigenous religions after centuries of Abrahamic suppression and eclipse.

And sure enough, a lot of these tales do this triumphantly, with the Yoruba pantheon as the stars of the show. Omenga's "The Deification of Igodo" takes on all the epic dimensions of myth with its narration of a would-be god's hubris as he clashes with Eshu the trickster; Ekpeki's "Ife-Iyoku" imagines a post-nuclear apocalypse Nigeria where tribal life continues, sustained by Obatala's magic. There are also tales of journeys into the spirit world, some with pre-modern protagonists as in Omenga's "A Dance with the Ancestors", some contemporary souls, e.g. his "The City of the Dead" or the duo's collaborative "Land of the Waiting Birth".

But I've gotta be honest: a lot of this just doesn't fit the theme. Ekpeki's "O2 Arena", though high-stakes and action-packed, is secular dystopian sci-fi; his "The Magazine of Horror" feels like it borrows more from Western-style horror tropes of the Grim Reaper than anything Afro. Plus, there's also a lot of showing rather than telling, bizarre absence of dialogue, extended psychic distance, endings that aren't as satisfactory as I'd like—there could've been so much more to the cultural dynamic between the greedy Chinese engineer Jun Li and the marine goddess Olokun in "The Phial of Olodumare".

On the whole, it's a mixed bag—but there's a bunch of gems in that bag. Besides the first six tales I mentioned, Ekpeki's essay "Too Dystopian for Whom?" is a text I would've liked to feature in my syllabus, back when I was teaching speculative fiction. And lord knows, we need to platform more African SFF by writers who actually live on the continent!

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Endnotes

[i] In a comment, Arunaa @rebelbooksta wrote: "Hey, Ethos books. I never thought this day would come to you as a beacon of hope for Singapore literature, advocating an oppressor casteist narrative published into a novel. Brahmins are a caste based community. In fact an oppressor caste who have subjected the rest of the Tamil community to caste discrimination. Until today, the caste system continues oppressing Tamils even in Tamilnadu.... An [sic] it is appalling you are enabling it in Singapore which is supposedly a caste free country. I am calling you out for your ignorance,  insensitivity and your hypocrisy in platforming an oppressor casteist book. This is an absolute shame." Instagram, 20 October 2023. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cymzr-mSVU4/

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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.

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