#YISHREADS March 2025
By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob
Time for some shameless self-promotion!
My first children's book is hot off the press: Twisted Temasek, a middle-grade primer on precolonial Singaporean history, focusing on the gross, violent and silly bits of the past in the style of Terry Deary's Horrible Histories series. [1] On top of that, I've also got a historical fantasy novel coming out in August: Utama, a retelling of the rise of the first king of medieval Singapore, shortlisted for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2024. (Coincidentally, the actual winner of the prize was also historical fantasy: Meihan Boey's The Mystical Mister Kay.) [2]
But what's with this obsession with history? It's this crucial meeting point between cultural identity and storytelling, where all of us are constructing and contesting these versions of our pasts to try to better understand ourselves, our present, our future.
It's fictive and factual—which is why I'm devoting this month's column to works of historical fiction. The five novels I've chosen are all a little subversive, written against the grain of well-worn narratives: the glory of Greek civilisation, Malay nationalism, the rags-to-riches immigrant stories of Singapore, the American Jazz Age as portrayed The Great Gatsby—and the final work doesn't even cleave to a linear view of time, straining the boundaries of the genre by venturing into the distant realms of the future. These books bring to life perspectives that don't get enough attention in history lessons: women, slaves, queer people, nature itself—everyone the anti-DEI crowd doesn't want to hear from.
So beware the ides of March! These shadows of the past can be curiously prophetic—and often, they're a bloody good read, too.
Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon
Fig Tree, 2024
I remember when the author was working on the opening chapter of this novel, back when we were MA students at UEA Creative Writing in 2014! It's a weird and moving exploration of the Ancient Greek world from the perspective of the underclasses and the marginalised, with huge resonances with the postcolonial/cosmopolitan world of today. Plus, it's written mostly in Irish English! (Why not? If you want accuracy, read something in Attic Greek.)
The story's set during the Peloponnesian Wars, specifically in Syracuse, Sicily, in 412 BCE, after a failed Athenian invasion, with the would-be-conquerors held prisoner in a quarry, starving to death. Two out-of-work potters, Lampo and Gelon, wander among them, mocking them and asking for quotations from the plays of Euripides, and eventually come up with the crazy idea of using them to perform a full staging of Medea and The Trojan Women.
So there's a complicated game of exploitation/recreation going on—shades of both Abu Ghraib and the POW pantomimes in Changi Prison—with the crucial factor that the Syracusians revere the Athenians for their high culture, even as they curse them for their warmongering and imperial agendas. Ferdia himself is a half-Libyan Irishman, and for a Singaporean reading this, it feels clear that he's trying to grapple with how we relate to the declining powers of the UK and the USA in an era when our once-developing nations are ascendant, yet their decaying glory still awes us, still defines our notions of high culture.
Mixed into all this are stories of slavery and exploitation and terrible loss—Lampo, our POV character, is illiterate with a disabled leg, but you see how he can behave badly when he's got an iota of power, e.g. over the woman he loves, the Lydian slave Lyra. But he fights to be his better self, and I wish I were able to do the dread-inducing scenes that Ferdia writes where he self-sabotages, where everything goes wrong for him... or where against all odds, everything goes right. He's also slipped a mysterious Irish merchant and a trio of Libyan slaves into the tale, each accompanied with stories of the terrible suffering that would've been part of everyday life in the ancient world.
And of course, there's a reckoning with the fact that Syracuse did not remain ascendant over Athens; that our own current states of peace and prosperity may be short-lived as the Carthaginians loom over our shores. Precolonial, postcolonial, neocolonial—all these words configured in terms of time, when the truth is that the utter constant is power.
Slave, by Akiya
Translated by Jason S Ganesan
Center for Orang Asli Concerns, 2024
First published in Malay as Hamba in 2013, this is a Malaysian historical novel set in the 19th century—but with a difference. British colonists aren't the villains, as would be the norm in nationalist narratives. Instead, it's Malay slaveowners and overseers, inflicting horrific suffering on the indigenous people of the region, the Orang Asli.
The author's a member of the Semai community, as is his protagonist Bujal, a strong, handsome man who spends his days farming gambier for his dissolute master Engku Kahar—we're witness to scenes of his addiction to opium, his practice of taking on enslaved Orang Asli women as concubines, then whoring them out to his underlings; his punishment of disobedient slaves with stingray whips and imprisonment in cages. Bujal dreams of freedom and revenge and of impossible love with the women stolen as concubines, all while others plot against him—but unexpectedly (SPOILER ALERT!) never gets round to running away.
So this isn't Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is, for some characters at least, a tale of liberation and agency. It's a story of survival and abjection, of dreams deferred until too late, a testimony of gross unacknowledged injustice—the liberator figure turns out to be J. W. W. Birch, the British Resident usually reviled by us today for encroaching on Malay rulers' rights, but praised here for his role in outlawing slavery in Perak.
What's also unusual is that it's not a story of solidarity and alliance. We love historical fictions in which motley crews of oppressed people come together, but here Malay debt slaves are depicted as even crueller than their masters, Chinese immigrants are complicit in slavery, and even fellow Orang Asli slaves end up causing Bujal harm with their toadying and treachery.
Only Engku Kahar's daughter, Engku Wati, who's crazy enough to fall for Bujal, is portrayed with consistent sympathy—and though I'd side-eye this as a problematic portrayal of decolonisation through sexual conquest (cf. Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, cf. Jordan Peele's Get Out), she's also presented as a barrier to Bujal's liberation when he becomes a slave of love. Shit's ambiguous.
Some readers may chafe at Akiya's literary style—clipped sentences, stock characters with little development—and at the cartoonish illustrations. But I'd say the perspective makes this compulsory reading for folks who care about local history and social justice. (To be honest, I know very little about how Orang Asli fare in contemporary Malaysia!)
Kopi, Puffs and Dreams, by Pallavi Gopinath Aney
Epigram, 2021
A while ago, I was chatting with Alex Chua of Book Bar about queer representation in Sing lit, and he mentioned that this novel featured an asexual character. Interesting, I figured, but not the biggest news.
Now I've finally got round to reading it, and... well, it is kind of a big deal. The novel's one of those classic immigrant narratives: in 1907, two friends, the educated rich boy Puthu and the illiterate labourer Krishnan, become allies and almost equals on board a ship from India to Singapore, work together on a coffee and rubber plantation in Malaya and end up opening a restaurant using Puthu's business acumen and Krishnan's cooking skills, eventually expanding into a sales empire by the 1920s.
What makes it all different is the fact that Puthu's a social misfit—he's autistic-coded, with his aromantic and asexual aspects part of that identity, a little like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. And this is crucial to his storyline: he's despised as gay in India (he does have a dalliance with a servant, Muthu, cos he's happy to help a buddy out), which means he has no love for his hometown and is super-reliant on the good-natured Krishnan to help him out in social situations. Once he's risen in status (even Krishnan, whom he loves platonically, is ever unsure how much to trust his Machiavellian ways), it's his singlehood that becomes suspect. And it's his decision to bring his long-betrothed fiancée Gayathri from India into a loveless marriage that results in a scandalous betrayal and breakdown in their lives.
In other words, this is a queer story. It's about how someone's sexual identity changes the path of his and other people's lives. Furthermore, it's a subversion of the Singapore immigrant narrative, because while Puthu and Krishnan achieve great financial and social success, they lose part of themselves in the process, and damage the lives of those they love—in particular, Pushpa, the landlord's daughter, who enters the story as a clever, romantic ingénue and exits as a bitter, neglected wife, compensating for the emptiness of her soul through compulsive eating. Interestingly, it takes time for the women's stories to emerge—unexpected, since the author's a woman—but reflective of the limits of their agency in the past and in transmitted history.
So yeah, this is a recommended read. Coupla downsides, though: the prose is pretty simple and unstylised—none of your Rushdie-esque OTT descriptions here—and there's a lot less talk about food than you'd assume from the cover!
The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo
Tor.com, 2021
I frickin' loved the author's Singing Hills series of Vietnamese-inspired high fantasy novellas, but this—their first full-length novel—was a little more challenging for me. It's a rewriting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, following the same plot and literary style, but with three twists: 1. it's told from the POV of a minor character, Jordan Baker, race-flipped into being a Vietnamese adoptee; 2. it's a world where magic is commonplace: a Jazz Age where electricity competes with enchanted fireflies; 3. almost everyone's actively bisexual.
And maybe it's cos I didn't really grow up with this Fitzgerald classic, but reading the tale, it all feels like a bit much—in contrast to the reclamation of Viet heritage in the Singing Hills books, I couldn't quite figure out why this novel exists the way it does, other than to allow the author the indulgent pleasure of having a self-insert character with all the themes they're crazy about (the Jazz Age, sex and dark magic—here Gatsby traffics not just alcohol but demon's blood, and literally got his fortune by selling his soul to hell). Sure, that's reason enough for an author to write something, but it's a little harder for me to swallow. This isn't even a Bridgerton scenario (i.e. Regency but woke); it's the 1920s with all the racism, xenophobia and sexism of the era, with Jordan only able to navigate it because of her wealth, beauty and intelligence.
But as disorienting as this is, one can't help but acknowledge when reading it how finely it's written—the language and style feel utterly period appropriate, and it's no mere pastiche, because Jordan grants us insights into Daisy and Nick and Gatsby that the original book simply doesn't. Plus, there's a riveting sexiness to the story: a description of what it might be like to be young and lovely and assiduously carefree, in this halcyon age between World War One and the Great Depression—invincible yet also utterly vulnerable, delighting in libertine sex (mostly with Nick, who's portrayed as a stunning himbo twink) while also knowing the mortal dangers of love. And yes, the threads do tie themselves up by the end, with Gatsby's death taking place the same day as an anti-Asian immigration act is passed, with Jordan gradually learning—hers is a side-plot turned central arc—to embrace her heritage.
Definitely recommended, on reflection! This is a book that grows on you: I think I made the mistake of approaching it as an SFF junkie, when really, it's more in the realms of literary fiction.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain, by Pitchaya Sudbanthad
Riverhead Books, 2019
I got a signed copy from the author at Singapore Writers Festival 2024! He was speaking at "We're Burning Up!", which gave me the impression this was primarily a work of sci-fi cli-fi, i.e. climate fiction, warning of a future trajectory where Bangkok is so flooded that it's no longer called Krung Thep, the city of angels, but Krung Nak, the city of water dragons. But as it turns out, that's only a teensy fraction of a much stranger, more ambitious project.
You see, Bangkok Wakes to Rain is told in multiple, disparate chapters, each one almost a short story in its own right, set in different historical periods, from the 19th to the 22nd centuries, featuring different POV characters—Phineas, the colonial doctor; Clyde, the washed up gay American jazz pianist; Sammy, the rich émigré photographer; Nok, the restauranteur in Tokyo; Mai, the plastic surgery patient-turned-tech bigwig-turned virtual life form—even a number of sections where we see life from out of the eyes of birds, or snakes, or crocodiles, witnessing the city's landscape as it develops and decays.
I'd argue that the central character is Nee, a Thammasat University massacre survivor who reinvents herself as a condo manager and swimming teacher. She—and to a lesser extent, her sometime boyfriend Sammy—are linked to almost everyone else in the story, with figures appearing and reappearing, interlinked by love or care or shared architecture, or else by the themes of rain and water and plague and death and dreamlike memory and an enigmatic shadow that looms overhead.
Shades of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, but that novel had a comparatively simple premise of stories as nesting dolls. Here, timelines are interwoven as pad thai, and we sometimes get life histories out of order, eras colliding, chapters apparently sequenced by resonance rather than cause and effect. Which is kinda masterful—incredible that this is a début novel. How does a first-time author get the balls to do something as epic and strange as this?
Endnotes
[1] The link's here, if you wanna buy it! https://epigrambookshop.sg/products/haywire-histories-twisted-temasek-book-1
[2] “Meihan Boey's third entry to Miss Cassidy series wins Epigram Books Fiction Prize.” The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/life/arts/meihan-boeys-third-entry-to-miss-cassidy-series-wins-25000-epigram-books-fiction-prize
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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