#YISHREADS August 2025

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

This month marks the 60th anniversary of Singapore gaining its independence on 9 August 1965. It’s been celebrated with an especially elaborate National Day Parade, assorted museum and propaganda exhibitions, and loads of SG60 logos.

What gets forgotten amidst the pageantry, however, is everything we lost when we became a nation. 1965 wasn’t the year we shook off the yoke of British colonisation. That started to happen in 1959, when we attained self-government, and was more fully accomplished in 1963, when we became part of the independent state of Malaysia. Two years later, we were ejected from the union, an event so shocking that it made PM Lee Kuan Yew weep.

Today, living in a prosperous 21st century Singapore, it’s easy to think LKY was into manipulative theatrics, performing anguish so we’d be more willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the fight for survival. But why shouldn’t he have wept? Mid-century Singapore had been glorious because it functioned as the cultural capital of Malaya, with innumerable migrants flocking here to work and play. For the people of the peninsula, we were like New York, London, or Shanghai: the nearest cosmopolis. That’s why we birthed cultural movements like ASAS ‘50 and the Golden Age of Malay Film—artistic waves that petered out when we had to go it alone.

But you know what? Singapore never completely stopped being a place Malaysians wanted to move to. Folks from the north still came here, integrating themselves into every level of society, creating beloved works of Singaporean culture—Catherine Lim’s Little Ironies, Michael Chiang’s Army Daze, Dave Chua’s Gone Case, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye—sometimes becoming citizens, but occasionally without actually giving up their allegiance to Malaysia.

Which is why this month’s column is devoted specifically to Malaysian authors resident in Singapore. These guys make my city feel like a centre of the world.

So, Selamat Hari Merdeka, my friends. [1] Let’s get back together sometime.

Salina, by A. Samad Said
Translated by Lalita Sinha
Institut Terjemahan & Buku Malaysia, 2013

This is the iconic novel of modern Malaysian lit: a 1961 social realist tale of moral corruption and poverty among the slum-dwellers of Kampong Kambing. This edition marks the third time it’s been translated into English!

What’s really interesting for me and my countryfolk is the fact that it takes place almost entirely in Singapore—the final chapter name-drops LKY, David Marshall and Lim Yew Hock amidst the buzz of Merdeka, before mentioning a so-and-so called Tunku Abdul Rahman getting popular up north. And it’s a multiethnic story, though with very few Chinese characters: Kampung Kambing is largely Indian, with Tamil-speaking landlords and Sikh watchmen, and everyone’s singing Bollywood songs of the era in the background. (One of Sinha’s decisions was to translate accented Indian Malay into accented Indian English.)

The big theme of the story, however, is sex. Our title character, Siti Salina, is a popular sex worker—but what sets tongues wagging is less her trade than the fact that she financially supports an abusive, unfaithful boyfriend, Abdul Fakar. (A back story reveals that she’s from a good family, but lost everything in World War Two—she even went to Raffles Girls’ School!)

Complementing her is Nahidah, a 17-year-old girl, pious and long-suffering as she spends half the novel washing clothes in the stinking public toilet. She’s forced by her monstrous mother Zarina—a former lounge hostess—to become a hostess herself, becoming a victim of sexual harassment and abuse. Sure, there are other POV characters—the schoolboy Hilmy, the trishaw driver Narto, the Islamic studies teacher Haji Karman—but they’re defined by their desires for and reactions to these loose women and wayward man, hard-drinking exemplars of the path of sin in 1950s Singapore.

I read an essay somewhere, claiming that Samad portrays Singapore as a site of Malay perdition—and indeed, Salina and Nahidah escape their hells by running away to Kelantan and Penang respectively. Still, I think that view’s a little simplistic. Though Kampung Kambing is dirty and dangerous, the author paints its social life with intimate affection: the society of washerwomen and teenagers secretly stealing water from the public tank at night; the carousings of lovers and hooligans by the sarabat stall—even Haji Karman’s walk to Salina’s brothel, where he gives her moral advice, is weighted with the pungency of male desire. and at the end, Hilmy’s on a train from KL to Singapore, even though Kampung Kambing’s burned to the ground and Nahidah’s married, because he longs to see the ones he loves. Ours is a city of corruption, but it is beloved.

I’ll be honest here: this book’s kinda heavy going: it’s 535 pages long, very repetitive, and weighted with weird patriarchal morality, even as it portrays working class women making solidarity out of their suffering. But I genuinely do think folks who speak about Sing Lit should read it in at least some form (could someone adapt it into a movie, a musical, a manga?), so we can understand the legacy of Singapore in Malaysian letters, from when we were an inseparable part of Malaya.

(Grrr, never got round to talking about the frisson of the elections, where everyone’s confused about posters going up cos no-one’s voted before, and campaigners are ferrying people to the voting centres and then dumping them out on their asses afterwards. Merdeka, man! What a magical era.)

The Long Shadow of the 19th Century: Critical Essays, on Colonial Orientalism in Southeast Asia, by Farish A. Noor
Buku Fixi, 2021

A collection of eight essays by the celebrated Malaysian historian, dating from 1997 to 2019 (plus one that seems to first appear in this 2021 publication), exploring colonial texts not as objective sources on Southeast Asia but as “confessional texts written by colonising imperialists whose politics were blatant and explicit.”

I've heard Farish talk about some of these ideas before—that “pirate” was a term thrown around about enemies that makes as little sense as “terrorist”; that encyclopaedic images of Asian ethnicity served to “arrest” us in specific categories of race, when in fact populations tended to be so mobile and fluid that essentialist definitions don’t make sense—and ofc these then get embraced by our own communities today for ethnofascist purposes.

But there’s new stuff here too. Refreshing to see the takedown of girlboss colonialism in “Innocents Abroad?”, pointing out how Sophia Raffles and Anna Leonowens thrived on imperial privilege as much as/more than they suffered from female oppression; fascinating to learn about British pamphleteer William Cobbett’s condemnation of Raffles’ invasion of Java (he kept writing about it even when incarcerated!) even though he never travelled beyond the British Isles and the original 13 states of the USA. Likewise America’s 1832 attack on Kuala Batu in Sumatra, their first incursion into Southeast Asia, preceding PH by decades—it's titled “The Woman with the Bayonet”, focussing on the US controversies over the killing of women and kids and the fact that some women are documented as fighting back (with protests that they weren’t recognisable as women).

Also a closing essay by Peter Carey, citing the Indonesian nation-building experience and Sukarno’s dictum that physical decolonisation is only half the battle, and that decolonising the mind is way harder. I think I’ve chosen the easy way out by reading mostly precolonial and postcolonial lit—dealing with the colonial legacy head on is less pleasant, but necessary.

The Undone Years, by Shamini Flint
Heliconia Press, 2012

There’ve been dozens of World War Two novels in Singapore and Malaysia, to the point that the genre’s tinged with cliché—yet this work actually does a few things I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Books like Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue and Singai Ma Elankannan’s Flowers at Dawn tend to focus on a single perspective (usually a young person coming of age), or at least a single ethnic community’s perspective. But this story gives us three central POVs from different races: Rajan, son of the rubber plantation’s Indian clerk; Matthew, son of the white owner; and Mei Ling, daughter of the Chinese shopkeeper; all of them 16 years old & caught in that classic friends-to-love-triangle phase of YA novels. Each one ends up playing different roles during the Occupation, divided by race & politics, despite their earlier status as near equals. Rather than the war bringing them together, it ultimately drives them irrevocably apart.

Mei Ling, surprisingly, is the only real warrior of the three: she volunteers for the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army and becomes a Communist guerrilla and assassin. (First time I’ve seen a novel focus this much on women in the Malayan resistance!) Matthew’s evacuated to Britain but enlists in time to parachute in at the end of the war. And Rajan’s kind of the sexy lamp [2]—he’s stranded in the plantation, protected by his dad who’s trying to stay on the good side of the Japanese, waiting & witnessing & ultimately needing to be rescued from torture, all while Mei Ling pines after his handsome brown eyes.

We get POV scenes from older characters too, which is how we see the POW camps & Sook Ching massacre in Singapore, the Death Railway in Burma—another unusual innovation, since war novels tend to focus only on one location, seldom even crossing the Causeway in their narrative of the war. (Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain places the British surrender to the Japanese in Penang, when it actually took place in Singapore's City Hall!) So we’re getting a more dynamic, more complex drama than most, revealing not only the fractious politics of the war but also the different ways people respond to crisis: loyalty to a fault, fruitless betrayal, vacillations between each.

Gotta be honest, though—I'm not sure if Flint stuck the landing. The fall of the Japanese happens so quickly, so undramatically, that it feels like the author's rushing to meet a deadline—though she probably just didn't want to shift our eyes away from the human drama? Still, well worth a read. And good news: the author tells me she’s reprinting this soon!

Mist-Bound: How to Glue Back Grandpa, by Daryl Kho
Penguin Books, 2021

Bought this at the Singapore Children's Book Fair—was asking a panel of Singaporean YA authors why all their Asian stories were East Asian rather than Southeast Asian. Who among them was writing SEA-themed fantasy? They suggested this guy—though he’s technically a Malaysian resident!

This meant I came to this book with skewed expectations. Flipping through its early chapters, I was frustrated by how it was repping Southeast Asian culture in the most facile way ever: basically using Western fairytale tropes and slapping the names of regional equivalents on them. Riff is a brownie (and is even referred to as such), but he proudly identifies as a kenit (cf. the Malay tradition of orang kenit, little people); Grandma Alyssa is revealed to be a fairy princess—whoops, sorry, a pæri; a rock troll is called a batuan; the friendly dwarves are called mrenhkongveal/duwendes, and we’re assured that they’re the same thing in Cambodia and the Philippines (which I doubt is true, given what I’ve read about each tradition—duwendes are way less benevolent).

Our POV character, Alexis, exists in a cultural limbo: neither she nor her family are assigned a culture or nationality, which means that when her beloved grandfather tells her tales from Malay or Maori or Native American culture, he’s speaking from the POV of the apparently neutral Western ethnographer (and indeed, this tale of mist and the coming of spring does not feel tropical): all the world’s a buffet with every dish equally exotic and none of them representing home. Which also results in a deconsecration of myth: when Alexis solves a challenge to race around the world by simply circling her grandma, there’s the merest throwaway line that is in imitation of the Hindu god Ganesha’s contest with Murugan.

But a third of the way through, after Alexis crosses the barrier between the mortal world and the magical world of Mist, something shifts. Kho’s imaginative worldbuilding takes over, cos she’s encountering scenarios that aren’t obviously derived from Western folklore: a colossal tree with its crown inhabited by an entire city of nang tani (usually they’re just banana tree spirits, but here they’re dryad warrior women); the island of Ujong (another name for SINGAPORE) which sits on the edge of the a vast oceanfall, populated by oni (here meaning snow ogres; the original is just Japanese for demon) and kudera (a seemingly original creation: they’re horse spirits made of smoke who draw on their prey’s fear—literal nightmares). After which I’m committed to the premise: a moving tale of a girl trying to save her grandfather from a fog of forgetfulness (the author explains it’s an analogue for dementia) through the concoction of a magical potion requiring a quest for otherworldly ingredients. (Huge parallels to how Digory saves his sick mother in The Magician’s Nephew. Wouldn’t call it derivative—the desire for hope against hopelessness is kinda timeless.)

Yes, Kho’s appropriating elements of world cultures, especially Asian cultures, without properly explaining their distinctions and origins. But he’s doing so for the sake of some original and splendid worldbuilding—stuff he could've just as easily done with Western creatures (unicorns, merfolk) or totally invented magical species that wouldn’t provoke any curiosity in his young readers about Asian folklore. It's kind of the same mythical rojak that C.S. Lewis was doing when he featured both satyrs and Santa Claus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—it made Tolkien splutter when he read it, but the average reader is charmed and sees it thenceforth as unremarkable.

Yet there’s that strange rub when it comes to cultural specificities. There's a strange sequence with a community of humanoid creatures called the Ombaks (Malay for "wave"): tattooed sea-dwelling boatbuilders who long for the island of Ujong, from which they were exiled, all of whom are given Muslim names: Saleh, Akileh, Zayn— clearly Malay or Orang Laut-coded. Feels weird that they’re represented as magical creatures rather than people, weirder that the Westernised Alexis ends up being their saviour, first from an exploitative duyung, then from the curse of exile from Ujong.

Am I reading too much into this? Arguably, yeah: the intended reader is gonna experience this as a palatable romp into the world of imagination, with positive messages about the value of family, patience, friendship, forgiveness, storytelling. But I’d also argue that local kidlit—especially award-winning stuff like this—to be analysed this deeply and critically, just like adult literature from any other part of the world. I’d expect nothing less of folks who approach my own writing!

Death Row Literature: A Collection of Poems, by Pannir Selvam Pranthaman
Gerakbudaya, 2025

 Now for something a little less bourgeois. These are verses written from 2020 to 23 by a Malaysian currently on death row for drug offences in Changi Prison. A foreword by Lim Kay Siu and Neo Swee Lin explains that they were verbally transmitted from the author to his sister Angelia, who memorised and transcribed the words for publication.

To be honest, though these aren’t really my kind of poems. There are a few which work for me—the succinct “Voice from D Row” and “Time”, the desperate “Before Death Grazes One’s Last Breath”, the bitterly political “Changes”. On the whole, however, there's a lot of over-simplicity and sentimentality, a lot of not-that-deep aphorisms and obvious rhymes and metaphors—“In the Darkness of Night” is stirring but full of unnecessary repetition; the best thing about “Justice Seems Like an Atlantis” is its title. I could be missing something, of course—I don't have the skills to critique the one Malay and one Tamil piece included, and some are probably meant to be song lyrics. Still, not exactly Said Zahari. [3]

At the book’s close, there's a brief essay titled “A message from Pannir”, and it's pretty decent: he talks about his heartbreaks and calls for us to make the most of our lives (and keep away from drugs, ofc), interspersing the whole thing with quotes from Schopenhauer, Huxley, Longfellow, Thiruvalluvar, Mandela, Malala Yousafazai. Which made me wonder if he should’ve published something in prose instead. But quite aside from the logistical difficulty of writing and smuggling out a work of longform literature, I’ve gotta consider what it says in the intros by the Transformative Justice Collective and the Anti-Death Penalty Network: both explain that the book exists so we can see the victims of the death penalty not as abstractions, but as individuals with their own dignity, cruelly destroyed in our name by the state apparatus.

And it is poetry that expresses one’s humanity, way more than the essay form, regardless of whether it’s to the reader's taste. We’re not being asked to praise Pannir as a poetic genius; we’re just being asked to recognise that he’s got a soul. Which he does have, more than any “writer” who just types commands into Chat GPT. 

[1] This is the traditional greeting for Malaysia’s Independence Day, which happens to be on 31 August!

[2] The “sexy lamp” is a literary trope originally coined to point out the lack of agency among female characters in fiction. Often, they can be replaced with a mere object like a lamp! For more information, check out “Sexy Lamp Test”, Fanlore. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sexy_Lamp_Test

[3] I’ve reviewed Said Zahari’s poems from prison/puisi dari penjara at “#YISHREADS April 2023”. 28 April 2023. Suspect. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2023/4/28/yishreads-april-2023

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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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