A Simple History of Singaporeans in America

[Jee Leong]

A Simple History of Singaporeans in America

Dec 2020
1. Letter to My Father
2. Letter to My Father (cont'd)
3. Letter to My Father (cont'd)
4. The Reply {continuation of "Letter to My Father")
5. The Reply (cont'd)
6. The Reply (cont'd)
7. The Reply (concluded)

Feb 2020
1. The Lady cont'd as The Dying Nurse
2. The Dying Nurse cont'd
3. The Dying Nurse cont'd
4. The Dying Nurse cont'd
5. The Dying Nurse cont'd
6. The Dying Nurse cont'd
7. The Dying Nurse cont'd

January 2020
1. The Lady
2. The Lady cont'd
3. The Lady cont'd
4. The Lady cont'd
5. The Lady cont'd
6. The Lady cont'd
7. The Lady cont'd


February 2019
1. The Daughter
2. The Muslim
3. The Columnist
4. The Poet
5. The Samurai (incomplete)
6. The Samurai (complete draft)
7. The Ally

[Jee Leong]

The Daughter

for Marguerita Choy (dinner at Barawine, December 10th, 2018)


They had always had animals at home,
welcoming every stray, kittens and pups,
into the house on Jalan Emas Urai,
the kinder of the neighbors named The Shelter.
Better god’s creatures than the devil’s beasts.
Her father grew up in occupied Ipoh
and, to help his family, sold vegetables
under the noses of the Japanese.
Her mother was an Austrian who did not
care for the Germans. The Americans
neither when their planes strafed a passenger train.
They met in London, after World War II,
he a law student and she an au pair,
and made a family home of Singapore.
Now they live in the city of Dundee,
where she and her sister had gone to school,
and where the older stayed to doctor fate
and bring up her own alien family.
A link, a leash, tenuous and Scottish.
Her mother sleeps alone in a nursing home,
a fact her father forgets when he wanders
beyond the confines of his house to search
for missing animals. The year’s been hard,
hardly a golden year. Right in New York,
Reuters is cutting staff into the bone.
Her cat has sprung a fang and it looks bad.
This Christmas, she will leave with Clay and Mag
the ailing pet and with the ailing parents
spend what little time she had to spare
from her preoccupation with Lafayette.

[5th column]

Could the strafing be done without? Cutting into the bone and the sound of sprung a fang are both lovely.

[Sorella]

I just love a story, and this one is attributed, packed with Singapore texture & ends strikingly with Lafayette. Try and top it!

[JFN]

Jee, this is a lovely short biography full of global history that has been made personal by the inclusion of specific events; the selling of vegetables, the mistargetted passenger train etc., then ending with an even older historical reference. The whole poem feels very genuine, and I'm looking forward to more of these simple histories.

John


Edit: Just Googled Lafayette with specific relation to Singapore, and realise I may have been hasty in assuming this to be about the Marquis. Every day's a school day.

[Jee Leong]

Thanks, Neil, Sorella, and John, for your comments. John, I was thinking of the Marquis, who straddled two worlds, not the shopping center in Singapore. Your first idea was right.

[Jee Leong]

The Muslim

for Zizi Azah Abdul Majid, interviewed on January 6th, 2019


Love is fanatical, the love of God
I disavowed so many years ago
for the love that dared not speak its name,
but in the soft, low hurry of her voice
hear why she named her daughter Zinira,
after the Roman slave so savagely
tortured for her new faith, her only God,
a scarf tightened around and in her eyes.
Love is blind and yet can see too much.
She was at Trader Joe’s and kneeling down
for Zini’s vitamins on the bottom shelf
when a black woman cried in a loud voice,
“Why are you praying here? Stop your praying.
This is America.” In Columbia U,
a play about the siege of Leningrad
was read for workshop and shocked by the news,
she asked the playwright, “Is it true, they boiled
their dead comrades and ate the boiling soup?”
The actor, overhearing surprise, quipped,
“What do you think? Those halal carts, who knows
what they put in to make the food taste good!”
The joke blindsided her. She can’t forget,
standing with Zini by their car, outside
the supermarket in Connecticut,
a Jewish man wearing a Jewish hat
espying her tudung, accosted her
for her opinion on the Middle East,
the bombing of the bus in Jerusalem,
his face so close she only saw his eyes
and only heard one sick and frightening thought—
where was Izmir? what was taking him
so long? She took her time to go to God.
After her heart stopped in the hospital,
her grandmother woke up from her coma
a vegetative thing, dear thing, and lived
with Zizi’s family for four years. Her uncle,
who went to Pearl Jam concerts with his wife
and cheered on her choice to wear the burka,
was thrown off from his motorbike and died.
She closed her show in Singapore and drove
to sit in KL with sequestered grief.
Along the drive up north and afterwards,
the question, like a supertitle, flashed—
“Why do I have to wait for someone else
to die before I take faith seriously?”
She started by praying five times a day,
pulled on long sleeves and then pulled on long pants,
smiled, frowned, smirked, narrowed her eyes at the mirror
before she ventured out, her hair well hidden.
It helped that Izmir gave her for her birthday
an Alexander McQueen headscarf, all
grinning skulls and smoky purple and brown.
She tells me this because she believes faith
is modern and because she knows I think
it’s hip, a silky crown by another queen,
and will include the detail in my poem,
and so I do. She’s writing a play now
about a rock band from Syria, whose faith
in music is contested by the war,
her graduate thesis on grudging theisms.
She loves New York. And Zini loves it too.
In school she studies French and Mandarin,
besides English, ethics and art as well.
She reads her storybooks when out of school,
or weaves her tapestry or plays the piano,
and when she is not doing any of these,
she writes poetry. She will learn soon enough
whom she is writing for, beyond herself,
her separate and united audiences,
who grow clearer when she closes her eyes,
as her namesake praised God for blinding her
and for returning her sight praised Him again.

[JFN]

Jee, glad it was the Marquis. Markedly more appropriate to the poem. I must try not to overthink these things.

I take it these are interviews that you have personally undertaken? It would explain why they feel so naturally written, alongside your obvious talent as a writer. The central question in The Muslim works well as a pivot point between others' assumptions and Zizi's realisation. faith / is modern is a sentiment that I wholeheartedly agree with; I like that section a lot, along with the overall feeling of making the best of the opportunities available.

This should turn into a lovely collection.

John

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Hi Jee,

Good to see you back.

The Daughter -- I like stories too, and enjoyed this one. I like the way the sprawl of real-life history is held together by the recurrence of the animals (and caring for them), the echo of her mother in the sister's "own alien family", and the reference Lafayette reference at the close. (Though to be honest I only got the Lafayette reference when I googled, thinking at first it was a place). I don't know what Neil's objection to 'strafed' was, but in terms of the metre, I did stumble on it.

The Muslim -- I really like this: the way you weave themes of love and faith and persecution -- and different kinds of faith, love and persecution -- through the anecdotes and details of her life. A really strong draft. I'll be back to read this again.

Looking forward to more.

-Matt

[Sorella]

Jee
The Muslim -- how absolutely lovely and topical!
"She tells me this because she believes faith
is modern and because she knows I think*
it’s hip, a silky crown by another queen,
and will include the detail in my poem,
and so I do."
You rock!

Sorella

[Jee Leong]

John, overthinking is good! You reminded me of the shopping mall back home. Now I like having the irrelevant echo at the end of the poem. Yes, the poems come from actual interviews with actual people. I have written a few, though, that are based on research, because the subject is either dead or otherwise unavailable.

Matt, thanks for your observations on the poems. I'm glad to hear that the details are forming themselves into a tapestry and not winding away into loose threads. I have not been very narrative in my poetry, so this is a departure for me.

Sorella, those are some of my favorite lines of the poems too! They give the interviewee some measure of influence on the final poem, so she is not at the mercy of the interviewer/writer. The double consciousness is what I'm getting from my re-reading of Henry James.

[Jee Leong]

The Columnist

for Kopin Tan, who renounced his Singapore citizenship in October, 2018.


The questionnaire required him to rank
his top three reasons. Children’s education.
Property prices. NS. CPF.
Thinking the answers only acronyms
for the good life defined by Singapore,
he chose to write next to the label Others.
He could have said he was the very first
gay Asian columnist for Barron’s, with
tens of thousands of followers, death threats
for dumping on the casinos, and he
threw over the stock market for his novel.
Or, more facetiously, he could have said
he liked Tate’s cookies. Or, more tellingly,
the pictures of his SG friends and wives,
but when he posted on Facebook holiday
snaps of his husband, deafening silence.
They liked his cheesecake photos well enough.
They did not like the pics of Tom and him.
Being an aspiring writer, he could have
added the grace note of that special time,
his teens, nose in The Swimming Pool Library,
he read about sex in the changing room,
another swimming pool in an elite school
floated to mind, also the swimming trunks
suspended at the back of the classroom
to dry (hearing him speak, I saw again
the wing-cowering, petroleum-covered birds),
what made the younger female teachers blush.
The trunks spoke volumes: he the willing scribe
could just outline their bios in this form,
enough to rub some noses in the pubes.
Or else he could have added, for the record,
before reason number one, before zero,
he was a block away from World Trade Center,
doing an interview with some big shot,
in Marriot’s Room 1703,
when the first tower chased a falling man
down to the ground, and everything the dust
covered turned white. Sprinting down, he was
out on the street to cover the event,
following his reporter’s nose. Bodies,
or what could be identified as bodies,
leeched the life blood from his face. Strangers stripped
their dress shirts off for masks and doused them
from bottles given free by hotdog vendors.
The smoldering smell persisted on Wall Street
more than a month later. Once in a while
the subway car would hear a cry, and sob.
He bonded with his city then, I thought,
reading his article, a hymn of love,
a declaration, a new constitution
drawn up, and ratified by meeting Tom
in Therapy, the bar and not the shrink,
and marrying in New York’s City Hall.
He could have said, gaily, and that is why
I’m turning in my passport and IC,
one long expired, but the other not,
and what he declared would have been a lie.
It would not have taken into account
the sad little bar squatting at the top
of Lucky Plaza, where men fell each night
into their drinks and could no way be dried.
The lonely hours of driving in a shell,
where was no standing up or lying down
but offered escape still, no questions asked
but Whitney’s “Don’t you wanna dance with me,”
on Nicoll Drive, which ran beside the coast
but wrote and rewrote O, number and letter.
Because of those drowned mouths, he was to write
for his one reason on the questionnaire
the criminalization of homo…
quantified those hours as 377
and graded his own answer with an A.


Notes:

NS: National Service, the compulsory military service that every Singaporean male citizen has to serve.

CPF: Central Provident Fund, a compulsory retirement savings scheme run by the Singapore state.

SG: Abbreviation of “Singapore.”

Lucky Plaza and Nicoll Drive: shopping mall and coastal road in Singapore

377A: The section of Singapore’s Penal Code proscribing sex between men.

[lauriene]

I have just read the first two and was enthralled through and through, both with the tales themselves and with your ability to entertain with story telling but without it being prosy. You are very skilled at poeticizing both past and present cultural issues with prevalent intolerance from an unbiased stance as a journalist. It makes your poetry enthralling.

The Daughter has some great moments and history. You manage to bridge time and geography so well without missing a beat.

The Muslim is epic story-telling and feels like a very important and relevant poem. I especially love the insertion of the interviewer halfway through and, well, with just a little bit of judicious pruning, just the whole poem in its entirety.

These lines in particular stood out to me:

a scarf tightened around and in her eyes.
Love is blind and yet can see too much.

and

when the first tower chased a falling man

and, of course, the Alexander McQueen lines. Divine.

Very powerful. I will be back to read the Columnist and look forward to the rest of your Sevens! Thank you.

[Donner]

Hi, Jee,

"I'm glad to hear that the details are forming themselves into a tapestry and not winding away into loose threads." Not at all, these are epic and so well-written. Which makes it a challenge to offer comments. They're intimate in the same way a lengthy one-on-one interview you might watch is - or should be - and that intimacy, along with being biographical, makes them captivating and fascinating. I almost wish they were longer. (But you being the writer you are, knew where they should end.) They also work because you get the both the interviewer's and the subject's perspectives.

Donna

[5th column]

I enjoy that the subject in the last poem is moving toward something and not just away. Without that the poem would lose the balance it has in its current form.

What concerns me at present is that for the first time in my lifetime I'm watching progress, globally, not only being denied, but on the brink of being rolled back.