Singapore Writers Festival: Opening Night with Irish focus by Elaine Chiew

Opening Ceremony, Yeow Kai Chai. Courtesy of Elaine Chiew

With every year that it’s held, the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) gets bigger, more ambitious, and more prominent – this year featuring close to 500 writers (of all stripes – from poets to playwrights, non-fiction writers to musicians of the written word) and from around the world, with Ireland being the country of special focus.  

The theme of Aram (which means “to do good”) is the first ever Tamil theme for the festival and takes its inspiration from the widely revered literary work in Tamil – Thirukkurai; aptly, this year SWF aims to focus on ethical quandaries and moral conundrums. Lo, how “particularly pertinent in a world [of]…increasing…fragmentation and polarisation, where it gets harder for people to agree to disagree,” as guest of honour, Ms Sim Ann, the Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth and Ministry of Trade and Industry says.

Eastbridge Books by John Ross

Camphor Press is a UK-based publisher specialising in English language books about East Asia, particularly Taiwan.  The company recently acquired an American company, EastBridge, and is now making its titles available to a new readership. John Ross, one of the co-founders of Camphor Press, here explains…

Contemporary voices: State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang

In her regular column Contemporary voices Elaine Chiew explores books and authors making waves around Asia, and beyond. Here she discusses State of Emergency, by Jeremy Tiang, from Singapore.

Henry James apparently said, “It takes a lot of history to produce a little literature.”  One might find this proven true in Jeremy Tiang’s debut novel, State of Emergency, which cuts across swaths of history starting from the Batang Kali massacre in Malaya by Scots Guards in 1948, wending through key episodes of Communist suppression in Singapore, such as the Hock Lee Bus Riots (1955), Operation Coldstore (1967) and Operation Spectrum (1983), the detention of a Catholic priest and various church members in 1987, fetching up to current day Singapore (the MRT system that’s like “something out of science fiction” and Tiong Bahru likened to Hoxton, London.)

We must protect wildlife along the Ganges, by Victor Mallet

Does the Ganges have a future? That’s the question posed by River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future by journalist and author, Victor Mallet. From 2012 to 2016 Victor was based in New Delhi as the Financial Times South Asia bureau chief, and he is currently in Hong Kong as the paper’s Asia news editor. 

Victor’s new book exposes an environmental crisis of international significance, with revelations about extreme levels of pollution, antibiotic resistance, droughts, and floods - the Goddess Ganga, the holy waterway that has nourished more people than any on earth for three millennia, is now so polluted with sewage and toxic waste that it has become a menace to human and animal health.

As he documents the degradation, Victor traces the holy river from source to mouth, and from ancient times to the present day. During four years of first-hand reporting, he encounters everyone from the naked holy men who worship the river, to the engineers who divert its waters for irrigation, to the scientists who study its bacteria - not forgetting Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, who says he wants to save India's mother-river for posterity.

As one Hindu sage told Victor in Rishikesh, on the banks of the Upper Ganges: "If Ganga dies, India dies. If Ganga thrives, India thrives. The lives of 500 million people is no small thing."

And the lives of animals relying on the Ganges are no small thing, either.  In this guest post, Victor calls for a revival of the wildlife-protection decree of the Emperor Ashoka, from the third century BC.

So, over to Victor…

Why I published Pai Naa by Phil Tatham

Not long before the outbreak of World War Two a young British woman, Nona Baker, sailed to Malaya to join her eldest brother, Vin, the tuan besar (general manager), of the world’s largest tin mine. When the Japanese army invaded, Nona and Vin hid out in the jungle with Chinese communist guerrillas - the people who would later become the communist terrorists of the Malayan Emergency. By the time the British surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942, nearly all white civilians had left Malaya - but Nona and Vin stayed on in the jungle. For three years, Nona, now known as Pai Naa (White Nona), the name given her by the Chinese guerrillas, avoided capture by the Japanese and betrayal by spies before at last she was delivered safely into the care of war hero Freddie Spencer Chapman.

Pai Naa is Nona’s account her time in the jungle - with her hair cut short she worked alongside the guerrillas, and with the guerrillas she suffered malaria, dysentery, beriberi, hunger and above all, fear.

Nona chronicled her experiences with assistance from Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross. Pai Naa was first published in 1959. UK-based Monsoon Books has just published a reissue.  Since Nona, Dorothy, and Robert are now all dead, Monsoon’s publisher, Phil Tatham, here speaks on behalf of the book they jointly produced, and explains why he republished Pai Naa for a twenty-first century readership. 

So, over to Phil…

500 Words from Alice Poon

500 words from is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their newly-published novels.

Alice Poon, author of The Green Phoenix, a novel of Old China, currently lives in Canada but she was born and educated in Hong Kong.  She grew up devouring Jin Yong’s martial arts and chivalry novels, all set in China’s distant past. That sparked her ambition to write historical novels of her own.

The Green Phoenix tells the story of the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, born a Mongolian princess, who became a consort in the Manchu court and then the Qing Dynasty’s first matriarch. She lived through harrowing threats, endless political crises, personal heartaches and painful losses to lead a shaky empire out of a dead end. The story is set against a turbulent canvas as the Chinese Ming Dynasty is replaced by the Qing. Xiaozhuang guides her husband, her lover, her son and her grandson  to success against the odds, and to the creation of an empire that lasted for 250 years.

So, over to Alice…

Backlist books: I Am a Cat by Sōseki Natsume

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post is about I Am a Cat, a series of semi-related stories published serially in 1905 and 1906 that provide a satirical look at Meiji-era Japan through the eyes of a smug young housecat.

Either eminent Japanese novelist Sōseki Natsume (1867 – 1916), also known for his novels Kokoro and Botchan, was prescient for choosing an uppity lolcat as his narrator, or that special attitude cats have has always been apt to make us laugh.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read I Am a Cat, or what you should know about it even if you never do!