The Interpreter's Daughter by Teresa Lim (Pegasus Books)

When Teresa Lim began to investigate her family history, she thought the primary figure would be her great-grandfather, a man who emigrated from China to Singapore when he was young and the British still controlled their island colony. Known to his descendants simply as Law, Law Foong-Siew’s father made sure that he and his sons paid for their tickets to Singapore themselves. Although this put them in debt to relatives, that was preferable to having a future employer pay for their passage and ensuring them to a life of indentured servitude, working as coolies to pay off a never-ending debt.

Law had two other advantages working in his favor. He had received an education and he had a flair for languages. Immediately embarking on English classes that were almost free, Law stood out among his fellow students who were almost all without education or an aptitude for learning English. He eventually became part of the colonial bureaucracy, an interpreter for British officials and a member of the Chinese Protectorate. Even though he abandoned the life of officialdom when the pay proved to be insufficient to support his wife and children, the prestige of that post carried him into a successful business career.

Long before Lim began to excavate Law’s history, when she was a little girl she asked her mother if their family had a tragedy befall them when the Japanese occupied Singapore during World War Two. Yes, her mother said, it happened to her aunt. No more was said and Lim forgot about this until she saw this woman in family photos.

Fanny Law was Law’s youngest child, much younger than her sisters and brothers, and she seemed to have been erased from the family history. Nobody wanted to talk about her and it took Lim huge amounts of painstaking research to discover who her great-aunt was and why she had become a non-entity in her family.

Fanny was her father’s favorite, the one who remained with him after her older sisters had married and her brothers pursued their careers. Law made certain she was educated, first by her oldest brother who steeped her in Confucian thought and codes of duty, then at an elite girl’s school where Fanny excelled. She was a brilliant scholar, one of the few Singaporeans to be accepted at the University of Hong Kong.

But before any of this took place, Fanny persuaded Law to allow her to take the vows of a “sworn spinster.” She had seen how one sister died within her marriage while the other left her husband when he insisted on having a concubine and was now, with her young children, dependent upon her father for shelter, food, and economic support. Fanny was determined to remain single and eventually persuaded her father to agree. Standing before the family altar with guests in attendance, she vowed to live a life of independence and celibacy, setting up her own household and taking on full support for her sister and her sister’s children. In return, her father ensured that Fanny would receive an education in English.

By the time she was 26, Fanny had a teaching position in Singapore, had her own house, and provided the sole support of her sister, niece, and nephew. She spent a brief period at the University of Hong Kong, failing her examination in English at the end of her first year, but that was enough to launch her teaching career.

But World War Two is brewing, boiling over when the Japanese invade China and move onward to take North Vietnam. From there they have a clear path into Southeast Asia and Singapore, supposedly impregnable, becomes a target for Japanese bombers. “Singapore won’t fall,” Winston Churchill proclaims after the British lose Penang, but once Malaysia is invaded, Singapore is doomed.

The conquering Japanese have around 30, 000 troops to control more than 300,000 Singaporean Chinese men. They single out those whom they discover are leaders and they execute them. One of these men is Fanny’s oldest brother and Fanny reverts to the Confucian ideals that he had taught her. The decision she makes is enough to eradicate her memory—until her great-niece uncovers her story.

“I wish I had known Fanny,” Lim says but discovers that without her great-aunt’s fateful decision, Lim herself would never have existed. Lim’s mother had been given to Fanny with the understanding that she too would become a sworn spinster. But while Fanny’s adopted daughter couldn’t keep her aunt’s memory alive, her own daughter becomes the one to return her to the family history.

The Interpreter’s Daughter takes on too much and this sinks it. A biography mingled with a detailed family history and the writer’s personal memoir, along with a concise account of the opening years of World War Two would be a substantial weight for any book. The crushing addition comes when Lim embroiders upon a brief sentence spoken by her mother. When Lim asks about the conclusion to Fanny’s education, her mother tells her, “There was a young man.” From that Lim invents a romance between Fanny and a family friend, with stilted conversation and a melodramatic conclusion. Since this is the only attempt at a novelization of Fanny’s life, it falls flat and diminishes Lim’s careful research.

Even with this flaw, the Law family history and the woman who honored all who came before her is a remarkable record of how rapidly the world has changed in such a dazzlingly short time. Fanny Law was a woman born too soon and paid the price for that accident of birth.~Janet Brown

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead Books)

At first only a small boy is able to find the islands. Ah Boon is on his father’s fishing boat when the first island appears, with its bounty of fish that will bring financial stability without effort. Elusive and mysterious, the island is gone when the next trip to it takes place, reappearing only when Ah Boon is on the boat to search for it. It turns out to be one of several islands, never before seen by the small village of fisherman who profit from this discovery. 

Money from the steady crop of fish sends Ah Boon to school, an unusual step for a child raised in a kampong, one of many villages at the edge of the sea, surrounded by mangrove trees. There he meets Siok Mei, a spirited, smart orphan from the kampong and their friendship is a fiercely loyal one, even when politics drives a wedge between them. Siok Mei becomes a Communist activist while Ah Boon finds an opportunity to join the Gah Men, British-educated Chinese from the city who find an economic goldmine in the mangrove swamps on the coast. First lured by the air-conditioned coolness and the television set in the newly built community center that has been built in the kampong, the villagers begin to understand that another, more comfortable, life exists outside of what they’ve always known. When Ah Boon tells them about the apartments that will soon be built nearby, ones with electricity, plumbing, bathrooms, and refrigerators, slowly they abandon their fishing village for these newfound luxuries and the construction equipment moves in. 

Singapore, the island they live on, needs more land. To get it, the Gah Men remove the mangroves, fill in the swamp, and extend Singapore into the sea. The kampongs disappear, the fishermen who live in high-rise buildings lose their livelihood, and Communism becomes a threat to be eradicated. Ah Boon and Siok Mei are on separate and dangerous pathways but their friendship pulls them together again.

Rachel Heng juxtaposes a mythic way of life against the hard truths of history, taking her characters from 1941 into the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945 and up to Singapore’s independence from Great Britain and its short-lived merger with Malaysia. The Great Reclamation shows how Singapore stamped out kampong culture in the service of its expansion, an act that would lead to the island eventually increasing its land mass by 22%. Since 1965, Singapore has gone from 227 square miles to 277 square miles and plans to reclaim another 38 by 2030, bringing it to over 300. In the process people who have traditionally been rooted to the seacoast are now far from it, suspended in buildings that keep their feet from the earth.

Rachel Heng’s characters are all servants of this history, each of them representing a fragment of Singapore’s past. None of them go much beyond this and the tragedy that engulfs them seems pallid as a result. It’s the kampong that’s given vivid life with descriptions that are bound to make readers mourn its disappearance--and when the enigmatic islands become threatened, this has more resonance than what takes place between Ah Boon and Siok Mei. 

This is a fine introduction to Singapore’s modern history but as a novel it falls short. Rarely does fiction cry out for a timeline but this book definitely does.~Janet Brown

Clash of Honour by Robert Mendelsohn (Prion)

Clash of Honour is Robert Mendelsohn’s debut novel and was first published in 1989. The story will take you to Thailand, Singapore, Burma, Spain and Japan. It centers on the theme honor, deceit, betrayal, loyalty and obligation. It is mostly a story of revenge and how far a person will go to achieve their aims without giving thought to the consequences of their actions.

The story opens in Bangkok, Thailand in December of 1975. A young English woman, the daughter of a British soldier and a Spanish mother, has come to the country and is heading Bang Saray, the place where her father died. 

Anna Bellingham is the daughter of Lt. Derek Pritchard, a soldier who was captured by the Japanese Imperial Army after the fall of Singapore. She is determined to find a man named Yoshiro Katsumata in the hopes of leading her to his father, Lt. Keichi Katsumata,the man she believes was responsible for her father’s death.

Yoshiro Katsumata is a businessman climbing his way to the top of Sato Kaisha where he works. He may become the first outsider to head the family-owned company. He has no idea that a foreign woman would come looking for him to seek revenge for her father.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, Lt. Derek Pritchard and an Englishman colonel, Dr. James Hedges became Prisoners of War. However, they were not sent to a P.O.W. camp. The two soldiers became a pawn in a secret mission for the Japanese government. 

As the story progresses, the reader begins to question what really happened between Pritchard, Hedges, and Katsumata. Of the three, it is only Pritchard who died in the war. Anna and Yoshiro are told the stories of their fathers by surviving members of the ordeal. 

Hedges was friends with the Pritchard family. As he was present in Bang Saray, Pritchard’s wife insisted on knowing the circumstances of her husband’s death. Listening to the evils committed upon the one she loves, she instills in her daughter the venom and hate against the Japanese and especially against Lt. Keichi Katsumata.

Yoshiro hears the story of his father from his father’s commanding officer. It is after Anna meets him and is seduced by her that he finds out the truth about her. He feels obligated to ask Pritchard’s family for forgiveness and believes it is his duty as a Japanese son to bear the responsibility of his father to retain the honor of the family name.

It isn’t until the very end where the reader learns the truth surrounding Lt. Derek Pritchard’s death and the motives of those involved. In this story the sins of the father do fall on the son but not all is as it seems. 

In this day and age, having the son bear responsibility for the sins of the father seems to be an outdated idea or at least one where the Bible is misinterpreted as it states, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” 

Japan also has a feudal tradition called katakiuchi which is also the taking of revenge against someone who has killed an ancestor of the avenging party. Fortunately, in today’s society, it is against the law to take the law into one’s own hand. If not, who knows how many unnecessary deaths would continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

Singapore Noir edited by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (Akashic Press)

Shanghai, Saigon, Bangkok—through the centuries these cities have taken on the alluring shadows of carnality and vice. But Singapore? A city where you can drink the tap water but can’t chew gum on the street, where, as myth has it, cameras are hidden in public restrooms to ensure that the occupants flush, where many people refuse to travel because it has the reputation of being the Santa Barbara of the East?

If this is your idea of Singapore, brace yourself because Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is out to change that perception with the collection of stories that she’s edited for Akashic Press, Singapore Noir. These glimpses of the Lion City will have you heading for a hot shower after you put the book down—yes, they are that dark, that gritty, that unsettling.

Singapore, Tan tells us, is a city dominated by girls, gambling, and ghosts, a product of two divergent cultures, English and Chinese.  “No Disneyland here,” she says cheerfully, “but there is a death penalty.” And then she backs up her introduction with fourteen different writers, each showing a city that should be visited in the company of body guards as well as a tour guide.

It’s probably no accident that the two mildest viewpoints are given by S.J, Rozan and Lawrence Osborne. Nonresidents themselves, they give the viewpoint of expatriates in Singapore, with Rozan’s American trailing husband falling in love with the city’s culture and Osborne’s Japanese salaryman falling in love with a tattooed lady of the night. But for those writers who live in Singapore, the darkness is absolute.

From poison to defenestration, death comes fast in these stories, which are vividly populated by debt collectors and prostitutes, rent boys and battered housemaids. They are often difficult to read, with their graphic descriptions of sex and violence. But they show a city that is eerily attractive, decadent, and dangerous. From the kelong houses on the piers to the air-conditioned shopping malls on Orchard Road, they offer a sense of place that is assured and knowledgeable beneath the layers of crime.

Macaques, mahogany trees, and street markets, the “green and ordered legacy” of colonialism, the “deathly quiet” of the city’s Nature Reserve, the sea with “shades of blue…like flowing silk,” the cadence and music of Singlish, “the swirling scents of curry, coconut milk, and coriander,” all give a gleaming luster to a city that is as clean and safe—or dark and dirty—as you might want it to be. Singapore Noir takes away the stigma of Asia Lite from the city-state by draping it in dark and sinister beauty.~Janet Brown

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