For two decades, Singaporean diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani has been a leading voice among a growing group of intellectuals and pundits publicizing the “Asian Twenty-First Century”, a triumphalist arc where Asian powers—especially a rising China—have cast off the shackles of Western colonialism to assume their “rightful” place atop in the global hierarchy of nations and civilizations. Mahbubani’s oeuvre, dominated by his series of bestsellers popularizing a tale of Western decline and Asia’s rise, has won recognition from a host of audiences ranging from American internationalists and Chinese nationalists.
Singapore
Migration, especially in literature, is normally seen as having “the West” as its destination. Migration within Asia, from the less affluent to richer places, appears far less often. Singapore, for example, has had a long history as a trading port drawing in merchants and laborers from East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Singapore’s colonial history also left in its wake connections with other British colonies like India—and this link is the core of Prasanthi Ram’s Nine Yard Sarees.
For much of his life, Jay Prosser was uncertain of where he belonged. He was “Jewish and not, British and Asian, Iraqi, English, Welsh, Chinese”. With a military father, his family moved often. At a boarding school, he was dubbed a “half-caste”. At synagogue, he felt like an imposter. Prosser’s memoir, Loving Strangers, tells the story of how he forged a sense of belonging, and a deep appreciation of his multicultural heritage and Jewish faith, through the excavation of a camphorwood chest.
Born of a Swiss mother and an Indian father and raised in England, Meira Chand’s novels have been set in Japan, Singapore, and India, and a couple have been adapted for the stage in London and Singapore. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she lived in India. Her recent book, The Pink, White and Blue Universe, is a new collection of thirteen stories set in India, many of which tackle the issues of belonging.
As Comet Hyakutake passes Earth in March 1996, four friends experience an array of puzzling events: the dead reappear and the living disappear. Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier begins in Kyoto, where the paths of Isaac Neo, Tori Yamamoto, Jing Aw and Mateo Calvo Morales first intersect, and where the trajectory of their lives change after one weekend together. Divided into three parts to weave through different perspectives, years and cities including Kyoto, Madrid and Singapore, Yam presents a story of once-in-a-lifetime encounters, not just with the brightest and closest comet to approach Earth in 200 years, but also with people.
Modern Singapore is the city in a garden, a biophilic and highly managed urban space that is home to a variety of animals, from mosquitoes to humans to polar bears. How has this coexistence worked as we enter the Anthropocene? How have human-animal relationships shaped Singapore society—socially, economically, politically and environmentally—over the last half century?
The opening story of Eternal Summer of My Homeland, the debut story collection from Singaporean author Agnes Chew, is about grief. Hui Shan loses her mother right before the birth of her first child—and gradually cuts her father out of her life after he refuses to do the traditional things one does to commemorate the death of a family member. Until she learns what her father has actually been doing: Growing a garden, illegally, on Singaporean government land.