Adrian Tan

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Samuel Lee
Dated 28 May 2021

Adrian Tan is the author of two novels, The Teenage Textbook or The Melting of the Ice Cream Girl (1988) and its sequel The Teenage Workbook or The Passing of An April Shower (1989), both of which were adapted as the 1998 film, The Teenage Textbook Movie (dir. Philip Lim). Tan was also an anonymous advice columnist in the late 1980s, the letters for which were later collected and published as Dear Adam, help! (1988). He is a lawyer by training and wrote extensively as an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Law. While this critical introduction to Tan’s fiction focuses on the two novels (hereafter referred to as the Textbook and Workbook), it will also consider the critical contexts within which Tan’s body of work may be historicised, read, and discussed. 

Background and reception

The Textbook and Workbook attracted considerable attention when they were published, appearing at the top of bestseller lists and even gathering a “cult following” among school-going teenagers, as reported in the Straits Times (Khor 1). The success of Tan’s novels, which came close on the heels of another local bestseller, First Loves (1987), a short story collection by Philip Jeyaretnam, prompted some discussion in the pages of Singapore’s national paper on the choice of Singapore fiction writers to write about the “personal and parochial” rather than to “focus on politics, economics and other social issues” (Sasitharan 9). It would be instructive to consider how, despite the strong popular reception of the Textbook and Workbook, the bibliography of Singapore and Malaysia in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature omits these titles from its listing of literary work published between 1987 and 1989. Its bibliographer Margaret Yong, writing in 1990, comments on the tendency of contemporary writers and scholars to approach history and memory as resources for thinking about personal and collective identity, citing Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill (1989) as one example of a general impulse among writers in Singapore to thematise such senses of the past. Likewise, the editors of Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature, exclude the Textbook and Workbook from their periodisation of a Singapore “literary history,” in which neither section on the post-independence decades (“1965–1990”) nor on contemporary writing (“1990–present”) mentions Tan’s writing. To date, there has been no sustained critical attention given to the novels; only its late-1990s adaptation The Teenage Textbook Movie has been discussed in a study on the history of cinema in Singapore (Uhde 130–2). Indeed, a powerful but unspoken line is drawn between popular or genre fiction and the sphere of cultural production posited as “the literary.” This divide is certainly not peculiar to the writing and publishing of prose in Singapore, but yet demands further critical evaluation, especially given the relatively smaller scale of publishing in this context. 

Form and narrative structure

The structure of the Textbook and Workbook may be described as a series of short episodic chapters interleaved by excerpts from the titular “Teenage Textbook” and “Teenage Workbook,” which appear in the narrative as physical volumes that the characters handle, exchange, consult, and anguish over in search of love and advice. Narrated in the third person, the Textbook and Workbook track, in linear chronological succession, the romantic entanglements of a motley group of students in their first four months at the fictional Paya Lebar Junior College. A kind of perspectival switch occurs during the metatextual “Teenage Textbook” and “Teenage Workbook” interludes, when characters encounter and engage with these books within the text, holding them up to our eyes, as it were, if only to reproduce the failure of practical advice: a main character, Mui Ee, falls asleep after reading a few pages of the “Teenage Textbook,” as a result of being “overcome by the soporific effect of the paperback with the shamelessly plain cover” (Textbook 59). She repeatedly condemns its advice, calling it “totally unhelpful” (4) and a “lousy book” (165) after consulting its pages for help on the baroque complexities of teenage dating etiquette. 

On the other side of the equation, Chung Kai, Mui Ee’s romantic interest, reads the same book but takes its advice without scepticism (“[he] tried to follow the three T’s [of a successful first phone call] to . . . well, a T” [Textbook 70]), creating conditions for a perpetual comedy of errors when calibrated social signs—the methodical withholding and giving of attention—are misjudged. The same formula is used in the Workbook. It is thereby through chronic misreading, crossed lines of interpretation, and pathological overthinking that the plot gains momentum, if only to resolve its problems by the end of the series. 

While it may be argued that Tan gestures towards metatextual play in the narrative structure of the texts, for example, through the use of the “Textbook” and “Workbook” interludes, the novels are still inclined towards a resolution of ideas (genre conventions are retained) and formal boundaries (textual levels, of frame narrative or omniscient narrator, are not transgressed). Thus they do not represent a “period-style” postmodernity or metafictionality characteristic of literary production in the 1980s, helmed by Umberto Eco, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and the like. That is not to downplay the ambitions of the Workbook and Textbook, but to draw attention to the revival of an interest in a new kind of literary realism, towards which Tan’s novels seem to aspire. Not unlike the representation of the social and economic world of bourgeoise urban life, which the heteroglossia and polyvocality of the novel-form affords, the Textbook and Workbook through its form and structure attends to the social milieu of the postcolonial nation-state, which Tan characterises by its top-down policymaking, linguistic code-switching and class-marking, the pervasiveness and plurality of media forms and images, among the many other peculiarities and vexations that elude the grasp of conventional literary representation.

Mass media and literary culture

The Textbook and Workbook depart from the historical-literary imagination that animates the work of an earlier generation of writers in Singapore cited in the aforementioned bibliographies of the era. For one, Tan eschews “literariness” for the language and sensibility of a popular readership attuned to mass culture, tending towards snappy referentiality instead of slow description. Sean Penn, for example, is counterintuitively described as “a famous Western pugilist” (Textbook 8); in another instance, someone is overheard in a double-decker bus exclaiming that they “just don’t understand U2 songs” amid a collage-like sequence of eavesdropped conversations (Workbook 208). Tan’s prose does not attempt to evoke the past, but instead roots itself in the contemporary moment, specifically, of the experience of navigating life in a junior college in Singapore while being surrounded by a swirl of media images and texts. If any suggestion of the past is brought up, it reaches us only partially, in fits and fragments that have the quality of rumour and hearsay. A character leering at Sissy, Mui Ee’s closest friend, is described in such a capsule-like manner:

. . . He was Hoo Hong-Wei, first born son of the millionaire tycoon Mr Hoo Wu. Singapore’s Who’s Who describes who’s Hoo Wu as a 58-year-old Chinese businessman who made a fortune in the house paint business. Eight years ago, he started selling a colour of paint known as Jealous Green which became very popular. Many people painted their flats with this colour as it had a soothing effect. Thus, the businessman became known as the Hoo Wu whose hue you’d view. (Workbook 7)

This passage compresses a recent history of wealth and the global economy in the 1980s in the service of a punchline, and the sophistication of Tan’s linguistic humour is worth appraising here and throughout these texts. In the offhand use of the term “flats” to describe the kind of housing that the consumers of “Jealous Green” live in, the passage is but one of the many moments in which Tan appears to approach questions of wealth, consumerism and inequality, while avoiding direct commentary on society and politics within the text. More remarkable instances occur through the perspective of Kok Sean, whose well-heeled upbringing causes him to feel disoriented when visiting Mui Ee’s Housing Development Board neighbourhood, and his wondering at how “they squeeze three people into this house” is registered as genuine shock inasmuch as it is played for comic exaggeration (Workbook 200). The idea of socioeconomic gaps—dramatised in Mui Ee’s obeisance to parental instruction in government-subsidised housing and Kok Sean’s inconsequential capers that take place on private property—is not pursued, however, but displaced or deferred in the course of switching the narrative focus to another set of characters. The frequency at which these cuts occur is not necessarily a deflection, but a stylistic strategy through which the narrative’s relationship to time is conceived: the frenetic pace at which alliances and desires change and evolve, as well as the ways in which relative, or “felt,” time within the institutional and national framework seems to charge relentlessly along.


Accelerated temporalities

The motifs of speed, auto-culture, and traffic that run through the Textbook and Workbook      are thereby significant as the main avenues by which the friction of social stratification is marked, despite the shared institutional affiliations of all the characters. Figures in Tan’s novels are constantly entering cars, emerging from cars, and talking about cars. An early passage in the Textbook has Kok Sean offering his friend Chung Kai a ride to school, before swerving through traffic in a large Volvo “with big, roomy seats and a wonderfully powerful stereo system” (8), and then spiralling into a fit of road rage as he “[takes] his frustration out on the accelerator” (9). In another chapter, Hong Wei pulls up with a “chauffeur-driven gold-plated Mercedes 500 SEL” (Workbook 134) to talk to a friend who he meets on the way to Sissy’s house; elsewhere, Mui Ee learns that a love interest’s girlfriend drives a “rather old, battered sportscar” with its dashboard “filled with assorted papers, tiny toys etc.” (Textbook 87). And while the frequency of their appearance in the novels seems to be in comical excess, cars play no important function in the plotline, much unlike the Chekhovian gun. The narrative, too, refers to this knowingly, and the supposed fatal collision between a speeding double-decker bus “crammed to the brim with struggling, suffocating passengers” and Chung Kai and Mui Ee is immediately revealed to be an April Fool’s prank played on the reader by the narrator (Workbook 90–1). 

While cars are constantly referenced and discussed to foreground status and wealth (often juxtaposed with the public buses that characters such as Mui Ee and Chung Kai take), describing the function of the motif this way is insufficient to account for its recurrence. Rather, there is critical value in assessing the investments of narration and description on the banal details of how characters drive their cars, navigate the roads, and find parking. Pivotal moments in characters’ interior lives and external relationships, moreover, take place on the road, creating parallels between movement and mood that function as broader comments on the rhythm of institutional and national time in Singapore. The fallout between Miss Boon and Captain Hari, an older couple featured in the Textbook and Workbook, over a decision to move overseas for work is played out in a description of a single car ride. While Miss Boon at first takes pleasure from “the lullaby of the windshield wipers going click, rub, click, rub” (Workbook 192) upon entering the car, an icy silence descends upon them after an argument about emigration, during which Captain Hari argues that “Singapore drives [him] nuts” (196), in spite of her wish to remain in Singapore, where she prefers to be with family and friends (195). Following the argument, the couple “drove for several kilometres. Out, past Orchard Road, past Nicoll Highway, past Guillemard Road . . .” (196), traversing in silence the roadways that constitute their strained senses of home and identity. The latter reference best crystallises Tan’s expanded usage of the motif to encompass national time, in which an incipient geo-poetics of the nation-state is conceived through the banal flashing-past of urban landscapes in rhythmic succession. While Miss Boon and Captain Hari’s dialogue contains the seed of a social-realist plot, Tan truncates this plotline, cutting to another set of characters, almost as a kind of strategic deferral.  

For Tan, time is neither compressed nor stretched, but signposted and measured episodically and institutionally. The narrative displaces the experience of speed and acceleration onto the mostly frenetic pace of dialogue and action, with sharp cuts between scenes and perspectives, as if speeding through the passage of time. But it also structures itself around institutional time: the Textbook and Workbook are bookended by the first day of school and the final day of the junior college orientation period, which is to say that the temporal framing of the novels is predetermined from the start by the idiosyncrasies of a national school calendar. This mode of measuring time revolves around the bureaucratic rhythm of examinations, exam results, and school postings, which the narrator explains in ironic detail (Workbook 28–9). If there is any mention of life between and beyond institutional time, or if institutional time even functions properly, it is undermined quickly: a broken non-functioning clocktower presides over the grounds of a certain Holland Crescent Secondary School because “the school dog got crushed in the clockwork” back in 1971 (Workbook 30), and recreational activities that mark out leisure time during the orientation period are described as “silly games organised by the senseless, supervised by the listless and played by the shameless” (Textbook 28), undermining the idea of shared timekeeping as a communal, or community-making, practice. 

Beyond the school, another variety of institutional time provides sharp contrast. Daisy Sopramaniam, the wife of PJC principal E Sopramaniam, is revealed to be “the most efficient woman warrant officer in the history of the Singapore Armed Forces” (Workbook 171). Her penchant for barking orders at home is associated with military schedules, though the language of the military is enmeshed with the intimacies of domestic life:

“Look, Elvie, [Daisy] said irritably. “I’m going down to camp now. We are preparing for another full-scale all-night open mobilisation of reservists – so I’ll be having dinner out, don’t bother to cook for me. But don’t waste your time over your identity crisis. Don’t forget, today you have to do the windows. There will be an inspection at 0600 hrs tomorrow. Understand?” (Workbook 213)

While a kind of power inversion takes place on the level of gender for comedic effect, the humour of the situation also revolves around the policy of compulsory conscription of the adult male population; at the time of writing, the National Service (Amendment) Bill had been in effect for about twenty years, or barely a single generation of Singaporeans. Military time is caricaturised in the Workbook to the point of absurdity, and it is worth considering the similar presentation of military experience in popular contemporary texts such as Michael Chiang’s play, Army Daze (1987). The narrative set up by Tan, however, suggests longer temporalities of life in the Singaporean context through the eventual militarisation of civilians, introducing a kind of expectation that the text hardly needs to enunciate. 

Certainly, this question of enunciation runs at the core of the Textbook and Workbook. The pedagogical flavour of these titles sets up the promise of an education in the setting of an educational institution, but it is made clear at the end, during the school beauty pageant marking the end of student orientation, that any enlightenment or resolution can only be obtained through disentangling crossed lines of communication. Rather than the movement from ignorance to experience, the idea of individual growth might be more accurately described as a function of damage control, when characters are finally afforded time to communicate desires directly and decisively. Indeed, Kok Sean’s lisp is played up for laughs throughout the novel as a dimension of inarticulateness, culminating in the encounter after the pageant between him and a policeman, who misrecognises the lisp for the slurred tongue of inebriation. Pulling up beside Kok Sean’s car in the rain, the policeman performs a test on him:

“Young man, please say ‘She Sells Sea Shells On The Sea Shore’.”

Kok Sean said, “The Thellth Thea Thellth On The Thea Thore.”

“DRUNK! I knew it! Show me your driver’s license and identity card, please,” the policeman barked, whipping out his notebook. Trust these young people to go speeding on a night like this. (Workbook 245) 

Beyond merely representing literal failures of enunciation, the text also thematises it in its repeated curtailments and truncations on the subject of history, political, and socio-economic issues, as mentioned earlier in this essay. The narrative thread that romantically connects Sissy and Daniel, who has to clarify his sexuality repeatedly (“No, no, I meant it’s true that my parents think I’m a homosexual. It’s a long story. It all began with you” [Workbook 175]) and the representation of effeminacy in the figure of his friend Goei Chong Gay, however, requires closer unpicking, when read in light of the alarmist mood of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality in Singapore. 

It is therefore clear that Tan’s works are not absent of originality, ambition, or style, but rather that their value under the rubric of “Singapore Literature,” with its concomitant assumptions and expectations about the literary, tends to be curtailed when compared to the works of other Singapore authors in the late twentieth century. As a result, the Textbook and Workbook have not attracted or sustained any critical attention, appearing in no major academic study to date. While it may be easy to write-off the popular success of the Textbook and the Workbook to their ability to amuse and entertain readers, particularly those who share with the author the same educational experiences in the culturally specific Singapore junior college system, there is more than surface-level sophistication to the narrative and enunciative structure of Tan’s texts. Beyond their comedy and impudence, the novels track a certain sensibility within the decade that still holds as universal in the present, marking out enduring features of national experience and the almost-cruel velocity of growing up in Singapore. 

Works Cited

Chiang, Michael, Sin Ann Cheah, and Man Loon Chan. Michael Chiang’s Army Daze: The Play. Singapore: Landmark Books, 1987. 

Jeyaretnam, Philip. First Loves. Singapore: Times Books International, 1987. 

Khor, Christine. “Book Bang.” The Straits Times 16 Oct. 1989: 1. 

Kon, Stella. Emily of Emerald Hill: A Monodrama. London: Macmillan Publishers, 1989. 

Poon, Angelia, Philip Holden, and Shirley Lim, eds. Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Singapore: NUS Press, 2009. 

Sasitharan, T. “When Will Fiction Get to Grips with Real Life?” The Straits Times 9 Apr. 1989: 9. 

Tan, Adrian. The Teenage Textbook, or, The Melting of the Ice Cream Girl. Singapore: Hotspot Books, 1988. 

Tan, Adrian. The Teenage Workbook, or, The Passing of an April Shower. Singapore: Hotspot Books, 1989. 

Uhde, Jan, and Yvonne Ng Uhde. Latent Images: Film in Singapore. 2nd ed. Singapore: Ridge Books, 2010. 

Wong, Adam, and Adrian Tan. Dear Adam, Help! Singapore: Hotspot Books, 1988. 

Yong, Margaret. “Malaysia and Singapore.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25.2 (1990): 110–122. 

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