Amanda Lee Koe

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Stellar Virtue

Written by Shirley Chew
Dated 28 May 2021

Amanda Lee Koe is the author of Ministry of Moral Panic (2014), a collection of short stories, and Delayed Rays of a Star (2019), a novel. Ministry of Moral Panic was awarded the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction, and has been dubbed, among other accolades, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘incredible’. To reread the stories half a dozen years on is, once again, to come upon work of vitality and inventiveness.

A sociological concept, “moral panic” occurs when the ideas or behavioural patterns of a person or group of people are viewed as deviant and a threat to existing social norms and cultural values. [i] When public reaction is whipped up by, say, reports of the media, and there is a resultant need to deal with the crisis, the likely outcome is increased social control and legislation that, ultimately, benefit those in authority. With self-reflexive wit, the title of Koe’s collection would seem to ask, on the one hand, if the fourteen stories could be said to risk generating moral panic themselves, concerned as they are with subjects such as gay lovers, adulterers, and a transsexual prostitute soliciting in the streets of Singapore. And, on the other, if Koe’s “unconventional” characters and relationships are simply her attempt at countering the “heavily regulated ethical conservatism often associated with the city-state” (Tsang). Literature, it is said, “escapes politics even when it directly discusses them” (Wood 13). Grounded as Koe’s stories are in the context of their making, what approaches other than the overtly political are open to the reader?

Koe has remarked in an interview “I am always looking for the secret life of anything. Even if it is an object or a situation or a person” (Koe, Interview with DW). In Ministry of Moral Panic, in stories where love is a word that recurs and a closely worked theme, it is the ‘secret life’ of her characters, caught as they are in a skein of pleasure and loss, that Koe seeks to apprehend. In “Flamingo Valley”, for example, what has awakened Ling Ko Mui’s memories of the past while she is an aged and dementia patient? Is it the unexpected presence of Deddy Haikel in the nursing home and the recollections he brings with him of their incipient romance many years ago? Or is it the music which he performs and which he has become identified with in her mind since the first day she heard him play and sing in her father’s pub? And in “The Ballad of Arlene & Nelly”, what would Arlene have put forward as her “bucket list”, had Nelly, pragmatic and self-regarding, stopped to find out amid the sensual freedoms of their holiday in the Galápagos? Undoubtedly “I could die happy here, right now” is a common mode of speech, except that Arlene would already have known, as she said those words, of her illness. If the “secret life” remains tantalizingly out of reach in the stories, then nowhere is its elusiveness more marked than in “Fourteen Entries from the Diary of Maria Hertogh”. A narrative which leaves indeterminate whether the extrapolations are the work of the character or the narrator, it returns the reader to the public history and self of Hertogh, leaving blank, as it were, the intervening pages of the diary, an emptiness figuring forth the paring away of hopes, memories, and expectations in a life spanning more than half a century. 

Koe’s achievements in this debut collection are generally impressive even though some of the stories are marred by overwriting such as “Carousel and Fort” or by lapses into the exotic as in the duplet, “Two Ways To Do This”, with their descriptions of the Indonesian maid, Zurotul, and her encounters with the village hag. Where Koe is at her most convincing, there is her sharp, inward delineation of a range of characters. Her precise rendering of their voices whether it is the monotones recounting a life barely lived, or the tender, resonant converse of an ageing woman and a late teenager that trembles always at the edge of possibilities not uttered. Her supple handling of time within which are unfurled significant strands of public or personal history. And her deft experiments with form so that a ballad incorporates an interview which can also pass as a prose poem; folk tale and fantasy interweave the harsh realism of incidents of schoolboy bullying; and episodes from Chinese-language TV serials sit cheek by jowl in the same narrative space with memories of childhood abuse, a police interrogation, a botched suicide, and an unlikely seduction. 

*

According to the Acknowledgements page, the provenance of Delayed Rays of a Star was a matter of happenstance. Having spied in a secondhand bookshop in New York, and in a critical study on Alfred Eisenstaedt, the two photographs he had taken of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl [ii], Koe knew she had come upon the donnée of her novel.

A blinding flash—and there is caught, in an image that gleams with an irresistible allure even today, the unlikely conjunction of three ambitious and determined women at the Berlin Press Ball of 1928. In the photograph that opens the novel, all three are lined up and smiling, their arms around each other; all three were at the threshold of their careers; and all were in search of a breakthrough that would launch them into the thick of the cinema world. The industry was changing, transiting from the era of silent films into that of sound; and from pre-Code openness in movies into the regulated products that emerged after the imposition of the Hays Code. Other changes, imminent and far-reaching, were the stock market crash of 1929; the dissolution of the Weimar Republic taking with it the intellectual and cultural productivity of the Weimar years; and the consolidation of Nazi Germany with Hitler elevated to Chancellor in 1933. 

Nonetheless the turn of the decade was to bring Dietrich, Wong, and Riefenstahl the acclaim they sought, and in films which are today a part of cinema history. Anna May starred in Piccadilly (1929), produced by British International Pictures, and Daughter of the Dragon (1931), the third of Hollywood’s Fu Manchu films. Marlene was taken up by Hollywood after The Blue Angel (1930), and went on to make six films for Paramount including Shanghai Express (1932) which also featured the “inimitable Anna May Wong” (Delayed 182). Leni moved from acting in films to directing them and her innovative cinematographic techniques in Triumph of the Will (1934) and Olympia (1936) brought her recognised if also controversial success. [iii]

Despite the air of amiability issuing from the photograph, it was a one-off and chance encounter of strangers that Eisenstadt captured in Berlin. Within the textual space of Koe’s novel, however, deeper connections among the three women are to be gleaned at the levels of theme and action. Examples include their dedication to cinematic art and fame; their painstaking efforts at self-fashioning; and their concern to negotiate a viable course between how they see themselves and how the public wish to see them, packaged as their images are by the movies they took part in, by studios, agents, and the media. Bringing to her reinvention of their personalities and histories her exacting eye, ironic wit, and flair for pinning down the absurd, Koe’s narrative tells of Marlene’s gift for making the femmes fatales she plays in the films her own creations. “Because she played them bored”—given that “Love is a divertissement they have long since tired of” (Delayed 35) – “her characters became complex” (35). Of Leni’s keen knowledge of cinematography in her analyses of the works of the directors she admires. And of Anna May’s determination, restricted though she is as a Chinese American actress to stereotypical roles, to never play it “dumb, servile, or cloying”. That is what the studios want. What she wants is to know the craft itself and be capable of entering “the process of living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” (172).

According to Koe, a question that would seem to link the destinies of the three iconic women, and which constitutes a governing concern of her fiction, is “what does one have to give up to realize one’s dreams?” (Interview with Harper’s BAZAAR). To what extent has Marlene been thwarted by her bisexuality as well as her self-fabricated images of “a cynic, a cabaret singer, and a satirist” (Lasalle, 161) from forming genuine relationships? [iv] Are the veiled threats and sly bullying meted out by Joseph Goebbels in his position of Minister of Propaganda the price Leni must pay for making films with money from the Nazis? Will Anna May have to contend always with her out-of-placeness both in Los Angeles and in China? With being either Chinese and hence anathema to some, or “too Chinese to play a Chinese” to others, or a failed Chinese and a disgrace to China itself? 

But, fleeting though they may be, moments of self-conscious satisfaction exist. One thinks of Anna May’s adroitness when, faced with the “sparring,” so-called, of a journalist in a restaurant in Shanghai, she chooses to “steal the scene” (Delayed 333), thereby reducing the dinner party to speechlessness; Leni’s gritty attempt, even past her 101st birthday, at answering her critics and delivering, amid the usual cover-ups, denials, and self-justifications, a calculated rejoinder to Susan Sontag’s critique of her work and career; and Marlene’s decision in 1935 to bring to an end her albeit successful collaboration with Josef von Sternberg because “she could not stomach the part of him that was convinced that he owned her because he’d spotted her in Berlin when she was a nobody and cast her in his movie” (35).

With Ministry of Moral Panic still recent in her memory, it is not surprising that in its form Koe’s novel should on occasions call to mind a collage of stories. At the same time, if a characteristic feature of the contemporary novel, as it has been said, is that “[s]tories come back, more often than not, inside novels – even take over novels …” (Wood 2, emphasis in original), what function do the stories in Delayed Rays of a Star play within the larger compass of the novel itself? In nine chapters, the headings of which read like elaborate title cards in a silent film, Koe’s narrative of distinct episodes in the life of each of her protagonists cuts freely across different temporal and spatial contexts to embrace other lives and their stories. Some of these stories could be excerpted intact, such as that of the Kabuki performer whom von Sternberg visited, a vignette of the distilled purity of art and of being. Others, loosely interwoven with the main narrative strands, often serve the dramatic play of perspectives in the novel. For example, the melancholy account of Hans Haas—guilt-stricken at losing his friend and mentor while serving with the Afrika Korps in the Libyan desert, and sent subsequently, while on furlough, to escort the Roma and Sinti extras on the set of Tiefland back to the camp at Maxglan—points inarguably to the human cost behind the making of Leni’s bergfilme. 

Yet others are integral to Koe’s employment of montage in her narrative or the technique of juxtaposing apparently disparate and opposing events and actions to create new meaning, viewpoints, and emotional impact. One example of her creative editing pivots upon the widely separate lives of Anna May and Walter Benjamin, “each remote enough from the other in so many ways” (Delayed 89). For several years after Benjamin’s interview with Anna May in Berlin was published in Die Literarische Welt, letters have passed back and forth between the two, a polite, gentle correspondence often eliciting mutual reflections on the different facets of their individual selves. When Anna May finds her letters returned to her unopened, and without explanation, she assumes that Benjamin has forgotten to tell her of his new address: “As a freelance writer, he must have been able to work from anywhere he pleased, did not have to be tied down to an industry and a place, the way she was with Hollywood and L.A.” (Delayed 89). [v]

It is at this point, amid the gathering silence, that Koe’s narrative cuts abruptly to a very different scene. To Benjamin who, having failed in his attempt to leave France and escape the Nazis, lies dying at a motel at Portbou on the French-Spanish border. Here—and Koe has surely in mind the essay “Unpacking my Library” (Benjamin 1979)—an extremely moving image of Benjamin is conjured up in which, as the man notes the encroaching effects of the morphine he has taken, so the scholar, philosopher, and cultural critic is returned to his lifelong passion as a book collector, and the final joy of envisioning and itemizing mentally his beloved and sadly missed acquisitions, his library of books.

Another example of Koe’s artful technique occurs in the narrating of the last meeting between Anna May and Marlene. Having seen Marlene’s nightclub show at Las Vegas advertised, Anna May decides to drop in on the performance. The year is 1960. Anna May has been very ill—the liver damage for one thing being “irreversible” (Delayed 307)—and is moreover extremely unhappy with the very few and minor roles which her agent now puts in her way. To see Marlene again will be to remind herself of livelier days gone by but of her own failure also.

The evening, as it turns out, is one of bizarre excesses. It begins, the cabaret over, with time spent in the bathroom struggling to reduce the swelling on Marlene’s leg, and to extricate her from what she terms her “support system”—“a latex suit wrapping and contouring her body from neck to ankle” (315). This is followed by a hysterical and noisy taxi ride back to the hotel, that includes snacking on ninety-nine-cent tubs of shrimp cocktail, and an impromptu and fervent rendition of “Cuando Calienta el Sol” by cab driver and Marlene alike. The suggestion then arises that Anna May should stay the night in the plush hotel room. From Anna May’s point of view, this means repeating yet again the old routine of Marlene calling the shots, “a woman who was used to getting whatever she wanted wherever she went” (318). It means the impossibility of separating Marlene, the real woman, from Marlene, the diva. And yet, even at the very last minute, the temptation to yield to the invitation to stay is present. Even then, there is the shared understanding: “We could have given them something to talk about” (323). 

An old look began to pass between them. First it was real. Then it became a look only two actresses could have shared. She was starting to open herself up, to let the way Marlene was looking at her affect the way she looked back. The valet stood at the car door. Her engine was running. If she didn’t go now, she might never leave. (323) 

Koe’s handling of the scene is wonderfully assured and compelling, catching as she does the women’s unspoken feelings for each other and their set notions of how they wish to see themselves, their memories of what has been and their awareness of the erosions of time. In the brief time Anna May takes to drive away from the hotel, the complexities of the emotional moment are compactly held, with the rear mirror of the car—like the eye of a movie camera—bringing into view only to leave steadily behind the rare image of a Marlene, in pain, dejected, and alone. As for Anna May herself, the feeling of being free grows upon her as she moves out of Las Vegas, only this time she is not “an anonymous face in the crowd” (334) in the busy streets of Shanghai, but “riding through her town” which is L.A. and racing “back home” (324, my emphases).

Anna May dies in the spring of 1961. Marlene lives on until 1992 but, from 1975, in self-imposed isolation in her Paris flat. Anna May is a third-generation Chinese immigrant in the US; Marlene an émigré, like a number of the well-known names mentioned in the novel, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Maria Remarque. Aside from film celebrities, literary luminaries, and creative artists, migrants of various other kinds, such as guest workers from Turkey and Tunisia, Lebanese refugees, Algerian and Chinese immigrants, crisscross the extensive textual terrain of Koe’s novel, all part of the movements of peoples in the years following the Second World War.

Among economic migrants Bébé’s story is not untypical. Having been guaranteed a job in Marseilles, she leaves China in 1988 only to find she has fallen victim to a human trafficking ring and, with her passport confiscated, ends up not as a worker in a Nike factory but a prostitute in a brothel. A lucky escape takes her to Paris where, as an illegal immigrant attached to a refugee programme, she is sent to work as a part-time cleaner for Marlene. The sections of the narrative which deal with Bébé’s visits to a bedridden and incontinent Marlene are edgy, poignant, and touched with a sense of the comic. Neither knows who the other is. What matters to Bébé is getting the room cleaned, persuading Madame to leave her bed and walk the few steps to the TV and back again, to visit the bathroom, have a bath, and change her clothes. And to Marlene, it is having someone to go to the shops for desserts and pastries and help her with her make-up. 

Bébé meets by chance Ibrahim, a talented individual with aspirations to be “some sort of an artist” (232); a prankster who calls Marlene on the phone to read her, “in a voice launched evenly into High German” (32), poems by Rilke, Hölderlin, Novalis; a person of mixed German and Turkish descent, an ethnic other, destined to find himself stumbling from disaster to disaster. A relationship of sorts forms in the course of which Bébé is shown the sights of Paris, and taken on a trip to Travemünde, “where the northernmost tip of the FDR [Federal Republic of Germany] met the GDR [German Democratic Republic] before it opened out into the [Baltic] sea” (359). The episodes leading up to Ibrahim’s fatal attempt in 1989 to breach the East-West barrier at Travemünde and Bébé’s subsequent deportation have about them an element of the tendentious. Within Koe’s narrative, the question arises as to whether Ibrahim’s suicidal act was spurred by an idealistic repudiation of a divided Germany? By his sense of alienation? And by a conviction that “[a]s long as they saw his face, he was always going to be the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time” (247)? And while Bébé’s predicaments both in France and West Germany can be said to underline the ambiguities in EU policies relating to migration and border control issues, to what extent is her repatriation to China aimed at showing that events in history, such as the massacre at Tiananmen Square earlier in the same year, can, under state censorship, be readily erased out of existence. Having found her way to Beijing in search of the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the country, Bébé is confronted with the People’s Square looking so clean and imposing with the portrait of the Chairman, the only one of the portraits remaining in the square, the others having been removed in 1980. Her conclusion is that “If a massacre had happened at Tiananmen in June, how could anyone be enjoying fried chicken across the street at KFC in November?” (379). It is possible that, after the mishaps and hurdles encountered in her attempt to get to Europe, the feeling that takes hold of Bébé once she is back in China is the relief of being ‘home’. However, Bébé has been from the first a person who knows her own mind, and, despite the difficulties she has undergone, some of the alert intelligence, it might be thought, would have remained, some touch of the earlier sceptical outlook: 

What is your real name, Bébé? 

Is there such a thing as a real name? (257). 

Were you and the deceased lovers? 

How is this love that you mean? (363)

Unbeknown to Bébé in Beijing, it is 9 November 1989, and in Paris, in the fifth-floor flat which she used to clean, the TV screen is flooded with news that the Berlin Wall has fallen. In the flat itself, a change is taking place also. With the blackout blinds accidentally brought down, and the room plunged in sunshine, everything that has been in the dark for so many years looks to Marlene “incredibly precious” (382) even as she herself becomes exposed to the light.

A trillion light particles strike our skin at every second outside on a sunny day. Eight and a half minutes ago they left the surface of the sun, but they had first to wander blind and torrid for ten thousand years inside that massive star before they could escape to its exterior for emission. (383) 

Coming in the midst of Marlene’s fumbling efforts to face up to the unaccustomed radiance, the measured statement above—an intervention possibly from a popular science manual [vi]—strikes an amusing and ironic note. In addition, the statement serves as a gloss for the title of Koe’s novel. Delayed Rays of a Star originates from a comment by Susan Sontag which Roland Barthes alludes to in Camera Lucida [vii], and, in view of the description of the photons above, several ways of reading the title present themselves. Koe’s suggestions are that “it speaks to the idea of interrogating stardom … and it could also talk about photography as a medium” (Interview with Tracy Philipps). Crucially, it could be said to speak to Koe’s creativity as a novelist in uncovering what finally is beyond reach, and in bringing into our own time and awareness the reinvented lives of the three legendary women with “something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is” (Berger 61).  

At the forefront of Koe’s achievement is an informed and imaginative engagement with her material. Substantial research lies behind the novel, and Koe would have had access to a large body of film studies as well as, on the star personages in question, to biographies, critical studies, articles and, not least, the autobiographies of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl themselves [viii]. However, rather than revisit the peak moments of fame among her three celebrities, Koe has chosen to delve into the areas of their histories that have not been overly chronicled, seeking out and uncovering in her fiction the traces and fragments hidden from or embedded in the public and personal records. Closely observed and sensitively realized, her characters, their foibles and vulnerabilities notwithstanding, come across as larger-than-life personalities. And a good part of Koe’s success in this respect has to do with her shrewd management of mood and tone so that within a single moment, scene, or episode, there can often be found to co-exist contrary notes such as the light-hearted and grim, the commonplace and extraordinary, and the tender and grittily cynical.

As in some of the short stories in Ministry of Moral Panic, Koe’s experimentations with form in the novel are at once telling and bold. Encompassing a temporal span of close to a century and a world of momentous changes, the narrative in Delayed Rays of a Star is made to move in restive fashion back and forth across time and across locales, while within its intricate texture the past insistently returns in the shape of memories, in stories handed down across generations and from afar, and in works of literature, music, art, and of course films. 

An ambitious work, Delayed Rays of a Star is comprehensive, detailed, skillfully crafted and richly reinvented. Within a “radial system” (Berger 43) constructed around one particular photograph, Koe brings her iconic personages into touch with wide-ranging issues—world events, the history of the early years of cinema, aesthetics, gender discrimination, migrant politics, even snippets of critical theory—and the outcome is a novel that is not only highly entertaining but an extremely fine achievement.

Notes

“Stellar Virtue”, the phrase in the title of this article, is taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 4, l. 671.

[i] See Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: Routledge, 1972); Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978).

[ii] Both photographs are reproduced in Delayed Rays of a Star.

[iii] See “Leni Riefenstahl | The Holocaust Encyclopedia” for comments on these films. 

[iv] My thanks to Michelle Chiang for referring me to Mick Lasalle’s work. While his main focus is Garbo and Shearer, the short section on Dietrich is excellent.

[v] Unknown to Anna May, Benjamin had to flee Berlin in 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor, and seek a living in Paris. German forces invaded France in May 1940, and provisions for asylum for Germans came to an end. And German anti-fascists were turned over to the Nazis with the connivance of the Vichy regime. Having entrusted his papers and documents to friends, Benjamin decided it was time to leave France by way of Spain for the US and L.A. where Adorno and Horkheimer awaited him. See “‘Even the Dead Won't Be Safe’: Walter Benjamin's Final Journey.” 

[vi] See Karl S. Kruszelnicki, “Sun makes slow light,” ABC Science, 24 April 2012, and Robert Krulwich, “Sunshine’s Crazy Sloppy Path to You”, National Geographic, 7 July 2015. The passage on the “trillion light particles” appears also in Koe’s interview with Tracy Phillips (“Delayed Rays of a Star”).

[vii] Susan Sontag’s comment, “the photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star”, resonates with Koe’s reaction upon encountering the Eisenstadt photograph. 

[viii] See Marlene Dietrich, Nehmt nur mein Leben (Take Just My Life), published in 1979; and Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl's Memoiren, published in 1987.

Works Cited

“‘Even the Dead Won’t be Safe’: Walter Benjamin’s Final Journey.” The National WWII Museum New Orleans. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/walter-benjamin.

“Leni Riefenstahl | The Holocaust Encyclopedia.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/leni-riefenstahl.

Andrew, J. Dudley. The Major Film Theories. Oxford University Press, 1976.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. by Richard Howard. Vintage, 1983.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. 1972. Ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn. Fontana Press, 1992.

Berger, John. “Uses of Photograph.” About Looking. Pantheon Books, 1980.

Koe, Amanda Lee. Delayed Rays of a Star. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

---. Interview with Deutsche Welle. “Why Singaporean author Amanda Lee Koe writes from the fringe.” Deutsche Welle. 17 Jul. 2017.  https://www.dw.com/en/why-singaporean-author-amanda-lee-koe-writes-from-the-fringe/a-39702594. 

---. Interview with Harper’s BAZAAR. “Amanda Lee Koe On Her Debut Novel And What To Expect From Her Book Tour.” 20 Aug. 2019. https://www.harpersbazaar.com.sg/life/amanda-lee-koe-debut-novel-book-tour/. 

---. Interview with Tracy Philipps. “Delayed Rays of a Star: Amanda Lee Koe on her debut novel, life in New York, and why she relates to Marlene Dietrich.” buro 24/7. https://www.buro247.sg/culture/insiders/amanda-lee-koe-on-her-debut-novel-delayed-rays-of-a-star-life-in-new-york-and-which-character-she-most-relates-to.html. Accessed 8 Mar. 2021.

---. Ministry of Moral Panic: Stories. Epigram Books, 2014.

Krulwich, Robert. “Sunshine’s Crazy Sloppy Path to You.” National Geographic. 7 Jul. 2015. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/sunshines-crazy-sloppy-path-to-you. 

Kruszelnicki, Karl S. “Sun makes slow light.” ABC Science. 24 Apr. 2012. https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/24/3483573.htm#:~:text=So%20while%20in%20eight%20minutes,pretty%20slow%20rate%20of%20delivery.

Lasalle, Mick. Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Tsang, Michael. “Thrilling Panic Attacks: Amanda Lee Koe's The Ministry of Moral Panic.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Issue 26 (2014): https://www.asiancha.com/content/view/1960/480/.

Wood, Michael. Children of Silence: Studies in Contemporary Literature. Pimlico, 1998.

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