Lydia Kwa
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Cheryl Narumi Naruse
Dated 29 Jun 2021
Lydia Kwa is a Singapore-born novelist, short story writer, poet, painter, mixed-media artist, and impressive home cook who has been living in Canada since 1980. Her short fiction and excerpts from her novels have been included in Sanctuary: Short Fiction from Queer Asia (2019), Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Four (2019), Food Republic (2014), the Journal of Intercultural Stories (2019), among others. Her novelistic works have earned her a number of distinctions, including nominations for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the Ethel Wilson Book Award. Kwa’s four novels—This Place Called Absence (Kensington, 2002), The Walking Boy (Key Porter 2005; Arsenal Pulp Press reissue 2019), Pulse (Key Porter Books, 2010; Ethos Books reissue, 2014), Oracle Bone (Arsenal Pulp Press 2017)—illustrate her historical range, with stories set in contemporary Singapore and Canada as well as Tang Dynasty China. A fifth novel is on the way.
Kwa started her writing career as a graduate student at Queen’s University in Canada, where she trained to become the practicing clinical psychologist she is today, and when she first began submitting her poetry to campus periodicals. Abound with subtle symbolism, fine observation, and exacting language, Kwa’s writing combines her background as a poet and psychologist. Kwa has a particularly keen ability to convey the local colour of setting. For example, in the opening scene of “Oh-Chien,” Kwa writes:
Amanda exited the vegetarian restaurant on Jalan Tokong to a cul-de-sac thronged with people and food stalls. The contrast was jarring—from a soothing, serene atmosphere to crowds and noise. Enamel plates heaped high with raw cockles, mussels, and periwinkles were lined up on two long tables. Prawns and cuttlefish atop crushed ice were on display at a side aluminium counter. A man heckled passersby as if they were fools to pass on the offer—shellfish served with satay sauce, black bean sauce, or chilies. (Sanctuary location 2370)
Kwa dramatizes a very ordinary scene of an eatery in Malacca through the contrasting shapes and textures of the round cul-de-sac, abundant piles of seafood, the shine of the “side aluminium counter,” and long lines of “two long tables.” Such contrasting imagery heightens the excitement of the scene, especially for readers familiar with the gustatory pleasures associated with such foods. Kwa’s inclusion of the heckling restaurant host serves as a metafictional technique, who at once acknowledges the reader wise to the dynamics of this scene and pokes fun at the ones who pass it by. Such metafictional techniques are characteristic of Kwa’s works. For example, Philip Holden writes that This Place Called Absence is “elaborately self-reflexive . . . a fictional text devoted to questioning the process and purposes of historical memory” (286). While one might attribute Kwa’s ability to draw out the dynamism of local Singaporean settings to her diasporic perspective that has afforded her some critical distance from her former home, critics have also noted Kwa’s “rich . . . worldbuilding details” (Wang) in her historical works that are not set in contemporary or modern Singapore.
Across all of Kwa’s works is her desire, as she puts it, “to subvert the dominant narrative” (Chau). In Kwa’s writing, such subversion often takes shape through a grappling with history. In some of her works, this grappling manifests through settings and genre adaptation. In the duology, The Walking Boy and Oracle Bone, the historical context of ancient China and the patriarchal chuanqi genre, which includes both kung fu and wuxia stories as well as supernatural elements, become a fantastical mode through which to tell stories of female empowerment. Within the spread of Singapore literature, one might situate Kwa’s recent turn to the chuanqi genre among other writers who also draw on elements of classical Chinese aesthetic forms, such as Boey Kim Cheng, Eddie Tay, and Hwee Hwee Tan. On the other hand, her chuanqi trilogy joins a recent turn within Singaporean literature towards speculative fiction and fantasy as a way of imagining alternatives—as reflected in collections such as Eastern Heathens and novels such as Sharlene Teo’s Ponti or Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper. While Kwa’s contemporary novels, This Place Called Absence and Pulse, operate in a realist mode, her experimentation is evident through the texts’ play with non-linear narrative and temporality. These techniques allow her to wrestle with dominant tellings of history—a familiar theme throughout Singaporean literature.
While Kwa’s oeuvre defies easy categorization because of its transnational and transhistorical range, she consistently tells woman-centred stories. Kwa’s focus on sexuality through queer, female protagonists further subvert dominant understandings of women framed by heteronormative narratives. Pulse and This Place Called Absence, for example, are part of a burgeoning group of contemporary Singaporean texts in English that explore issues of sexuality. Moving transnationally between Singapore and Toronto and transhistorically between contemporary Singapore and newly independent Singapore of the 1960s, Pulse features Natalie Chia, a lesbian Singaporean-Canadian, who after a long hiatus, returns to Singapore to uncover the reasons behind the suicide of Selim, who is the son of her ex-lover, Faridah. This Place Called Absence also begins in present-day Singapore with a lesbian Singaporean-Canadian protagonist, Wu Lan, who returns to Singapore for her father’s funeral, and finds herself reading about the lives of ah ku (sex workers) living in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Singapore. Given the controversial status that non-heteronormative people continue to have in Singapore, it almost goes without saying that the novel’s queer themes are a significant contribution to Singaporean literature and understandings of Singaporean culture. Moreover, when further considering that issues of LBGTQ identity have mostly been explored in Singapore through theatre and drama and poetry and that the two most well-known queer novels, Johann S. Lee’s Peculiar Chris (1992) and Andrew Koh’s Glass Cathedral feature gay protagonists, Pulse stands out as an even more radical text for the way it combines an exploration of lesbian desire and queer expression.
Kwa’s focus on queer diasporic women in her Singapore-based works unsettles the heteronormative and reproductive logics that so often undergird nationalist projects. To take a phrase from postcolonial, queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath, lesbians represent an “impossibility” as “a non-heteronormative female subject within patriarchal and heterosexual configurations of both nation and diaspora” (16). In the Singaporean context, for example, queer women are unthinkable within Singaporean legislation since Section 377A of the Penal Code criminalizes only sex between two men—lesbians are ignored. Moreover, as women whose lives are not shaped or valued by nationalist, economic values of heterosexual procreation, subjects like Natalie and Wu Lan are not simply impossible: they become ignored and invisible. But they also exist as important figures of subversion and critique in Kwa’s writing. Michel O’Brien discusses, for example, how queer subjects like Natalie and Selim of Pulse help readers break down the workings of the government’s “developmental aims and emphasis on racial productivity” (195). This is accomplished through the many characters from marginalized communities—Wu Lan and Natalie are part Peranakan, Faridah is Malay and Peranakan, Selim is Chinese and Malay, and Selim’s boyfriend is Indian. In Kwa’s work, queer protagonists are key for deconstructing the politics of race in Singapore, as O’Brien claims, and moreover reveal how race and sexuality are entwined.
Diasporic perspective combines with queer identity in Kwa’s works. Natalie’s diasporic identity allows for a critical distance from her former home, but in a way which only haunts the edges of the novel. For example, towards the end of Pulse, when Natalie is in her hotel room in Singapore and flipping through the television, she comes across the airing of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s annual National Day speech:
The prime minister’s speech starts out with a list of all the excellent achievements Singapore and its citizens have accomplished. He reports on the economic growth and productivity of the country. How different his style is from his father’s. In the early days, our first prime minister emphasized Singapore’s vulnerability at the hands of the Communists. (249)
As indicated by the possessive shift from “Singapore and its citizens” to “our prime minister,” however, the passage illustrates something of Natalie’s more distant and diasporic positioning in relation to the state. Although Natalie feels removed from current Singapore and does not include herself as part of it, the use of “our” indicates her identification, being someone born on the day Singapore achieved self-government, with an older generation of Singaporean citizens who lived through the years of decolonization. Natalie’s emotional distance from Singapore is further emphasized as the passage continues after the speech ends and Natalie marvels at the “[v]ery grandiose” (250) National Day festivities on the television. Natalie’s amazement and puzzlement at the scale and nature of the patriotic celebrations underscores her lack of familiarity and remove from Singapore’s national scene. The fleetingness and inconsequentiality of the passage within the scheme of the novel also indicate the peripheral role of the Singaporean state in Natalie’s life.
For Kwa, subverting dominant narratives does not mean direct critique—indeed, critique is often subtle in Kwa’s works and does not play out in confrontational ways. In this way, Kwa’s work is distinct from earlier works such as that more firmly situate queerness with, as Ng Yi-Sheng writes of queer Singapore literature from the late 1980s and early 1990s, rebellion or counterculture (259). Very little of Pulse, for example, specifically takes up the suppression of queer identity. The above mention of the government, for example, does not draw a connection between Natalie’s queer identity and the state’s conservative stance towards homosexuality—the speech is not about sexuality in any way. The strongest antagonism Natalie faces in terms of her queerness comes not from Singaporean legislation, but from her ex-lover’s husband, Adam. In Natalie and Adam’s first direct exchange during a dinner in Faridah’s home, he makes clear his homophobia when, after he learned about Canada’s laws that allow for gay marriage, he comments: “That’s pushing it, don’t you think? I mean, we need to be tolerant, but…” (202). In his specific attention to law and his depiction of Canada as the liberal west, Adam’s homophobia is expressed through an occidentalist, national framework. In a later scene, Adam makes an unexpected and drunken visit to Natalie to tell her, “I don’t mind if you still want to sleep with my wife. I mean, help her get it out of her system. I don’t care” (207). Natalie challenges Adam’s homophobia, and when the scene escalates and becomes physical, Natalie, not Adam, triumphs. Natalie’s two altercations with Adam represent the clearest and most oppositional moments in the novel in terms of queer politics. That Adam is a fairly minor character and that such scenes pass rather fleetingly suggest a greater interest on the part of Kwa in exploring Natalie’s identity through less confrontational ways. In other words, Kwa’s exploration of non-normative sexuality through Natalie is not primarily shaped through oppositional politics. In this way, subverting dominant narrative means not recentering them through direct critique. For example, rather than situating Wu Lan of This Place Called Absence as a direct or oppressed subject of state discourses that encourage biological reproductivity or work productivity, such discourses are instead focalized through Wu Lan’s brother, Michael. On the occasion of a short phone call, Michael both announces his wife’s pregnancy and chides Wu Lan for her extended leave from work (94), during which Wu Lan inwardly grumbles about the imperative of “Singaporean industriousness” (94), the passage calls attention to the ways that such industriousness—of capitalist labour and heteronormative reproductivity—are conceptually entangled. Weihsin Gui also notes Kwa’s tactic of oblique critique in This Place Called Absence, which he argues does not “express an overt resistance to [the Singapore government’s] regulation of gender and sexuality” (304). Rather, readers can pick up on the critique of how queerness is instrumentalized by the government for creative industries (309)—or, what some might describe as the process of “pinkwashing”—by tracking the “demythologization of language” in the novel (304). In Gui’s reading of This Place, such a demythologizing is made possible through the novel’s mapping of queer lineages and histories, which contrast the government discourse that rely on “patrilineal descent” (309).
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006, pp. 543–74.
Chau, David. “Centuries-old ghost stories guide Lydia Kwa through new novel Oracle Bone.” The Georgia Straight, October 2017, https://www.straight.com/arts/979501/centuries-old-ghost-stories-guide-lydia-kwa-through-new-novel-oracle-bone. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021.
Kwa, Lydia. “O-Chien.” Sanctuary: Short Fiction from Queer Asia, location 2370–465.
---. This Place Called Absence. Kensington, 2002.
---. Pulse. Key Porter, 2010.
Fedo, David. “Buoyant Pulse.” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore 9.3, July 2010. http://www.qlrs.com/critique.asp?id=788. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021.
Gui, Weihsin. “Tactical Objectivism: Recognizing the Object within the Subjective Logic of Neoliberalism in the Fiction of Tash Aw and Lydia Kwa.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, Volume 25, Issue 4, 2014, pp. 291–311.
Holden, Philip. “Interrogating Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in the City-State: Some Recent Singapore Fiction in English.” Mobilities, Volume 5, Issue 2, pp. 277–90.
Ng, Yi-Sheng. “Burning in Your Hands: Singapore’s Queer Literary Tradition.” Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts. Routledge, 2017. pp. 256–84.
O’Brien, Michel. “Un/productive Raciality and Transnational Affiliations in Lydia Kwa’s Pulse.” Asiatic, Volume 10, No 2, December 2016, pp. 181–97.
Wang, Yilin. “Transmitting the Strange: A Conversation with Lydia Kwa.” Augur Blog, January, 2020. http://www.augurmag.com/transmitting-the-strange-a-conversation-with-lydia-kwa/. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021.
