O Thiam Chin

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Carissa Foo
Dated 28 May 2021

A casual glance at the writer O Thiam Chin’s oeuvre suggests his mastery of the short story genre. He is an award-winning author of six collections of short stories: Free-Falling Man (2006), Never Been Better (2009), Under The Sun (2010), The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It (2011), Love, Or Something Like Love (2013), and Signs Of Life (2019). He has been nominated thrice for the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award, and his acclaimed collection Love, Or Something Like Love, was longlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction. Most recently, Signs of Life published by Math Paper Press is an eerily resonant read in a time of pandemic, in which many stories teeter on the edge of post-apocalyptic realities. An avid reader of Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, O is interested in the episodic form that perhaps best mimics the feverish and elusive workings of the heart. From the story “Good Job” (2009) published in Body 2 Body: A Malaysian Queer Anthology, in which an adolescent boy experiences an unexpected sexual awakening at his uncle’s workplace, to the slow brewing of desire in “Exes” (2015) and “Touching” (2017) published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, O’s stories are almost vignettes of desire, grasping well its slippery movements—the rise and fall, the ecstasy and angst, the loss and the morning after. 

In the short story “Grasshoppers” (2010), published in the Asian Literary Review, desire morphs into a son’s longing for an absent father, a longing that is mediated by his long-suffering mother. A woman of few words, she says nothing about the knick-knacks in her drawer that are possibly keepsakes, the hard work of raising a son and managing a hawker stall, the persistent limp in her leg, or about the time her husband had come home drunk and left her hospitalised. Remnants of the missing father appear in the form of an unidentifiable face in a photograph, in the gossips and secrets concerning the father that float around the kopitiam, in the boy’s own unexplainable but sympathetic shame for his father’s doings. Absence continues in the lack of a home: the boy roams the kopitiam like it is his second home; Uncle Ben and Auntie Siew Bee seem to take the place of surrogate parents rather than talebearers of the late father’s disappearance. In place of the absentee, flashes of the man and his story pepper the narrative, just enough to offer a semblance of the father character but never too overt as to identify the once-oppressor. The story is sensitive to the needs of the son and the mother: it gives in to the curiosity of one and, at the same time, remains protective of the other. O’s deft handling of loss is distinct but not limited to this story. Longing for a person or a thing, whether they are deserving of attention or not, seems central to O’s most unforgettable stories. There is always that one person, a missing thing, or an unfulfilled desire that exists between characters, between the story-world and that of the reader, that keeps the narrative going. An ex-partner, a deceased family member, a ghost from the past, a familiar stranger—O’s protagonists are often pained by a phantom limb of sorts, haunted by a tangled past, an inexplicable pain. This phantom limb is a lacuna in the landscape of O’s writing. And it persists, haunting the amputee-characters in his short stories as well as his novels. 

Despite the notable collections and the accolades they have received, O is more than a short story virtuoso. Also a novelist, he won the inaugural Epigram Fiction Prize in 2015 for Now That It’s Over, which went on to win the Best Fiction title in the 2017 Singapore Book Award. His second novel, Fox Fire Girl, was a finalist for the 2016 Epigram Fiction Prize and was published in 2017. While both stories have little obvious overlaps in their plots and genre—Now That It’s Over is mostly a tragedy; Fox Fire Girl is playful and romantic—they are extended ruminations of the longing to know and to love that is found in his shorter pieces. Now That It’s Over, in particular, is also episodic, presenting vignette-like narratives, not unlike O’s self-sufficient short stories. Still, this cross-genre move from short stories to the novel is daring but not entirely surprising when one considers O’s own personal journey. Moving from a diploma in mechatronics engineering to a degree in literature and language, and then working in public relations and marketing, O does not shy away from variety and change. Notwithstanding the versatility and openness to genre, the characters in his novels are afflicted with a similar phantom limb syndrome, moving through the course of life and narrative with an unfathomable pain that is too grave to speak of. One might even go so far as to say that given the capaciousness of the novel form, the ocean of pain is allowed to seethe, its waves surging and culminating in an unstoppable force that not only shatters the lives of characters, but also tears at the heartstrings of keen readers, overwhelmed by the tsunami of emotions as encountered on the page.

Now That It’s Over is a story about the Boxing Day Tsunami in the aftermath of the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake that left an estimated two hundred and twenty over thousand people dead. It is a fictional account of the wreckage and gruelling loss told through the perspectives of four characters—two couples to be specific: one heterosexual (Ai Ling and Wei Xiang), the other queer (Chee Seng and Cody). A day that is known for deeds of giving back—the Day of Goodwill—turns into one of no return for many people. Lives snatched away within the span of eight to ten minutes, the longest duration of a geological faulting ever observed, can never be justly recovered. Now That It’s Over does not promise      recuperation or indulge in grief. Rather, it shows what O’s writing does best in the face of loss: that is, it reveals the kinds of unvoiced care and the nuances of love that can come into existence alongside the profundity of pain and regret. The talk of death in its many guises—slumber, stasis, darkness, for example—is a sobering reminder that love exists and has never left us. This sanguine disposition may be traced back to the novel’s change of titles. Its original title, The Infinite Sea, suggests an insurmountable force of nature over which humans and all our feelings and resilience have no power. In some ways, Now That It’s Over, is more hopeful, gesturing towards closure and the new chapter or phase that could come after.

A brief summary of Now That It’s Over will inevitably involve the catastrophic damage done unto the lovers and the trauma of losing someone overnight. One could go on about the intersecting lives of the two couples in the novel or offer the layout of a land destroyed and the devastated tourist economy. More, something could be said about the dialogical narrative that shuffles between Ai Ling and Wei Xiang’s narrative and the story of Chee Seng and Cody. The play in the novel, sorrow and loss notwithstanding, is a formal one. Chapters are unabashedly singular, almost selfish in its insistence on the skewed lens of whichever character is narrating. Love is selfish, that is for sure. That it is sacrificing is a thing we learn only after the disappearance of the two characters. With Ai Ling, the future is hopeless; we mourn with Wei Xiang for the things we have missed and never had the courage and sense to say and dare to claim. With Chee Seng who is still missing, we are not sure to give up or to hold on to a feathery hope. Like Cody, we are caught in a bind, standing still and abiding, hoping morbidly and in shame that another tsunami will come and bring the beloved back. From a narratological perspective, hope is the thing that turns the page and plots the reader on the horizontal axis, a kind of narrative desire that runs parallel to our want for Chee Seng to survive. We keep reading because nothing is worse than the hope of the never found.

O’s writing of loss and longing is close to perfect in Now That It’s Over. What is most striking, and arguably more affective than the rest of his oeuvre, is the narrative of one decomposing body. It is anonymous and no longer human per se, but it rests on the body of the novel, decaying as we flip the page. The paragraphs written in italics feature an objective telling of this one body on a beach, interrupting the voices of characters. The body, presumably Ai Ling’s, is grotesque yet at the same time regal and poised; it communes with pigeons and basks in the heat, salt, sand, and blood intermingling. Even as it disintegrates—at one point, a pigeon pecks at the eyeball—the writing encases the moment as though it were a precious artefact in a museum, in awe of Nature’s ability to give back. The birds and maggots are fed; the dead literally gives back to the surrounding world; no-body is ever gone to waste. The image of the body surfaces as characters mourn the loss of their partners, just as the grasshoppers in “Grasshoppers” symbolise the mother’s resilience. Whatever that is missing finds their corresponding manifestation in surprising but sentimental forms. With the novel genre, O also manages to sharpen his use of plot twists and play with endings. Unlike the looser endings of his short stories whose foci are puncturing stasis and expectations to create a lingering effect, the novel affords O a luxury of time and space. Rather than a persistence in loss, there is a light somewhere, a closure despite the open mess. At the end of Now That It’s Over, one prodigal lover returns, though all has been swallowed by the sea. Is Ai Ling’s death less of a loss with the return of Chee Seng? The short answer is no. Yet one is not quite sure what to feel as love and loss seem to be interdependent. A terrifying revelation that one might only come to understand love when the tide comes: why does love show up most strongly where loss prevails? 

O seems to answer this with a myriad of possibilities in Love, Or Something Like Love. A collection upfront with its thesis, themes of loss and love are interwoven and apparent in its stories, “The Cat that Disappeared,” “Boys at Play,” “Third Eye,” and “You are Always Here, All the Time.” A bereaved daughter finds comfort in cats; a man grapples with the loss of a friend whose body is lost in a canal. Arguably the apotheosis of O’s writing career, as indicated in its ambition, the collection is more than simply soppy and lovelorn tales. For pain always makes way for a semblance of love and light, even as characters acknowledge that the only way to survive loss is to resurrect the moment of losing somebody. The man in “Boys at Play” will hold the dreams of his dead friend close to him, reliving the moment he was lost in the canal in order to see him swimming and moving in the water, a sign of life. Lee Ching in “The Cat that Disappeared” cuts herself to feel the dripping of blood, to re-enact the final minutes of her father’s passing. Time is a blurry thing in these stories; no timestamp separates the processes of loving and losing. One could say that the something that is like love might just be loss. Love’s company is a ghost from the past whose commitment to love is its undying presence. This sense of spectrality that is neither ghoulish nor fantastical is well captured in “You are Always Here, All the Time.” The moral of the story—and of all the stories, in fact—is that silence is not indicative of absence. A missing someone, their absence and silence, it seems, is only evidence of a presence that is taking shape and solidity within oneself. The lover or the loved one’s being may be lost to the world, but their existence is forming and already engraved on one’s heart, mind, memory.  

O Thiam Chin is a writer after our hearts, in a literal sense. He might be writing about a fox spirit girl, about Zheng He, about grasshoppers, yet underpinning these stories is an unassailable distance between people, between one and one’s emotions. Regardless of genre and form, O’s stories involve the inarticulable feelings and that brooding sense of unease that inundate us when one is at a loss, whether in love or in suffering. Desire and despair are not exclusive, a pairing that is not new to Plato, Nietzsche, Lacan, and even the common reader. This way O’s writing is familiar and persistent. We read his stories to get closer to the variety of human experiences that are all too close to the heart yet are never quite expressed well enough. His persistence as a writer echoes the resilience of his characters. The stories form a repertoire of the possibilities of human existence shaped by inadequacies and emptiness. Reading a few of these, we get a sense that there is some light to our laborious tunnelling. That people who have been hollowed out by loss are also the ones who have a depression within that is deep enough to be filled up by love in its many forms. Even something like love can make us full. 

Works Cited

O, Thiam Chin. “Exes.” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore 14.3 (2015), http://www.qlrs.com/story.asp?id=1196. Accessed 2 December 2020.

---. “Good Job.” Body 2 Body: A Malaysian Queer Anthology. Matahari Books, 2009.

---. “Grasshoppers.” Asian Literary Review 16. 2010.

---. “Touching.” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore 16.2 (2017), http://www.qlrs.com/story.asp?id=1330. Accessed 2 December 2020.

---. Fox Fire Girl. Epigram Books, 2017.

---. Free-Falling Man. iUniverse.Inc., 2006.

---. Never Been Better. MPH Publishing, 2009.

---. Under The Sun. MPH Publishing, 2010. 

---. The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It. Zi Publications, 2011.

---. Love, Or Something Like Love. Math Paper Press, 2013. 

---. Now That It’s Over. Epigram Books, 2016.

---. Signs Of Life. Math Paper Press, 2019.

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