Simon Tay

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Pang Ru Yan Jeannette
Dated 28 May 2021

Perhaps you’ve heard of Simon Tay, more widely known for his public and political service as a previous Nominated Member of Parliament and currently Chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. He also served on the National Environment Agency board working with issues related to civil, environmental and human rights. It thus comes as no surprise that his novel City of Small Blessings, which won the Singapore Literature prize in 2010, stands as a work of quiet protest for the conservation of old buildings. 

In the novel, Bryan, a retired civil servant, and his wife Anna, face eviction from their home (an old colonial house of historical significance) after the Ministry instates plans to build an aviation hub in the neighbourhood where they live. The narrative follows Bryan’s attempts to prevent the demolition of this historical site, all of which prove futile against the government’s rule. As the new comes to replace the old, Tay’s work addresses the lack of historical rootedness in a city of vanishing landscapes.

The question at stake: What is “home”? Is it tied to a place, a memory or to the writing of history? Tay writes: “[W]hen Singaporeans individually think of home, it is a much more particular and varied space, dependent on individual and differentiated memory.… There are so many who live here who can tell of markers of their memories – homes, schools, favourite restaurants, neighbourhoods – that have been removed” (97–102). City of Small Blessings explores the working of memory in its construction of various senses of home. Our concept of home, as the novel depicts, rests upon a fragile web of memories that is tied to various events and places. As familiar landscapes disappear, we begin to lose a sense of home and belonging in a city where history is erased. Tay’s work suggests that through the writing of history, in its negotiation with memory, we might come to recuperate a sense of home. 

The novel begins with an account of Bryan’s past, working as a school principal, marrying Anna and selling his childhood home for five million. He moves to Canada after retirement where his son Peter lives and finally returns to Singapore to live in a rented colonial house soon to be demolished. In the second section of the novel, the narratorial focus shifts to Peter, a rather lackadaisical character who lives in Canada with a Korean roommate, dates a girl from Toronto, and uses slang words like “helluva” (Tay 107). Between father and son, we follow each character’s struggle to decipher a connection to home. We find an elderly man fighting to protect a part of the nation’s history, and a cosmopolitan youth with little regard of this history: “why were they sitting on the millions of dollars and living in that old place anyway?” (82). The novel’s illustration of the younger generations’ growing disconnect to history emphasizes the need to find ways to remember a past increasingly absent from our everyday spaces.  

Things vanish in this novel. The narrative shifts between past and present, descriptive and lyrical sequences that embody a kind of memory or dream space in which we find inscriptions of loss. Often depicted cycling through his neighbourhood at night, Bryan ruminates: 

I turn off the main road into a narrower lane. Here, the air remains quiet and cool. The coolness comes from the trees that bend over the road, providing a dappled shade. It comes from the open patches of long grass and unkempt fields on either side of the road. The quietness comes from absence. There are no housing estates, industrial parks or condominiums, and no construction sites. There is the narrow road and just a scattering of farms, sun-bleached wooden houses, fish ponds and market gardens. The quiet is deepened by the songs of birds I cannot see but only hear, and by the whirring of my wheels as I cycle on. (City of Small Blessings 34) 

We find descriptions of a landscape no longer there, yet persisting in the act of remembrance. In the novel’s ode to scenes of the everyday, we are asked to remember the little things that mark out “home”. As readers, we find ourselves like the character cycling through a landscape of uncertain events and wisps of memories. Cycling comes to function as a metaphor of resistance against the tide of modernity’s progress. The bicycle moves on in time suspended, and in its slow-moving passage, we are invited to partake in the imagining of history.

We begin to decipher a concept of home as tied to mobile and transient spaces. “Home” is continuously written into existence, not fixed or concrete, but anchored to stories of history never complete. Tay’s writing moves along digressionary narrative paths that unfolds in loops, fragments, non-chronological and non-linear time. As the narrative slips between past and present tense, the first and third-person, even alternating between the first-person perspectives of Bryan and his son Peter, we are given multiple accounts of an event representing the plurality of historical narratives. An event happens once, twice, in different versions of memory and forms of account. This narrative feature comes to illustrate the continuous endeavour of memory in its narration of home. For example, the story of how Bryan and Anna first met during the war is told and re-told as a story Peter heard long ago from his mother, and, later on, as a third-person account, presumably an act of remembrance, as images surfacing in Bryan’s recollection (89, 131, 183). “[H]ow things happen,” as Bryan pronounces, “flow and split, one from another. There are always more than two ways ahead, two ways behind. There are always many perspectives, many futures and many past histories” (11). We discover the past in what lies ahead, the novel suggests, as the surface of memory shifts in the continuous movement of time. 

“Allow me to try again,” the narrator comments (14). We encounter these moments of hesitation in the narrative that renders the uncertain quality of memory, an attempt to mediate with a past that is impossible to grasp. The “past” does not simply remain a fixed point in time, but as instants that continue on in some allusive, yet necessary relation to the “present”. Towards the end of the novel, in a bizarre turn of events, the National Day Parade takes place alongside a story of Bryan as an adolescent boy growing up during the Japanese Occupation. And so the story goes: a boy befriends a Japanese soldier, he runs errands for him receiving essential goods in return, he learns to survive. What is peculiar is how events of the “present” shift in and out of view with events of the “past” in a rather jarring procession. Following Bryan’s meeting with the Prime Minister during the parade, the narrative cuts to a scene of torture where a man’s face is brutally skinned off. Does this divergent sequence of events, occurring simultaneously in the space of fiction, present some undecipherable connection? Does Bryan’s experience of discomfort while attending the National Day Parade somehow stand in correlation to this incident of torture? We might gather from this some implicit criticism—of Singapore today, its defacement and lack of collective identity—or, perhaps, it remains decidedly uncertain, as an amorphous haze of events that seep through the walls of time with no particular, decipherable meaning. “Home” remains suspended in the intrinsic connection between the past and present, someplace in the writing of history.

To write history, then, depends on a certain quality of memory—to remember better, to remember again—and we find in the novel the pursuit of memory in the crystallization of images. The image of a dying tree resurfaces throughout the narrative. In Bryan’s memory, the tree is first associated with the announcement of eviction: “No one can agree why the tree is dying…. Then, they are taking the house, our home, away from us” (39). This image appears again: “I see the garden and a tree, a path and a bicycle. There is the city under a rising moon” (54). And again, towards the end of the novel: “I have seen a tree that is dying in the midst of that garden. … I have seen a city rising and changing so quickly with towers and busy streets” (218). Even as landscapes of the past are erased, history is preserved in memory’s images, restored through the interweaving of fiction. 

The nature of storytelling is also of concern. How a story is told, and who tells a story, comes to determine our conception of self and identity, home and nation. “We have a history to write,” Peter declares, “[a] history of many people, many stories” (208). And history preserved in the written record functions as a mode of return to landscapes no longer there. Tay’s novel captures a nostalgic portrait of Singapore’s historical landscape: the days of Singapore as a fishing village with its coolies and bumboats (51), the old Changi beach now an international airport, or the Fullerton once an old fort and post office now a grand, modern hotel (177). As the narrative progresses, the plot thickens with stories of the British colonization, the Japanese Occupation and Singapore’s independence. While veering too often towards a romanticized version of history, the work initiates the question of how we might continue to write history differently as an act of reclamation. 

But whose story is being written? In a brief excerpt, Peter writes a story of a man who lived abroad for many years, returning to Singapore to eat the local dish char kway teow—that is, reflective of Peter’s own story living abroad. And yet, he concludes: “That’s the story I write. … But this story is not mine. The character is not me. Not exactly, but there must always be a bit of the writer in a story for there to be a truth worth the telling” (158). In relation to the novel’s autobiographical mode of telling, the “author” seems to disown relation to his own narrative in this self-reflexive gesture. The notion of authorship comes under questioning: Who writes history? Do stories belong to a singular person or the collective? Narrative shifts from the first to third-person persistently complicate a fixed sense of authorship. For example, the chapter titled, “The Airport and Three Men,” is prefaced by: “This is the story of an old man I don’t recognize” (22). The character, Bryan, appears to tell a story from his past, of three old men sitting at the airport reminiscing the olden days. On the one hand, this strategy of narrative distancing produces a sense of one looking back at the past, trying to make sense of events from a distant point in time; on the other hand, who speaks and whose story is being told, is made uncertain and ambiguous. The voices of history seem to whisper and rustle, accompanied by other voices, other perspectives, always situated in relation to other narratives yet to be told. As Tay writes: “The past is unresolved, voices in another room, to which the door is closed, whether they whisper or scream so terribly” (193).

City of Small Blessings explores the condition of “homelessness” in a modern world. Whether that has to do with vanishing histories or immigrant journeys, Tay explores the very predicament of man’s loneliness—one’s longing for kinship to a place or a loved one, and the struggle to reconcile a divided sense of self. While the work’s critique of modernity is worth considering, Tay’s depiction of a well-to-do family, those who benefit most from Singapore’s prosperity, takes away from its ostensible criticism of progress. It is hard to ignore the novel’s rather limited representation of history, given its depiction of characters from a more privileged and educated class. In the novel’s own questioning of historical truth, we too, as readers, must question the discourses of history we are presented with, and its means of production. The work does admit we find a history of omission in any narrative, we can at the very least begin with that.  

Works Cited

Perks, Samuel. ““Here’s to the Grass we Step on!”: Complicating the Spatial Dynamics of the Garden City in Singaporean Historical Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 673–85.

Tay, Simon. City of Small Blessings. Landmark Books, 2016. 

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