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LIVE in a few hours! I'll be discussing my debut fiction collection, This Is Where I Won't Be Alone, with Amanda Hall '21, Co-Editor-in-Chief of New Forum, UCI's undergraduate creative writing journal. It's going to be a great conversation! 🎉
Wednesday, January 27
5-6pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link - https://illuminations.uci.edu/events/2021_1_27_Inez_Tan_Faculty_Book_Talk.html
It's here! THIS IS WHERE I WON'T BE ALONE, my debut collection of stories! I'm happy to announce that there are many ways to order the book, and it will reach you wherever you live in the world. IN SINGAPORE: - Stores: Coming very soon to Neo Kinokuniya Singapore Main Store, BooksActually, and other fine places where books are sold! - Online from Epigram Books (https://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/this-is-where-i-wont-be-alone), with free shipping in Singapore over $25. In other words, no charge for shipping if you buy two books! :) ANYWHERE ELSE OUTSIDE SINGAPORE: - Epigram Books (https://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/this-is-where-i-wont-be-alone), shipping by weight - LocalBooks.sg (https://localbooks.sg/collections/authors/products/this-is-where-i-wont-be-alone), flat shipping rate on any number of copies (great for larger orders!) Above all, I hope you'll enjoy reading my first book! I think of these as stories about home and belonging in Singapore and beyond that I've wanted to read all along. I'm so excited for them to finally find their way to you. Yours in the company of book-lovers everywhere, Inez <3 https://ineztan.com/
4/5/17: Ministry of Moral Panic
Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe
It’s 8 May today; I’ve left the review for a few days because I wanted my thoughts on this book to percolate. For some reason reading Ministry of Moral Panic was emotionally tiring for me. Given the title, I can see how the stories would involve or set out to trigger moral panic. Their conflicts often involve deviants from the unspoken celibate, high-flying, Singaporean norms involving marrying off old maids and marriages of compatibility. The stories are probably meant to provoke, but ironically it was the lighter stories (less sensational, less deviant) that I enjoyed more. I started to expect the scandalous and the societally frowned upon in every short story, before I had even read them. It is partially a fault of my own, but I felt that I was racing ahead of myself and thus couldn’t appreciate the stories as I could have if I had encountered them individually (I was more blown away by “Pawn” when I read it independently on QLRS than in this collection). However, the way Amanda Lee Koe structures her stories does deliciously provide hints to what she wants to say.
In “Pawn” for example, the main “couple” seem to play a zero-sum game. He cheats her, or he loves her; she loses, or she wins. However, by bookending the story with juxtapositions against prettier office ladies, Amanda Lee Koe shows us that the game was never played between the couple, but between the pretty office ladies and those who aren’t considered so. It’s presented as a surprising twist, but one realises it’s been there all along.
In “Laundromat”, the ambiguous ending is also an apt ending to a question that has yet to be resolved.
4/5/17: Kappa Quartet
Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam
It’s 9 am and I’ve just finished Kappa Quartet. I’m not sure what I think about it, because I’d always thought it would end cheerily. Slightly past the midpoint mark last night I noted: “The story grows on you. The characters come together in greater numbers and more frequently, and they meld together like members taking position in a symphonic orchestra.” In some senses the ends of some characters reflected their sad situations in life - sometimes something had to give, like in the trio’s case. There was quite a lot of irony, and sometimes there is the sense of people missing out on deeper conversations because they politely held back on pushing topics - like in the case of Mr Shimao and Ahab. Daryl weaves in quite a bit of detail in various places - dates and names that I miss because I’m still a skimming reader. This is a very vague and sparse review, I must say.
In the earlier bits of the story I felt like some lines were dropped because they sounded poetic, the kind of line you wave your hand about and try to grab from the air and say wistfully. Perhaps because some of them didn’t strike me as being specific to the situation. They were apt, but they didn’t seem solely applicable to whatever was being talked about. A friend once said something about a Naomi Kawase movie about a town, that Kawase doesn’t explicitly state things. She shows them for a while, and if you haven’t gotten it by then she just moves on. Given the structure of Kappa Quartet, with each chapter narrated from the POV of a different character, and the characters featured dependent on the experiences of the narrator, readers are not made aware of the fates of all characters. We only know of what happened in the end to three out of the many characters, and while I was surprised at how the novel narrowed to a point in its conclusion given its number of characters, I wasn’t displeased by it because I had accepted by this point that Kappa Quartet wasn’t going to be the sunshine and roses story I assumed it would be.
Man, what a lot of rambling on my part. Quick notes:
There was a point where I thought that though humans do not have the cavities in their skulls Kappas have, quite a few human characters had deficiencies reminscent of those holes.
Also, I noticed myself fearing Kappas “turning rogue” or causing trouble, or being the cause of trouble in some sense, which made me examine this form of xenophobia in me.
~~~~~~~~~ more material below ~~~~~~~~
30/4/17
We Rose Up Slowly by Jon Gresham
Great book. A collection of speculative short stories, some of them reworking legends and real events. My favourite was “Rashid at The Sail”, simply because I liked the bit of optimism in it. My least favourite is “Walking Backwards Up Bukit Timah Hill”, because I felt it was too strange, yet not strange enough to be mindblowing.
And on the topic of “strangeness”, it’s a pity, but perhaps because the book starts with the memorably unquotidian “We Rose Up Slowly”, I found myself expecting some unnatural element in the following stories. This expectation impeded my immersion into some stories, because I was always looking out for something else. Nevertheless, this is a small gripe and wouldn’t be a problem if the reader encountered these stories separately - as they would have been when first published in various different collections.
Other People’s Cats - my favourite line is “I am not your manic pixie dream girl.”
A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night - the first time I read this I was vaguely disatisfied. I felt that though some expressions were clever - the shit on streets/ don’t shit on me twist of stereotypes, some lines of direct speech - “let me protect you in my cocoon, inside my spaceship. Let us fly through the night together” - verged on the artificial and wouldn’t be said irl. Unexpectedly, I found it thoughtful and charming upon my second read. True, the cringey lines are still cringey, but writing is a craft, and it’s plain that the author took pains to subtly weave in “clues” to the conclusion. I didn’t catch those on my first read, and catching them on my second was a pleasant glimpse into another dimension of the story. I also picked up more mirroring of speech/actions that (again, subtly) showed that the first person narrative of one character was based on misunderstanding and was flawed. Given the suspension of belief one has when viewing fiction, I hadn’t realised that on my first read.
Final verdict:
Definitely worth re-reading. I’m considering buying a copy and bringing it to China as a Sing Lit rec.
Post-script:
The sensuous descriptions are quite tingly - “soft as a vole”. Whoosh.
~~ read the following after you’ve read the book ~~
Hiroshima
Does it matter that your hands are cold? That your breathing is shallow, No I cannot hear you breathe anymore Your swollen eyes are shut But it’s light outside Open your bright eyes Your translucent eyelids are caked With something thick and dirty Maybe that’s why- I’ll lick it up Hot red liquid is coming out of your little nose No matter, it’d dry up I remember when you got blood on your knees, You were brave, and you kept smiling Oh but where is your smile? The loud noises took them away Your laughter wasn’t what I heard when the flash came It was a kind of gurgle, Like when you tried to call my name with water in your mouth Maybe you lying here under the fallen roof of your house is a joke And you are playing a game of who can hold your breath longer Maybe the cement and dirt and blood on your face were all from that dreadful holiday in October that I hate so much But if you tell me now, I would love Halloween Call my name again and laugh that sweet sound bury your face in my fur and tell me it was all a big joke to punish me for peeing all over the house when I was a puppy but it doesn’t matter that your voice no longer calls Your eyes no longer open Your chest no longer rise and fall with every sharp intake of breath It doesn’t matter that your hands are cold I’ll stay Like a good boy
“This was how, at last, Congruence arrived at the feast. It did not matter that he was dusty and bruised from his voyage, nor that other guests had already taken their places. With open arms they welcome him and listened in awe as he described landscapes and heartlands that no one else before had walked or witnessed. He spoke of how in his darkness moments when path seemed lost, the clear song of his wife, Conviction, had kept him from wandering astray.
"Truly,” he said, “it is what we love that gives us our names.”
Then their son Integrity - who had started his journey as an infant and was now a grown man - stepped forward proudly and began to sing.“
- Alvin Pang, from “What Gives Us Our Names”
Get yours here~
"Mother's voice as she spun or re-affirmed gossips, filling the space of her domestic hours. But that time was unusual. The handset clicked back in place within seconds, and, as I roused my mind to question the rashness, there was a low-pitched roar, one I did not hear before nor have since heard again. It was unwomanly, even inhuman, off-tune and steady but loud, like that aching groan of an old engine. By the time I came startled to the door, I caught sight of its end, Mother raising her face from her deep palms cupping tears. She swept clean her eyes with one brush of her arm and, with sudden singleness of purpose, had a new face on. She dug out a small, black notebook, pulled off its rubber band, and began punching the plastic phone buttons. With her back turned, the words fell, in Teochew: 'Grandmother is dead.'"
- from "Balik Kampung"
Available for sale here.
