Alexandra WONG speaks to Wena POON

WRITING ABOUT OURSELVES

By ALEXANDRA WONG

Just because we’re Asian, it doesn’t mean we have to address mother-daughter issues in our literature. A refreshing new voice joins the crowd that’s moving Asian lit onto new ground. Wena Poon wants to write about real, modern Asians, not perpetuate stereotypes.

LIONS IN WINTER is a rare book. It’s written by an Asian author and yet there is nary a tortured concubine or plucky waif in it, no tear-jerking plot or even a flower or bird in the title.

Singapore-born Wena Poon, 33, is determined to talk about the here and now, and give voice to the millions of modern Asians who are woefully underrepresented in English-language fiction.

The 11 short stories in Lions in Winter are populated by an array of characters that could have been plucked out of any modern Asian family tree. There’s the Freud-quoting teenage wunderkind, even a marriage between—gasp!—pen pals: a modern relationship our forefathers would never have dreamt of.

The stock characters of yore are nowhere to be found.

“As an Asian writer, I have had enough of ‘prettified pathos’,” the San Francisco-based Poon declares, her firmness on this point coming across even in an e-mail interview.

“It’s always about the past, about Chinese people being concubines, having their feet bound, etc. We’re not all Amy Tans, and we Asian women don’t all have ‘issues’ with our families or mothers, or have immigration issues. We’re ready to move on.”

Her timing is perfect. It seems publishers, too, are ready to move on from “scar/misery” literature, as the life-in-poverty-under-repressive-Asian-regimes genre is called. Reports the International Herald Tribune: “International publishers and literary agents say they are ... looking for new voices and genres that capture the rapid social and economic transformation of the new Asia.”

Poon’s is definitely one of those new voices. Her stories in Lions in Winter are a tribute to real people she met and are based on real-life situations. They examine the quiet lives of displaced Singaporeans living abroad, and those in Singapore who are often torn between two worlds in their search for an imaginary homeland.

“I wanted to really capture their lives,” she says. “They would be very surprised to know they were worth writing about as they all think they are ordinary and uninteresting. Of course, it is fictionalised, I’ve ‘done something’ to the reality, but the details are authentic.

“My theory was: white people write so much about themselves, we should write more about ourselves. Don’t we have our own sorrows, stories, joys, histories? I never want to believe that Singaporeans, for example, are less interesting than any other group of people on Earth, but in Singapore we often think of ourselves as boring, dull, compliant, etc. Are we not worthy of being captured for posterity in our own writing?”

But all these deep thoughts percolated through her mind later. At first, these stories were not even conceived as a collection; like most things in life, the book happened accidentally.

While on an airplane during one of her frequent business trips several years ago, Poon read a newspaper article about Penguin putting together an anthology of stories by Malaysian and Singaporean writers. At that time, she had already had articles and essays published in magazines and literary journals but had never had a short story published.

“I was so inspired by their effort that I took out one of my legal pads and started writing a short story right there on the plane,” she recalls. “The flight between Singapore and Hong Kong was three hours long—and I finished the story in that time. When I landed in Singapore, I immediately sent it to the editors of that book and asked them if they would like to include my story.”

Inspired by the publication of that first short story (“The Move” was published in 2002 in The Merlion and the Hibiscus: Contemporary Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia), Poon kept at it and, over a period of five years, came up with the 11 stories that appear in Lions in Winter.

Some of the stories in Lions in Winter have appeared in other anthologies and literary magazines; this is, however, the first time they have been collected together in one publication.

Eric Forbes, senior editor at MPH Group Publishing, was instrumental in getting Lions in Winter into print. He had been referred to Poon’s story in one of the Silverfish New Writings anthologies produced by local publisher Silverfish Books and was impressed enough to contact Poon and put Lions in Winter into motion.

I ask Poon what she hopes will come out of Lions in Winter. Does she want to sell a zillion copies? Become the next big thing in Asian literature? Nothing so grand, I find out, but something more profound.

“My biggest hope is that it strikes a chord with people and that they see themselves or people they know in it, and they appreciate my attempts to capture and distil our culture and identity. I hope I make them think about their lives and realise that even the most ordinary things can be extraordinary.

“In the titular story, for example, there is a scene in which the narrator looks at the clothes hanging out to dry in a typical public housing estate. We’re so used to that sight, we don’t even think about what it really means, that it could symbolise a kind of lazy, late tropical afternoon peace and security that other societies don’t have.

“Turn-of-the-century British writers like Conrad, Kipling and Maugham thought the Malaya region so fascinating,” she declares. “Why was it of such great literary focus 100 years ago, and not now? Let’s do it again, guys!” (Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924; Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936; and W. Somerset Maugham 1874-1965, who famously visited Malaya and wrote stories set in colonial times here.)

Poon and I may be 15 hours and 7,000 kilometres apart, but I can almost see the fire spitting out of her eyes as her fingers fly over her computer’s keyboard, pouring out stories that affirm her beliefs.

If hers is the voice of the new Asian literati, the future looks brighter than I think.

Interview originally published in The Sunday Star, November 25, 2007