Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . When two young women, while trying to talk to Singapore's Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam about the misuse of POFMA (Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act) , were provoked to flip the bird to the cameras of his minders, the fast-and-furious criticisms of the sisters from politicians of the governing party, civil-society actors, and community leaders were telling about the rigid restrictions of political discourse in the country. As  Jom  puts it, "When we are quick to judge, to believe authority over activists, to pine for some imagined decorum in a dialogue biased by the disparity in power, we leave out much from our collective consciousness, our understanding of who we are." The sisters have given  their own version of the event , and I choose to believe them instead. If the full video were to be released, and not just the seven minutes that whistled to the ...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . "Art can activate the inert," I heard the Singaporean theater artist Ong Keng Sen say in his keynote lecture for last weekend's 6th biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC. "It can activate what is latent, what is potential." This is one of many gems that I will carry with me after the festival. Another is the story that  Ajoomma  writer-director He Shuming told about joining a group tour from Singapore to Korea to research the aunties for his film. Hearing that he was single, the ajoommas wanted to match him with their daughters, but on learning that he was a filmmaker, they stopped.  The stories were both funny and sobering. Filmmaker Dev Benegal shared his memory of sitting besides a famous film editor for four whole years in order to learn how to direct. Author and curator Simon Wu explained his urgent and joyful discovery of forgotten Asian American artists in NYC. Theater-mak...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Congratulations to  Rahad Abir  for winning the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction! We're so proud of you! Past winners include Malcolm Tariq, Ruby Lal, and Natasha Trethewey. The award citation reads: " Bengal Hound  is authentic and complex, and the storytelling skills on display here are impressive. At times the narrative becomes tight and abrupt, a mirror of what is happening with the protagonist. Overall, this is a vividly imagined, smartly edited novel. " At its very core a story of love and loss,  Bengal Hound  traces the turbulent years of East Pakistan that led to a mass revolution, eventually culminating in the creation of Bangladesh. Rahad Abir conjures up characters haunted by memory and trauma in a society reeling from the pains of the Partition of British India. A powerful exploration of the dynamics of nationalism, family, religion, and gender relat...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   Gaudy Boy is proud to publish this astonishing story collection  The Way You Want To Be Loved , by Aruni Kashyap. It is praised by Amitav Ghosh as "poignant, finely crafted." We think you will love it as much as we do. At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.  In agile and frank prose,  The Way You Want to Be Loved  tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village s...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Straits Times, Singapore's main broadsheet,  reported  that some Singaporean parents are not sending their children to the US for college because of the ongoing campus protests. One student told the newspaper, "My parents dissuaded me from attending a university in the US because they felt I might get influenced by the culture to protest and get into trouble." A PSA to these parents: Your children do not have to leave Singapore to learn to engage responsibly with the world. Last Friday, 40 students and alumni of Singaporean institutes of higher learning delivered 40 letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs opposing the newly proposed Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill.  Their letter , a model of reason and clarity even if you don't agree with their stance, deserves an answer from the Ministry. It also shows clearly how student activism around Israel/Gaza has broadened to a critique of cens...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Every year I teach sonnets to my Grade IX students, and so every year I teach  Claude McKay . A Jamaican, an Afro-Caribbean, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, a Communist, a bisexual, he wrote not just poems of passion and protest, but also delightful novels about Black life in Jamaica ( Banana Bottom ) and America ( Home to Harlem ). One of my favorite poems of his is "The Harlem Dancer," where he finds himself in a highly pensive mood. Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway; Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes Blown by black players upon a picnic day. She sang and danced on gracefully and calm, The light gauze hanging loose about her form; To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm Grown lovelier for passing through a storm. Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise, The wine-flushed,...

Weekly Column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Yesterday I was asked by a student writer of the school's newspaper to recommend a recent read for an article about students' reading habits and preferences. This was what I wrote back to her: "I just finished reading Rachel Heng's novel  The Great Reclamation , and I loved it. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an epic. The story follows Ah Boon from boyhood in a fishing village to adulthood in the government. In the process, it also traces the trajectory of Singapore from the last days of British rule to the heady times of the country's post-independence development. What is lost in the rush to modernize? What does modernization do to one's sense of self? These are questions that the novel explores with keen sympathy and insight. And with magical islands to boot." What I could have added to modernization but did not, was the question about what is lost in the rush to statehood....

Column written for the weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  As poetry editor of the Evergreen Review, I'm organizing the NYC-based journal's new year poetry celebration "Resolutions and Irresolutions," featuring Amber Atiya, Brad Vogel, and Katherine Swett, on Tuesday, Jan 16, 7 pm, at a Tribeca home (RSVP me at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org). Why that event name? I was thinking of the obligatory new year resolutions, certainly, but I was also thinking of the equally obligatory irresolutions of poets and poetry. The fiercer the pressure on poetry to be didactic and activist,  the harder I find myself resisting it in favor of indecision, ambiguity, questions, and irony. There is a gap, I have discovered, between being a citizen and a poet. They are related, but they are not the same. The citizen wants justice above all, the poet wants beauty. And an ideal society worthy of its name must find the space to accommodate the poet, its unreliable ally, its steadf...

We have a new video for Singapore Unbound! Thanks to Eunice Lau. The video captures our history and past accomplishments and looks forward to our future directions and plans. Take a look!

Hard on the heels of the election of former Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam to the Presidency of Singapore came the outrageous sentencing of rapper Subhas Nair to six weeks’ imprisonment for attempting to “promote ill will” between different races in Singapore. His crimes? Making four social-media posts that called attention to the different responses of the authorities and the media to wrongdoing by perpetrators of different races. Subhas is not alone in feeling angry and frustrated about systemic racism in Singapore. More than half (56.2%) of respondents in a 2021 survey on race relations felt that racism was an important problem—this was an increase of almost 10 percentage points from the 46.3% response in the 2016 survey. During his run for the Presidency, Tharman spoke about the racism he experienced while growing up as a brown child. When he returned home from sports on public buses, there were fellow commuters who would not sit beside him. It was also not uncommon that ...

  One of the effects of  the July 2023 scandals  that hit the Singapore government is the state’s loss of control over the narrative around the upcoming Presidential Election. The Elected Presidency, an invention of the governing party, has come  under strong fire  for being a flawed institution that was created out of political maneuvering and expediency. Instead of uniting the country’s people behind a ceremonial but vital figurehead, it has been struck by the lightning of political dissent and division. On state-controlled media, the ruling party’s candidate Tharman Shanmugaratnam attempts to burnish his independent (and dare we say it, populist) credentials by describing himself as  a former student activist , an irony not lost on activists persecuted by the state. This blatant attempt to appeal to the younger and more politically conscious generation only throws up questions about Tharman’s complicity with past and present state persecution. ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  My father died five years ago. Yesterday was his death anniversary. Five years seems wrong. It feels both too long and too short. In this state of unmooring, one becomes time's orphan, just as moving from Singapore to New York made me an orphan of place. I have lived in New York as a foster child for 20 years. 20 years seems wrong too, for the same reason. Yesterday I tried to recall the exact day I landed in JFK airport and took the bus to Grand Central Station, in order to board the train to Sarah Lawrence College, where I was to learn how to write, but I could not remember. What I remembered was sitting across from an older Jewish man on the train. He told me he was a jeweler who opened his own shop. Tonight, 20 years after I came to this city to see if I would be any good as a poet, I am having dinner with a younger Singaporean poet and her mom. She is here to pursue further training in the craft of wri...

Singapore Unbound and Mekong Review are jointly organizing the first-ever independent media fair in Singapore. With interesting exhibition booths and exciting speaker events, the fair is free and open to the public. Donations welcomed. Join the conversation!   Fair Exhibition (2.00-6.30 pm, 6th floor)  Ethos Books  Function 8  Gaudy Boy Press  Jom  Kontinentalist  Lepak Conversations  Meantime Magazine  Mekong Review  New Naratif  Singapore Climate Rally  Wake Up Singapore  and more!  Open Forum: Why Do We Need an Independent Media? (2.30-4.00 pm, Ruby Room, 5th floor)   What kinds of activities does the term “media” cover? What is meant by the term “independent”? If the media are to be independent, who exercises oversight? What are the sources of their authority and validity? What about objectivity or evenhandedness?  Panelists: Ariffin Sha (Wake Up Singapore), Loh Pei Ying (Head and Co-Fo...

I reviewed Monica Youn's new book FROM FROM for The Poetry School in the UK. "From From, Monica Youn’s fourth book of poems, is a striking departure from her first three books. Instead of addressing race obliquely and occasionally, From From confronts it full-on, from beginning to end. Interviewed in Bomb magazine, Youn explained, ‘I always felt I had permission to talk about race, but I wanted to figure out a way to write about race that would ring true to me.’ The child of Korean immigrants, Youn trains her incisive intelligence and considerable lyrical gift on her experience growing up in Texas and living in New York as a racial minority. The result is a volume of poems that is deeply heartfelt yet bracingly suspicious, exploratory and accomplished...." If you're in NYC and would like to hear Monica Youn read, please consider coming to this fun Happy Hour jointly organized by the NY Public Library and Singapore Unbound on Friday, May 26, 5.30-7.30 pm, on a midtown...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   In Capital, Volume One , Karl Marx shows that capitalism is the thief of time. In pursuit of ever-greater profits, capitalism increases either the working hours or the productivity of those hours in order to cream off the surplus value from the wages paid to workers for maintaining bare life. Individual capitalists cannot help doing so if their business is to stay afloat in the market competition. Since capitalism is pretty much the global mode of production now, national economies cannot escape the logic either. If they cannot exploit their own citizens due to labor laws, they will exploit vulnerable migrant children .  Written in the 1950s, when the American postwar economy was supposedly booming, the play A Raisin in the Sun , by Lorraine Hansberry, revolves ostensibly around a Black family's difficulties in purchasing and owning a house in a white Chicago neighborhood. Yet, to put the emphasi...