December’s over, and we’ve had, almost strangely given climate change, something close to a normal rainy season here. The heat and humidity builds during the day, grey clouds piling up in the sky, and then there’s a sudden wind, and the release of rain and thunder in the late afternoon. We visited Penang for a few days, and the rain was so regular in late afternoon that we could plan the rhythm of our day to match it, walk in George Town or up Penang Hill, and the retreat to our hotel verandah at Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion at 4 o’clock. In Singapore the weather hasn’t been quite so predictable, but it’s nonetheless exhilarating to go from oppressive heat and humidity to that sudden cool blast of air, the scattered leaves and the big, slow raindrops, and then a shower of water on umbrellas and covered walkways and sandaled feet.
In the last two weeks there’s also been another wind blowing. 大风吹, literally The Big Wind Blows, is the Chinese-language title of the latest movie from Kelvin Tong: in English the movie is called A Year of No Significance. I saw the movie at its premiere at Singapore International Film Festival, and through correspondence with a friend, I’ve been drawn into responses to the movie not just in English, but also in Chinese. One very positive thing here is that a Singapore movie does appear to have touched a chord—or perhaps several chords—of public sentiment, and raised issues both concerning linguistic privilege and also how a younger generation remembers and re-imagines a past that was not theirs, but whose postmemory, in Marianne Hirsch’s term, they have inherited.
First, the film itself. It’s set in 1979, and its central character, Nanyang University graduate and architect Lim Cheng Soon, finds himself increasing marginalised in an English-speaking workplace. His father favours his younger brother, who moves much more fluently in an English-speaking world, and yet Cheng Soon, as eldest son, must take on the burden of caring for him. There’s a moving scene in which Cheng Soon is feeding his father, who mistakes him for his brother: he thinks for a moment of correcting him, and then just plays along. Cheng Soon’s life is on a downward trajectory: his wife has left him, and he stalks her, gloomily watching her growing joy in a new, independent life. The movie ends with a tragic accident in a quarry, where he’s taken his two young nephews to search for tadpoles.
There was a strong sense among the audience at the premiere of the film that A Year of No Significance was important, both personally for the director, and in larger socio-historical terms. The closing of Nanyang University, and the loss of Chinese-medium education, has produced a generation of “scar literature” in Chinese, and has affected family lives in complex ways. Chinese-educated Singaporeans of my mother-in-law’s generation often have the experience of being strangers in their own land, with the shift to English as a lingua franca but also a language of privilege. Younger Chinese Singaporeans often have a functional proficiency in Mandarin, but not a deep cultural sense of connection with the language, and this often results in difficulties in communication over generations. While the movie was billed as an attempt to bear witness to this experience of loss, and to ensure it’s not forgotten, for me it seems more a work of postmemory, an act of exploratory mourning for a loss by a generation that did not directly experience it.
I found the movie challenging, thoughtful, and moving, but I, unlike most friends I chatted to who watched it, also had immediate reservations. I found it a little one-paced, in that it followed an unremitting trajectory of decline by the main character, with whom an audience might sympathize but was also in many ways unknowable and even unlikable. And I found the atmosphere of the film bleak. It was filmed in Batu Pahat, in Malaysia, which stood in for Singapore of forty years and more ago, and the interiors and exteriors were very bare. A tailor’s shop – admittedly due to close – had no bales of cloth on its shelves at all. The construction site on which Cheng Soon worked seemed to be a ruin or an abandoned, half-finished building, with only a few wooden concrete forms added so that it might masquerade as an edifice under construction. The bleakness of the settings perhaps came from the low budget, but it also harmonized with Cheng Soon’s mood. Oddly, the settings remined me of those minimalist, stagy, Brechtian sets for Lars Von Trier’s movies such as Dogville and Manderlay. If I had to sum up, then, I’d say that the effect of alienation was achieved in the movie, but at a cost. There was very little suggestion of the richness of the Nanyang Chinese culture that was being marginalised—in a very sharp contrast to the vitality and depth of such culture in another movie I saw, Chong Keat Aun’s Snow in Midsummer, which dealt with another historical trauma, the 1969 13 May Incident.
My reservations, perhaps strangely, given our difference in backgrounds, had some resonance with the critiques of the movie in Singapore’s Chinese press from people who had lived through the historical experiences of loss: graduates of Nanyang University and the Chinese-educated. I’m here basing my comments on three commentaries published in Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore’s major Chinese -language newspaper, by Lee Guan Kin, Liu Peifang and Han Yongmei. While there are differences in the articles, there are common threads. First, A Year of No Significance does contain historical inaccuracies. There was no architecture department at Nanyang University, and one of the songs playing on a car radio in the film wasn’t released until the1982. Liu Peifang also makes an important point that if Cheng Soon had been working at his company for many years, his English would in all probability be much more fluent than the level shown in the film, in which he cannot hold a basic conversation and must look up words such as “construction site” in the dictionary. The point made in these articles is that these inaccuracies do have significance, because although the movie is a documentary, it does claim to represent a historical reality.
A second, related theme in the articles is that Lim Cheng Soon is not an appropriate representative of a generation. Kelvin Tong doesn’t have a deep lived experience of the generation he depicts. People like Lim Cheng Soon certainly existed, but it would be better to show a more exemplary figure, someone who, like many Nantah graduates, found a way to succeed, or at least to rebuild a life in a different way.
I can see where this sentiment comes from. Along comes a film that purports to speak for an experience of a generation, and yet it’s directed by someone who is not of that generation, and who has only experienced the effects of the language policies and social changes attending on them indirectly. That said, I don’t think a new generation revisiting history and re-visioning it is necessarily a bad thing. History will always be re-narrated and interpreted for use in the present, and eventually all of those with lived experience of any historical event will pass away. Perhaps what is problematic is the implicit claim in the movie—through its early reference to language policies, and in some of the publicity—to speak for an older generation, while in fact it speaks for the generation of its director. It’s certainly possible to illustrate this tension by telling a story in which different time levels speak of remembrance and forgetting across generations: I’m thinking here of Boo Junfeng’s Sandcastle, where the past intrudes into the life of an eighteen-year-old. A justified criticism might then be that A Year of No Significance doesn’t foreground issues of representation, as Sandcastle does, but rather produces an illusion of transparent representation, of speaking for an other.
At the end of Han Yongmei’s article she raises the issue of Chinese privilege, and how the movie’s greatest impact, in her view, might be in helping younger Singaporeans who use this term to question its use. Personally, I think issues of racialized privilege in Singapore are important, and thus “Chinese privilege” when placed in context – and not simply used as a parallel to Mary McIntosh’s notion of “white privilege” — is a useful concept. Yet Han’s comment does raise the issue of linguistic privilege, and how access to English and high-level fluency in it is something that’s often overlooked when we think of marginalisation in terms of race, gender, sexuality and class. For me, this is also an interesting moment, because it’s a time in which Singapore’s experience can be used to speak more widely. Thus we can challenge not just the applicability of theoretical concepts largely mediated through the North American academy to Singapore, but think of their limits in their countries of origin. In Canada and the US, a first generation of immigrants, unless they migrate from places or classes where English (or French in Quebec) is widely spoken, tend not to be able to represent themselves publicly. The second generation, growing up in Canada, naturally focuses on how racialization still brings its exclusions. Yet the voice and experience of that first generation of immigrants, often losing social status in the process of migration, and through language unable to fully participate in a public sphere, isn’t so frequently heard. And universities, where these debates are often condensed into “theory,” despite their openness in other ways, are places of thoroughgoing linguistic exclusion.
What’s finally exciting to me about the movie, then, is the questions it raises, the debate it’s produced, and the possibilities of wider theoretical critique opened up by lived Singapore experiences. I was talking with a senior colleague recently who has spent his life critiquing Singaporean multiculturalism as policy, and the way it invites different racialized communities to live separately together, rather than engage in intercultural work. I said that I thought that there were some things that could be learned from Singapore’s experience, and he insisted that the policies were mistaken, essentialist, and wrong. I probably didn’t express myself very well: what I wanted to talk about wasn’t at the level of policy, but at the level of surprising lived experience: the passings and omissions and silences and misapprehensions and possibilities in the void decks and coffee shop on our HDB estate, when you descend. It might be very still, but then there’s a puff of air, a stirring of memory. Leaves scatter, and you make for the covered walkway as the big wind starts to blow.