Charlie and Elaine Chiew (The Light Between Us) discuss early 20th century Singaporean photography and its influences on Elaine’s novel in depth, which involves looking at social issues and the history of the qipao. We also dive into the time travel aspects and the use of Chinese spirit-mediums.

General references:
The Lake House (2006)
Il Mare (2000)
The Young Companion magazine
In The Mood For Love

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Constance Turnbull: A History Of Singapore
Elaine Chiew: The Heartsick Diaspora
Elaine Chiew: The Light Between Us
Elaine Chiew (ed.): Cooked Up!
Kevin Kwan: Crazy Rich Asians
Terence Heng: Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces
Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Sympathizer

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 23rd July 2024; published 9th December 2024

Where to find Elaine online: Website || Twitter || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

00:02:04 About Elaine’s research into early 20th century Singaporean photographs and bringing voices that haven’t had a say in fiction to the fore
00:10:28 How important is The Light Between Us’s Tian Wei compared to Charlie [the character]?
00:14:48 Working out the time travel and including Charlie’s family
00:21:04 How Elaine’s career in the creative arts influenced the book, and how women in Singapore used their agency when being photographed
00:35:38 Looking at the smaller moments of war and the lead up to war. Also Elaine’s inclusion of the Ghee Hin Kong Si
00:40:19 Aiko’s creation and importance in the book
00:47:17 Elaine’s writing style and use of punctuation which fascinated our host!
00:52:14 The use of the tangki and all that involved
01:00:59 Brief notes on what Elaine is writing now

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

[Recorded later] Charlie: Hello listeners, thank you for your feedback; the decision has been made! From January, this podcast will be known as Author’s Afterword. Same content, just a different name. I’ve been told there shouldn’t be any changes in regards to the RSS feed and your subscriptions, but, knowing what I do about technology, if by the middle of January an episode hasn’t shown up in your feed, you may need to search for authors afterward in your podcast app and resubscribe. If you are subscribed via YouTube, I think you should be alright. It should show up, but do double check as well.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 111. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Elaine Chiew to discuss The Light Between Us. Elaine has previously published a short story collection, The Heartsick Diaspora, and was the editor of the anthology Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around The World. But The Light Between Us – today’s book – is her debut novel. In 1920, photographer Tian Wei finds a curious letter on his photographic equipment from 2019.In late 2019, Charlie is working in photo archives in Singapore and starts finding letters from the past. Distanced by time, Charlie and Tian Wei begin the most unlikely of correspondences. If you’re thinking The Lake House or Il Mare, I’m right there with you – this is a time slip/travel romance. And I think that’s enough info for us to be getting on with. Hello Elaine!

Elaine: Hello! Thank you so much, Charlie, for having me on.

Charlie: I want to start with the inspiration. Can you tell us, if we start with this, about your research into early 20th century Singaporean photographs?

Elaine: Yeah. So in 2021 I was really fortunate to have been awarded the early historian grant by the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, in conjunction with LaSalle College of the Arts, where I did my MA in Asian Art History to look at specific archives in Singapore. And one of them that I was really fascinated by was the historical photographs of early Singapore. But then I really wanted to focus on women. And the reason I really wanted to focus on women is because first of all, it’s always been a neglected subject for whatever reason. And second of all, I was quite drawn in by the early emancipation efforts of female education, female agency, and also because in the global discussion around feminism, we don’t as often, and maybe we should, really look at how global feminisms happen in different places. And as well, during this time, 2021, if you remember, the hash #MeToo movement was actually going quite strong. There were a number of issues that had come up. So I really felt that addressing this gap in the global feminism, about the rise of feminism – they didn’t really use the word ‘feminism’ then, they really used the word ‘early emancipation efforts’ – and looking at how women found their own way of expressing themselves through dress as a political regime, made it really interesting as a vehicle for limited agency, what I call ‘situational agency’. So that was really the academic paper that anchored the research, but then, as I got into it, I had all these photographs – I must have looked at 2500 photographs in the Singapore National Archives – and all these faces looking back at me and suddenly I got this really ghostly feeling that the past is very much alive. And I also felt that there was very much a story here about… it’s a decolonising narrative, it’s basically putting centre stage voices that have never been heard before, they’ve never had a chance to tell the stories before. So that was when Tian Wei came into being as a Chinese photographer who had immigrated to this part of the world from China. And it’s through that lens, that filter, that he gazes at the world, the diasporic world, which very much ties in, even today, with the way that British Chinese understand themselves. They’re linked to diaspora, they’re linked to history, they’re linked to an ancestral homeland that’s actually quite ghostly, if you think about it. Because if you’ve never been, what does that actually mean? So these were a lot of the things that came out of actually looking at the historical archives. And so that was very much part of the inspiration.

Charlie: Well, could you tell us more about… you saying about the voices that don’t really get an opportunity to speak much, especially in fiction, can you tell us more about working on that and bringing them to the fore?

Elaine: Yeah. So if you look at literature from before World War Two, about Singapore, Malaya – because it is a British colony, it’s part of the British Straits Settlements, one of the treasures, really, in the Queen’s coffers, if you think about it, because it was a major metropole – if you look at the literature from that time, you’re really thinking about Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, a lot of these names that you would be familiar with. And a little bit after, post World War Two, it’ll be Anthony Burgess. And in all of the stories, you absolutely do have local characters, but they are not centre stage, it’s not their story [Charlie: yeah]. So in this part of the world, obviously there are narratives, but they never get to be on the global stage. So because the book is published by a London publisher and it’s published in London, that as an act in itself makes it a decolonising narrative. And I wanted to centre a voice that… in fact there has never been a story about a Singapore Chinese photographer from a British colony pre-World War Two. There isn’t any story around those characters. And what makes him Tian Wei interesting is not just because he is a story that has never been told, it’s also because of his links to the Chinese diaspora and how there’s a level of consciousness in terms of understanding, what does it mean to be a subject. So what’s interesting, actually, one of the important things to understand about that period, is that there were two kinds of Chinese, and this was determined by the British and their policy. You would have the local Peranakans – they were half- Chinese, half-Malay, because their Chinese ancestors had basically sailed to this part of the world in the late 14th to 15th century and settled and married local women. And so obviously they knew the local culture really well – they spoke English, they spoke Malay, and they were the natural choices for the British to choose as intermediaries between local business concerns, trading posts, and with the British colonial administration. Less so, the new arrivals. So the new wave, which is what Tian Wei is, he’s part of the new arrival of Chinese immigrants, also spurred by British policy, migrant policy, because they needed cheap labour for the plantations that they were opening, the rubber estates, the railways that they were building, the tin mines. So this new wave were called Sinkuh. They were considered guests and they did not intermarry as much because a lot of them couldn’t intermarry at all – they didn’t have the money, they were basically labourers. They lived in really cramped quarters, and they sent all their money home. Also, a lot of them were illiterate – they didn’t speak English, they spoke to in their local dialects. Many of them couldn’t speak Mandarin. And there was a difference in terms of how the British treated the Peranakan, who a lot of them became actually Straits leadership, Straits Chinese leadership. They were considered elites, basically, from this new influx of immigrants. So the Peranakas were British subjects and they were entitled to some of the benefits that came with that, including availing themselves of queen scholarships, for example, so that a number of them actually went to study in Scotland, they went to study in London, they went to study in Cambridge. Not so the Sinkuh. In fact, if they were caught having any kind of participation in political organising, political activity, that the British at that time considered unsavoury or threatening – they had no status. They were deported lickety-split. Off you go. There was no trial, no hearing, nothing. You basically had your papers revoked and you went back. And this was during a time of huge political turmoil in China, as you know, because the Qing dynasty had fallen, the Republicans were in charge. And so a lot of that diasporic links were very interesting so this formed a lot of the backdrop of the book. And as you can see, Tian Wei himself became one of these… almost like a peon caught in between, like, ‘where are my loyalties? Are they towards this new place that I now call home? Or should they be towards China, where I came from?’ And I really wanted him to reflect this conflict within himself. ‘Should I participate in what’s happening in the homeland when that homeland is becoming increasingly less and less familiar to me, when I’ve made a livelihood somewhere else and define my identity by something else entirely? My livelihood is wrapped around my photography studio, and I am a photographer. I’m also an artist.’ So those links began to be attenuated and began to be interrogated as well for himself, and I think this reflects very much a lot of the journey of Chinese diasporic citizens around the world. And we are still facing this even today.

Charlie: Sure, sure. What you’re saying here, I’m thinking it’s classism, alive and well, isn’t it? As it always was. Hopefully it won’t always be, but yeah, That’s interesting as well, because I know when I was reading it, the book, I was struggling to decide for myself, in terms of the reading experience as its own thing, who was more important. And it’s sounding to me, from what you’re saying, that Tian Wei is more important than Charlie to you, is that right?

Elaine: Such a great question. You have me there. I don’t think this book would have been written if Charlie had not been present, because I could very well have chosen to do it completely as a historical novel but I really felt that the camera itself, a photograph itself, is a thing that is both past and present at the same time. So for me, the structure of the novel from the get go – because every single time you hold a photograph in your hand, you’re actually holding a piece of the past – to me, that’s so compelling that it just seemed to me, organically, that I would absolutely have to have a character in the present. And also because it is a decolonising novel, I also had to ask myself, ‘what am I colonising?’ There’s always a power dynamic. So, as a diasporic, British-based Chinese, when I take a narrative from another place, which I have not been part of – of course, I could say I’ve got all these roots, I’ve got all these linkages, I’ve got family – but even so, when it comes to history, can we freely just take? Can we just freely adopt the voices of any piece of the past? So that was a relationship question that I had to ask myself. What relationship do I have to the region, to the archives, to the voices of the past that would need to be represented as authentic? And so, for me, it was very important that Charlie be there, because she is a curator, she is an art historian. So I definitely was assuming all of those roles when I was researching the archives and writing my paper. And so I felt that her gaze, her gaze and her filter very much set up our understanding of Tian Wei. Without that gaze, it might have been a completely different enterprise. And also because the photograph is a framework in itself of past and present, so I wanted to make sure that the structure has those two layers, if you will, within the story. So I needed to make that happen through something magical, something supernatural, and that was when the idea of quantum entanglement came about. I will be honest, I struggled with finding out how to exactly portray that – what are the mechanics of it for quite some time. And it actually held me up in the writing of the first draft. That was the thing that I struggled most with [chuckles]. Because I’m not a photographer – I studied photography as an art historian, but I’ve never actually been in a photographic studio from the 1920s, where they use wet plate collodion, or the dry plate process, exactly how they might actually develop a photograph. I had to actually go research that step by step. What are some of the components, the chemical components that make up film at the time? But I have to say, it was fascinating. I mean, talk about falling in love, maybe it had to be a love story because I was falling so deeply in love with the subject as I was researching it! I really, really enjoyed the process of researching it so, so much. Maybe a little bit more than actual writing itself, because writing, as you know, can be quite painful, right? So, anyway, I would say, Charlie, she might come across as slightly less important because of the weight of history on Tian Wei’s shoulders, but she is essential to setting up the framework for us to understand Tian Wei.

Charlie: That’s fascinating. I mean, before I’ve been talking to you here, to me, Charlie was more important. I think that’s partly, though, because of the ending, because she is still around at the end, and Tian Wei isn’t, so I suppose seeing that narrative structure of her being there from the beginning and the end. But, no, that’s really interesting, and I’ve got a couple of notes written down I’m gonna have to get to. You said about quantum mechanics, and that took you a while working it out. Can you tell us more about this?

Elaine: Yeah. So time travel, obviously, is quite a big genre. I wanted to add that in also because I’m quite drawn to speculative fiction, and in this particular region right now, this is one of the hottest genres, just because it allows so much imaginative room to develop a story. And the idea that came from the beginning, because of this whole ‘past is alive’ thing, was the idea of letters, criss-crossing back and forth. So that really came first. Letters are so intimate to me – I think texts don’t quite fulfil the same function somehow – but in letters, because you’re actually not really able to see the person who will receive it, you don’t know when exactly they will receive it in the olden days, writing a letter is so intimate because it feels a little bit like you’re bearing your soul to yourself; until that person receives it and then sends a missive back, really, you’re writing to yourself. And I was going to add that Tian Wei and Charlie, even though they’re separated by 100 years apart, are in some ways mirror souls. They are both outsiders to a community that hasn’t quite embraced them. At the same time, they also see the potentials of choices in terms of if they were to choose to do certain things a certain way, they might feel more of the belonging, but they may not be comfortable – there’s a tension in that. They are also two people who are actually quite lonely, I would say, they’re quite lonely. They have this gaze, this focus on the small, minute things which Roland Barthes call the punctum. And a photograph can affect you that way because of that one word, ‘detail’, just as books can and texts can, because of that one detail, you find yourself basically unravelling. And I think that they are both those kinds of people. So as a result, I really thought that the letters could be their main mode of communication. I have had quite a few readers now ask, ‘can you really fall in love from just reading someone’s letters?’ I will be honest, it actually has happened to me, so, yes, I think you can. But I think it takes a certain kind of person, maybe, a certain kind of person who loves words, images, again, that word ‘detail’, looking for beauty in all these unlikely, forlorn places. I think it probably is that kind of sensibility. And also maybe your time in life sometimes. We recognise that Charlie, she’s holed up in the basement. All she does is look at reams and reams and reams of photographs. It’s part of a digital archive as well. So her job is very, in some ways, very technical, almost clerical. It doesn’t have the glamour of the art curator that sometimes we think of when we think of art. As well with her complicated background – no mother, very little links to this region, even though she’s actually working here – and she’s got one friend, Sebastian. And so I think that she’s almost predisposed to fall in love with somebody who sends her a beautiful letter, that it’s a bearing of the soul. It’s just like if you were sitting around and one day something supernatural happens to you, you can’t believe, you know, why? Why did this happen to me? There must be a reason. There must be a cosmological reason I can’t quite fathom yet.

Charlie: Okay, so not that you – I’ve said this before to people as well, with this kind of phrasing – not that you need a reason to include a family then, by any means, obviously, because people have families, but this is why you explore so much Charlie’s family?

Elaine: Yeah, because being a diasporic person, or being the diasporic person that she is – coming from London and trying to reconnect with her roots – the usual ways that diasporic people will connect with their roots, either through food – food is one of the biggest things, you miss food from your region – language, if you’re able to maintain those language links, family, if you’re able to visit family, even if they’re extended. And so for her, all of these are somewhat problematic. She can’t really speak the language – well, she’s trying. She’s learning. Her mum’s dead, from when she was a very young person. So all she has are these photographic images of a past her mother has that she does not really know the stories of. And the family that she has is so complicated with their power dynamics in terms of who is really in control of what. And there’s a matriarch involved as well, but I wanted to make sure that the figure of Cassandra is humanised. And I wanted very much to show that Cassandra is a figure conditioned by her times, a woman conditioned by her times, and I hope that that comes across. But it can make for very difficult relationships with your children. It can make for difficult, especially difficult, relationships with those you consider your step children. So I wanted to really delve into all of that in terms of the complicated family dynamics. Also, it’s fun to read. You need a little bit of drama! You need to have a few crab claws raised in defeat or aggression! It’s almost a trope. In fact, I think I refer to it in the book, that there’s very few contemporary Malaysian, Singaporean, stories that do not have a complicated family dynamic, these kind of dysfunctional families at its heart. They’ll probably shoot me for saying this, but happy families are all the same. Unhappy families each have their own stories, right, to tell.

Charlie: You haven’t got much of a story to tell if you’ve got a really happy family, like, oh, they’ve gone here and they’re happy! Oh, they’ve gone here… there’s no conflict there, is there?

Elaine: Absolutely.

Charlie: So I’m gonna reel us back quite a bit now back to the inspiration, which is quite far back. I know. We’re doing time travel here. I wanted to ask you more about how your career and your work in the arts industry, creative visual arts, how this influenced you in this book as well? Just a bit more about that.

Elaine: Yeah. So one of the things that has been absolutely enriching is doing the Asian Art History degree – it’s actually out of Goldsmiths, but the location is at La Salle, so it allows for this global local component, which is fantastic, really – the circuit here is very lively. If I had continued to stay in Singapore, I would definitely have continued to try to work as a visual arts researcher and probably at some point taken on curation and all of that. It is also very competitive, so not easy to break into. There’s a lot of hierarchy as well. In terms of how it influenced the book, I think that it influenced it in very organic as well as macro and micro ways. So in the structuring of the book, I already mentioned in terms of just the idea of the photograph and the framing of stories, so definitely there. In terms of also the way that the links are happening within the story: so, for example, this idea that a photograph, when you upload it onto a digital space, is actually a bunch of numbers [Charlie: yeah]. So that allowed me to extrapolate and think about Chinese philosophy and how they think about numbers and how numbers themselves feature so much in Chinese contemporary romance. There are all these little sayings, cute sayings – 1314 in the alliteration in Chinese actually means ‘forever yours’. All these little games that you can do – innuendos, I guess, and links you can pull in. So there are a lot of those different things going on within the book where that’s just one idea of a thread. And I think that this idea of the threading or linkages between different episodes or plot twists within the book allows for what I would call its molecular lines that spills that story out of the frame. So, again, playing with the idea of the photograph as a framing device as well. When I was doing research as an art historian into the historical photograph, there’s this idea behind it that because it’s documentation, it’s historical documentation so therefore, the component of truth in it is absolute, that it is telling the truth. And what you do is you read around the photograph in order to glean information as to what exactly is the truth that is being portrayed or represented. What have we learned about the past? Looking at a photograph from the past. And then when I actually delve into it more, looking at that photograph, what I realised is that it actually tells you very little. It actually doesn’t tell you all that much [Charlie: yeah]. Because all those faces, unless you are actually able to completely identify who those people are and where they are in their stations in life, you don’t know anything. These are faces now, images, lost to the past. And it’s only from reading around it that you’re able to understand, ‘okay, so this is how they set up a photographic studio at that time’. And these props, actually are a European convention that they took it from a lot of the Victorian photographic images. And it also conveyed a bourgeois sense of, look how well I’m doing’. So the minute that we get to that point where we realise that the person we project in front of the camera is actually an idealised self, a self that we want others to see in a particular setting, conveying a particular narrative, that’s when you realise that that line between truth and fiction is actually very fine. And so that is definitely an art historical thing that weaves through a lot of the artistic canon. I very much wanted to play with that and explore that in the book. So all the historical photographs referred to in the book are real; there’s a photograph that I am referring to from the national archives, which I can actually show on the slide, so you would actually be able to see, ‘ah! I see. So that is Aiko, the Japanese girl. So that’s what she looks like.’ Then there came an interesting question in terms of the historical facts that I gleaned. So, for example, this image of Aiko that was from the historical archives, she was identified by caption only as a Chinese girl, a young Chinese girl, circa 1920s. It was only upon reading around the photograph and trying to trace the historicity of the photograph that I realised, actually, she’s not Chinese at all, she’s actually Japanese. Because of that historical fact that I unearthed, I stayed faithful to that in the narrative, then I took liberty in terms of inventing a story around her. So anything fictionalised that I took liberties with is not historical fact that I was able to confirm. By hewing so close to a certain set of historical truths and yet still embedding with it quite a full story, it does blur that line between truth and fiction. As a reader of fiction coming to it, you don’t quite know which part is truth and which part is fiction. You don’t know which part is unless I tell you. So I thought that that is also a little bit what the photograph does. It beguiles us. We see ourselves the way that we would like to project. So that function was what I wanted to play with.

Charlie: Goodness. Okay. Wow. Yeah, I mean, you say about things that we’ll only know because you tell us. Yeah, definitely, because I know I’ve tried to do research on this novel and I found it difficult. And I think you’ve just answered why. And you brought up the thing about the space in between the camera and the person, which is something you were talking about in the book that I just found so fascinating. What would you even call it? This literal fact of space in itself, which is a fascinating concept?…

Elaine: I can say a little bit more about that. One of the things that I realised when we put ourselves in front of a camera is this idealised self. But also what was interesting to me was that we think in some ways that with all the multiplicity of images that we use nowadays on social media to portray a certain self to others, in many ways, we kind of assume that we invented it. You know, this idea of portraying ourselves in different ways, all the Instagram feeds and things like that, we haven’t – from day one when the camera was invented, the people then realised that that space in front of the camera is a space of desire to portray a different self. And so what was interesting when I was looking into the history of that time, was that actually studios facilitated this. They actually provided a rack of garments, depending on the studio. Some of the studios in Chinatown, for example, run by Chinese photographers, were not as high end as Tian Wei’s studio was. They would provide a rack of garments – so people might come in their labour clothes, and then they would get dressed up in something quite fancy, the European coat and tie, or actually at that time, what was it called, the spats, the colonial silver servant top and trousers, which is white in colour with the hat – so they could get dressed up and then have a photograph taken. And the studios also provided different sorts of services, which I thought was so interesting. They provided makeup services, they provided hair services to do up your hair, and they provided wigs. So in Japan, actually, there would be studios that allowed this. What’s also interesting is that all the studio practises copied each other. So even here in Southeast Asia, some of the practises were mimics of what was happening in Japan, what was happening in China, Shanghai, all these metropoles. So it was very interesting – what were the links, the photographic links, that allowed this dissemination of knowledge of photographic practises? So in Japan, for example, there are any number of photographs of Japanese women in kimonos, but they would wear then a Victorian pompadour. And this was quite a popular choice at that time, this hybridisation of east and west elements. And you would also see from the photographs at that time, they had a choice of setting. A lot of women were actually photographed in cloistered settings, I guess to signal their domestic roles. Men, they’re more likely to be photographed outdoors. And taking a photograph outdoors at that time, for a studio photographer, was actually not an easy enterprise because you had to adjust for lighting and all sorts of things, movements – you don’t want blurry photographs. And a lot of couples, actually. What was also interesting was that the man would almost always – especially the Peranakan, the Straits Chinese – would be in European suit or clothes. The women, though, would be wearing traditional clothing. So there was this idea of the woman as the traditional culture bearer. And, in a way, this again ties in with this whole idea of women’s roles at that time. So what was really interesting to me when I was doing my research, was as I moved on through the ages, from the 1920s to the 1930s to the 1940s, I was seeing an evolution in terms of dress. And as women’s emancipation took hold and they became more educated and began to express themselves in local newspapers, writing fiction, writing opinions, editorials – all types of subjects, from how a woman should dress to whether she should cross her legs in public, to what her particular role is and whether she had a right to choose her own husband – you began to see that freedom that translated itself into clothing and how they dressed themselves. Because skirts became shorter, expressing a freedom of movement. The sporty woman was a signal of the modern woman. This was an idea that was actually very much spread also by magazines, from that time; you’ve probably seen some of the Shanghai pictorials and magazines like The Young Companion. And a lot of them actually borrowed ideas, obviously, from Hollywood, from what was happening in the West, from the flapper girl and all of that. So they took all of that on, and being cosmopolitan, at that time, they also worked it into their own [ideas]. So that was when the very form-fitting Chinese qipao came about. Because prior to the mid 1920s, you did not see this form of dress. It was not invented. So In The Mood For Love and all, that tight fitting, only came about during the 1920s. And by the late 1920s and 1930s, everywhere in South East Asia, especially on the streets of Singapore, you would definitely see women wearing this form-fitting. And it was a form of situational agency – they were expressing themselves because the men took to the editorial pages as well and expressed their opinions about whether or not this form of the modern woman is a good thing! There was even an article I stumbled across where a woman wore a pantsuit, a trouser suit, basically, a pantsuit in America, and there was a huge debate about whether or not she should be dressed like a man. So it’s so interesting, all of these debates, in some ways, because it was really mirroring what was happening within female consciousness in terms of their own agency and their own right to express themselves in writing as well as in choices that they were making, going to work, and livelihoods, and as well as how they dressed themselves, their imaging, their self-imaging of themselves.

Charlie: I’m glad you’ve brought that in, actually, because one of the things that I liked, and I noted down that we had to talk about female agency, because you’ve got Tian Wei talking about his work and as it’s changing, and you’ve got these sections where women are coming in, and he’s saying, ‘oh, do this, do that, do that’. And they’re saying, ‘no, I want to do this, that and the other’, which was obviously just fascinating in itself to read. You’ve made me think – I watched In The Mood For Love so many years ago, I must have been a kid – I’m going to have to watch it again with what you told me and see how it changes in my perspective. Definitely.

Elaine: Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting one, right? Because I don’t actually know when it happened, but at a certain point in time, the qipao also became a way to sexualise the female.

Charlie: Sure, yeah.

Elaine: And it’s a matter of who is actually looking and who’s actually putting out that narrative. So it’s an interesting question. And in fact, when I was growing up, I hated that. I was just like, ‘there’s no way I would ever wear a qipao!’ because it felt very closeted. It’s controlled by this very tight fitting… it’s not comfortable. And even then, at that time, what was so interesting was that, if you look at the images, it was the way that the women posed as well. Because they were taking so much of their ideas from these glamour girl pictorials. So they posed in a way that’s not in any way comfortable. Their bodies were always twisted. So I was thinking, yes, it is female emancipation, but at what cost? And what’s ironic, I think, in this exercise of expression, self-expression, is that at some point when you re-appropriate that dress, that form of dress for yourself and you redefine it for yourself, it becomes a different thing again. So when, in my thirties, when I was living in Britain at that time, then we moved away, and then I’ve now come back, and I felt that my link to my home country was becoming quite distant, I took to wearing qipaos as a sort of reminder to myself, and for my children as well, to kind of see that linkage to the culture. So it’s interesting – at that point, I didn’t feel that it was in any way closeting! [Laughs.] I felt quite liberated indeed, so it’s ironic. It’s quite ironic, really.

Charlie: No, that’s interesting. And I’m feeling this is the deepest dive I’ve ever done on an episode, which is fascinating. I’m loving this. So I would like to ask, you have said, and it’s also shown in the book, that you are looking at Tian Wei’s narrative, smaller moments in the war. I think it’s interesting that you have the occupation by Japan in the end, but before that, you are talking more about the daily life. Obviously, there’s some politics involved. And I did want to ask about your use, I suppose, of war, or this aspect of war, and also, I suppose, if we put that in together with the ever presence of the Ghee Hin Kong Si.

Elaine: That’s such a great question. If you look at a lot of the contemporary literature, Tan Twan Eng and a lot of the major writers from this region, not so much Tash Aw, but definitely Tan Twan Eng and a number of other ones; Vanessa Chan also recently wrote a book. There’s still quite a lot of focus on World War Two and the Japanese occupation, because obviously it was quite a traumatic time. However, war isn’t a singular event, and the lead up to World War Two – there’s a reason why World War Two happened the way it did, why there was a Japanese occupation, because that history had been beginning long before that. In fact, there’s quite a lot of documentation that the Japanese had begun spying, or had set up a huge network of spies, in China as well as in Nanyang in Southeast Asia. From the 1900s onwards they had begun talking about the conquering of Asia. But you have to see that in the mindset of this was the time of empire, this was the time everybody was talking about colonisation. So when there was gunboat diplomacy and they were forced to open their doors and the Meiji restoration happened, very much so they saw the technological march of progress during the Victorian era, they think to themselves, the Japanese, ‘why can’t we partake of that?’ There was quite a pivoting as well, and this is in line with communism and all the other things that was happening at that time, that there was a bit of a pivoting away also from empire at the same time. So what’s ironic, of course, in this understanding of the Japanese and Japanese colonisation, is that as they were pivoting away from being colonised, they were also colonising, which is usually the case – you replicate what you know in terms of the chains of power. So I wanted, first of all, not to focus on war, because we’ve done that, we keep doing that, and the narrative has to escape a little bit from just that centrism. Second of all, I wanted to show that there is a lead up to war. War is not a singular happening. And that that lead up to war is one of those phases we have never focused on. We don’t tell that story, but that story, if we’re really serious about writing a historical novel, we also probably need to look at. Because when we can understand why war happens, it’s less a binary thing than we think. It becomes a more nuanced, contemplative understanding, of what was happening in terms of political forces and colonising drives. People like to paint things – even now when we are studying the British empire, they do like to paint it in black and white terms – but you have to understand in that setting everybody was doing it. So we were all out for grabbing whatever we could. And that idea for me was very important because you can’t collapse the times as if what was happening then is happening now. We need to understand that that becomes a false equivalency. What was happening at that time was very much a symptom of that time and it has a lot of power in terms of how we understand what is happening today. But we need to put that in context. So for me, that was why the letters had that edge of like, being quite old fashioned in terms of their language – I really wanted to convey that sense of time, that that is a different time that people talk differently, they thought differently, even as some things remain the same. The link to the Ghee Hin, it’s not as obvious. It is more obvious in East Asia in terms of historians looking at the links between spy activity, political activity, and triad activity. It’s just an area that historians themselves have not been able to determine for sure, but it remains an open question. So it’s a huge new area of open inquiry for young historians out there, but there is talk, that we have continued to speculate, as to how much the triad activity is linked to the political ferment at that time as well as the Japanese occupation. So I wanted to include that just to spice things up a bit!

Charlie: Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, they certainly did their intended work well, if it’s still difficult to work out and everything.

Elaine: Yeah.

Charlie: So you mentioned Aiko earlier and I would like to ask about her, you’ve brought her into the conversation. I want to focus in on her for a moment. I want to ask, talk more about Aiko, her creation and her importance in the novel?

Elaine: Yeah. So what’s, again, a lesser known historical fact is that there was actually quite a lively Japanese community living in Singapore pre-World War Two. I wanted very much to show that because I didn’t want to end up in this kind of dynamic where Japanese occupation bad, Japanese soldiers did horrible things – bad, bad, bad. I just wanted to show that actually [there was also a] lively community of contributing citizens before that. And one of the interesting things that I learned while I was looking into this Japanese community was that the brothel business was obviously very much in demand. It was very much in demand and interestingly, again, British policy played into this because the British felt that they needed to tolerate a certain level of brothel activity because there were a lot of labourers and they were all men, just for control purposes. You needed an outlet for these men who couldn’t be married just to lower the amount of feared criminal activity. So the brothels were tolerated. And what was very interesting at the time was actually there was the whole segment of Japanese brothels, and then there was a whole segment of Chinese brothels, and they were run very differently. The Japanese brothels were segregated around, like little Japan, and that whole area, the Malay area of town, and Chinese brothels were obviously situated in Chinatown. The Japanese, I guess, for lack of a better word, the sex workers, if you will, they were called Karayuki-san, had a lot more freedom than their Chinese counterparts. So actually, when I was looking through the archive, one of the things that turned out were images of these Japanese Karayuki-san. I don’t know if they were paid by the studio to have their photographs taken. There are not a lot of them, but there were several which then documented not only their existence, but how they imaged themselves and it allowed historians to look into how were they able to escape the confines of the brothel business and have their images taken by a studio. So these were all very interesting questions. We do not have a single image of their Chinese counterpart, what’s called the Aku, with Chinese prostitutes. We simply do not. There’s no historical evidence. All we have are, writings, some textual evidence. So it’s interesting – we do not know what they looked like, how they solicited for business, whereas on the Japanese side, we have a lot more. We have personal testimonies, because there were court cases… they were not treated well. That’s the long and short of it, and it’s going to be the case. So sometimes when they were badly treated, some of these cases ended up in British courts, the magistrate at the time, and some of these cases were used as documentation, as historical evidence, to glean an idea of how they served their clientele and how they were treated, what kind of hours they had, what kind of food they ate, how they were dressed, how they entertained. So a lot of this, the history, the stories behind it, came from those images. Historians looking into the question of the Karayuki-san. All of this research has, I think I would probably say, never been told on a global stage. Locally there have been a couple of novels in Singapore that focused on them, otherwise, no, they’ve just never been featured. So it was another one of those things – I thought this is such a rich history, so fascinating. So I wanted very much to make – Aiko allowed me – to make her part of that whole history because of her background. Her mum used to be a former Karayuki-san and was taken into a rich tycoon’s family as his mistress. And so from the environment of a brothel, she was brought up as a lady of leisure. And this allowed me to address that class issue as well for women. I remember discovering that she was Japanese. It was as if this whole part of the story just fell into place because I had already been doing research into Karayuki-san. The thing just locked in place like a key in a lock. It was great. It felt like an epiphany had happened [laughs].

Charlie: Well, what kind of time are we talking about in terms of where you were in the novel when she arrived, when she was there?

Elaine: Well, in the novel, she appeared quite early on, right?

Charlie: Yeah.

Elaine: So in the beginning, all I knew was that there was Tian Wei, there was Charlie, they were writing letters to each other, it was set apart. There was this magical element which I was very stuck on. And then I was reading about the history – because I really wanted to walk in Tian Wei’s shoes down the street so I spent a lot of time looking at images of Singapore in the 1920s, 1930s, to try to place myself there. And I also began to read a lot of history books of that era – when did electricity come in? Stuff like that. I was learning about all this history, but I didn’t really have her in mind. This is Constance… I forget the name of the woman who wrote this is seminal history book about Singapore… and it was talking about 1919, the Versailles Treaty, and how basically all these boycotts of Japanese goods were happening. And it was quite a level of turmoil that was already taken to the streets. And suddenly something popped into my head of a kidnapping. And at that point in time, the story hadn’t really happened; there were all these disparate pieces. And I actually thought, ‘oh, okay, this is the beginning of the story’. So I actually wrote that first, the kidnapping. I didn’t know it was to be the kidnapping of Aiko. I only knew that she was Japanese and it was somehow tied to this, the Chinese boycott of Japanese goods in Singapore, at a time when there was quite a lively Japanese community residing in Singapore. When I found the picture, which was quite a bit later, of Aiko, and realised that actually she was Japanese – and this was through another written account by a historian that actually they had spoken to a famous studio, the studio that had actually taken her photograph – that was when I put two and two together and said, ‘ah, I see’. So, in a way, actually, Aiko kind of steam-rolled the story. She’s like the progenitor; she actually triggered the whole unravelling narrative of the kidnapping and the political turmoil leading up to World War Two. So that’s Aiko, yeah.

Charlie: Blimey, okay. That’s very interesting to hear. You have mentioned about the writing in the letters, and… I’m rethinking now if I maybe was looking too much into it… I think there’s times where, while you have definitely got the different ages of the language, there does seem to be parts where maybe Tian Wei has picked up something from Charlie and Charlie’s picked up something. I don’t know if that’s maybe just me putting it in there while I’m reading, but it was interesting for me, I suppose, doing that. But also, I do find your writing style very different, in a good way [Elaine says ‘phew!’, both laugh]. But I know also you’ve used things like more colons than I think I’ve seen anyone use, which isn’t. That’s not a negative thing, by any means. It’s really interesting. It’s really fascinating how you structured it. You’ve used more… I don’t know what the official word is, dashes and stuff, and really honed in on what’s important. So I suppose I just want to ask you more about your writing style in terms of this book and writing it, if that makes sense?

Elaine: Well, I mean, hopefully, with all the dashes and all the colons, it does not stop the flow. Did you feel that maybe it stopped the flow?

Charlie: No.

Elaine: Very interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody make that observation before. I myself didn’t quite realise that, I think; I now have to go back to read the book and see, and maybe mark all the places or colour code it or something! All the places that I put colons and commas! I don’t think that I consciously realised, as I was writing, that I was doing that a lot, but I think it probably mirrors a lot of my thought process. Even as I’m speaking, you can tell I whirl in this direction, I whirl in that direction. I’m talking about this. I’m talking about that. And I think it may be a mirror of that. I wish I could be a little bit more sort of ‘da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum,’ in my thinking, one step at a time, but I don’t seem to be able to operate like that. It’s always going off in all these different tangents. So maybe the writing is a function of that. Yeah, it’s a function of that. If you’ve got tips in terms of how to help me manage that very nested kind of thought process a bit better, I definitely would welcome it. I mean, I obviously grew up, in terms of being a literary writer, on the diet of short stories. Given my background, it’s definitely very short story oriented. And I also tend to focus on economy of language, I’m not so big on, in, terms of just a lot of flowery writing, sentences that are long and flowy are not really quite my style. Having said all that, I think that what’s on the page is probably a mirror of my editing process as well. So I’m from the Viet Thanh Nguyen – he wrote The Sympathizer – I’m from his school of editing. You write a little bit, you go backwards, you edit, you creep forward, you write a little bit more, you go backward. So, very much a snail in that respect. I know it’s quite shocking for some people because I remember attending lots and lots of different writing classes where people say, ‘how can you do that?’ It’s like operating the schizophrenic space of always having a constant editor on one shoulder as you are trying to draft a first draft, which should be free of this constant voice saying, ‘go back and revise. Go back and revise.’ But, hey, it works for Viet Thanh Nguyen, and it seems to be the only way that I can function! I don’t know, maybe it’s a, slight pernickety or perfectionist… so I need to go back and work on it a bit more, really understanding the material, what it is I’m trying to get down on the page, sentence wise, before I can actually move forward. So it makes for a very laborious, long, which is why I’m not very prolific [laughs]. People would have written five books by the time I write one!

Charlie: I think you saying about how you’re writing and editing and writing and editing and going back and forth. Yes, I can see that now that you’re saying that, I can see where that is in the text, which is fascinating. But, no, what I’m saying about colons and dashes, yeah, I’m meaning it in a good way because I think what you’ve got is you’ve set out, whatever it is at that time, a statement, and then you’ve got the colon and then more of a expansion or emphasis on what you’re saying. No, I actually really, really liked it, I thought it was very unique, something I haven’t come across. So no, I I really appreciated it.

Elaine: Thank you. That’s so kind. I’m now going to go back and look with that lens in mind. That’s really very interesting observation. Thank you.

Charlie: The tangki and the religious inspiration, which I’ve also noted down, you’ve also got, I believe it’s pronounced ‘Chang eh’, the moon?

Elaine: [Pronounces it] ‘Chang euh’. Yeah, Chang’e.

Charlie: She comes in as a very important inspiration as well. I just want to ask you how you worked all this in together. I mean, with the tangki, it’s more obvious. And then as I got towards the end of the book, I saw what you’d done with Sebastian earlier, and I was thinking, ‘why has he done that?’ And then at the time I was like, ‘why has he suddenly got this going on? Why?…’ And then you revealed to us later. So, yeah, just talk more about your inclusion of this and its influence on the story.

Elaine: Glad that you’re giving me a chance actually to talk about that part because that definitely, there’s a quite a big plot twist – I’m not going to reveal it, so no spoilers – and I think that some people have really loved it and some people have said, ‘wow, I really did not see that coming’. Singapore – this is through my lens as a diasporic person – it’s a very interesting mix because it’s so modern, ultra modern. It’s all technologised. It’s so completely efficient. But if you really walked the streets of Singapore, you would see all these religious shrines, you would see temples and these tangki processions that I had mentioned in the book, and the celebrations, are very common, are actually very common. So you would drive, especially during the hungry ghost festival, there would be all these yellow tents set up and they would have these tangki events where they were appeasing the hungry ghosts. So the fact that these, I would call them traditions, they’re also ancient, because they go back so far back – and I give a little bit of that history of the tangki in terms of where it comes from, Han dynasty, really, 220 BC – the fact that that exists alongside the ultra-modern makes Singapore a very interesting place that I think you can easily forget that there is this very interesting quantum entanglement of the ancient tradition, all these religious rituals alongside the ultra-modern suspension of superstition, all of that stuff that comes with modern progress and thinking of yourself as a city in the 21st century. It’s a bit like putting a cleaning robot, which they have a lot, in the malls in Singapore, alongside Tua Pek Kong shrines. And both are equally acceptable, equally fine. That is my lens of Singapore. Whether or not people would agree with that, whether they think that that is a fair depiction, it is my depiction, it is how I see it, and for me, it’s a very fascinating story, it’s a fascinating facet of Singapore. Having said that, there’s also Christianity, there are also all these churches, there are also all these Indian temples, so the fact that all of this are coexisting simultaneously. Some of these ancient historical places are places of ghosts. And that, to me, is, again, another of those links, those tangents that I was talking about from art history – the fact that in the ultra-modern technological society of Singapore, that you have these ghostings, that you have these hauntings from religion, from, mythology, Chinese mythology, from spectres, really. And it ties it so well with this idea of the camera as an instrument that brings the past back to haunt us. And so I really wanted to capture all of that. That’s why there’s such a plethora of dialects as well – the Malay, the Chinese, all of that. Because to me, if you walk the streets of Singapore on any given day, that’s what you will hear, this heteroglossia of different languages, this melange. And to me, another thing that was fascinating, too, was that even in the 1920s, when the British were here, when it was a British colony, this melange of dialects and languages was already in place. So in a way, that is a continuity from the colonial period that I think makes it a very, very interesting place. And I just wanted to take it away slightly from that Crazy Rich Asians, despite the fact that Crazy, Rich Asians is part of the description of this book! But you know that this is Singapore, but maybe not many of us in London or in Britain or would have encountered.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I’m seeing more uses of light in what you’re saying there, whereas, of course, you’ve got the photograph light and stuff like that. It’s interesting. So you said about no spoilers [Elaine chuckles]. So the thing that I was wondering if we can talk about – when you say no spoilers, are you saying the use of Charlie and Sebastian?

Elaine: Yeah. So, yeah, no spoilers, so I won’t say exactly what happened, but maybe I can give a little bit of a teaser. So, when I first landed in Singapore, there was a shop that was very close to where I had rented a place, and I think they stole the idea, basically, but it was called Ghostbusters.

Charlie: Okay.

Elaine: And literally what it was was a shop where you can go to consult a tangki about whatever it is that you want to know, ailments or, ‘is my spouse gonna leave me?’ Or whatever. And you seek the tangki, seeks the gods. I walked past this establishment every single day, and there was never any activity. So I became quite intrigued, and I thought, I really want to write a story about this. But I didn’t have access, I mean, other than becoming a client yourself, and I was kind of scared [so] I didn’t. But as it turned out, as I was doing research into this book – it was also during the pandemic – I came across Terence Heng’s Of Ghosts And Spiritual Places. He calls it an anthropological, sociological look at Singapore through photographs and imagery. And he basically photographs all these religious places. And as I began that research, I began to understand that actually, when a tangki is possessed by a deity, his soul is no longer present. The body is there, but the soul is not. So for all intents and purposes, that person is not present. But at the same time it began to unlock a couple of questions for me. What makes a person? Is it the physical, or is it the spiritual? If you take away the spiritual and you just have the physical, is that still a person? If you have the spiritual but not the physical, is that the person still? And I think for me, it’s going to become very much a question for our 21st and 22nd century, as a lot of us begin to, with AI, with intelligence, questions about personhood – what makes our identity? What makes a person a person? And as we begin also to experiment with all sorts of things, we’re already doing it – eugenics, all sorts of things – when you can preserve your mind, was something about you that is really key, or what you consider the raison d’etre, or the inner being of yourself, your soul, but you’re able to transplant that in a different body – is that still you? That goes far, far beyond what my particular story was experimenting with, but those were some of the things that I was thinking about. I had it in there as a plot device, because I needed a way for Tian Wei to arrive in the present. Yeah. I myself struggled with the idea, you know?

Charlie: Yeah!

Elaine: Was Sebastian there? Was he not? Was his person there, was he not? And the only thing that I can say is you have to understand the constitution of the tangki, when he’s possessed, or she is possessed, that there is a vacating of the soul.

Charlie: Well, that’s answered, fully, the questions I had with that, I think. Yeah, I think it was quite bold. Very bold. May I ask on this – in the future, if he could time travel, could he stay in the future in this environment, in this context? Is that something that happens?

Elaine: Yeah. So with a tangki possession, which I wanted very much to stay close to, because that’s the vehicle that I’m using, I wanted very much to make sure that I’m faithful to that. Otherwise, why put it in there? You can’t. So I think that if I understood it correctly, within the Chinese cosmogony, if a soul vacates for too long, the body dies, basically. That soul can’t come back. It’s just gone too far. It’s migrated too far. So there’s the idea that the soul, when it leaves the body, doesn’t circulate around the body. It actually travels. And the longer it takes for the soul to return to the body, that’s essentially death.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah. What’s next? What are you writing at the moment?

Elaine: I don’t think I’m comfortable talking too much about it because it’s still very much in the thinking, researching, phase. And this is how I work – I tend to actually research a lot until I’ve got all the different elements researched before I actually begin to even put pen to paper. There is already a skeleton of how I think the story is going to play out. The only thing I probably will say is that it’s within the Victorian gothic genre, involves some level of, because it’s Victorian Gothic, has to involve a level of supernatural in it. All I will say is that he makes clocks. It’s probably safe to reveal this – he’s, in effect, a version of the Grim Reaper and he makes clocks. But he’s having huge problems with his business [laughs] marketing his clocks. So he hires a social media manager and she comes on board to help him market his clocks.

Charlie: Okay, I like the sound of that. You are very early on; I won’t ask when it’s out – we will keep an eye. Elaine, this has been fantastic and, yeah, absolutely, I think this is the most detailed episodes I’ve done yet. I think it’s been amazing. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Elaine: Thank you so much, Charlie, for having me. Very generous with you.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time. And, if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you. The Worm Hole Podcast, episode 111, was recorded on the 23rd July and published on the 9th December 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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