TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN POETICS:

THE POETRY OF WONG MAY AND BOEY KIM

CHENG


JOANNE LEOW
(B.A. (Honors) Magna Cum Laude, Brown University)











A THESIS SUBMITTED

FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF LITERARY
STUDIES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND
LITERATURE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2010



Joanne Leow 2

Acknowledgements:

It has been a challenging journey to start my work in academia again and I
could not have done it with the advice, support and mentorship of my thesis
advisor Professor Philip Holden. I would like to thank him for his prompt
responses to my concerns and queries (even when he was on a different
continent), for his careful and precise reading of my endless drafts and for his
subtle insights on how my work could be sharper and more nuanced.
I would also like to thank Professors Ross Forman, Barbara Ryan and John
Whalen-Bridge for renewing my interest in literary studies and for bringing me up
to date with developments in literary theory and writing.
Of course, this would not have been possible without the love, patience and
the constancy of my husband Giuliano. I owe him all this and more.
Last but not least, this thesis is for my sons Luca and Dante, whom I hope will
grow up with the benefit of many homes, languages and possibilities.
Joanne Leow 3
Contents
Summary 4
Introduction 5
Chapter one:
Familial Connections 14
Wong Mays universality 19
Boey Kim Chengs deracination and cosmopolitanism 30
Chapter 2
Travel, Migration & Return 46
Wong Mays lostness 54
Boey Kim Chengs between home and home 67
Conclusion 89
References 98

Joanne Leow 4

Summary

National identity and the authenticity of a writers cultural and geographical
origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature. This
thesis will investigate what happens as writers travel beyond their native countries
and choose to disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and sentimentalism and
de-emphasize a sense of rootedness to a specific cultural origin. Through close
reading of the poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng through the lenses of
familial connections, and travel and migration, I intend to show how both achieve
different degrees of cosmopolitanism that have led to difficulties in critical studies of
their work. Wong and Boey show us the possibilities of a new world writing which is
not circumscribed by national or colonial rules and instead goes beyond more insular
aims of building national identity to become individual, eclectic and mobile.

Joanne Leow 5
Introduction

National identity and the authenticity of a writers cultural and geographical
origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature. In her
book Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Sarah Brouillette notes
that this association between an author and a national authenticity has become an
excessive burden within specifically postcolonial literatures, taken on as a partial
requirement of the cosmopolitan function of those literatures (177). Brouillettes
focus is on the global literary marketplace, but her analysis also holds true for
postcolonial literary scholarship. Indeed she sees that post-colonial authors and their
works are usually situated within clearly differentiated political locales and under
the 'banners' of geographical affiliation(145) whenever they are written about
critically. So what happens when these banners become irrelevant as writers travel
beyond their native countries and choose instead to not write about their origins or
write about them in ways that disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and
sentimentalism? Brouillettes analysis of Zulfikar Ghoses body of work seems to
suggest that because Ghose emphasizes his deracination and homelessness (153)
he has risked being forgotten critically, especially when it comes to canon formation
in the context of postcolonial scholarship. Not to say that inclusion into a canon
should be the goal of all postcolonial writers, but the question that must be asked is
why scholars and critics consistently avoid dealing with postcolonial writers who
shun their alleged responsibilities to either portray their purportedly native locales in
their writing or specifically work for or against the post-imperialist nation building
exercise.
To this end, the cultural specificities and narrative strategies of fiction
(postcolonial or otherwise) often make its intentions more transparent and more
Joanne Leow 6
readily accessible for readers and critics alike to draw conclusions on the place of
national authenticity and cultural origins in a piece of writing. Yet, this is not always
the case for poetry, which is often predicated on elusive metaphors and elliptical, non-
narrative methods. Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poetry uses some of these
methods to embed a certain hybridity in the vocabulary and syntax and that this
distills the ambiguities, tensions, and discrepant temporalities of postcoloniality
(Ramazani 2001 184) and in doing so opens up the conversation on aesthetic
possibility and intercultural experience in our era of transnational
imagination(Ramazani 2001 184). My thesis, however, will take a slightly different
look at postcolonial poetry that de-emphasizes a sense of rootedness to a specific
cultural or geographical origin, with a view to examining how the oblique techniques
described above, operate to complicate and even obfuscate ideas of culture and
identity. The poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng,
might arrive at a place open to possibilities similar to the one described by Ramazani,
but their methods are slightly different. They do not seek to embed hybridity in their
work, but instead attempt to move beyond placing culture and cultural authenticity at
the centre of it. There is little in Wongs work, for instance, which suggests a mixing
of cultures as much as an attempt to show how their assignations can be unreliable.
As for Boey, his poetry might at first glance seem to be full of cultural markers, but
he subsumes them in his attempt to achieve personal epiphanies and refuses to burden
his poetry with a sense of cultural verisimilitude.
Although the two poets write in two different periods in Singapore history,
Wong and Boey both spent their formative years in Singapore, Wong before it gained
independence in 1965 and Boey post-independence. In my analysis of their work, I
will show how through their emphasis on familial connections, diverse settings
Joanne Leow 7
achieved through travel and the craft of their poetry itself, both poets achieve different
degrees of statelessness that have, in my opinion, led to difficulties in critical
reception of their work.
Firstly, it is important to address the genre of poetry as one where form is
central. Like with most poets, ideas in Wong and Boeys work are enhanced and
underpinned by the form of their verse. In the case of Wong May, poetic style plays
an important role in distancing her work from the reader. Wongs poetry is
fragmentary, disorienting, rich in double meanings and run on lines that serve to
create multiple levels of signification and ambiguities. This lack of a singular, clear
message poses problems for those who would have literature be a medium to instruct
or provide higher moral guidance. In some ways, her style recalls what formalist
Viktor Shklovsky writes about in his seminal work Art as Device there he notes
that,
In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, involving both
the arrangement of words and the semantic structures based on them, we
discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact that
has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized perception. It
is 'artificially' created by an artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in
his reading, dwells on the text. This is when the literary work attains its
greatest and most long-lasting impact. The object is perceived not spatially
but, as it were, in its temporal continuity. That is, because of this device, the
object is brought into view. (12)
The text itself in Wongs poetry is central and crucially aesthetic in nature. If, as
Shklovsky notes, "the language of poetry may said to be difficult, 'laborious',
impeding language"(13), then in Wongs poetry it is this labor, this impediment that
produces a new way of looking at the world. In many ways, through her writing,
Wong pushes us to look at objects, people, places and emotions in new and interesting
ways, ones that go beyond boundaries and rules of national identity building or even
nations themselves. Boey, as well, uses self-reflexive asides, unusual choices in
Joanne Leow 8
lineation and imagery that lend themselves to novel ways of perceiving his
relationships with people and places.
At this juncture it is important to note that while postcolonial studies and
writing have often privileged hybridity and marginality, they have often done this at
the expense of reifying cultural binaries in order to create the so-called third space.
Homi Bhabha for instance, focuses on the inscription and articulation of cultures
hybridity, wanting the inter the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the
in-between space [to carry] the burden of the meaning of culture (Bhabha 1994 38-
9). Yet while in theory this might be possible, many writers working in the more
recent postcolonial context continue, in practice, to write from the perspective of one
culture at the expense of others, perhaps as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin note to first
[assert] difference from the imperial centre (5). Local places, histories, philosophies
and languages are written with a sense of ownership and distinct belonging to a
specific geographical place. Yet in a sense, writers and scholars firmly embedded in a
particular culture are recreating imperialist and nationalist discourses that inevitably
privilege a centre it is merely that this centre has shifted to the countries they are
writing from.
Poets such as Wong and Boey have often fallen through the cracks of
postcolonial scholarship and discourse because they refuse to be categorized in
national and postcolonial canons. If they are to be brought back into the conversation,
it becomes imperative to avoid the trap of an analysis that privileges a national stance
on literature written by a writer from a particular country. Most crucially then in this
thesis, it becomes imperative to eliminate an idea of a single origin or a fixed
definition of culture as tied to a writer. Arif Dirlik points out the pitfalls of these
ideas when he investigates the idea of what is Chinese, which he sees as a reductive
Joanne Leow 9
placeholder for references to territory, nation, culture, and race, which are often
thrown together without further analysis (226). The two poets Wong May and Boey
Kim Cheng are cognizant of these and other complications in their work, looking
beyond the particularities of Singapore to the intersections at which culture comes to
be constructed and consumed. I will show how through Wongs musings on the
instability of origins and identity and Boeys confabulation of memory and history
that they are, as Dirlik puts it, aware of the constructedness of ethnicity and culture,
which also makes them available for articulation to new circumstances (225-6). It is
the possibilities of these new circumstances that are the most promising as we look
for new ways to approach these writers who would see culture not as a prison-house
(Dirlik 226) but as a gateway to new ways of remembering, discovering and
experiencing.
What is useful at this juncture is the lens of Bruce Robbins concept of
cosmopolitanism one that has nothing to do with detachment from the national, but
is instead a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a
distance (3). Wong and Boeys lives and works have both been international, yet
their poetry is very aware of the spaces in which the poets move in and also
emphasizes familial connections that seem in many ways to transcend simplistic
drawing of national borders. These multiple attachments preclude any easy defining
of these two poets, which might explain the lack of critical work on their poetry. I will
examine two main aspects to these multiple attachments in two parts: one focusing on
familial connections, and the other on travel, migration and return. By looking at
these elements, I hope to show how these different ways of thinking about belonging
and understanding the world might provide alternatives to a more nation-centric view
of things. After all, Robbins notes how all of us are
Joanne Leow 10
connected to all sorts of places, causally if not always consciously, including
many that we have never traveled to, that we have perhaps only seen on
television including the place where the television itself was manufactured
[] (3)
What Wong and Boey do then, especially with their poems about travel, is to lay bare
these multiple connections, cultural or capital, and ways of belonging that go beyond
what Robbins sees as the childish reassurance of belonging to a place (3).
Whether it is Wong illuminating the contradictions inherent in the lives of Algerian
garbage men in Lyon or Boeys unease with his struggling touristic gaze in India,
their work often throws up unexpected links that de-centre the text culturally and
complicate relationships between people and places.
I stress the importance of what cosmopolitanism in Wong and Boeys work
can achieve and not what it is because as Robbins notes, cosmopolitanism by
suggesting that that there is no right place to stand [] can take some of the moralism
out of our politics(261) and instead liberate us to pursue a long-term process of
translocal connecting that is both political and educational at once (261). Taken in
this light, cosmopolitanism ceases to be a liability in its full theoretical extension,
where it becomes a paraoid fantasy of ubiquity and omniscience(260) but instead
functions as a unrealizable ideal and produces normative pressure on ideas like
binarism and hybridity. This means that the poetry of Wong and Boey does not seek
to embody the term cosmopolitanism in its strictest definition, but should be seen as a
movement towards an ideal that enables us to read them beyond the constraints of
fixed origins.
Thus, when observed, Boey and Wongs choices of subject matter and form
frequently run counter to some of their contemporaries who see their lives and
autobiographies as illustrative of a postcolonial narrative that has national identity
Joanne Leow 11
building in opposition to a colonial legacy as a central purpose. Wong, for example,
published her poetry between the years of 1969 and 1978 and the space between these
years saw the publication of Singapore poet Edwin Thumboos Gods Can Die and
Ulysses by the Merlion two poetry collections that in many ways articulate the
struggles of a young nation. Thumboo himself writes in his essay Singapore Writing
in English: A Need for Commitment that [p]oetry is but one of the forces working
towards a collective psyche(66). Making his argument with Lee Tzu Phengs
seminal work, My Country and My People, Thumboo sees poetry as a way to add
to the sense of our destiny as a people (66). More interesting he delineates the
different races in Singapore, Indian, Chinese and Malay rendering them somehow
completely separate before bringing them together in an uncomplicated way as
elements which constitute an identity, that is shored up by a historical continuity
whose force is validated by the individual imagination (66). For Thumboo, poetry
has the responsibility to tie together these different races in a way that emphasizes
both Singapores public and personal history. Even though Thumboo saw it fit to
anthologize Wongs poems in his Seven Poets, it is clear at the later time when he
writes this essay, that she no longer fits into what he feels is a canon of poetry that
could create a collective psyche for Singapore since she does not in any way choose
to play a part in shoring up this historical continuity. It is not just Wongs subject
matter that a critic like Thumboo would hold suspect, but her very positioning as an
international writer: able to dip in and out of cultures, not necessarily exhibiting
cultural confusion but instead a clear understanding of each context in which she
writes. Indeed, in a 1977 essay available online on his National University of
Singapore website, using Wong Mays second book Reports as a specific example,
Thumboo muses on the difficulties of charting a poetic style that is distinctly
Joanne Leow 12
Singaporean since contemporary poetry in English has entered a phase where the
style, the vocabulary, the urban preoccupations are international. However,
Thumboo views this not as an asset, but as a liability since poets tend to establish
an individual rather than a national identity. More significantly, the focus on
individual identity is seen by Thumboo to be the reason we do not have
contemporary poets comparable in status to either Yeats or Eliot. With this
emphasis, Thumboo lays the responsibility of creating a national poetry with the poet
and fails to note, perhaps, how the methods of critical responses and ways of reading
such poets also play a role in shaping how their writing is received. By insisting on
the specific elements that give it a local habitation and a name, Thumboo espouses
a particular sort of national poetry that precludes the appreciation of poets like Wong.
Boey on the other hand, writes in a period where Shirley Lim has noted that
The majority of Singapore English-language writers, likewise, see the domain
of art as separate from the domain of the state (that is, expressed as the
government as national identity or as the public), and reject any attempt on the
part of the state to take literature into its sphere of influence. This autonomy,
this rejection, in almost all cases has meant a separation of the themes and
content of the work from the themes and content of state ideology (35).
Lim, however, sees this decision on the part of the writers as risky since by
depoliticizing their poetry they risk becoming irrelevant, in a society where many
social features have become imbued with political significance (Lim 37). I am not
suggesting that Boey is depoliticized; the poems that he does centre on Singapore
are imbued with a critique of its rapid modernization, which he feels has come at the
detriment of its history and people. However, as in Wongs case, it is Boeys
positioning which renders him suspect. Even before the poet migrated to Australia,
Boeys outsider view of Singapore gives his poetry a detached style that sits
uncomfortably with those who would reify a national literature. Boey, now especially,
working occasionally on Singapore but distinctly apart from it, provides a jarring
Joanne Leow 13
clarity of view on Singapores rapid development that is often out of step with the
city-states view of itself. This sense of detachment sets him apart from other
Singapore poets like Alfian Saat and Cyril Wong who while are decidedly not of the
mainstream still embed their work deeply in the context of Singapore in terms of
setting, subject and point of view.
More generally speaking though, the position of the English-educated poet in
Singapore has been seen as suspect by some; Koh Tai Ann has written about his or
her alienation, specifically how he or she cannot deny or escape the complicating
fact that he knows no other language or literature better than the English otherwise
he would not be expressing himself in English (17). Koh sees these writers as
embedded, albeit in a troubled way in English traditions in a time when the
internationalizing of English has brought in its wake the further burden of a rich
cosmopolitan body of work and tradition (17). Kohs fear (like Thumboos) is that
the writer will be subsumed into a neutral international style [] and for the
country, a fear that writers should cease to belong to the national community, but
would harbour suspect international affiliations (17). However, Kohs essay does not
fully address the problematic of why such poets or writers should be suspect.
Furthermore, what is objectionable here is the idea of the neutral international
style, the existence of which is difficult to prove. Through this thesis I will argue
that even though Boey and Wong have rejected a nationalistic way of looking at the
world, their poetry is no less rich, specific or unique. The two poets cosmopolitan
world-views lend themselves instead to a new way of looking at world literature one
that does not have to be burdened with cultural origins.

Joanne Leow 14
Chapter one:
Familial Connections

I will fall apart
I will become so many dogs
dogs of all directions
I will breed a whole race of lonely children,
Each dog a judgment
- The Judge, Wong May


The idea of family is intimately connected to a sense of place. In most cases,
when one writes about home, one cannot help but write about family. The converse is
also true, with the concept of the family being used as an allegory for larger social
communities, specifically nations. One thinks of the use of words like fatherland or
motherland which allude to patriotic and nationalistic impulses in both colonizing
and colonized countries. This preoccupation with the family and its linkages to the
nation are further complicated and diversified in the literature of post-colonial
countries. Major literary works in the period leading to and post-independence refer to
the family and place a great significance on the social unit. For example, Chinua
Achebes Things Fall Apart (1959), posits the African family as the bearer of
traditional pre-colonial values, while Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1981)
takes the vehicle of an Indian family saga to work through how these relationships
relate to the larger socio-political climate of the post-colonial period in India. Here
family is inextricably linked with country and culture. There are, of course, a vast
number of ways and complexities in which the family has been explored, yet one is
struck by its repeated use as a way to position postcolonial literature in a particular
cultural context.
Before continuing, it is useful to clarify that I use the hyphenated version of
the word post-colonial to simply refer to a historical period after previously
colonized countries gained their independence. Moving on to the unhyphenated term
Joanne Leow 15
postcolonial is to talk about a movement in literature and literary studies that
examines the colonial relationships of power and seeks to dismantle or complicate
them. Ania Loomba cautions however that,
The word 'postcolonial' is useful in indicating a general process with some
shared features across the globe. But if it is uprooted from specific locations,
'postcoloniality' cannot be meaningfully investigated, and instead, the term
begins to obscure the very relations of domination that it seeks to uncover (19)

With this idea of specificity in mind, I want to turn my attention to the context of
Singapore and its postcolonial literature. Most writers in Singapore are similar to their
peers in other post-colonial nations in the sense that they see their families as cultural
repositories and chronicle the struggles of the family in the context of the great
changes taking place in the socio-political fabric of newly independent nations.
However, the work of the poets that I am examining, Wong May and Boey Kim
Cheng, represents a departure from the concerns of their peers, in ways that preserve
the bonds of family but release these ties from a single culturally specific context. I
want to examine a certain universality in these works to look at a post-national, post-
postcolonial way of understanding Wong and Boey. This is not postcoloniality
uprooted from specific locations as Loomba fears, it is not uprooted but instead
able to exist in multiple locations and contexts that do not lose their individual
specificity. For the most part, Wong and Boey write about culturally nonspecific
contexts that focus our attention on familial relationships instead of embedding these
relationships in a particular place. This leads to an intensification of focus on familial
relationships, as cultural and national authenticities become tools in a search for a
cosmopolitan identity.
In order to better understand why the two poets works make a case for a
different look at family and the postcolonial context, it is important to examine the
writings of some of Wong and Boeys peers. From Stella Kons play Emily of
Joanne Leow 16
Emerald Hill (1989) to Robert Yeos poem Malacca Grandmother (1999), to even
more recent works like Koh Buck Songs poem Ah Por (2001) and Alfian Saats
Minority Report (2001) the Singaporean family is always written about in a
specific cultural way. In earlier works like Yeos Malacca Grandmother, Yeos
grandmother is seen as the sole remaining representative (103) of a time that has
passed. He sees her departure for Southampton as detrimental to a sense of history,
name and wealth (103) that is conjured up by descriptions of strangely
antique(103) ethnic clothing and historic spaces. Stella Kons Emily of Emerald Hill
is a record of both a womans life in the second half of the 20
th
century in Singapore
and a rich document of the social and cultural elements of the time. The eponymous
character of the play is a matriarch whose identity is inseparable from the trappings
and mores of a modern Nonya or Peranakan woman. More contemporary works of
poetry like Kohs Ah Por continue to use fixed cultural details to define and mourn
the passing of a certain cultural authenticity embodied in an elderly family member
1
,
now the only lights
you leave behind
are memories
of fragrant face powder,
snow mountain pallor,
smoothening the years,
your standard samfoo
of Samsui simplicity,
and scent of medicated hairpins (57)

One of Singapores most successful younger poets, Alfian Saat, also uses cultural
embeddedness for social critique in Minority Report, a poem in which he
characterizes his parents by details like his mothers preoccupation with the Muslim

1
While Boey Kim Cheng has written two poem Remedies and Her Hands in his most
recent collection of poetry After the Fire about his grandmother that echo Kohs sentiments in
Ah Por, I would argue that these are uncharacteristic pieces that do not represent the larger
trend in his work, which is a more complex rendering of the relationship between culture and
family.
Joanne Leow 17
head-dress and his fathers fixation with finding successful Malay scholars. Alfian
hints at the fact that he recognizes the problems with these fixations, seeing minority
Malays as too eager / to recognize ourselves (20).
This is but small selection of Singapore literature from this period yet there
is a definite thread of the familial coupled with a cultural specificity that runs through
much of the work. Angelia Poon sees this idea of a specific cultural and geographical
location as more than mere passive or neutral physical setting, place works with the
above writers evocation of the past to constitute the cultural specificity and identity
of particular individuals and social groups (372). Poon sees Singapore writers as
engaged in the production of locality which uses geographical space as a starting
point to create a powerful imaginary. I posit that pursuing this strategy of cultural
specificity, there is no more affective and logical way than to associate place with
family and familial connections and that this has been seen in a great deal of
Singapores postcolonial literature.
As for the two poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey
Kim Cheng, they use the trope of the family in their work in unexpected and
unsettling ways. Wong delinks her familial connections from cultural specificities
while Boey emphasizes a deracination from his past and family due to a rejection of
their ideals and the physical disappearance of cultural and geographical spaces, which
only continue to exist in his unreliable memory. Cultural references are present in the
work of Boey and Wong (although they can seem to be particularly rare in much of
Wongs work), but these cultural references are not central to the poems and the
works do not draw on these references to attain authenticity.
By moving beyond reinforcing a sense of cultural rootedness in their poetry,
Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng depart from the writing of their peers. Wongs
Joanne Leow 18
poetry is more universal and Boeys work is often a conscious rejection of an easy
understanding and acceptance of ones cultural positioning. Both writers are
cosmopolitan and transnational. Their writing reflects a lack of connection to one
particular tradition or origin, and instead, either diminishes any connection at all or
draws on multiple connections that carry equal weight. Wong and Boeys
relationships with their ancestors, mothers, fathers and offspring become ways for
them to either create bonds that become universal to the point of excluding the
culturally specific or repudiate existing cultural connections by creating and
imagining new ones that lead to a multiplicity of attachments. No production of
locality occurs in the poems that I look at in this chapter, at least not a locality that
exists geographically or that is easily recognizable. In Boeys poems about his family,
spaces are opened up, but these are emotional, imaginary spaces, sometimes as
confabulations of history and memory or as a hybridized set of possibilities for the
future. In Wongs work, we look into a universal space, devoid of a cultural compass
an almost liberating experience.
The critic Carine M. Mardorossian writes about the shift from exile to
migrant which challenges the binary logic of here and there, between a
homeland and a new country. Mardorossian notes that by emphasizing movement,
rootlessness, and the mixing of cultures, races, and languages, a migrants identity
takes on a certain element of ambiguity and flux; she writes her identity is no longer
to do with being but becoming (16). This certainly seems to be the case for both
Wong and Boey, as they no longer look at their past or indeed their forebears as a
fixed and comforting anchor (Mardorossian 16), but as I have suggested a space
open to the possibilities of confabulation and free from the burden of cultural
specificity. While Mardorossian writes about what she calls a paradigmatic shift
Joanne Leow 19
from exile to migrant primarily through the narrative strategies in Hispanic American
fiction, Wong and Boeys poetry also presents us with a different methods by which
ideas of family can be delinked from a culture. In the particular case of the family, it
is useful to observe how Wong and Boey scrutinize their relationships with family
members and familial history by using poetic techniques like unusual imagery and
lineation, which force a sense of defamiliarization on the reader, to either viewing the
idea of family in a way that removes it from a cultural context completely or setting it
against the context in sharp relief.

Wong Mays universality

In this section I will be looking at Wongs poems on her family in
chronological order to better discern the development and evolution of her treatment
of the theme. Wongs poetry is full of wordplay and self-contained, deeply evocative
images, which often resist easy interpretations. Some of her more immediately
accessible works, however, are about familial relations and a sense of her ancestry.
Wongs mother features more prominently in her entire oeuvre than her father, with
all three of her books dedicated to her. The most directly personal poems that Wong
writes (of which there are only a few) are also about her mother. Her poems from her
first two books appear to address the idea of family and specifically her mother with
greater urgency than her last book, which was written after a longer hiatus. What is
problematic for the postcolonial or nationalist reading here is Wongs lack of
contextual specificity. But it is precisely through the absence of this specificity that
Wong manages to write a poem that speaks to multiple saudiences
Many of Wongs early poems use deceptively simple images to portray
familial connections and histories. This is particularly apparent in her first book of
Joanne Leow 20
poetry, A Bad Girls Book of Animals, which has poems like History. The poem
opens with a scene of snow at a door, an ephemeral image that plays with our
perceptions of permanence, since the snow can melt without leaving a trace. The
poem expands this to more consequential statements that culminate in our
understanding that history has become a series of lies, demonstrating its fallibility.
The unreliability of the past is extended to something as fundamental as biological
origins: [t]he lie then / Ive got a mother. This is taken further in a disorienting turn
in the poem where child is conflated with mother and the space between different
generations appears to collapse. This early poem is crucial in making sense of Wongs
relationship with the idea of the past and of her relationship with her family. The
confusion that manifests itself in this poem is a way of coming to an acceptance that
inheritance, heritage and the past are in some sense arbitrary and not predestined and
imbued with a greater meaning.
This theme of detachment forms the familial and the tone of bewilderment is
continued in the poem simply entitled Your Umbrella, Daddy,
Among other things I totally lack
this propensity of a young monkey
to hold on to its old. At high

noon I thought I could walk
the rest of my life with

out history geography
biology, a man

in his net weight with
out shadow. 30 years

later I ran into a ditch
heard 3 bones broken
The man helped me

out said its your
umbrella Daddy (18)

Joanne Leow 21
By beginning the poem with a distinctively de-romanticized view of familial
attachments, the poem suggests that familial relationships are biological, instinctual
and universal. The work appears to equate 3 bones with history, geography and
biology, three words which stand in for family in the most complete way and yet are
referenced in a universal way without a link to a specific culture. However, she also
notes her inability to hold on to [her] old; she does not want to be shadow[ed] or
weighed down by the past or her ethnicity, even though she knows that these things
shield her from some of the challenges in life, as an umbrella of sorts. This short,
deceptively simple poem forces the reader to pause at Wongs ambivalent conclusions
and pushes them home with the striking visual image of an umbrella, signifying a past
and a belonging that adds weight and encumbrance, something that both protects and
yet obscures. Because of the elliptical nature of this and other poems, multiple
readings are required to come to any interpretation of the work; a style that echoes the
actual complexities of pinning down the significance of ones history, geography and
biology and refuses to settle for easy, comfortable conclusions about these issues.
Wongs other poems on the subject of family suggest that she sees her poetic
persona as a starting point where meaning and history explode into something that is
far more complex and nuanced than a linear family tree. For example in the same
book, she writes in another poem The Judge:
Who goes on watch tonight?
Im here to judge
My father the lonely man

My mother the lonely woman
People who have never met
and are harsh on each other.
I tell you before daybreak
I will fall apart
I will become so many dogs
dogs of all directions
I will breed a whole race of lonely children,
Joanne Leow 22
Each dog a judgment (6).

Wong here focuses on the arbitrary tragedy of her parents union as she sets the
poems persona firmly above them, as a judge. The poem discusses the
consequences of this loveless relationship: a multiplicity of identities, dogs of all
directions, a whole race of lonely children. The subject confusion in these lines is
particularly poignant; dogs and children become interchangeable even as they
signify both the persona of the poem and her progeny. Ironically, the repetition of I
ultimately seems to suggest a fixed identity that is illusory.
The major relationship that is returned to continually in Wongs poetry the
bittersweet and complex bond between mother and child and consequent meditations
on mortality:
Mother, this is not even it.
If I say the day is

Beautiful, it probably is.
I dont affect it. Nor

Does it affect me. If I
say I love you, love

You, I probably do.
I cannot live with

Out you, yet I do.
Failing that, it doesnt

Make me feel the
grapes are less sweet

Or cool. The insignificance,
mine. After yours

Or anybodys funeral,
the world is not made

Ugly for me, it is (11).

Joanne Leow 23
This particular poem, A Letter, infuses these musings on death and maternal
attachment with a pragmatic sense of a lack of control. Wong does not want to
pretend to be responsible for creating a narrative about her mothers death, and thus
she eschews a controlling sense of the situation that might make sense of the tragedy
of yours/Or anybodys funeral. Instead, Wong conveys her insignificance, her
inability to make a world ugly, since it already is, and I dont affect it. This
surrender of authorial control over her narrative is important, because it shows
Wongs understanding of the reality of her mothers impending death on multiple
levels. Even her choice of using couplets in run on lines also reinforces this
impression as she breaks and opens up meanings in each pair of lines, I cannot live
with/ Out you, yet I do. This poetic technique punctuates the reading of the poem,
forcing the reader to stop and consider the multiple ways of understanding each line
and emphasizes the idea that a singular meaning would be suspect. Wong has an
unwavering understanding of her context in a world that cannot be altered by her or
her writing, it is a world that she keenly observes, where the non-specificity of her
context is also one that is universal.
Continuing to write about her mother in the poem Dear Mama, Wong sees
herself as a grafted green, using an image of biological descent that permeates the
entire work:
By the same token I leave you,
I leave myself (with you). The
going forth

henceforth a grafted green
fit to live
or die.
By the same token I leave

you living,
dying, or
unfit for both, waiting
Joanne Leow 24

for my return: Your
big eyes,
short arms
that I inherited, failed. (59)

Wong uses a familiar trope of parental-child separation, but detaches the reader ever
so slightly by using the startling image of the grafted green. The image conveys the
feelings of liminality; between attachment and separation from the maternal ( I
leave you, /I leave myself (with you)) and between life and death: the waiting that
is in the middle. Wong returns to the idea of biological inheritance at the end of the
poem Your/ big eyes, / short arms/ that I inherited, failed and these disembodied
body parts seem to echo the image of the plant that pervades the poem. This piece,
like so many of Wongs other poems, bears repeated reading in spite of its cryptic
restraint. Yet, it does not readily yield the culturally specific reading encouraged by a
conventional postcolonial analysis. Wongs relationship with her mother is not
allegorized to a larger social context; it simply is what it is.
Wongs portrayal of the familial is sharpened in her second, arguably best,
collection, Reports. In the poem To My Mother, the themes of mortality and
detachment remain and are more clearly articulated:
Does the hair feel pain
Do the fingernails complain

All right pain
is what connects me to myself
but your pain is yours

It separates us
as it goes on I realize
perhaps it only means to prepare us
each separately
for death (108)

Wongs characteristic philosophical tone is again simple in its choice of words but
deceptively so. She plays with the repetition of key words like pain and separate,
Joanne Leow 25
and brings them back in slightly different permutations that play out almost like
musical variations on a theme. Her line breaks are significant as she uses form to echo
meaning, but your pain is yours / It separates us. This poem starts out fairly
coherently as Wong writes about the inherent alienation of the human experience with
lines like How much of you has failed / to reach me and But already I understand
less and less / I can separate nothing from nothing. Her persona yearns for clarity of
vision and simplicity when it comes to her relationship with her mother, May you at
last occur to me / as a glass of water by my bedside / Yes we have loved. The poem
reaches a tipping point when Wong finally gives the reason for her mothers pain:
Beginning September / I should be expecting your cancer report / which I will never
get(108), the implication being that her mother will be dead by then. At this point,
Wong begins to push the repetition in the poem further, consistently beginning each
sentence in the poem with I, emphasizing the inability to understand anything from
any perspective but her own, leading to an almost litany like effect:
I remember
as a child I began to be aware of language
only when I began to be aware

painfully
how I cannot write without a pen

about you
Yes, even about you

I will perhaps never write about you

to this day I consistently write about other things

I wish so often love were otherwise

I wish so often to completely enter

the bark
the stone

to part-take
Joanne Leow 26
a scheme
so vast, so minutely hopeless

perhaps one does not even have to call it love

I go on (109)

The spareness in Wongs poetic language and her use of monosyllabic words and
uncomplicated phrasings bring home the universality of losing a parent, of the
helplessness when we are confronted by the death of a loved one and the tragic
inability of language to convey the totality of human experience. The introduction of
the physicality of objects like bark and stone in a poem about abstract emotions
serves here to draw a reader to the material reality of Wongs desire to comprehend
her relationships. Further, the poem is stripped of any references to culture or
ethnicity; it is not mediated by any of these contexts and this makes it a more
immediate, visceral experience.
In contrast, one poem that does insert some cultural context is Letter to the
Dark, a hallucinatory, nightmarish vision of pregnancy, progeny and mortality. Yet,
it is a cultural context that does not anthropologize the subject matter; the reader has
no sense that he or she is entering a different culture. In the poem, Wong makes
references to the young of a fox, a phoenix and the idea of break[ing] out of my
form(92). The lines about foxes call to mind the Chinese myths of female foxes who
disguise themselves as women to lure unsuspecting suitors and the image of the
phoenix has both Western and non-Western meanings. However, Wongs poem
does not seek to alienate a more general audience; there are no overt cues to
traditional rituals or myths, or even italicized words to signal a translated sentiment or
idea. Someone without any prior knowledge of Chinese culture would still be able to
negotiate this poem without a cultural guidebook. The poem is a disturbing meditation
on cycles of life and the inevitability of loss, as I weep over my parents / I weep over
Joanne Leow 27
my children now / the rows of teeth in the churchyard / and their slow decay (93).
Wong also returns repeatedly to the idea of deracination or as she puts it lostness,
The space that I am
I still cling to: my lostness
where the chromosomes dance like small bent nails

the music of the sad cosmos and its ruined stars

I am stretched upon nothing. (93)

These lines create a vision that is simultaneously on a microscopic and cosmic scale,
revealing how Wong sees her deracination as fundamental from the bent nails of
her biological makeup to the cosmos in general. The alliteration between
chromosomes and cosmos cannot be accidental, given her generally careful choice of
words. It is this leap that confirms, then, that Wong is not just concerned with the
personal loss here it is a larger existential nothing[ness] or lostness that
preoccupies her, something that is both more biologically fundamental and universal
than culture or ethnicity.
Wong seeks to extend this sense of physical, cultural and familial
displacement that runs in an unbroken fashion throughout Reports to describing an
emotional and intellectual state as well. In the final poem Blessings she starts with
the lines I run cold water/ to forget everything I have learned (139). This clean slate
is one that is devoid of acquired culture, of history and literature. The poem instead
values the moment a birds shrill voices/ say more than all the poets / through the
centuries / put together (140) and it is one of the clearest instances where there is a
rejection of a literary canon, the poets through the centuries and instead a nod
towards life as it is experienced. Going on to paint a slightly ghostly tableau through a
bathroom window, where [t]he houses take on a/ chalked look. The washing/ on the
Joanne Leow 28
clothesline dances/ like apparitions(140) and the poem ends Wongs second book
Reports with this sinister vision:
I see my grandchildren.

Nothing is stranger
than Spring. I smell blood in the wind.
I accept the offerings

of one who died for me
in the Tang Dynasty. I do not know him.
I do not know him. (140)

In an almost prophetic voice, Wongs poetic persona envisions progeny and yet finds
that this Spring is strange. She also harkens back to her ancestors and yet, quite
honestly ends with the repetition of I do not know him, as who can truly claim to
know ones familial ancestry and history? In doing so, Wong shows up the
arbitrariness of inheritance and cultural belonging; she highlights the gulf that exists
between personal experience and the historical past of the one who died for me / in
the Tang Dynasty.
In her third and last book Superstitions, Wong barely touches on the subject of
her family at all, instead the main theme in the collection is travel, which will be
addressed in the next chapter. However, one vivid portrait of her mother stands out in
the poem Homage to Matisse, where it is as if the poet has thrust us into a canvas
that becomes an impetus to her memory of her late mother. It is a still-life, a
retrospective glance at her childhood memory of her mother:
So much of Matisse
looks like
furnishing fabrics
the sea-green & oleander-
reds
of the sofa & rattan chairs
of my childhood
& is connected with
my mothers youth
her effusion & regal beauty
Joanne Leow 29
her astonishing
forehead
radiance of the brow
candid eyes at ease
with each object
one arm resting on the chaise-longue
while some large leaves, as on an espalier,
look on
-- of a hushed green)
that I stood to-day in the museum
gazing into that interior

as if her happiness
belongs there. (109)

The poems unusual spacing and lineation forces the reader to pause to absorb the
tableau and the careful choice of words that create it. Words like regal,
astonishing, radiance, espalier allude to a classical setting and of Western
traditions in portraiture painting. Wong is paying homage to Matisse not necessarily
for his own skill, which looks like / furnishing fabrics, but because he connects her
to the memory of her mothers happiness. The physical painting becomes mere
furnishing fabrics, whose sea-green & oleander- / reds bring to mind pieces of
furniture. The real painting here in this poem is the portrait of Wongs mother. Wong
distances herself from this fairly emotional revelation by placing herself firmly
outside the frame and by sharply acknowledging, in the penultimate line, that it is an
illusion that her mothers happiness could belong in a canvas by Matisse.
At this juncture, it is important to consider why then, in spite of her obvious
masterful command of the poetic medium, Wong May has not been the subject of
more critical studies by both Singaporean and international scholars. An attempt to
locate secondary sources of research on her only turns up two brief works. A negative
review of Superstitions by Valerie Barth seems to undervalue Wongs love for
wordplay by paradoxically calling her writing irritatingly circumloctionary and
prosaic (100). Robert Yeo has also provided a rare close reading of one her earliest
Joanne Leow 30
poems The Shroud, yet it is a work that is not illustrative of her later pieces, which
have a greater sense of complexity and nuance. The same source that gives these
citations lists thirty-three studies on Edwin Thumboo, most of them in-depth analyses
of large selections of his work
2
. While Thumboo is undoubtedly the more prolific
poet, I believe this is a valid comparison given the similar time frames that Wong and
Thumboo were writing in and given Wongs astute command of the medium. Was her
choice to write in what Thumboo would call the creeping internationalism of
idiom(63) the reason? Wong writes about maternal attachment and descent in a
deeply personal voice, without any hint of the national or postcolonial, and when she
does write about ideas of belonging and rootedness, she tends to emphasize the
opposite. This undoubtedly poses problems for scholars who might seek to position
Wong within a postcolonial Singapore canon whose aim, as Thumboo notes is to
create myths that work towards a collective psyche. Yet, I believe Wongs work is
crucial in showing how the family can be delinked from the contexts of nation and
culture.
Boey Kim Chengs deracination and cosmopolitanism

While Wong May erases place in her poetry to focus on the timelessness of
relationships, Boey Kim Cheng inserts place into his work, but it is always secondary
to his familial relationships. Boey does connect certain narratives of his family
members with Singapores history and progress, especially in his earlier work, yet
these only serve to re-emphasize his feelings of detachment and ultimately

2
The source that I am citing is the National University of Singapores library website
<http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/bib/singlit/poetry-indiv.html#Wong%20May>. 2 October 2009.
While it is certainly not exhaustive, it does provide an interesting observation on the dearth of
secondary sources on Wong May. Further research into the matter on my part only found
three more fairly brief studies on Wong May, by Elizabeth Su, Shirley Lim and Anne
Brewster.
Joanne Leow 31
deracination from Singapore. Boey very self-consciously sees himself as an outsider,
an interloper who has come not to belong where he was born and raised. This tactic
makes Boeys work significantly different from Wongs when it comes to their focus
on their relationships with their immediate kin.
In this section I will look at Boeys poems about his family in a chronological
fashion starting with poems from his collection Another Place, from which poems
have also been collected in Boeys volume of selected and new works After the Fire.
Boeys early poems about his family often present conflicted relationships with his
immediate family members, set in the context of his position as an outsider in the
Singapore context of material gain and pragmatism. Unlike Wongs poems, Boeys
work seems at first to be grounded in the Singapore context through his family, yet
closer examination reveals that Boey uses this position to firmly reject his roots and
open up new geographical and cultural horizons that go beyond what he feels are the
narrow constraints of Singapore life. I will go on in my analysis to look at his work in
After the Fire, published in 2004 where Boeys later poems show a definite evolution
in his view of the family; in contrast to the earlier more conflicted tone, the poets
later work speaks of his familial relationships in a tender fashion and opens up a
world of memory with his father as the central figure. While there is some reference
to place in these poems, Boey here is more concerned about giving an impressionistic
vision of what has been lost through the urban development in Singapore and using
this to create an imaginary, emotional landscape which serves to foreground his
central theme of familial loss. Boey, however, does adopt an optimistic tone when he
looks forward in his relationship with his daughter. Arguably, his most recent poems
about her anticipate the hybrid spaces and histories that she will inhabit and create.
Joanne Leow 32
Boeys first references to his family are mostly about being in conflict with his
relations. In Boeys poem Letter to my Brother for instance, he positions himself
firmly in flux, halfway through now / in life and travel, traveling almost aimlessly
and writing maniacally, gush[ing] forth like mountain streams, / words tumbling
over one another, a lunatic / with cataracts of thoughts (161)
3
. In contrast, Boey sees
his brother as having taken the ideal route to success in the eyes of the nation of
Singapore:
Yes, I can see you now. A race
brilliantly run. A job, wife and home
for trophies. You trained hard for all that.
I have been running too. A difficult race though.
While you clock the track they laid for you,
I am doing it cross-country.
I rest when I please. Enough
of these odious comparisons. (161)

Boey uses the metaphor of a race on a closed track to emphasize the competitiveness
and rule based nature of his brothers life, which is full of expectations and rigid
measures of success. This is also borne out as well in the short sentences that this
verse is composed in, full of abrupt breaks that seem to draw on a quiet sarcasm. The
tone of the poem mocks his brother, and yet Boey frequently undercuts himself as
well. He shows up what he feels is the weakness of his own poetic metaphors,
enough / of these odious comparisons, and in doing so disorients the reader.
Further, he reveals his own follies, writes about the realistic nature of his travels and
notes his inability to automatically absorb cultures and countries: This note rings
false. The truth is / such beauty leaves me cold. / Like churches with shut gates
(161). The poetic persona here becomes an unreliable voice, highlighting its own

3
Unless otherwise noted, references to Boeys poems will be taken from After the Fire: New
and Selected Poems. Singapore: Firstfruits, 2006.

Joanne Leow 33
weakness and creating believably complex and ambivalent emotions within the
context of the fraternal relationship described in the poem. Another point of note is
how Boey does not use specific cultural markers in referring to his brother; for
example, his final line Hope you keep the flag flying at home (163) is universal
enough to be understood by readers without prior knowledge of the Singapore
context.
The companion piece to this poem, entitled Letter to His Mother is clearer
in its conclusions. Evoking travelers of every era, but especially Bruce Chatwin,
whose influence permeates his oeuvre, Boey tells his mother that he has no desire to
return:
No thoughts of home for me here.
All roads homeward peter out in the desert,
like footprints emptying into the sea;
tides of sand erase the tracks of our past,
give rootlessness its proper place,
lead to beginnings where no paths exist,
and short of turning us into mystics,
transform emptiness from curse to gift. (164)

This landscape of liberating emptiness and a-historicity where there are no signs to
follow or marks to leave is gravely contrasted with the constriction and
claustrophobia of what Boeys mother seems to represent,
This landscape loves everything in it, yet
does not cling to them, the way
we hoard our feelings, freeze them
in fixed deposits, expecting rich returns.
That is to say. I am unrepentant,
and celebrate my departure everyday.
You held me so tightly I couldnt breathe,
couldnt grow. I was a plant that resented being potted
on your sill, reviled the constant shower of affection,
the unfailing attention. I didnt just want
to lean into the light. I wanted to run
with it, pace it across the globe, reach
its very source. (164)

Joanne Leow 34
Boey uses the vocabulary of finance to illustrate family relationships in Singapore, a
nod to the countrys capitalist leanings. Words like hoard, freeze, fixed
deposits and rich returns add texture to his descriptions of these relationships,
crucially though, without adding a layer of cultural detail. Coincidentally, like Wong,
Boey uses the metaphor of plants to describe his relationship with his mother. Wongs
images of grafted green hint at the inherent alienation at the heart of familial
relationships. Boey on the other hand uses the conceit of the potted plant, unable to
thrive within the confines of his familial life. Again, these images are removed from
culturally specific ideas. Unlike Wong, whose mother is completely unconnected
with ideas of nation and place, Boeys mother appears for a moment to stand in for an
authoritarian Singapore that Boey ostensibly rejects,
I didnt want to be useful, at least
not for a term, until I knew what that meant.
I wanted to go without the privileges of name,
wanted to lose the countrys damaging interest
in everybodys welfare. (164-5)

In lines that give new meaning to the term motherland, Boey also draws the
connections between the idea of a family name and citizenship. The rest of this
particular poem suddenly becomes fragmented and disjointed. Boey writes
increasingly shorter stanzas that appear to have little or no relation with one another.
In a way, the disorientation in the poem can be read as Boeys ambivalent relationship
with his mother. While he certainly ties his mother to Singapore, he is also capable of
looking beyond its borders to draw more general conclusions about freedom,
capitalism and environmental degradation, and his place in the world, swinging in a
hammock / hung in the sky / between singing stars(165). Boey opens up the poems
and his own possibilities beyond the claustrophobic confines of his mothers and
countrys expectations.
Joanne Leow 35
After these references to his family early on in his poetic career, Boey does
not return to the theme of familial relationships until his poems in the volume of new
and selected poems After the Fire. While his earlier poems about family eschew direct
cultural references for the most part, Boeys later poems about his father and his
daughter do situate his subjects. However, these are spaces that are not burdened with
excessive or essential cultural detail. Instead, Boeys poems about his father recreate a
past imaginatively, taking license with details in order to flesh out his fathers
personality and life, while the poems about his daughter open up imagined pasts and
futures that are cosmopolitan and hybrid.
At the time of the publication of After the Fire, Boey had been in Australia for
about twelve years and his new work centres on the family, with the majority of the
poems (thirteen out of twenty-one) having some connection to family members. The
book is dedicated to his family, and the titular poem refers to the cremation of his
fathers body. After the Fire is a Lazarus-like resurrection of his fathers cremated
remains, an eerie deconstruction and re-assemblage of a loved ones parts. Boey
conflates the physical and spiritual, the scientific and the religious,
[] He pieces you
together, his post-mortem
reconstructing your life.
A broken man, he says, picking
the slivers, the bits that sum up
the whole man. He wants us
to go through the pieces
to make sure you are all there.
He has a responsibility
to the living and the dead, he says,
to get it right. He starts from the base,
an anatomy lesson in Hokkien,
showing us what we didnt see
in life, where it went wrong, the rot
attacking the tibia, the fatal flaw
in the scaffolding. A smoker
and drinker, and a fracture
that never healed, he adds.
Joanne Leow 36
The cranium piece completes
you and the ash is poured
into the urn. He says we have to rig you up
in sequence, from the feet,
so that in afterlife, you will be upright,
standing on even feet and ground. (16)

Boeys description of the Buddhist mediums careful handling of his fathers ashes is
a strange yet appropriate mixing of Chinese cremation traditions and scientific
jargon. Words like post-mortem, anatomy. tibia, cranium, and fracture are
contrasted with the almost mystical reconstruction of Boeys dead father, in
sequence, from the feet. Biology and moral character become quite literally
inseparable, with idea of a broken man taking on actual physical manifestations.
Again as with Wongs poem Blessings, Boey doesnt italicize (literally and
figuratively) any of his references to Chinese culture. His poem might be imbued with
a sense of culture, but it is one that is readily accessible and does not seek to exoticize
its subject. What is even more interesting is the Christian references that are
interlaced with the Chinese ones. For example the lines I take his word like
sacrament, / take the jade-green stone urn, / and cradle its surprising weight(17)
have definite references to both Christian and Chinese traditions. Boey seems to
suggest an interchangeability between them and this hybridity suggests a more
complex rendering of cultural traditions in Boeys family. In the last stanza of the
poem, when he poetically recreates what the Buddhist medium seeks to do with his
fathers remains, one cannot help again but notice the Christian references to the
resurrection and Jacobs ladder, the idea of ascent heightened by the short run-on
lines,
I can see you in heaven
materializing from the urn,
the scraps and dust
assembled into a ladder
of bone and flesh, up
Joanne Leow 37
on your feet, the limp gone,
dusting the ash off,
and ready to walk
back into our lives. (17)

Boey embeds multiple ways of looking at death and an afterlife in this poem, in ways
that make the urn that contains his fathers ashes heavier / than the sum of its sifted
contents (17). Transitioning from the difficult physical reality of receiving his
fathers ashes to a transcendental meditation on a redemptive afterlife, Boeys poem
reconciles the various strands of religious and cultural beliefs in his life in a way that
shows how they are intimately and irrevocably entwined. Boey does not privilege any
set of beliefs and traditions, choosing instead to combine them, embedding this
hybridity in the imagery and vocabulary of the poem.
This sense of flux and liminality is even more apparent in another poem about
Boeys father entitled Kelong. Boey uses the idea of the fishing outpost to illustrate
the central theme of the liminal nature of this space in his memory:
My father carries me into the hut
where I sit and find equilibrium
on a floating world of water and air.
The smell of salted fish everywhere
and through the gaps of the worn timber floor
you can see the threadwork of the tossing tides
and imagine the kelongs legs stretching
miles to the ocean bed. You feel the pulse, the tug
of the depths at the kelong frame and wonder
if it will hold (18-9)

Arguably, Boey is aware that at this point in his career, he no longer writes just for a
Singaporean audience and has developed strategies to prevent cultural translation
from being obtrusive in his work. One sees this impulse when he chooses to use fish
names like trevally and whitebait where the fishermen of his childhood would
probably have very different names for these fish in their own Chinese dialects. The
effect of this is a sensorial immersion into Boeys memory, without the lens of
Joanne Leow 38
extraneous explanations. It seems natural then to draw parallels from Boeys liminal
position as a poet writing from outside the culture he grew up in for an audience
wider than the Singapore context, and the idea of the kelong as hovering in a realm /
neither water nor land (19), in a space that is in a way outside the borders of a
country. It is this space where Boey truly finds his father, buoyant, free / from debts,
going for the big catch(18). It is also through the memory of this space that Boey
comes to an acceptance of the lack of fixity in his life, as he notes that it is here that
he learnt to trust the aerial walkways, / fit my tread to the swaying sense of things, /
the planks bending but holding firm with each step (19). The memory of a borderless
world is where Boey hopes to find his father again through his own poetry, In my
dream I cast about for the word / that will reel in the sea hoard in one haul: / starfish,
seahorses, and my father (20). This moment of revelation also brings to mind the
Christian references that continue to run deep through the preceding poem After the
Fire and now Kelong. Boey talks about walking on water and connects the
fishermen in the kelong and those in the New Testament when the nets are reeled in,
like a retiarius / ceiling, and there is a heaven of fish / heaving, thrashing scales, and
mouths / agape in hosannas of death (20). Life and death are seen as intrinsically
linked with the plenty of the fish coupled with their necessary death the
undercurrent of mortality becoming all the more evident in this poem about Boeys
late father. There is of course, also the redemptive idea of this fishing, echoing the
biblical salvation that is tied to the apostles and their role as fishers of men. Boeys
father is somehow rehabilitated through this memory and seems to thrive in this
liminal space. Furthermore, the poets use of Christian imagery here and throughout
the rest of his work provides a layer of imagery and meaning that is not easily linked
with a particular ethnicity. Boeys references to Christianity, along with his use of
Joanne Leow 39
Buddhist mythology, jazz vocabulary and a whole host of other cultural references
create a nexus of cosmopolitanism that does not lend itself to simplistic definitions of
ethnic belonging.
For Boey, it appears that the word itself or poetry is the most important in
negotiating the murky waters of history, identity and belonging. As such, the poem
immediately following Kelong, Placenames extends the theme of the ability of
words to breathe life to a forgotten past or deceased person. What is interesting here is
Boeys usage of the italics when naming specific historical Singaporean locales like
Buffalo Road, Robinsons / The Arcade and Satay Club (21). Where before Boey
resisted the use of italics, perhaps seeing that they distance the reader from the text, he
uses them specifically for the place names. Yet the effect here is not one of
distancing, it is merely one of emphasis, to show the power of these words for Boeys
father. A reader of the poem who is unfamiliar with these places, a category that also
includes younger Singaporeans, is still able to understand and appreciate this piece.
Even though, someone with a first hand knowledge of Singapore history might have a
more profound connection to this poem, what is evident here is that place becomes
secondary to Boeys meditation on his fathers demise. Boey uses the idea of these
long vanished places, now remote as the stars / in a galaxy already extinct(21) to
illustrate his fathers failing memory and return to the past. The narrative of the
ruined city is direct parallel to the fathers vanished self, and Boey writes,
I dont know if it is the dead places
calling him to come home
or my father summoning them
for a last walk. He intones
Johnson Pier, Malacca Street,
Old World, New World,
as if piecing together the alleys,
the streets and neighbourhood
of his body, reassembling
the ruined city
Joanne Leow 40
of his vanished self. (21)

It is a meditative litany of forgotten places that Boey says he will inherit, in a way re-
emphasizing his deracination since he is attached to something that no longer exists.
Yet Boey does not romanticize versions of his supposed origins, that he is completely
aware of the finality of the disappearance of these dead places, like his deceased
father they have been erased, with only the poem left to remember them.
Boeys preoccupation with his late father continues in the poem Prodigal.
Beginning with its title, the poem continues with Boeys use of Christian imagery;
Boey sees his fathers corpse as a formaldehyde body / hard like the plaster St
Anthony / close to the coffin, removed / from life as the preserved saint / I once saw
in a Siennese Church (31). Boey seems to be hinting at the deadness of Catholic
iconography through its macabre fascination with a saints corpse. Instead of religious
revelation, Boey simply sees
His face a blank map,
arctic peace, no trace
of the errant ways
scarring the image
in the funeral photograph
under Anthonys watchful eyes.
He had left for the last time,
eluding us again,
for the country
where all fathers wait. (31)

These lines show how Boeys ideas of space and country exist in the realm of the
imagination, memory and emotion. His grasp of geographical space and cultural
specificity in these poems is far more tenuous than many of his peers who write in
more realist ways about their country and living environment. This points us to
finding a different way of locating Boeys poetry about his father, one that does not
tie itself to a specific locale or culture.
Joanne Leow 41
While Boeys poems about his father necessarily look backwards, Boeys
work about his daughter is an exploration of what kinds of cultural belonging and
identity can exist moving forwards. In Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB,
Boey writes about his daughter discovering the sound of her name / the new old
country revealed under / her tiny preschool tentative hand(32). Boey seems to tie the
idea of belonging to a language and further raises the question of who his audience is
by carefully breaking down the construction of the Chinese character for his family
name:
She prints the pictogram mu,
a solid vertical stroke like a tree trunk,
a horizontal across for the arms, and a sinuous
downward branch on either side. That is
the radical for wood or tree. And on its right
she prints mei, meaning every, made from a roof
over the pictogram from mother, mu,
with its nourishing embrace. Grafted on
the tree, it adds up to the talismanic
plum, tree and blossom.
It has been years since I have written
my true name. (32)

It is curious here how Boey steps back into a Chinese essentialism, using terms like
true name and talismanic. In spite of this culturally specific focus, there is also a
certain universalism that runs through Boeys deconstruction of the character of his
name. By making the pictoral elements readily accessible to a reader who might not
have any knowledge of Chinese script, Boey both more deeply explores the layers of
meaning possible in one Chinese character and elucidates the process to a degree that
makes prior knowledge of Chinese a moot point. The importance that the poem places
on this character is also very much in line with Boeys previously articulated ideas on
the centrality and significance of words and their power. Further on in this stanza
Boey fantasizes about being
No longer emigrant, foreign
Joanne Leow 42
but recalled home, and not to the country
left behind, but further back
beyond the South Sea.
Vague lost connections
somewhere south of the Yangtze.
Karst country, paddies
and mountains the color of jade (32)

This seems like an almost clichd view of South China, where Boeys ancestors are
from and his claim to understanding this sense of attachment is tenuous at best. He
acknowledges as much, In a few years my daughter will press / for her family history
and tree / and I will have nothing more to show / than the withered branch that is her
dead grandfather(33). Yet this idea of having multiple attachments to south of the
Yangtze and the country / left behind (Singapore) and further on new soil
(Australia) (32) seems to suggest an inbuilt capacity that Boey has for
cosmopolitanism. He is able to imagine attachments that go from before his historical
existence, to a migrant nation and to his new country of residence.
By the end of the poem, Boey begins to confabulate a family history to replace
one that is buried, irretrievable(33), choosing to creating his own identity, his own
history with a free hand, coming to terms of acceptance that are wholly his own and
even of his own imagining. Boey feels free to recreate a possible history involving his
grandfather and a Chinese / pioneer who made it good in White / Australia(34).
Crucially it is an unknowable possibility that cannot be proved or disproved; Perhaps
Great-grandfather sallied forth / with Quong Tart on the same junk [] Perhaps they
were brothers(34). A sort of alternate history that speaks of paths not taken,
I see my other life my father could have had
staring out from the sepia shots,
if our forbear had traveled on
down-under. I could not explain
to my daughter the dj vu (34)

Joanne Leow 43
Australia, in this poem, is a free space where it is possible to have married a
Scotswoman, sang / Border ballads and wore tartan kilts, fed the Aborigines / and
played cricket with the whites (33-4). It is a fantasy of alternate origins for Boey, one
that sees his father as Mandarin of the Fifth Order, costumed in silk tunic and
plumbed hat(34), a status far removed from the pig-tailed coolie in the new
colony(33). Yet while Boey appears to have situated this poem in an almost
ironically hyper-Sinicized context, it is important to read the work with the full
knowledge that it is a creation of Boeys imagination. Boey is borrowing a history
here and claiming it as his own, almost in opposition to what he feels is the actual
subaltern gap in his paternal heritage.
This exploration of identities and histories continues in the poem Stamp
Collecting which depicts a scene between father and daughter as Boey shows her his
old stamp collections and she asks,
Is Australia our home?
What is this country? Why doesnt it exist
anymore? Why is the Queens face
on the stamps of so many nations? (38)

If the question of where home is has to be asked, then it seems like the answer is
uncertain. A five-year olds questions about political changes in the colonial and
decolonized world have a simultaneous effect of making them both simplistic and
complex. Making sense of the complicated and fraught histories behind these changes
seems too much for a single poem or a stamp collection, yet, these stamps were also
Boeys first encounter with the wider world, my first travels, / transported on these
serrated tokens(38). Through the poem, he conflates the idea of nations and colonies,
making them interchangeable and showing how drawings and redrawings on the
global map are to a certain extent arbitrary. As with Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at
the QVB though, Boey makes up for the gaps with his imagination and ends again
Joanne Leow 44
with a hybrid image, of a youthful Elizabeth / pendant over a Chinese junk, and slips
it home (39).
In these two poems about his daughter, Boey seems to see her in much the
same way Wong May sees her poetic persona in poems such as The Judge: as a
locus for change in the way one looks at family history, family relationships and
cultural identity. There is in fact a certain kind of freedom for his daughter that her
family tree is broken branches. So little history / to go on(33), enabling her to create
the other life that Boey so wishes for his father. While it is ironic that Boey does
use culturally specific and overladen images of village life in South-east China, the
fact that this is an imagined history and that Quong Tart is such a vividly hybrid
character, speak to the myriad possibilities of this endeavour.
Arif Dirlik has noted that that literature in postcolonial nations has been
placed at the service of exploring ethnic and transnational (or diasporic) identities,
leading to a problem where the construction of identities in literary work has been
confounded with the ethnography of culture, subjecting the writer to pressures that
subvert the autonomy of creative work (210). What we see in Boeys work, however,
is the opposite of this. Boey has used culture to service his work; choosing stories and
fabricating an autobiographical history that speak to the greater cultural freedoms that
are possible. Where Dirlik is concerned about ethnic writers finding that their work is
treated as ethnography that erases individual and social complexity(231), here Boey
rescues this individual agency and complexity through his confabulation, and in doing
so frees himself and his family from a cultural specificity that might seek to define
them.
Both Wong and Boey have worked outside the constraints and obligations of
constructing national and cultural identities through their poetry. In this chapter I have
Joanne Leow 45
shown how this has been achieved through the poets focus on familial relationships,
a subject that has been so often tied to ethnicity and cultural origins in postcolonial
literature. Wongs poems about her parents are written for the most part without any
reference to the specificities of culture or race, while Boey uses cultural history as
only one of many ways to approach his relationships. In doing so, both poets open up
the possibilities of invented, imagined origins and personal histories that encompass
cosmopolitan landscapes and are not fixed in defining a particular culture or countrys
identity.
Joanne Leow 46
Chapter 2
Travel, Migration & Return


I long to be nowhere.
I long to be merely
going, but not

Some-Where. Please No.
Going, Wong May

Besides family, travel is another prominent theme that figures in the oeuvres
of both Boey Kim Cheng and Wong May. Both have set a significant portion of their
work outside Singapore: Boeys second and third collections, Another Place (1992)
and Days of No Name (1995) move from India to Europe to North America, while
Wongs Reports (1972) and Superstitions (1978) chronicle journeys from America,
back to Asia and then to Europe. A constant sense of restlessness is apparent in poems
from these collections, but more crucially, when compared with their peers, Wong
and Boey are unique in their portrayal of travel and the diverse settings that have
informed their work. In this chapter, I will take a chronological look at a selection of
poems from both Wong and Boey through the lenses of travel, migration and return in
order to understand the development of these ideas in their work. Through a close
reading of their form and content, it is possible to trace how their ideas on leaving,
traveling and returning have evolved through the years. Their journeys to each
country and city naturally culminate in longer voyages of revelation.
Comparing the poetry of Wong and Boey reveals striking similarities in the
way they perceive travel and ideas of movement, while also highlighting the vital
differences in their work. Both poets see travel as metaphor for life and write about
the impossibility of a return to a home or origin. While Boey starts out ostensibly
rooted in Singapore before moving into a more cosmopolitan stance, Wong starts out
Joanne Leow 47
from her first book with a sense of universality and statelessness that continues
throughout her work.
First, it is important to examine some generalizations about the impact and
aims of the misleadingly broad term travel literature. One commonly perceived
notion of travel writing is as a journey of cultural and emotional self-discovery
through interaction with different people and cultures. Thus, a seemingly paradoxical
move occurs where, in spite of writing abroad, a writer continues the production of
his specific locality and culture, whether by contrast or through obvious absence, and
in this way reiterates the simplistic binary of us and them. In a similar manner to
my earlier discussion of the theme of family in post-colonial Singapore literature, this
often leads to an over-emphasis on the ethnic, and a tendency to exoticize the foreign
or even re-exoticize the local. The travel writer is also seen to be writing for a home
audience; as Steve Clarke puts it, a decision has been made to be there, rather than
here, and yet still to wish to be heard here (17). This sense of a home audience that is
removed from the realities of being abroad illustrates the problems of representation
and value judgments that occur when travelers write about countries they visit. These
issues are further complicated when one considers the act of migration as a form of
travel that seeks to leave home behind. In short, the acts of leaving, traveling,
migrating and returning create complex problems when it comes to identity,
belonging and finding audiences.
There are many examples from the body of Singaporean literature that
illustrate these complexities of travel, migration and return. This is especially so in the
second half of the 20
th
century, a time that saw the Singaporean writer abroad and
finding inspiration there. For the purpose of showing how some of these writers have
remained firmly rooted to their home audience, I have chosen two poems--Leong
Joanne Leow 48
Liew Geoks Exiles Return and Yong Shu Hoongs poem Guilt Trip-- from a
broader selection. Taking a closer look at these two poems is important here to
illustrate how the themes of travel, migration and return are treated with a Singapore
reader in mind.
In Leongs Exiles Return, the treatment of exiles who have returned to
Singapore after migrating shows the construction of an idea of Singapore and its
supposed antithesis of overseas. Leong describes the tastes and behaviour of
returning Singaporeans who play a bizarre neo-colonialist role in which they indulge
in the exoticization of a tropical paradise:
No stranger from absence,
They come to see
New streets, pick hawker
Food, soak the crooked
Equatorial heat.
Orchids, hibiscus,
Greens of weeds and grass
Throw up, bruising
Eyes accustomed to less.

Chewing satay
Dripping kuah, they watch
Gula Melaka leach
Chendols peaks
Ask for rojak: hot-salt-sweet-sour
Aftertaste of past aches
Assorted on a plastic plate. (284-5)

Here the descriptions of flora, climate and food overwhelm the reader with a hot, lush,
sultry sense of the tropics, which rather disingenuously refuses to acknowledge the
modernity of air-conditioning, western cuisine and concrete that was also present in
Singapore at the time in which the poem is set-- circa 1991. Leong chooses to focus
on what she sees to be the most important aspects of an exiles interaction with
Singapore, its food and its shopping: [e]xiles compare/ Notes, size things up, / Scour
bargains / Between torrid heat and temperate zone, /The yin and yang of home(285).
Joanne Leow 49
The strange and superficial exoticization of Singapore ends with a simplistic
conclusion that reinforces the binary of home and abroad, here and [e]lsewhere:
[t]o end is after all to start, / To come home, to know where you belong. / Secure,
they depart /And then return to air / Secrets of their zig-zag hearts(285). Travel here
is depicted as a trajectory that begins and ends at a particular home which Leong
equates with a sense of certainty that is deceptive and illusory, since both the migrants
depicted in the poem and city itself have irrevocably changed since their departure.
Yong Shu Hoongs poem Guilt Trip(628) is about traveling abroad and
chronicles a coach trip from Singapore to Thailand played out ironically to the
soundtrack of U2s Where The Streets Have No Name and trashy Euro-disco(628).
The poems objectification of Thai girls burning bright in bars and masseurs put
on display Amsterdam-style in store windows degrades the foreign subjects and
reinforces the dichotomy of an ordered Singapore life and the zoo-like anarchy of the
city of temples and massage parlours so unlike our own(628). Perhaps it is most
telling how the poem equates a sexual encounter with a prostitute with her front /
row of misaligned teeth with a Thai dish of tom yam goong(628), as if the
transaction of sex could be equivalent to indulging in foreign cuisine while abroad.
Significantly, the poem notes that what happens in Hat Yai stays there - no one
would admit / to anything at all, hoarding our secrets into adulthood, / like domestic
scandals better kept behind latched gates(628) - further compartmentalizing the two
worlds of Singapore and outside Singapore. While there undoubtedly is irony in
Yongs poem, it is telling that he is still unable to escape the cultural binaries and
stereotypes that perpetuate the myth that countries exploited for tourism by
Singaporeans are necessarily inferior, dependant and wholly separate.
Joanne Leow 50
The selection of Yongs and Leongs poems is by no means an exhaustive
final word on the idea of travel in Singaporean literature or of the positioning of all of
their work, yet they are useful in highlighting fixed definitions of home and abroad,
and the objectification and exoticization of both the local and the foreign. Both poems
are also written in a prose-like style, set in free verse with fixed narratives that have
straightforward beginnings and endings written with a specific Singaporean audience
in mind. Yongs poem carefully creates an impression of anarchy and excitement in a
holiday away from the ordered, sterile city-state, while Leong depicts a return to
Singapore that is coupled with an artificially cloying sense of nostalgia for a sensuous
cornucopia of culinary delights and materialistic activities. This is significantly
different from the suspended, open-ended style that the two poets discussed in this
thesis work in. The audience that Wong and Boey have in mind for their work is also
less apparent: Wongs poetry, published away from Singapore by an American press,
does not make any attempt to speak specifically to a reader from Singapore or from
any other country. Boeys work, on the other hand, seems to move from addressing a
Singapore audience to a more diverse one through his four collections.
To delve deeper into these differences, it is useful to consider a study of travel
literature by Anke Gilleir that looks at the work of diasporic writers writing about
travel and migration in ways that suggest the dominance of their literary methods
rather than their biographies. Gilleir examines these writers through a lens provided
by Gayatri Spivak who defends a sophisticated study a reading of postcolonial or
marginal literature that does not replace literary criticism with identity politics, the
routine use of literary texts as representations of collectivity (256). Gilleir, through
Spivak, focuses her attention instead on the undecidability of collectivities that
occur in literary texts that exist on the borders of cultures and move the process of
Joanne Leow 51
literary analysis beyond the false certainties of ethnicity and nationality. She
examines the trope of travel in transnational writers who are unique because of their
use of complex and demanding prose, concluding that it is necessary to avoid a
narrow identitarian perception of their work and instead acknowledge a sense of
strangeness that emerges from the literary nature of the narratives (266). This
questioning of identity politics in postcolonial or marginal literature is central to my
reading of Boey and Wongs take on their travels, as is a closer look at exactly how
the trope of travel itself is explored through literature. Although Gilleirs work
focuses on prose, she is conscious of how the language functions almost flaunting
poetical and rhetorical devices and of the unreliability of the narrator (261). These
factors contribute to the literariness of these texts and for her, literature is important
because of its aimlessness, its unwillingness to be complicit in identitarian
discourse and the texts self-awareness of the stereotyping and thus the fallibility of
(literary) representation(261).
In Boeys poetry on travel, this idea of literariness and the self-awareness of
the limits of its representation are also similarly apparent in poems like The Howrah
Station and Sudder Street, Calcutta. With self-reflexive asides embedded within
poems, his poetic personae are fundamentally unreliable, questioning their own
existence. In his later poems, written after a stint at the Iowa International Writing
Program, Boey continues to emphasize the centrality of poetry and words in both
content and form. He also displays a cosmopolitanism influenced by both his reading
and travel. A poem from his debut collection, For Chatwin, puts him in the realm of
the British novelist and traveler Bruce Chatwin whose peripatetic musings were often
semi-fictionalized and placed the traveler within the context of the particular culture
being written about. Chatwins tendencies were towards impressionistic remembrance
Joanne Leow 52
and his central conceit of Aboriginal songlines suggests that life is to be lived through
travel and music. These ideas continue to resonate throughout Boeys poetic career, as
a great proportion of his work is about traveling, has an awareness of the particular
context of his journeys and consistently contains references to music. Like Chatwin,
Boey sees himself through his journeys, noting a man must place himself on a map /
to see how big he is (195). Yet his is not a typical cultural self-discovery through
travel; Boey has a constant tone of self-awareness that set him apart from his peers,
and avoids making unsophisticated comparisons with Singapore in his poems about
being abroad.
In Wongs work, there is a comparable awareness but instead of using self-
reflexive asides and questioning the value of poetry, Wong focuses on the liminal
spaces between physical states and written words and suggests their power to
transform perspectives. Poems like On Leaving Berlin and Kampong Bahru seek
to go beyond stereotypes of travel writing and ethnicization, and instead intently
converge on moments of liminality and flux that give rise to alternatives to simplistic
ways of defining culture and belonging. Like Boey, Wong also displays a certain level
of literariness with her poetry. Wongs work is often challenging in both form and
content as she uses unusual lineation, inventive imagery and metaphor, and firmly
eschews a straightforward and predictable sense of narrative in her poems. These
techniques reinforce a sense of strangeness and dislocation that preclude catering to
any home audience.
Furthermore, Wongs adaptation and appropriation of cultural references and
inflections recalls the strategies of cosmopolitanism that Ross Posnock describes: it is
a cosmopolitanism that is not preoccupied with opposition and exclusion but
regards culture as public property and nurtures the capacity for appropriation as a
Joanne Leow 53
tool for the excluded to attain access to a social order of democratic equality (804).
Posnock writes about the contemporary African author Manthia Diawara and his
reverberant move [] to reanimate the dream of deracination as freedom, through
deploying cosmopolitanism as an escape from what he calls the conundrum of
identity politics and the malaise of identity fatigue (804). Cosmopolitanism in this
sense refuses to define itself through differences or oppositions, and seeks instead to
grasp the syncretic basis of culture(809) and sees what cultural differences that may
arise as non-hierarchical. In many instances in Wongs poetry, she looks not to define
herself culturally or locate herself ethnically through difference but instead to retell
and reinhabit the stories and lives of the people she encounters. This is obvious not
just through her subject matter but also by her choice of vocabulary, syntax, phrase
structure and imagery. Wongs poems about the New England landscape are starkly
different from her litany-like elegy of East Bengal, and even more so from her bleak
portraits of Eastern Europe. In each poem, she does not, like Yong Shu Hoong in
Guilt Trip, contrast an idea of home with the location in which she has set the
poem. Instead, there is a sense that she has placed herself within the setting without
losing her distinctive voice, but yet not set apart as a dispassionate observer.
Ultimately, both Wong and Boey show us that there are more sophisticated
ways of looking at how travel, migration and return affect poetry, ways that are
beyond the narrow definitions of ethnic belonging and cultural relativism. In doing so,
they significantly alter the concepts of home and abroad. Boey emphasizes the
impossibility of a nave and one-dimensional return that Leong Liew Geok
ultimately seems to suggest is possible in Exiles Return. Wong, on the other hand,
turns to the idea of being constantly in-between: by the end of her third and last
book, she declares unequivocally that the world is beautiful even with its
Joanne Leow 54
imperfections and debris, and that she seeks to be traveling anywhere (135), getting
her windows dirty. The two poets concur on the inability to truly return home once
one has left; Wongs poems seem unwilling to entertain the illusion that a home
existed in the first place, while for Boey any return is only possible through memory
and not in the present-day reality.

Wong Mays lostness

The little biographical detail that can be gleaned from the back flaps of her
three books tells us that Wong May was born in China, spent her formative years in
Singapore and by the writing of her third and final book had also spent time in the
United States, Germany and France. While Wongs first book is opaque about its
locations and biographical detail, Wongs second book Reports chronicles her time in
the United States from 1966 to 1971, her third book Superstitions continues
immediately from 1971 to 1976 and ventures further afield. There is less geographical
range in Reports, but Wongs poems about the people, landscape and life in the
United States are significant because of their settings which are observed without
comparisons to a home or an origin. Poems like America, New Hampshire,
New England and New York make this readily apparent as they weave cultural
references to jazz, American poetry, rural and urban landscapes into the subject and
form. The poem East Bengal stands out in Reports as one where the social realities
of poverty and political injustice are brought to light, but without a condescending
descent into comparisons or stereotyping. The poem is a foretaste of work in Wongs
third collection of poems Superstitions, which journeys beyond North America to
Europe and returns in parts to Singapore and Asia. In these poems, Wong is far more
culturally specific in her remembrances and critical about the social inequities and
Joanne Leow 55
political injustices that she encounters. While she still retains a neutrality and
cosmopolitanism when talking about each different culture, crucially for Wong this
does not mean disengagement with the realities at hand. Superstitions is a less inward
looking collection of poems compared to her earlier work and many poems in this
collection politicize themselves without resorting to cultural stereotypes. And when
Wong tackles her return to Asia later in the book it is managed with a detachment that
avoids any sentimental nostalgia or reconstruction of the past. This balance of
political engagement with cultural detachment becomes the hallmark of Wongs later
work as she successfully negotiates between making informed social critiques and
what it means to be traveling without a firm sense of home.
In her poems about various countries and people, Wong moves from being
aesthetically embedded in a particular context to being socially and politically
engaged. And when she stages a return to an originary context, it is without a nave
acceptance of the status quo or a stereotypical belief that a simple return to the places
of ones youth is possible. What is also striking about Wong Mays work and its
critical reception, is the lack of a comprehensive biography which often accompanies
the work of a postcolonial writer, and is often used to supposedly illuminate the
themes and motives of his or her work. For Wong, the lack of a biography has worked
in a paradoxical way: while readers of her poetry are forced to deduce what they can
of her peripatetic life from her poetry, the elusive and elliptical nature of her work
prevents them from doing so with any great certainty. This gap in knowledge points to
the necessity of looking beyond the biographical and instead focusing on the literary.
In doing so, it becomes possible to concentrate on the text itself without the
distractions of having to fit Wongs work into the larger narrative of her life.
Adopting this approach, I will do a close reading of a brief selection of Wongs
Joanne Leow 56
poems looking at their lineation, imagery and cultural references. While elements of
biography might suggest themselves from time to time, they do not eclipse the fact
that Wongs poetry about travel is fundamentally disorienting, untraditionally non-
narrative and formally innovative.
Beginning with an analysis of Wongs second volume Reports, it is important
to consider her series of poems about North America separately from a poem like
East Bengal which is significantly different in terms of style and references. In the
range of these poems, we see Wongs ability to absorb cultural references, stylistic
and syntactical traits in each poem in order to suggest a sense of place. The poems
New Hampshire, September 1969 and New England share a sense of the space
and weather of the east coast of America. In both works, Wong uses a series of
truncated run-on lines spread across the page visually to create a sense of liminal
spaces and a greater awareness of the surroundings as she becomes conscious of all
the minute dying things / and their phosphorescence (53). Wong relies on a sharp
attention to the natural details of her surroundings and transforms spatiality into an
awareness of temporality and mortality. She does not use any ethnic markers to
describe this landscape; instead she notes the universality of her revelations, writing
the earth always turns up / with something to say / the earth never fails (79). This is
not to say that the landscape appears familiar to the poet or the reader; Wongs
considered words and lines suggest careful observations and meditations on her
environment. However, what is achieved here is a sense of a place without resorting
to clichs, her own ethnicity or a direct comparison with a home.
When making specific references to a places culture, Wong does so in
unexpected and unsettling ways. The clearest example of this is her poem America.
Even while delivering a wry social critique on America, the poem refuses to resort to
Joanne Leow 57
the binary reasoning of cultural difference. Instead, Wong delivers a poem that is
simultaneously violent, syncopated and exultant:
What is N.Y.C. after dark
but Miss Lulu Marican
singing blues
her breasts pushed to her throat
across her body the traffic
the live wires and dead wires the neon signs
and used tires crossed and crisscrossed
What is Miss Lulu Marican
but a road
to be stamped out entire

the universe
reduced to a scream []

Nothing will recover
from her singing.

From her silence
None
none but America!

Business Management

Is that all you have to teach us
America (7)

Wong here uses short lines and the visually complex placement of the poem on the
page to evoke a sense of rhythm and movement that is central to her portrayal of the
desolate and disturbing landscape of N.Y.C.. Images of a womans body are
subjected to the violence of urban traffic and detritus, and yet there is also bittersweet
beauty to be found in Miss Lulu Maricans singing and the irrepressible nature of the
American spirit that thrives despite the degradation. In the lineation and phrasing, we
find an improvisational quality in the poetry that invokes jazz and blues, as does the
use of the formal address Miss Lulu Marican which echoes the announcers at music
performances. Wong combines the worlds of music making and the bleakness of the
cityscape before ending with a crescendo of noise a scream and a non-sequitur that
Joanne Leow 58
contemplates what can be learned from it all. The absurdity of the ending mocks the
reader who would find easy conclusions and lessons from an experience in New York
City. In this unflinching encounter with the terrible beauty and violence of the
country, there is, Wong seems to assert, nothing to learn here. At no point in the poem
does Wong pass judgment or attempt to define America in contrast to another
culture or memory. Yet, there is an understanding that she stands apart from the
America that she describes, in the distinct position of an involved observer.
Wongs other poems about America are mostly focused on the east coast of
the country as she describes the cold, dark landscape of New Hampshire being full of
vertiginous possibilities or the urban alienation of New York uncannily figured
through its women. Reports is a collection that is centered mostly in North America,
but two poems, East Bengal and November 1969 hint at the geographic and
thematic scope of her following book Superstitions which sees Wong traveling, as the
book jacket points out from the Hebrides to Singapore. East Bengal in particular
stands out from the collection because of its short run-on lines, which are not at all
characteristic of the lineation in the rest of Reports:
Children die
Children go
first everywhere
Children are ancient
like milk
they dont keep
they are wise
like dried fish
they lie by the roadside
After Cholera
and War
they expect to see God
meanwhile
they wait
for cremation (14)

Wongs short lines create a rhythm that mimics child-like speech and epigrams that
Joanne Leow 59
hold the promise of inherent truths. The use of anaphora and simple phrasing also add
to this effect. Horror is mixed with innocence, and age with youth, as Wong uses
paradox to invoke scenes of suffering that are so incomprehensible in their scale that
they become surreal:
Cholera was nice
her sari
a triple hoop
of flame she was gorgeous
Our Lady of the Rock
attended by a psalm of flies
War was nice
like Shiva
She has many arms
one face & many legs
when she dances
She is a dancer with no feet
Vultures are nice
they cant wait
they are angels
but people are stupid
they ought to get wood
enough wood
to make a pyre for all their children
meanwhile they fight Cholera
& each other
when we wait
like bottles
in Deaths factory
& God is hand-woven pressing his face close to me
a piece of cloth (14)

Wong uses the form of a long sentence to evoke a tone of quiet desperation and
conjures up a nightmarish vision that ends with the desolate scene of Deaths
factory and a suffocating sense of divine inevitability. Wongs references to both
Our Lady of the Rock and Shiva hint at her understanding that East Bengal has a
complex, heterogeneous, hybrid culture. Her use of these religious references brings
to life the tragedies of war and cholera with terrible beauty, melding images of intense
suffering with dance or female beauty. Yet it also undermines these religious
symbols, reflecting their powerlessness in the face of such great misery, only people
Joanne Leow 60
who are stupid can make a difference, although it is clear they are not doing so.
While other poets might choose at some juncture to give themselves a superior
vantage point within the poem to absolve them from the suffering of other peoples
or countries, Wong here does not make a single reference to the more advantaged
background that she comes from. Instead she puts herself firmly in the context of the
poem, noting that everyone wait[s] / like bottles / in Deaths factory; it is a fate that
nobody escapes. Her use of the first person in the last five lines of the poem is part of
this strategy, and she waits till the end of the long sentence of the poem to make the
reader fully understand the suffering that he or she is complicit in. The poem manages
to do away with an anthropological view of the situation of the children in East
Bengal, while in no way diminishing the horror of it. It does this by obliquely
acknowledging that everyone is in some way complicit through inaction and cannot
accept deaths inevitability. If we recall Yong Shu Hoongs poem Guilt Trip with
its precise and pragmatic stance apart from its subject matter so unlike our own, it
becomes clearer how Wongs poem by embedding personal liability in a wholly
claustrophobic tone, collapses the binary between us and them, here and
there.
In Superstitions, Wong displays a social and political awareness particularly
with her poems about French Algerians, Morning in Grenoble and Europe. In the
latter, Wong astutely points out how in Europe, racism has become intimately
entwined with ideas of class. It is a short, cutting poem where simple, direct lines
bring out the ironies of European attitudes towards Algerians. Wongs focus on the
postcolonial citizens of France reveals her preoccupation with their position of
disadvantage in the country. Yet, her work Morning in Grenoble reveals that there
is no simple relationship between ex-colonizer and ex-colonized. In this longer poem,
Joanne Leow 61
Wong explores the dreams and ambitions of the ouvriers in a more in-depth
manner. In doing so, she manages to humanize them and render their lives with a
realistic yet aesthetic eye:
The Algerian Garbage-men
who hang onto the rear-end
of their truck
whistle & hum
lustily like sparrows
with their backs turned
to the worlds (if only the Frenchmens)
garbage, their shoulders
heave
good-naturedly
with a rare energy
to the sound of a filth not theirs
being spinned
shredded & spinned
in great detail
are they not
seeing already
the green field
theyll acquire in Tipasa, in Djemila
in Oran
with this perhaps not their
last days toil
in France?
O to own

an almond tree, an
almond tree
where you know it (61)

Wongs carefully spaced out lineation and her method of breaking up each of her
phrases create a sense of energy and rhythm in this passage and echo the whistling of
the garbage men and the start-stop motion of their truck. In a neat reversal, Wong ties
the filth not to the garbage men, but to their ex-colonial masters, the French. Further
distancing them from their oft-despised profession, she looks instead to the green
field and almond tree that they will acquire from their toil, naming each hometown
that they come from with ease. As Wong recreates the interior lives of subjects who
are typically subaltern, she elevates the immigrant narrative of the Algerian garbage
Joanne Leow 62
men in a way that make them equal if not superior to the French. Writing about
France, she turns a cosmopolitan eye on the social landscape seeing how it is made up
of layers of belonging and identity that are complicated and interconnected. Wong is
especially wary not to be carelessly optimistic about the lives of these French
Algerians, she ends the poem with a necessary return from her reverie:
but Ive seen the wives
of some
in the fish market
of Place St. Bruno under the railway
bridge, the
worm-eaten look
in the immigrant childrens black &
utterly still
eyes (61)

Despite her ability to colour the Algerian garbage mens dreams with a vivid hue,
Wong is only too aware of the effects of the racist and segregated society on the
immigrants. She is careful to not exclude the plight of their wives and children, who
have possibly even less of a voice in society. Their world is reduced to the fish
market which is under the railway / bridge, the only place that they appear in
public. Wongs use of simple, short words and the absence of overtly ethnic
descriptors and references to the women make it clear that she refuses to objectify or
exoticize them. Instead, the poem Morning in Grenoble is remarkable precisely
because of Wongs ability to simultaneously see the Edenic possibilities that are
created through the Algerians toil and understand the imminent social break-down
due to the plight of their children and wives who are unable to be assimilated into
mainstream French society. These revelations are achieved through direct
observation, and an ability to appropriate new cultural references. Wong does not
attempt to draw her own cultural baggage into the poem or over ethnicize and
exoticize her subjects. Disappointment and complexity are built into the structure of
Joanne Leow 63
the poem, which opens exuberantly and ends with a more multifaceted understanding
of the situation. This structure is also evident in the poems America and East
Bengal as well, as Wong sets out to complicate the revelations that she gains from
each country. There is no simple narrative or conclusion in each of these three poems,
suggesting that in poetry, as in travel, there is no direct route to understanding.
In fact, it is neither the origin nor the destination in this journey that become
essential for Wong, but the act of moving itself. Poems like Shopping in Steglitz
and On Leaving Berlin explore the idea of motion that leads to a metaphysical
discovery. On Leaving Berlin in particular works with the liminal space and
physical cold that awaken the mind to a multiplicity of possibilities:
At 15F
Flesh begins to wander:
the Form verges
on a blur as first frost
on a field
of winter vegetables
- the night passenger
on the train wakes
to. Im leaving
leaving what would be
too strange to go into
& too familiar;
occasionally
the blur is like
China, & could be
Home. (26)

This is one of the rare poems in Wongs entire body of writing where she makes
reference to Home. Leading up to this single worded last line, the poem suggests
that the idea of Home can only be approximated when Flesh and Form are
sublimated into the landscape of first frost / on a field. So like Boey Kim Cheng,
Wong discounts the possibility of a physical or simplistic return to Home; only
traces of it can be grasped in the liminal spaces of travel - the blur, a word that she
repeats twice for emphasis. This idea of the blur is central as it is this indeterminate
Joanne Leow 64
sense of space and time that becomes occasionally like home. While Wong was
born in China, her tentative reference to China in the poem and the suggestion that it
could be / Home is more striking for its hesitancy than its choice of country. What
is evident here is the fact that the blur gives rise to a multiplicity of prospects as do
her characteristic gaps within lines and run-on lineation that focuses the reader on the
spaces between the words and the multiple meanings possible through the breaking up
of the lines. Wong contemplates the liminal space of train travel, with scenery that
rushes by in a blur, and sees in it a corollary universal landscape of travel that could
approximate any location. This is a physical observation of an intellectual sense that
being in-between could be being anywhere. By showing how origin and destination
are uncertain and focusing on the multiple possibilities of the in-between of travel,
Wong disorients her poetic persona and the reader, rendering the separateness of
terms like home and abroad suspect.
Even though it is clear that Wong comes to believe (as Boey does in his poem
Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB) that China represents some kind of
origin for her, this is never treated as an uncomplicated truth. For example, the poem
1966-76 contemplates [t]he beauty of Chinese girls but in doing so, stands apart
from them, never identifying Wong as Chinese herself. It is a surrealist, elliptical
work, which suggests that concepts like ones own people and a return to them are
suspect at best. In the poem, Wong likens her experience of return to a dreamlike
sequence where what was once solid ground turns into water. Her use of quotation
marks in the poem makes the identity of the poems persona ambiguous, distancing
herself from lines like To be / among your own people and the repeated the beauty
of Chinese girls never / as clear to me as now. Indeed, Wong sets herself apart from
both what is being observed in the poem and the person doing the observing; she is
Joanne Leow 65
fully prepared to walk away from it all. It is clear then that the idea of return to a
cultural source or geographical origin is one that is unattainable and perhaps even
undesirable for Wong.
This sentiment is elaborated on more distinctly in Kampong Bahru, 1975.
The poem describes a scene from the Malay quarter in Singapore as a muezzin
delivers the call to prayer. Yet it is not a call that seems to come from one particular
place for Wong, instead the voice for her is
Calling from all corners
not a corner
not his minaret. The voice
looks in all nooks &
crevices
a scent really,
released
from the earth. (105)

Wong here employs synesthesia to bring across her point that the muezzins call for
prayer does not come from a single, determinable place or culture, but instead recalls
its past and present incarnations and its existence throughout the world. Sound is
conflated with both vision and smell as the call to prayer permeates its surroundings
completely. Wongs lineation creates a similar effect with her lines visually moving
away from an ordered pattern to one where words appear with unusual indents and
spacing, filling up spaces across the page that would otherwise be left empty, given
the short length of the lines. This is not to say that Wong sacrifices specific detail to
evoke the universal, she is very precise about how this experience moves her:
The expanse
of sadness inherent in the Muezzins voice makes
distances
near: a motion really
that moves the immediate
the hair, the sleeves, the burnt grass
near the gravel. []

If as a child Ive said
Joanne Leow 66
one day I shall have no home
nearing that hour of the
day, prompted by
that voice, & partly in
answer, now it is said
over & again
echoing everywhere, creeping like lizards
the lostness that 20 years later has
fetched me here. (105)

For Wong, the call to prayer appears to bridge not just geographical but also temporal
distances, it becomes a way of traveling, a motion really in itself. Again here, there
is a sense that it is in a moment of flux that an approximation of truth arises.
Considering the cosmopolitan nature of Islam, this is an apt reference that highlights
Wongs refusal to be tied to a single geographical or cultural origin. In a sense it has
been transplanted, as Wong herself has, into various contexts and has no [one]
home. Eschewing closure and certainty, Wong focuses on a sense of dislocation and
alienation that is heightened by her return to Kampong Bahru. In doing so, she turns a
simple idea of return on its head and connects it to lostness and bewilderment.
Instead of being able to return like the exiles in Leong Liew Geoks poem and
enjoy the tropical delights that Singapore affords, Wong looks to a minority group in
the country and reveals how their call for prayer reverberates with possibilities of
cosmopolitan memory and history. Wong also connects this very public call to prayer
and larger sense of history to her personal story of growing up and her sense that an
idea of a single home is inherently false. Even though Wong credits this lostness,
a neologism, that seems to suggest an ultimate sense of disorientation, for bringing
her to Kampong Bahru, there is no indication that she sees the return as a panacea.
Encountering the muezzins call seems to intensify Wongs childhood idea that one
day I shall have no home, for now it is echoing everywhere.
Not having a home means that questions of audience continue to plague
Joanne Leow 67
Wong, a poet from Asia, published in the United States. Writing about travel usually
presumes a home audience, yet it is difficult to say for Wong, exactly where this
audience is situated. This is due in some part to her biography but in a greater part to
her writing itself. Wongs poetry is cosmopolitan to the point of relinquishing any
claim to one particular culture or country of origin and it is because she does not
pander to commonly held notions of home, return, migration and travel writing that
her work continues to garner little critical and popular attention. However, as I have
shown, Wongs poetry is not an anonymous internationalizing idiom that Edwin
Thumboo fears, but instead a careful consideration of the context of each of her
settings and deeply engaged ruminations on the interstitial moments of travel, the
illusory nature of home and the contradictions of human societies. Wong manages
to write about different countries without resorting to an essentialist view of her
subjects or by looking to an audience in a simplistically defined homeland.

Boey Kim Chengs between home and home

Boey Kim Cheng starts out differently from Wong, with his audience initially
in Singapore. His first book, Somewhere-Bound (1989), is written as he is poised to
leave the country, while his second book, Another Place (1992), sees him writing
extensively about his travels, still looking homeward to Singapore but with a greater
sense of dislocation and alienation. Boeys third collection, Days of No Name (1996),
mostly chronicles his time in North America and features a few poems about Europe.
It is in this collection that he more consistently began to write in a cosmopolitan style
that is similar to Wong Mays, appropriating styles, aesthetics and references
depending on the subject matter of his poem. Boey then left Singapore for Australia
and his latest set of new and selected poems, published after a decades hiatus in After
Joanne Leow 68
the Fire (2006), reflects this change in setting and audience, even though it is
published by the Singapore-based Firstfruits Publications. In looking at Boeys entire
body of work thus far, it crucial to see his evolution through a sequential analysis of
his writing. Also interesting is which poems Boey chooses to include in After the Fire
and how some of these poems have been significantly revised, adding layers of
meaning through absent or changed lines. The selected and occasionally edited poems
give us an idea of the sentiments, journeys and memories that have remained relevant
to Boey and through how they have been edited, give us an archaeological view of
how Boeys concerns and writing styles have changed through his career.
Boeys trajectory is different from Wongs in the sense that he begins
inextricably although unwillingly rooted to the Singapore context. Boey uses travel
first in the conventional sense to escape from an authoritarian, materialistic, rapidly
developing society that he writes about in his poems. Yet, there is a sense at first that
try as he might, Boey cannot escape his familial, literary and cultural upbringing. His
poems about India in particular, while more nuanced than Yongs version of
Thailand, are still markedly conscious of Boeys position as a privileged outsider
seeking escape and enlightenment. The major change that occurs in Boeys work is
only apparent in Days of No Name, written when he spent a significant time in the
United States, when he was awarded the University of Iowa Writing Fellowship to
attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Nevertheless,
even though Boeys biography is far more transparent than Wong Mays, it is also
important here to consider the poems themselves. Boeys writing evolves as his
collections progress, from self-conscious reflexive asides and the use of dense, over-
wrought imagery to a cleaner and more direct style that is more coherent and focused.
While some of this can be attributed to the craft of an older poet, Boeys later work is
Joanne Leow 69
also more formally innovative and assured as he comes to accept and explore the
function of travel in his life.
While critics like Angelia Poon see Boeys preoccupation with travel as a
necessity of [his] life, with restless motion paradoxically offering peace and
equanimity (375), there is a need to look beyond Boeys apparent fixation with the
idea of travel as flux. Boey sees each of the places he visits as holding important keys
to a whole library of meaning; the specificities of each city and country are
essential to the poet as he re-examines his place in the world whether through social
awareness in India or a more figurative spatial and historical understanding in
America. Again, Bruce Robbins ideas on cosmopolitanism as not detachment but
(re)attachment is germane here. Certainly Boey does display the desire to leave
Singapore behind especially in his earlier collections, yet it is only to redefine the
place of Singapore in his world view as but one of many other cities and countries.
While Poon might see that Boey continues to write back to Singapore (375), he is
also simultaneously writing himself away, and conscious of the irrevocability of this
move.
Where Boey begins this journey is in an early poem that contemplates travel
and pinpoints his affinity to the traveler-writer Bruce Chatwin. In doing so, he
demonstrates a cosmopolitan sensibility that is hitherto not displayed in the preceding
poems in his book Somewhere Bound (1989). In the original 1989 version, the
eulogistic poem is entitled For Bruce Chatwin, A Great Teacher, while the version
published in 2006 in After the Fire is simply titled For Chatwin. Boeys revised
version appears to have been edited for clarity and style, where the original takes a
more intimate tone in its mourning of Chatwins death. In both versions, Boey sees
himself as a fellow traveler with Chatwin, through the medium of poetry,
Joanne Leow 70
A man must place himself on a map
to see how big he is. I have come
into your song, an ant dreaming
himself into your line. (195-6)

Boey sees both a spiritual and intellectual connection with Chatwin, specifically in the
notion of songlines where lives and journeys are seen figuratively to be songs. Many
of Boeys poems throughout his career return to the idea of songlines and also feature
musical motifs. Boey also identifies with Chatwins notion that a man is defined
through travel because the ability to be in motion, to explore and discover, serves as a
measure of his worth. He looks to Chatwin as a role model of sorts:
On the BBC they tell how you left behind
the little things you had grown to love,
like a child letting the petals drift
from the one flower in his hand.

I am desperate for these signs
marking your trail the pieces of the map,
the colours of the countries,
the scattered beads of your thoughts. I try
to read what enchanted you
into such song.

The man who is left behind has not moved.
Tonight he is a million miles away. (197)

Boey here places his life and writing in context, and positions himself finding solace
in the work of a cosmopolitan traveler schooled in European literature (he quotes
Chatwin quoting Proust) who has been drawn to the primeval ideas of Aboriginal
tribes in Australia and taken to wandering the far-reaches of inhabitable regions. For
Boey, taking Chatwin as a role model is a form of rebellion from life in Singapore
which he sees as static and superficial. The last two lines of this selection which are
italicized are a recurring motif, providing a self-conscious narrative about Boey
himself that is embedded throughout the rest of the poem; and even though at this
point he hasnt yet moved, it is apparent that he will soon.
Joanne Leow 71
Boey sees himself as sharply separate from the Singapore context, wanting
instead to pick up on Chatwins abruptly halted trail. Yet, this idea changes from 1989
to 2006; where in the first version Boey writes,
I am praying before an open window
leaning over the rail of the ship given me,
that at the end
of every journey,
the father welcomes
the errant son, and that walking
is the way to what the Greeks called
catharsis, and Christ, purgation. (Somewhere Bound 68-9)

in the second we find the same verse changed and in some ways expanded upon:

I am sitting before an open window,
facing a quadrangle of flats, so many lives
and stories, broken songlines, dots
of a canvas I cant quite see.
I want each dot to become
a walking dream, to take the first
step on the waiting map.
I see the son leaving again and again
till is no more leaving to be done
and the father welcomes
the errant son. I see us all
walking as you did, Bruce,
walking into our waiting lives. (After the Fire 197-8)

In the first version of this verse, we find references to the Bible and Aristotle and a
paternal theme which will figure extensively in Boeys later work. Boeys spirituality
is also clearly referenced here, as he prays in front of an open window. It is telling
that the poet has chosen to alter the verse so much after twenty years, removing most
of the references to mythology, the bible and spirituality, as if he sees that they are
insufficient placeholders for his sentiments. Instead, Boey embeds himself in an urban
landscape, ostensibly Singapores. He sees clearly that lives / and stories here are
broken songlines, seemingly trapped in the city, unable to fulfill their dreams. The
poems line breaks interrupt each phrase and echo the idea that journeys are curtailed.
More significantly, there is a new pronounced visual element to the imagery: Boeys
Joanne Leow 72
reference to dots creates a vision of an Aboriginal style artwork that more deeply
recalls Chatwins work in Australia. In choosing to re-work his poem, Boey acquires
a double perspective of the past and present (or rather his pasts future). He
simultaneously sees what happens at the point of the writing of the poem and after,
where he is more conscious of his mortality and his diffused sense of belonging.
In a sense, this early poem sees Boey playing the role of a would-be
cosmopolitan and world traveler even though he has not yet ventured extensively
abroad. Accordingly the poem is rife with dream-like, fantastical images with
ancient figures covered / in an ancient dusk and lost fairy-tale[s] involving a
drowsy dragon in Patagonia (195). In his revised copy, Boey acknowledges that the
reality that is tangible for him is a quadrangle of flats before him, which he wants to
walk away from. Travel here becomes an abstract ambition and a pseudo-spiritual
quest for enlightenment and freedom. To a greater extent than Yong however, Boey
undercuts these mawkish sentiments with a sense of disenchantment and irony
clearly seeing himself as desperate and immobile. What is crucial here is the
significance that Boey places on the idea of travel, seeing it as the movement of man
/ across the empty landscape, / sowing his trail of poems (196). Boey sees poetry as a
way to mark his way during his travels and this theme will continue throughout his
career.
As the titles suggest, Boeys next book Another Place (1992), acts as a natural
progression from Somewhere Bound. The majority of poems in this collection are set
away from Singapore, mostly in either Asia or Europe. As with Wong, Boey does not
set up the countries he writes about in comparison with Singapore. However unlike
Wong, Boey initially positions his poetic persona firmly outside the cultures he writes
Joanne Leow 73
about. Consider the tableau that The Howrah Station paints where the traveler is
strictly separate from the context of the train station:
To purchase a ticket out
I pick my way through the homeless souls,
sprawled between refuse heaps and bags
on the sooty station floor. The leveler
is working overtime here, tireless,
laying out a field of maimed mortals,
half-killed, untended, unfinished,
his indiscriminate scythe
littering with travail
the pilgrims path. (136)

As Boey continues he sees the traveler bizarrely as an adroit footballer, a
laundered self trying to escape the lunging pleas / for mercy, warding off eyes /
that draw the heart into their dark pits (136). It is a scene of horror, straight out of a
Hieronymus Bosch painting, in particular the lines maimed mortals, / half-killed,
untended, unfinished where negations are broken up by caesuras emphasizing the
irrevocability of the scene. These are lines dense with imagery that piles upon itself
conflating football metaphors with images of a medieval Death and references to
Elizabethan poetry. It is as if the experience in the station has been so intense for
Boey that in order to fully express his sentiments he feels he must overexert himself
in his craft. Crucially though, the poem does not deliver a simplistic anthropological
verdict; the beggars are not portrayed as inferior beings at all, instead the scene sets
itself up as a challenge to faith and art. The multiple questions in the following verse
serve to stress the interrogative tone,
It is a terminal ward. Enough revelation
to stop all seekers carrying urgent requests
for truth in beauty and beauty in truth
in their tracks. What are we doing here?
Is this the right address? The capital
of God? Arts proper haunt? (136)

Joanne Leow 74
Here the fact of travel alters the traveler instead of reaffirming his cultural roots or
identity. It is not a validation of the his preconceived truths or certainties, instead
Boey comes to question the value of his choice of career, his search for meaning and
his place in the world,
If poetry could drum up courage,
correct the economists, reform the politicians,
and bake a million loaves, my presence
would need no apology.
But who eats poetry? (136)

Of course, this verse is not without irony, since Boey does not stop traveling or
writing poetry. His unplugged conscience however, has been awakened and while
there is no easy resolution to his unease at the great suffering that he witnesses, it is
an experience of travel that is more realistic since it resists painless conclusions and
pithy generalizations.
Boey makes a parallel move in Sudder Street, Calcutta, documenting the
terrible scene of poverty, in inexhaustible variations of deformity and need (138)
and his consequent helplessness and insignificance:
The hands of this poem are useless stumps.
They cannot even begin to turn the page.
I come from a race that has no word for despair,
its culture purged of povertys germs, its language
a propaganda of faith in absolute health.
I even doubt my ABC. (138)

In contrast to the limbless artist in The Howrah Station, Boey declares that his
poetry is unable to even move beyond the narratives of inequality and suffering that
he has so vividly portrayed, where deserted angels lie sprawled on Sudder Street, /
beauty broken in Gods terrible neglect (138). His end-stopped lines here emphasize
the finality of his pronouncements. In an indirect way, he blames this on his insular,
cloistered upbringing in Singapore, described using a vocabulary of medicine,
education and political discourse. This sense of dichotomy between Singapore and
Joanne Leow 75
Calcutta might seem similar to Leong and Yongs separation of home and abroad, yet
Boeys intent here is not to contrast the two cities unfavorably. Instead, Boey seeks to
explicate his biased position that arises from his upbringing and in doing so reveals
the limitations of each culture. The lines are a sharp deviation from the first two
stanzas of the poem, and Boey continues by again showing how his encounters have
destabilized his sense of self,
Perhaps I am looking in the wrong archives
for my history, checking the wrong catalogues,
tracing irrelevant titles. Perhaps I should stop
subscribing to foreign publications which inform me
of happenings on the other planets.
On Sudder Street my mind is numb. (138)

The alienation and dislocation that Boey encounters in his journey through Calcutta
extend into his quest for a better understanding of his familial history and his idea of
what home is. Boey comes to question his predilections for all things foreign, as
if they distract him from the task at hand. Filled with doubt and uneasiness because of
this encounter with despair, Boey chooses to end the poem by placing himself firmly
within the context of the poems setting, But tonight let me take my place / among
the forlorn angels of Sudder Street (139). Whether this is a successful move is
debatable; in fact, I would argue that the final couplet of the poem rings false, since
Boey has spent the entire poem setting himself apart from the scene on Sudder Street
before suddenly arbitrarily fitting himself back into the context. What is important
here however, is not necessarily Boeys conclusion, instead it is the process of his
self-conscious departure from what Philip Holden sees as an Orientalist turn(357) in
his portrayal of Calcutta to a cultural and personal disorientation that seems be a more
genuine response. With these poems about India, Boey reflect his uneasiness with the
idea of travel as a quest for spiritual enlightenment. There is a disparity between his
expectations of travel as seen in his poem For Chatwin and his actual experiences
Joanne Leow 76
abroad. This leads him and his readers to reconsider his motives for travel, to rethink
what if any cultural knowledge and experience can be gained if Boey continues to see
himself as embarking on a journey of spiritual discovery.
As these issues work their way through his poetry through the years, it seems
logical then that Boey would choose to see these notions of flux, motion their
attendant possibilities in the vast cosmopolitan American landscape where his next
major collection Days of No Name (1996). The collection is separated into two major
sections with the former set in America while the latter is a section entitled Home,
Elsewhere encompassing Singapore and other locations outside the United States in
Europe and Asia. Through the poems in An American Journey, Boey sketches a
journey that takes him from the centre of the country to the East Coast and finally
coming to a revelatory conclusion in San Francisco, a city that comes to signify both a
destination and starting point. America dominates Days of No Name for it is there that
Boey finds others like him, who write in the borders between cultures and countries,
and question the reifications of ethnicity and nationality.
In the poem Day of No Name, each of Boeys companions in Iowa is
described as being on the fringe or in a space that is difficult to pinpoint. In particular
though, there is the poet Helena Sinervo
4
who becomes a recurring trope through
Days of No Name. In his interaction with Helena, Boey seeks to unwrap the images
like boxes within boxes(66) to discover a culture, aesthetic and history wholly
different from his own. In taking on and appropriating this different aesthetic, Boeys
poetry performs in a similar way to Wong Mays poetry about North America, taking

4
While Boey never explicitly gives Helena Sinervos full name, we can infer that he is referring to the
Finnish poet because of her concurrent participation in the International Writing Program in the
University of Iowa in 1994. Also, the themes that Boey explores in this period of his poetry are very
similar to Sinervos, see an interview with Sinervo on The Virtual Writing University Archive:
http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/archive/record/helena_sinervo_interview/. Accessed 28
February 2010.
Joanne Leow 77
on the cultural references, form and imagery of its setting. Poems about Helena and
her native Finland dominate Boeys first section An American Journey in Days of
No Name. Seven poems out of the twenty either address her directly or are written
with specific references to Finland and its landscape. This is the first time that Boey
so intimately adopts a different poetic style and imagery, and it invigorates his poetry,
enabling him to look beyond the disorientation that was so evident in Somewhere
Bound.
For example, in the poem Springtime Sonata, which is dedicated to Helena,
Boey describes the poet and her poetry as a place that escapes the boundaries of space
and time. The metaphor of Helena and her poetry as a primeval temperate forest
permeates the poem. The slum-like or overdeveloped urban landscapes of Boeys
earlier poems are sharply contrasted with images of nature and a deep-rooted sense of
the earths possibilities. Boey departs from his usual vocabulary and even lineation
style to create metaphors that conflate the body and the forest. Words are rough-
hewn and can be held in hands and Helena has dark firs in her throat and her eyes
are a lake (70). Boey has been able, for the first time in his work, to completely
enter into anothers universe and forms lasting attachments. The very quality of light,
the long slant of sun appears altered in these poems as a different aesthetic pervades
Boeys writing. At this juncture, it seems pertinent to recall Bruce Robbins concept
of cosmopolitanism - a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment
at a distance(3). Boeys ability to draw metaphors and imagery from a temperate
landscape without any touristic overtones and his references to religion and childhood
reinforce the elemental nature of his revelation. Another characteristic of poems about
Helena is Boeys return to faith in words and their power to redeem this is an
about face from his poems set in India where he doubts the utility and value of his
Joanne Leow 78
craft. Here his words become a talisman against forgetting the power of literature and
its attempt at a form of immortality. The style of these poems about Helena is more
direct and less fraught with a diversity of seemingly unrelated references. Boey is able
to master a single aesthetic and focus on a single emotion or thought.
Boeys encounters with Helena are also an encounter with a foreign language
that enlarges his poetic vocabulary. In the poems Last Birds and For Helena,
Boey incorporates Finnish words into his poems, reveling in their unfamiliarity and
aurality. He italicizes these words where he has not italicized foreign words before, as
a way of emphasizing their power for him. In Last Birds, Boey never explicitly
refers to Helena and yet reveals her presence through Finnish bird names as he writes
about their parting. This poem echoes Wong Mays New Hampshire, where Wong
walks into the unknown of the New Hampshire countryside and this leads to a greater
awareness of her surroundings and of her mortality. For Boey, it is the Finnish words
that bring him into the dark of their possibilities, they are poems / translated whole
out of our dreams here and they transport him to Helenas land, becoming birds that
migrate between north and south. The shortness of his lines seem to mimic the quick
flight of birds and also suggest a newness in the emotions that Boey depicts.
Boeys poems about Helena are usually written about liminal situations and
spaces. Boey hints at a relationship with Helena that borders on the romantic and yet
pulls back at crucial moments to suggest that his feelings are not fully articulated. One
poem about travel sees the two in mid-journey North to Boston. In the poem Boey
continues with the idea of travel as song, this time with Helena as a companion. He
writes the poem in the trip between New York and Boston, treating it as a
homecoming of sorts for Helena, whom he writes is drawn to northing:
New Yorks polyphony behind us now,
the piano bars, the Village voices fade out
Joanne Leow 79
like a croon tune for the lonely
by Sinatra, the Greyhound progressing
into Massachusetts, the Transcendentalist
country rolling past like a score
of silent music. We are edging towards
the unspoken, to the border
between two chords, the duration between
two partings, to the place words turn back from. (75)

Boey uses this musical metaphor both to suggest the landscape unfolding before him
that is rich in musical and literary traditions, akin again to Chatwins idea of
songlines. These references seem varied from popular singers like Sinatra to the
highbrow literary nod to the Transcendentalists yet they are all part of a coherent if
diverse American landscape where music and poetry are central. Boey uses his
journey through this landscape to embody the in-between space that he finds himself
in, between two chords, a place where words turn back from (75). In the rest of
the poem, Boey sees Helena as the bearer of light, a candle [] / like the body of
white birch, the grain of your hands / filling with its glow casting an oblique light
and leading into the darkness at the heart of the snow-buried woods (75). With a
great deal of sensitivity, Boey manages to absorb and render a temperate snow laden
landscape that resonates with its rich, particular and coherent imagery, recalling the
quality of light on a winters night. The poem is especially intimate since it uses the
form of a direct address to Helena and assumes an almost omniscient persona that is
able to enter Helenas memory while simultaneously observing the scene at hand. The
persona of the poem is firmly embedded in this scene with no sense of being an
outsider, in spite of the fact that the memory of winter being described is someone
elses. The poem is able to convey, through focusing on the liminal space of the bus
journey, the feeling and aesthetic behind the homecoming, forming an attachment to
Helena and her country that does not even require a physical journey there. This is a
Joanne Leow 80
clear parallel with Wong Mays revelations in Leaving Berlin where a train journey
creates a sense of the universality of the in-between-ness of travel.
Boey continues to explore the geography of the borders of feeling and travel in
other poems about Helena like Strangely Coupled and For Helena, and his poetry
comes away distinctly enriched by the encounter. What Boey calls the short strange
life of our being together engages him in a way that his travel has not engaged him
before. This is not to say that there are not other characters in Boeys Days of No
Name; the Burmese poet Win Pe also figures in a selection of Boeys poems, yet
Boey does not seem to have been drawn to him with the same intensity. Other voices
in Boeys poems here also include James, who journeys to California with Boey and
seems to infect him with restlessness and risk-taking in San Francisco with James,
Wanton with James.
More generally though, the landscape and geography of America affect
Boeys poetry in profound ways. In poems like Falling, The Art of Seeing, San
Francisco Again and Flowers Flagging on Haight-Ashbury, Boeys meditations on
landscapes, cityscapes and his observations of the people around him shape his
perceptions of his place in the world. From the change of seasons to urban
topographies, Boey finds his sense of space and direction changed both literally and
figuratively. While his poems about the American east coast are imbued with
melancholy, his poems about the west coast seem to speak of the multiple possibilities
of ways to live ones life. For instance, in The Art of Seeing he writes,
The different districts, the different lives
drew us on; straight, queer, left
or right, hip or down, all directions
taken, we were on the way. Crossing the streets
at a bias, or going with the flow, we saw
seeing whole is seeing differently, swinging
from part to part to whole, at peace
with the pieces. (96-7)
Joanne Leow 81

This selection recalls Ross Posnocks ideas that cosmopolitanism looks
beyond differences and oppositions, to consider how culture is syncretic(809). Boey
is aware of the different districts, the different lives that pull on all directions, yet
he points out that there are many way of crossing the streets and that to see America
in totality means accepting all its parts and pieces. Boey superimposes this
intellectual understanding of cosmopolitanism onto the physical map of San
Francisco, creating a visual representation that ties the urban landscape to a cultural
one. There is a rhythmic quality to Boeys verse here, with the line breaks and
caesuras working together to suggest the experience of walking that connects the
disparate neighborhoods of San Francisco. The pace of the verse also echoes the
process of bringing together straight, queer, left / or right, hip or down, with the
single-syllable, staccato-like descriptors giving way to longer phrases and continuous
present tense of crossing, going, seeing and swinging. And ending with the
apt pun of peace and pieces equating a wholeness and completion with the
disparate parts of the city.
When Boey returns to San Francisco as a subject in a second poem in the
collection Days of No Name, he continues to animate its neighbourhoods, creating a
universe of meaning that brings together the fringes of the city into a coherent whole
through his writing,
[] the climb
and plunge of the streets, the decentred districts,
Castro, Mission, Haight and Tenderloin, afloat
on their own meanings, these scattered lives settle now
and cohere in the language we found
to speak to the darkness in each other. (102)

The poems finding meaning in these seemingly disparate parts recalls how Sheldon
Pollock and Homi Bhabha see cosmopolitanism as ways of living at home abroad or
Joanne Leow 82
abroad at home ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings
simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller (587).
Boeys recognition of the inherent blurring of boundaries between home and abroad,
larger histories and more personal ones is characteristic of this view of
cosmopolitanism. So, it seems fitting that in the section An American Journey in
Days of No Name, Boey traverses the breadth of America and arrives in San
Francisco Again, making connections between where he has come from and where
he is going. Standing at a characteristically liminal space, a long wooden pier /
striding into the bay, drenched in morning light (101), Boey makes one of his final
revelations about his time in America,
All seems comprehensible, in place now, why
we came, why this end of America ended
a story and started others writing. First
the rending, as you hurt me into tearing up the claim
I made for poetry as the only religion
to keep our lives whole, its lines ascetic, lean
with fasting and keen as need. Your words nudged
me into the uncertain waters of a blank page.
Here I learnt to let the centre go, riding
the heaving streets till I came
before the dark room where you wrote, the room
holdings it secrets quietly, untroubled by the desire
to transcend. I found the house you made of pain,
and made my way to my own dark room. (101)

Here life, poetry and travel merge into one as Boey connects the stories of the
immigrants, explorers and artists who sought out the American West before him as a
goal and those who have settled there to start new paths. He makes a crucial choice to
situate the poem here on the border of America, looking Pacificwards as he puts it.
This destabilizes the idea of a one-way journey westwards and instead points to the
destination of the American West as an illusory one. The American West coast in fact
a Janus-faced location that looks one way towards America and the other towards the
Pacific and beyond, full of possibilities as the uncertain waters of a blank page.
Joanne Leow 83
Reading the poem as a meditation on this liminal point, we understand how Boey
learns to let the centre go and make a journey that is both exterior and interior to his
own dark room. It is clearly not an a-cultural understanding that Boey achieves: he
chooses to end the poem with this portrait, more than aware of the cosmopolitans
before him, who have marked their way in a world where borders seem arbitrary:
An old Chinese man shuffles to the piers end, pauses
and begins the slow breaths of tai chi. His hands
begin to weave the wind and light into tracks
moving beyond time. Our long walks
through the city, the stumbling into reconciliation
on this pier, seem now part of the story,
the story of the distance I have travelled
between here and here. (102)

Much of Boeys later poetry returns to the theme of his absent father and here it is
apparent that his presence haunts this poem too, as does the reference to long walks
which Boey associates with time spent with his father. Yet it is apparent that Boeys
associations with a sense of his origins an old Chinese man are both complicated, as
envisaged by the mans unknowable but necessarily transnational past, and universal,
as this same man is still used as a symbol of greater meaning and purpose, able to
weave the wind and light. It would be easy to dismiss this image of the old
Chinese man as risking stereotype and clich but it is the context of Boeys
observation that makes the difference. Boey is conscious of the histories and
pathways that San Francisco hides and is finally able to place himself with greater
certainty in one of these tales, between here and here, eliminating the idea of
there as something separate and foreign. Ultimately, this ability to transcend time
and distance to grasp at universal truths while acknowledging the specificities of a
place is a crucial development from Boeys American journey. So it is not without
significance that Boey performs the same move twice in this passage, by moving from
Joanne Leow 84
the specific (the man and walking in a particular city) to the abstract and transcendent
(an ability to move beyond time and a more figurative idea of the journey).
The poems in the section An American Journey are followed by a section
entitled Home, Elsewhere where, armed with new realizations, Boey writes poems
about traveling that are significantly different from those in his previous book,
Another Place. These poems like Painting into Life, Madness in Tbingen and
Bach in Leipzig see him better able to absorb contexts and other lives, and less
unsure of his craft and his place in each setting. However, one particular poem stands
out as a harbinger of Boeys later work in After the Fire: Change Alley is unlike
the poems Rites and Arming Rituals which are firmly emplaced in Singapore.
Boeys poem about going back in a time through a reverie inspired by a trip to
downtown Singapore is essentially about traveling, although Boey ostensibly puts it
in the Home category, it is clear that it could also belong to Elsewhere. In the
poem, Boey journeys through his memory to a place in Singapore that is vibrantly
cosmopolitan and in a sense both at the heart and the fringe of the country. It is a
strangely familiar yet disorienting memory:
[] the trade of tongues,
the bazaar of puzzling scents and smells,
an underwater world of sailors
stale from the sea and travellers
drowned in dreams of home
[]
in each recess he heard the conspiracies
of currencies, the marriage of foreign tongues
holding a key to worlds opening on worlds
for the wakening sense of the child. (108)

The poem is Boeys catalogue of the possibilities that once were in Singapore, as a
port and crossroads, before these routes became buried or closed and the streets
[have emptied] into loss (108) with a forgotten past and a sterile, singular future. It
is a dream-like sequence with an almost exotic take on the Singapore of the past,
Joanne Leow 85
emphasizing the importance of the foreign and the travellers who flooded the country.
Boey undercuts the sense of exoticism by making it clear that this vision is through
the unreliable memory of a child and has it end in a grotesque illusion of the
laughing clowns / in the toy shop at the end of the Alley, / secreting peals of ghostly
glee, derisive / and disembodied (108) before returning to the present-day Change
Alley. In following this narrative to the end, unlike Leong Liew Geoks more
superficial Exiles Return, Boey shows how the reality of a home cannot remain
static and instead is with the passage of time utterly changed (109). By plunging
into the heart of this change, Boey comes away with the revelation that the map [is]
useless / for navigation in the lost city (109). Yet his nostalgia for this changed space
is tempered with a clear-eyed resignation of the irrevocability of the change effected
by development. The poet sees himself journeying to the country of the mind(109)
to compensate for the fact that he is utterly lost in this new city; in effect he is
traveling to two places: back in time to a lost Singapore and also to a new city that he
is completely unfamiliar with. It is a double loss for Boey and yet at the end of the
poem he sees himself as changed beyond all changes (109), moving beyond his
earlier bitterness at the rapid development in Singapore to a calmer acquiescence of
what has been lost.
Change Alley heralds a new stage in Boeys poetic themes, building on his
earlier realizations that leavings and goings have begun to merge and that he has
learnt to let go of the centre. Again, Pollock and Bhabha come to mind with their
assertion that cosmopolitanism is not a circle created by culture diffused from a
center, but instead, that centers are everywhere and circumferences nowhere (587-8).
For Boey, these multiple centers have been created and cultivated by travel. Pollock
and Bhabha, as Boeys poem hints, go on to note that this points to cosmopolitanisms
Joanne Leow 86
previous and continuing existence. Boey comes to a realization that there is no fixed
idea of culture or belonging, but that the foreign and the abroad co-exist
simultaneously in the local and at home. I do not mean, however, to suggest that
Boey has arrived at a faultless way of depicting a utopian idea of free cultural
exchange and movement, democratically decentred. New poems in After the Fire like
Bodhgaya, Benares and Slieve League disappoint for the most part with their
more superficial grasp of the countries they encounter. While there is certainly less
angst and more self-assurance, this is often at the expense of genuine engagement
with his subject matter.
Bodhgaya, nevertheless, does bear closer analysis as Boey draws out a
religious and spiritual significance to his travels, which here are infused with
Buddhist beliefs:
We too retrace the routes from that life to this, erase

the false forays, arranging the frenzied
sketches and torn pages into a scroll
of arrivals and departures that will lead us
to the empty quarter, beyond the poems

end. (51)

At this stage in his life, Boey has the advantage of hindsight and uses it to try and
impose a sense of order in his arrivals and departures, turning them into a narrative
that is drawing to its inexorable close. The idea of pilgrimhood, referenced in so many
of Boeys poems, also comes with a greater intensity in the poem as he retraces the
paths of those before him
[]our soles
memorizing the worn surface, gleaning
the songlines in its deep texture, the grace
that comes of exhaustion, meeting

and parting compassed in one place. (54)

Joanne Leow 87
Again here, Boey destabilizes ideas of origin and destination in a place where
meeting and parting appear to conflate. In this poem, as in so many others, Boey
returns ultimately to Chatwins songlines that crisscross a map that disregards borders
and how they are drawn. It is a journey that has taken him from a superficial and
romanticized view of travel to one that is conscious of the complexities of movement
and voyage insofar that they have no fixed points of departure and arrival whether
geographic or temporal. In Boeys worldview, journeys have always been made and
will continue to be made, blurring national borders and cultural traditions to the point
of casting that original validity in doubt.
In this chapter, I have shown how through the trope of travel, Wong and Boey
challenge commonly held stereotypes of home and abroad. In their cosmopolitan
readings of landscapes, people and situations, differences and comparisons are
conspicuously absent. Jahan Ramazani makes a similar point when discussing modern
and contemporary American and postcolonial poets. He notes that, although national
labels impute singularity and coherence, poets make and remake their often-interstitial
citizenship (Ramazani 2006 354). Ramazani is particularly fascinated by the
techniques that are used to achieve this, like formal and ideological rewritings and
sonic mutations and tropological reinscriptions that can span multiple nationalities
and ethnicities (Ramazani 2006 354). It is evident that there is much in common with
the projects of Boey and Wong who make and remake their lives in between
borders refusing to adhere to strict ideas of nation and crossing territorial boundaries
to find homes in motion. What is also noteworthy is how their poetry itself changes
with each setting, whether absorbing a musical inflection or adjusting the lineation to
suggest different rhythms and speech cadences - both Boey and Wongs work use
these techniques and many others to absorb context in their vocabulary, references
Joanne Leow 88
and form. This significantly disturbs the idea of a travel literature that speaks in a
specific way to a home audience and instead opens up the possibilities in themes and
audiences for their work.
Joanne Leow 89
Conclusion

Somewhere between stations you forget the name of the place you have left
behind, and the name of the place coming towards you in still indistinct. For
that moment, you dwell in an autonomous state, a resting place between
memory and imagination, between forgetting and remembering, between
home and home.
--- Boey Kim Cheng, Between Stations

In the eponymous essay that ends his most recent book Between Stations,
Boey Kim Cheng writes from that typically modern liminal space: the plane journey.
Flying from Australia to Singapore, Boey muses on the slippery quality of belonging
and identity, noting how he shifts between being Australian and Singaporean almost
unthinkingly. Very much like Wong May, Boey identifies the in-between quality of
traveling between places as one that makes both origin and destination
interchangeable. This blurring of national and cultural identities is central to the
work of both poets and demands a new way of examining their poetry without a focus
on their geographical origins.
In order to find new ways of reading Wong and Boeys work, I examined their
poetry through two main themes: family and travel. Both poets explore the most
fundamental set of human relationships with various techniques that defamiliarize the
cultural connections that are often made with the family. For Boey, cultural history
becomes a means to invent and imagine new personal and familial histories. For
Wong, familial relationships are detached from ethnicity and nation, and instead
portrayed with a sense of universalism. Furthermore, the poets emphasize the
importance of the in-between space of travel, portray encounters with different
cultures without a view to comparison with a home culture and form lasting and
profound connections to diverse locations and people. Wong and Boey have created
Joanne Leow 90
bodies of work that embody a cosmopolitanism that looks to multiple attachments and
centers. They have gone beyond the constraints of a fixed idea of home or origin
and from the obligations of constructing fixed national and ethnic identities through
their work.
Boey makes this particularly clear in his most recent work, where he
acknowledges the problematic of believing in a fixed sense of identity and belonging.
Having migrated to Australia and spent a large amounts of time traveling, Boey sees
himself as both emigrant and immigrant to those around him, but more crucially
as uncertain as the tags fall off (305). Boeys realization is that it is impossible to
label or categorize ones identity by nationality or citizenship. Yet, his idea of being
in-between is not to exist in an indeterminate third space that is devoid of
specificities and written about in a neutral international style. Instead, Boey
grapples with the realities and illusions of finding his way in a world where he sees
everything through multiple perspectives and biases. In his essay Between Stations,
he chronicles his vacillations between Australian and Singaporean cultures, between
being Kim Cheng Boey and Boey Kim Cheng
5
. These changes in the placement of his
family name signal a more profound tension between being an emigrant who is
haunted by the destruction of Singapores past and an immigrant who is open to the
possibilities (and disappointments) of a new Australian life.
As for Wong, her resting place approaches a similarly liminal state in the
final poem of her last published collection Superstitions. Entitled Michaels
Windscreen (135 Superstitions), it moves from a grotesque description of insect

5
Names in the Chinese language usually start with the family name of the person, in this case Boey,
whereas Western names put the family name last; thus the order of Boeys name depends on which
context he is in.
Joanne Leow 91
debris on a windscreen to an understanding that:
O Travellers, traveling anywhere
the world is beautiful
Our windows get dirty.

Wong pragmatically contemplates the dirt, grime and excrement that accumulates
with travel and accepts it as a thing of unconventional beauty that forms a
palimpsest of experiences and landscapes. It is a difficult poem to enjoy, with its
use of alliteration, repetition and highly specific vocabulary all working to create a
visual and tactile idea of travels detritus. But it is precisely this discomfort that
pushes the reader to confront it. In refusing to glorify travel, mythologize return and
simplify the idea of belonging, Wong comes to a truer meaning of the complicated,
messy and real meanings of these rites of passage. Her poetry opens itself up to the
difficulties and ambiguities of understanding ones place in the world in ways that
challenge ideas of home, abroad and travel. Her ability to write about family, other
cultures and politics without resorting to stereotype and cultural and moral relativism
means that her poetry has a distinctly non-ethnicized approach, something that sets it
apart from many of her Singaporean contemporaries.
Wong and Boeys poetry enable them to escape the mould of the national
writer that Edwin Thumboo privileges; their work does not seek to attain a collective
psyche or add to the sense of [Singapores] destiny as a people (66). Yet, it seems
difficult for critics of their work not to try to emphasize the Singaporean-ness of
their endeavours or failing which, exclude them from critical discourse all together.
Wong May, as documented earlier in this thesis, has suffered from the lack of critical
work on her three collections of poetry. Wongs physical absence from the country,
the paucity of references to Singapore in her poetry, the opacity of her writing and her
publication by an American press appear to have all played a role in her absence in
Joanne Leow 92
Singapore literary studies. However, I would argue that Wongs poetry is important in
the context of studies on Singapore because of her redefinition of the country not as
an origin or a point for nostalgia, but instead as a nexus of what she calls lostness
and bewilderment. In doing so, Wongs work sweeps away the notion that poets must
be tied to a particular origin and points instead to the complexities of establishing a
poetic identity and persona in a complicated postcolonial world. It becomes important
as well to consider Wong as a pioneer who heralds Singapore poets working in the
later part of the twentieth century who create, as Angelia Poon notes, worldly,
cosmopolitan persona[e], observant and alert to points of connection, cultural
differences, and the impermanence of encounter (375). It would appear that in this
sense, Wong was simply ahead of her time.
For Boey, who does explicitly write about Singapore whether with an
aversion to its rapid development or a sense of nostalgia for its irrecoverable past
the situation is slightly more complex. While he has not been subject to a similar lack
of attention, critical work on Boey has invariably focused on how he write[s] back to
Singapore(Poon 375). Philip Holden acknowledges this phenomenon and sees
himself having been complicit in this instinct to demand that these poems speak
overtly of nationhood, or proclaim their postcoloniality (356), as he admits to his
initial disappointment that Boeys later poems were set outside Singapore. Holden
comes to an acceptance of the significance of Boeys later work in terms of the
importance of memory and a reconstruction of the past that is urgently important in
the present at both a political and a personal level(356). But what is more crucial in
his analysis is his emphasis on the fact that Boey refuses to fall into the the
temptations of a nostalgic reconstruction of the past (356). The issue of temptation is
there as well for scholars involved in Singapore studies to burden Boey with nostalgia
Joanne Leow 93
for his past so that it constitutes the entirety of his present-day identity. Shirley Lim
provides one such example in her review Boeys collection of essays Between
Stations, as she sees Singapore as the linchpin to all of Boeys musings and Boeys
main purpose in the book to find a permanent solution to the restlessness in
[himself], to [his] quarrel with Singapore and with [him]self" (Boey 4). For scholars
with ties to Singapore like Lim, there is often an oversight that leads them to avoid
addressing how important Australia and the rest of Boeys travels are as well to his
work. Yet it is clear that Boey sees both his past in Singapore and his present
elsewhere as equally important: his struggles occur between home and home (313).
It is also essential, when reading his work, to take into account Boeys travels away
from Singapore and his reception in and relationship to Australia (particularly through
his interactions with his children). These are things that scholars of Singapore
literature often gloss over as they exert themselves to place Boey within a canon of
transnational Singaporeans like Simon Tay and Arthur Yap, who still put Singapore at
the centre of their work by choosing to reside primarily in the country and write from
an internal perspective. However, unlike Tay and Yap, Boey has chosen to
permanently leave Singapore and is, I would argue, more concerned with seeing his
old life through the lens of his new one rather than vice versa.
In the context of Singapores political culture, Wong and Boeys work reveal
the problems that are inherent in codifying what it means to be Singaporean. A case in
point is the 1999 government document, the S21 report, which consists of various
recommendations on how to improve Singaporean life and boost patriotism. One of
the key recommendations centres on how to engage Singaporeans working abroad to
ensure that they retain a strong emotional attachment to home through emphasizing
their fond memories of growing up in Singapore and material benefits which might
Joanne Leow 94
attract him to their best home. The report continues to add that if this is
successful, [i]nternationalisation will then no longer be a dilemma, for the Singapore
heartbeat will resound here and beyond our shores, wherever Singaporeans live or
work in the world. In effect, the governments strategy here is twofold: to try to
enlarge the definition of being Singaporean to encompass the international and the
cosmopolitan, and at the same time insist on a certain essential, biological sense of
being Singaporean, of the identity having a heartbeat as it were. To say this attempt
is inadequate would be an understatement, yet it is crucial to consider this document
as an insight into how the political authorities view cosmopolitan Singaporeans and in
turn to examine how this official mindset has influenced scholarly work on Singapore
writers who have left the country permanently. The major problem with this
worldview, which is echoed by many Singapore literary critics like Edwin Thumboo
and Koh Tai Ann, is that is places Singapore squarely at the centre, over-emphasizing
the importance of the country in a writers work. In doing so, it fails to consider the
equal if not greater significance of the migrs ultimate choice and the travels in
between. Another failing is the inability to reconcile the fond memories that a
writer like Boey might have of Singapores past and the inevitable disorientation that
rapid development brings. The overwhelming transformations of Singapores rural
and urban landscape in the past decades often render this nostalgia as a source of pain
and difficulty for poets like Boey.
Wong and Boeys poems, which inhabit multiple locations and develop
attachments to multiple cultures, complicate attempts to draw them back into the fold.
While the S21 report blithely states that [i]nternationalisation will then no longer be
a dilemma, the reality is the poets expose not just a dilemma between Singapore and
abroad, but a struggle and negotiation that sees a multiplicity of belongings and
Joanne Leow 95
attachments pulling them in many directions. Wong and Boeys awareness of the
multiple threads that pull at them lead them to more nuanced meditations on their
place in the world. Singapore is no longer the centre of this discourse in many ways
it never was. There are, as Bhabha and Pollock suggest, many centres and in fact, no
circumferences (587-8). So instead of seeing Singapore as a homogenous, self-
generating state whose history follows an uncomplicated line directed by Sir Stamford
Raffles and the Peoples Action Party, Wong and Boeys poems encourage a view of
history that is directed by the many immigrants that passed through the ports and
markets of Singapore, the marriage of foreign tongues / holding a key to worlds
opening on worlds (Boey 108). It is a rich legacy that certainly did not just begin in
1819 or come to a neat and tidy end in 1965
6
.
It appears then that Wong and Boey have much more in common besides the
fact that they spent their formative years in Singapore, a point that I made at the
beginning of this thesis to justify a comparison of the two writers. For in spite of
attempts to draw them into a Singapore literary canon, it appears that the work of the
two poets makes them firmly cosmopolitan, willing to define themselves beyond the
narrow confines of Singaporean nationalism and even the more expansive ideas of
postcolonial hybridity. This is no easy feat, for much of their poetry explores the
tensions, disorientation and as Wong puts it a lostness that comes with refusing
accept the burden of national authenticity. Angelia Poon notes that writers like Boey
and Wong allow us to picture globalization as a net with holes permitting connection
and disjuncture rather than a suffocating blanket of homogeneity (377).

6
1819 is the date Sir Stamford Raffles, a British statesman who is seen as the founder of modern
Singapore, landed in Singapore. 1965 is the year that Singapore separated from Malaysia and saw an
independent government dominated by the Peoples Action Party, who had been first elected in 1959.
Joanne Leow 96
Ultimately, what should evolve as well is the critical approach to these writers:
they must not be held to ransom to their origins. As we saw in the introduction to this
thesis, this is especially important if postcolonial writers are to be treated as equals in
the realm of literary studies and freed from what Sarah Brouillette calls the burden
of the association between an author and national authenticity (177). Scholarship in
the field has to evolve beyond national-centric criticism and instead find new and
unconstrained ways of approaching cosmopolitan writing. Not in the least because
this conflation of postcolonial writing and national authenticity is a problematic that
has far-reaching implications. Graham Huggan makes it clear that this is a burden
that gives rise to what he calls "the postcolonial exotic which is a pathology of
cultural representation under late capitalism - a result of the spiralling
commodification of cultural difference (33). Whether for profit or simplification,
much of the work done in the postcolonial studies has focused on cultural
difference, using writers and their work as bearers of essentialist definitions of
culture and nation. This is an insufficient response to writers like Wong and Boey,
who bring to the table multiple cultural attachments, affinities and occasionally
simply do without these markers, choosing to write in a universal, abstracted style that
refuses to be tied to any culture of origin.
I would share Rajeev S. Patkes hope that the idea of postcolonial cultures is
one that is contingent or provisional, like a name that is meant to become a
misnomer, or a ladder that will be drawn up when the climbing is done (239).
Writing like Wongs and Boeys looks forward to a time when colonial histories and
indeed postcolonial pressures no longer burden literature that is written in former
colonies. Perhaps this movement will be similar to the one Salman Rushdie writes
about in his essay Imaginary Homelands, as he describes how America has created
Joanne Leow 97
great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation, out of examining
ways in which people cope with a new world(231). Indeed Wong and Boey, through
their work, show us the possibilities of a new world which does not have to be
circumscribed by the rules of national or postcolonial. Their work has not just opened
up new vistas, but more significantly, new readership as well one that widens its
concerns past the more insular aims of building cultural identity in a specific nation or
situating hybridity between cultures and instead sees literature as Rushdie sees it, as a
polygot family tree(231) that has the freedom to be individual, eclectic and mobile.













Joanne Leow 98
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