Emily of Emerald Hill
… And yet again another story of victimization and tragedy. But, oh joy, it’s so much shorter, and more interesting to read.
Emily was an entertaining and bossy woman of the household. If I were to imagine Emily onstage, it would’ve deviated towards the loud, flamboyant type. A play is not complete without humour. Even Shakespeare’s tragedies contained some form of humour – humour is a necessary ingredient to keep the viewers entertained. Since Emily of Emerald Hill is a one-woman play, the quality of humour must be embodied in her.
For this play, the story ’stuck’. One could believe that she was living on Emerald Hill, all the parties she threw and all the food she made all seemed like what the Peranakans did in the 1930s. Fistful of Colours didn’t ’stick’. The characters were thrown into implausible situations, and they all talked about things that we would never do in reality.
I liked the play. Heh, I suppose Singaporeans have a certain flair for the stage. The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ (aka That Political Play) was also quite enjoyable. Rodney was so hot.
Stella Kon also did one major thing: she focused on only one aspect of Singaporean life – the Peranakans. Fistful of Colours attempted to cover everything, making it unfocused and vague. Kon brought us straight to the point, and the entire play was tight and compact. Perhaps it’s the fact that the play was a play. Kon didn’t have the luxury of time, so everything was minimized and was straightfoward. If Lim wrote a play, would it be as equally focused as Stella Kon’s? I don’t know.
But, tragedy is always talk of the day. Son dies, husband leaves her for mistress then dies, the rest of her children don’t want to live in the bigbig house anymore. So she dies a lonely old woman and the play ends with her petting her dead son. If this keeps up, everyone would think Singaporeans die sad, having lived a lonely life fraught with betrayal and tragedy. Aw.
Kon talks about the Peranakan life back then, and makes it believable. She makes history come back to life without making it look like history. She makes it entertaining. Her flashbacks are smooth, the symbolism poignant (like the chair and the pink coat) and the character of Emily herself charismatic and enjoyable.
Yes, I like the play. Score one for Singapore.
Fistful of Colours
by Christine Suchen Lim.
ETA: Okay, guys, this is seriously getting out of hand. Stop plagiarizing my review. If you want to quote, that’s fine, but stop paraphrasing my words and passing it off as your own.
It is an utter waste of paper and ink. Suprising that this terrible ’story’ won a Singapore Literature Prize when it was published (not that a prize concieved in Singapore has any prestige whatsoever). The banality and purple prose exhibited is astounding, and the recollections of her character’s pasts are so ‘tragic’ to the point of ridicule.
One might as well publish a historic account of Singapore, because this book has no story whatsoever. It is recollection after recollection of different families’ ’struggle for survival’, and the author’s attempt to be abstract and philosophical with her book is marred with terrible characterization and once again, the farce that is a ‘tragic past’.
Her characters are not real. They are, in the most part, one dimensional, where you can just stick a label on them and that word constitutes their personality. Suwen = arty-farty author sticking herself into the story (Suchen and Suwen; can’t the comparision be any more obvious?) , Nica = the big flamboyant rebel, Ah Buck = traditional Chinaman, Nica’s father (can’t remember what the hell is his name) = traditional Indianman, and all White Men = Arrogant Superior Blokes. They all serve as mouthpieces for the author, who seems extremely insistent that we have to see a blatant side by side comparison between the old guard and the new.
Victimization seems to be the trend for Singaporean authors. Catherine Lim uses it to great heights, and Christine Suchen Lim seems to want to take a leaf out of the former’s book. It displays a severe lack of originality, and with every single character’s path hindered with failure and obstacles, and the book ends relatively tragically. Rape, bondmaids, rickshaw pullers and towkays? Been there, done that. What is more infuriating is that Lim wants to portray Singapore as realistic as possible, but in doing so, Lim attempts to rope in every single aspect of Singapore life into a single book, which meant that generalizations needed to be made, thus her characterizations. Bondmaids are given the attention of half a chapter, revisited near the end and then forgotten completely.
And – this one really, really got to me – the censoring of the word ‘fuck’. When one uses that word in dialogue – or even a book – one expects every single word to be published in its full glory. Perhaps it is her publisher, or even she chose to censor it herself for god-knows-what symbolism that has yet to take place (and the book was renewed in 2003, so you can’t blame ‘traditional Chinese values’), but the effect washes away any hope of the book being taken seriously. (Not that it was serious in the first place, with passages fraught with purple prose)
It is a good representation of Singapore? On the macro scale, perhaps. Lim has obviously done her research, delving into events in old Singapore that we, as children, do not study in propaganda. However, the details of each event are hazy at best, and Lim runs free rein with this vague summarization of events, choosing to display things in an overly exaggerated light. Unless one knows what really happened in the 1915 Indian mutiny against the British, one must take her accounts with a pinch of salt.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to finish Disney War by James B. Stewart. I like that book. Alot.
