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Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Hamid Roslan, Melizarani T. Selva, and William Tham (editors), The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian and Singaporean Writing, Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2023. 320 pgs.

Singapore’s literary scene, it has been said, suffers from a surplus of anthologies. Since the pandemic alone—well past the peak of “anthology fever” that accompanied the nation’s 50^th birthday—brave editors have contrived to tackle subjects as varied as faith, food, death, and being dumped. In their defence (and speaking as a repeat offender myself), the anthology is often held up as uniquely able to mirror the curious, cheek-by-jowl nature of our writing community, where poets and fictioneers of every stripe are just as likely to be brought together by chance or persuasion.  

What then, of anthologies meant to represent not one, but two (or more) communities? These too have been published in abundance, running the gamut from Ethos Books’ ambitious regional project The First Five (2018) to Alvin Pang and Ravi Shankar’s star-studded UNION (2015), which paired Singapore not with another country but the “imagined community” of the literary journal Drunken Boat. Some, like the popular migrant-local anthology Call and Response (2018), showcased a deliberate diplomatic intent, with poets of contrasting backgrounds brought into conversation on facing pages. Others rely on poetic form to get the message across. In Twin Cities (2017), for instance, the twin cinema provides artistic scaffolding to exchanges between Singapore and Hong Kong.

In The Second Link, the construction of a second bridge linking Tuas in Singapore and Tanjung Kupang in Malaysia—opened three and a half decades after Singapore and Malaysia briefly came together as one polity in 1963—serves neither as staging-ground nor metaphor for its twenty-nine inclusions from either side of the Straits of Johor. Eschewing the tried-and-tested approaches of the examples above, the editors have not simply sought to reflect the burgeoning writing scenes north and south of the Causeway. Instead, the invitation is for the authors to ponder a lingering (or for some, new-found) “sense of entwinement” between their territories, and for readers, in turn, to “consider the artifice of nations and their imaginings” that, since 1965, has lent shape to two independent countries.

The challenge of the task is perhaps evident in the contortions of form and genre that the authors, in response, have put themselves through. The dazzling array at hand includes pieces of epistolary and speculative fiction (Sheena Gurbakhash, Kevin Martens Wong, Anna Onni), translated diary entries (Ruihe Zhang), found poems from the internet forum Eat Drink Man Woman (Max Ho and Tse Hao Guang), photographic essays (Noor Iskandar, Daryl Li), and other experiments that defy categorisation (such as Brandon K. Liew’s memoir, which melds prose and concrete techniques). Grounding the selection are also some scholarly biographical pieces: Clarissa Oon’s moving homage to the Malaysian director Krishen Jit, for instance, or Jonathan Chan’s wide-ranging essay setting the two enfants terribles of their respective scenes, Alfian Sa’at and Ng Kim Chew, side by side.

Taking their cue, the editors have chosen to do away with the more conventional co-authored preface (always a nightmare of personalities and logistics), in favour of an edited conversation—between Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Melizarani T. Selva and Hamid Roslan—as well as a reflective, understated essay by William Tham—which bookend the volume. Their approach to what they call the “straitjackets of genre” is clearly evident, not least in Lim’s observation that readers, and maybe anthologisers too, have “focused too much on difference”, missing in the process the sense of “immediate kinship” that is meant to run through these pages. Borrowing the expression, this anthology is perhaps best described as a couch full of curiously thoughtful and agreeable siblings, some of whom haven’t seen each other in a while. Strikingly different in their appearance (thick glasses here, a mohawk there), but with their legs propped on a common table (teak, of course) and passing round a bowl of keropok.

Even with kin, though, it’s hard to avoid having favourites. Mine were to be found in the volume’s subtler pieces (or quieter cousins, if you will), deceptively pedestrian in their form but packing real depth and flavour. Ho Kin Yunn’s “Kway Teow Coattails” contains a poignant though often very funny account of the author’s journey to Ipoh with his fiancée to close his late mother’s bank account. The piece is worth reading if only for its sumptuous detail—a famed bowl of Ipoh hor fun is “laid carefully into half of my spoon, then topped with a small bunch of beansprouts, a bit of chicken, two or three spring onion strips, and finally the life blood, the prawn broth, for the rest of the ingredients to soak in”—but Ho’s delicate handling of grief and adjustment easily makes it one of the anthology’s highlights. Another triumph is Sumitra Selvaraj’s “The Real Little India”, presented entirely as a dialogue between an amma and daughter who are preparing to buy the latter’s wedding saree in Singapore, which similarly delivers humour and heartache in equal measure.   

For Ho and Selvaraj, the fraught dynamics of family are an effective foil for the two countries’ proximity and estrangement. Others reach for historical and environmental touchstones, filtered through the lens of personal reportage. Clara Chow’s “Leper”, which begins as a discursive detour from her writing residency in the Rimbun Dahan arts colony, takes fascinating forays into the history of contagion and the colonial Malayan administration’s attempts at quarantine of different sorts, all the while ruminating on the nature of loneliness against the backdrop of a pandemic that suspended travel across the Causeway. Arjun Sai Krishnan’s “Selatan”, arriving close to the end of the book, asks what it means to belong to the straits, even as one who “grew up among new arrivals to the island” and within sight of its shifting coastline. Both are ambivalent about narratives that weave Singapore and Malaysia too closely together, remaining clear-eyed about how much history has accrued between them. As Krishnan writes, “every bridge on land becomes a wall underwater […] the Straits are as much a mirror as they are a boundary, reflecting our realities onto each other in infinite regress”.

In a brief note accompanying their introductory conversation, the editors compare the anthology to “a tasting experience, where one set of flavours can both complement and challenge the previous and following sets”. The menu they have assembled is as ambitious as it is varied, rich in its influences and inventive enough—by a country mile—to hold any diner’s attention. What makes the meal memorable, though, are the dishes most confident in their palate, that require little by way of formal embellishment and concern themselves least overtly with the questions inherent in the book’s title. Bridge or breakwater, one country or two? The thing is: with the best ingredients, it hardly matters where they’re grown.  

How to cite: Kwek, Theophilus. “Reunion Dinner: The Second Link Serves Up A Careful Feast.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2023/10/14/second-link.

Theophilus Kwek is the author of four poetry collections, two of which were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His work has been published in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Mekong Review, and elsewhere; and performed at the Royal Opera House. His latest collection is Moving House (Carcanet Press).  [All contributions by Theophilus Kwek.]

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