Shelfies #9: Ng Yi-Sheng

Presenting the top shelves of my Southeast Asian fiction collection!

It used to be alphabetized, but life got in the way, y’know? It’s separate from my Singapore/Malaysia collection (we used to be one country), and represents my efforts to try and grasp the broader heritage of the region, across boundaries of nation, race and language, and hopefully build a literary community that isn’t centred on the West.

Among the items on the shelves, you’ll see: Two editions of Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), an incredible, psychedelically disorienting work of Philippine magical realism. Some folks feel that term only applies to Latin American literature, Joaquin’s heritage as a Spanish-educated tropical intellectual thrust into an Americentric post-war world more than qualifies him to be in the tradition—in fact, the title refers to the Philippines itself, born twice out of the colonial mothers of Spain & the USA. The Penguin edition only includes the work in novella form; I got the full novel (which I recommend) on my first visit to Manila in 2007. Bloody hard to distribute national literatures even to our neighbours.

Below, I’ve got a few books by Thai SFF author SP Somtow, e.g. his horror novel Vampire Junction (1984) and his short story collection Dragon’s Fin Soup (1998). Written in English, they’re among the first examples of a Southeast Asian writer trying to represent our culture to the West using tropes of fantasy & sci-fi (which now occasionally read as super-problematic). I never met Somtow, but I got his stuff on discount at the end of Singapore Writers Festival 2015.

Also fascinatingly problematic: two reworkings of Indonesian epics by Westerners: Diana Darling’s The Painted Alphabet (1994: a novelization of the Balinese poem Dukuh Siladri, with added televisions and tourists amongst the witches) and Elizabeth Inandiak’s Forty Nights and One of Rain (2002: a novelization of the sex-and-mysticism-filled Javanese work Serat Centhini). Pre-dating our debates about cultural appropriation, these are loving tributes to local classics which remain kinda unknown globally—though I can’t say it’s wrong to be offended by the liberties they’ve taken in adaptation! (Forty Nights is technically on loan from the artist Jimmy Ong—got it while I stayed in his house in Yogyakarta in 2018.)

Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and activist with a keen interest in Southeast Asian history and myth. He has been published in Clarkesworld, The Sunday Morning Transport and Strange Horizons—check out his Pushcart-nominated essay “A Spicepunk Manifesto” and his BSFA-longlisted “A Not-So-Swiftly Tilting Planet”— and is author of the speculative fiction collection Lion City. He Instagrams at @yishkabob and his website is ngyisheng.com.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.