Abstract
In Vyvyanne Loh’s Breaking the Tongue, language and identity are entangled in the struggle to articulate seemingly authentic versions of histories. Set against the backdrop of World War II, Claude Lim’s and Han Ling-li’s torture at the hands of Japanese soldiers, and their attempts to bear witness to the war crimes inflicted on the local citizenry are associated with the trauma of war. To interpret Claude’s need to express his traumatic experience as a response to Ling-li’s torture is to overlook the complexities of how the idea of the mother tongue is intrinsically linked to ideas of pre-histories, and the role early histories play in the making of new ones. Loh’s novel depicts Claude’s “awakening” to his Chinese ancestry as a kind of triumph over his father’s fetishization of the West and a redemptive homage to Ling-li’s hatred of the Japanese. However, I argue that the structural elements that bind these ideas together appear to, but do not, render Claude a “reborn” Chinese. This chapter examines the versions of Chineseness in Loh’s novel, and how Claude must break away from assumptions and expectations of Chineseness that are linked to China in order to develop a unique Chinese identity that is more in line with the history of British Malaya, and later, an independent Singapore.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Haresh Sharma , Model Citizens (Singapore: Epigram, 2012), 40. The Necessary Stage staged the first performance of the play in 2010.
- 2.
In the White Paper on Bilingual Education in Chinese-medium Schools (1953), the colonial government recommended that financial aid be provided for schools teaching in English. In response to the race riots in the mid-1950s, the All-Party Paper (1956) stressed multilingual education in hopes of promoting racial cohesion among different ethnic groups. This became the guiding principle for the People’s Action Party (PAP) bilingual policy when they came into power in 1959. It was decided then that English would be used as the primary medium of instruction, and the mother tongue would be taught as a second language in all schools. For an overview on this subject, see S. Gopinathan, “Singapore’s Language Policies: Strategies for a Plural Society,” Southeast Asian Affairs (1979). Mrs. Chua’s “Long Live Nantah” is notable. Nantah (Nanyang University) was the sole Chinese post-secondary institution in Singapore when it was in operation between 1956 and 1980. Anti-colonial and revolutionary sentiments were widespread at Nantah in the early 1960s; the colonial government, and later the PAP, often associated Nantah with communist sympathizers. See Yao Souchou, “All Quiet on Jurong Road: Nanyang University and Radical Vision in Singapore,” in Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Post-War Singapore, eds. Michael Barr and Carl A. Trocki (Singapore: University of Singapore Press, 2017).
- 3.
Sharma , Model Citizens, 40.
- 4.
Ibid., 43.
- 5.
Ibid., 171.
- 6.
Ibid., 209–10. A “study mama” is a foreign parent who possesses a long-term non-resident visa to accompany her child while attending primary/secondary schools in Singapore. These visas are granted for the caretaking of the child and parents are generally prohibited from working while they are in the country (although in some cases are allowed to seek employment within a restricted scope). The term “study mama” has become a somewhat derogatory term mostly associated with female Chinese mainlanders who seek illegal employment at massage parlors, nightclubs, and bars.
- 7.
Ibid., 209.
- 8.
Statistics at last count in 2016; Population.sg. http://www.population.sg/population-trends/demographics.
- 9.
Pang Eng Fong, “Foreign Talent and Development in Singapore,” in Competing for Global Talent, eds. Christine Kuptsch and Pang Eng Fong (Geneva: International Labor Office; International Institute for Labor Studies, 2006), 157. (“[T]he non-resident workforce increased by 9.4% a year, seven times faster than the rate for the resident workforce.”)
- 10.
Aaron Koh, “Global Flows of Foreign Talent: Anxieties in Singapore’s Ethnoscape,” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18.2 (2003), 232.
- 11.
Eugene K. B. Tan, “Singapore: Transitioning to a ‘New Normal’ in a Post-Lee Kuan Yew Era,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2012): 270.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Koh, “Global Flows,” 232.
- 14.
Official estimates of the number of Chinese migrants in Singapore are unavailable. According to Yazhou zhoukang, there were about 300,000 in Singapore in 2004. More recently, in 2011, estimates were at about 700,000–800,000, and the New York Times’s estimate was at one million. See Liu Hong, “Beyond Co-ethnicity: the Politics of Differentiating and Integrating New Immigrants into Singapore,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37.7 (2014), 1228. 1225–38.
- 15.
National initiatives to foster bonds between locals and migrants and to promote assimilation include the establishment of the National Integration Council in 2009, and the Singapore Citizenship Journey in 2011.
Brenda Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin, “Rapid Growth in Singapore’s Immigrant Population Brings Policy Changes,” Migration Information Source: The Online Journal of the Migration Policy Institute, April 3, 2012, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapores-immigrant-population-brings-policy-challenges.
- 16.
Chun Han Wong, “Chinese Migrants in Singapore, Chapter Two: Festering Feud,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/08/27/chinese-migrants-in-singapore-chapter-two-festering-feud/.
- 17.
Sa’at, Homesick, 187–8.
- 18.
See the famous case of the “Curry Dispute” in 2011, when a Chinese mainland family living in Singapore complained to the Community Mediation Centre that they could not tolerate the pungent aromas from their Singaporean Indian neighbor’s apartment. The mediator’s ruling, which decided curry could only be made when the Chinese family was not around, sparked uproar among the local community. A Singapore Chinese resident commented: “I am incensed with a People’s Republic of China family telling my fellowmen not to cook curry … Almost all Singaporean homes cook curry. The mediator should tell the PRC family to adjust and adapt to Singapore’s way of life and not tell the locals to adjust to the foreigner’s way of life!” Malcolm Moore, “Singapore’s ‘Anti-Chinese’ Curry War,” Telegraph, 16 August, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/singapore/8704107/Singapores-anti-Chinese-curry-war.html.
- 19.
This is mentioned only in passing in Loh, Breaking, 63.
- 20.
Png Poh-Seng, “The Straits Chinese in Singapore: A Case of Local Identity and Socio-cultural Accommodation,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10.1 (1979), 97.
- 21.
Robert Birnbaum, “Author Interview,” Identity Theory, April 6, 2004, http://www.identitytheory.com/vyvyane-loh/.
- 22.
Png, “The Straits Chinese,” 101. Some critics also associate their prestige with the establishment of the Chinese British Association around 1900; see Png, “The Straits Chinese,” 97, no. 15; 99.
- 23.
Straits Chinese Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 14 (June 1900), 86. Qtd. in Png, “The Straits Chinese,” 101.
- 24.
Png, “The Straits Chinese,” 100.
- 25.
Ibid., no. 26.
- 26.
Vyvyane Loh, Breaking the Tongue (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 31.
- 27.
Ibid., 32.
- 28.
Ibid., 127.
- 29.
Ibid., 127–8.
- 30.
Ibid., 41.
- 31.
Ibid., 55.
- 32.
Michael Barr, Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The Tepid War (New York: Routledge, 2002), 31.
- 33.
See ibid., 4–5, 35; Lam Peng Er, “The Politics of Confucianism and Asian Values in Singapore,” in Confucian Culture and Democracy, ed. John Fu-sheng Hsieh (New Jersey: World Scientific, 2015), 114, and Chua Beng Huat, “The Cost of Membership in Ascribed Community,” in Multiculturalism in Asia, eds. W. Kymlicka and B. He (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 34.
Barr, Cultural Politics, 5. The use of Confucian discourse in multicultural societies has been questioned because of its roots in Chinese history. Some scholars have responded by asserting Confucianism as a “universal system of ethics and a universal way of life,” while others were more cautious in acknowledging that Confucianism cannot be entirely isolated from Chineseness. See Goh, Daniel P. S. “Eyes Turned towards China,” in Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, eds. Daniel P. S. Goh, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 63. In multicultural Singapore, PAP’s Confucian state ideology (in the 1980s) was repackaged as “Asian values” in the 1990s. For the motivations of this change, see Lam, “The Politics,” 114–15. It is also notable that the role of “Asian values” in Singapore was raised much earlier in 1977 as a response to criticism against PAP’s failure to achieve its “democratic socialism” rhetoric. Then Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam made an especially astute observation of the term:
I have very serious doubts as to whether such a thing as “Asian values” really exists … If it has any meaning at all it is merely a convenient way of describing the heterogeneous, conflicting and complex network of beliefs, prejudices and values developed in the countries which for geographical purposes have been grouped as being in Asia.
See Barr, Cultural Politics, 31.
- 35.
Goh, “Eyes Turned,” 62.
- 36.
Lee , My Lifelong Challenge, 40–1.
- 37.
Lee , My Lifelong Challenge, 34, 47–8.
- 38.
Chua, “The Cost of Membership,” 111–12; qtd. in Daniel S. Goh, Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (New York: Routledge, 2009), 55.
- 39.
Goh, Race and Multiculturalism, 56.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Lee , My Lifelong Challenge, 49, no. 2.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Loh, Breaking the Tongue, 58.
- 45.
Ibid., 64.
- 46.
For more on the subject of Chinese identity markers and the implications of performing identity in Chinese diasporic communities, see Ien Ang , On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), and ed. E. K. Tan, Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2013).
- 47.
Ibid., 36.
- 48.
Ibid., 37.
- 49.
Ibid., 63, 89.
- 50.
Loh’s explanation of how Ling-li became involved with Tan’s Chinese Relief Fund and the pro-China political activists is doubly imagined: readers know Ling-li is a fictional character, but Loh, who repeatedly calls attention to the instability of history through a variety of literary devices in the novel, reminds readers that Ling-li is not only fictional; she is a fictional character whose fictional narrative is fictionalized twofold. Her early involvement with the Chinese Relief Fund is told through two versions. The first is imagined, it seems, by Sister Regina, the head nurse whom Ling-li works with at the Singapore General Hospital: this version tells of Ling-li being summoned to see Tan. The second version, when Ling-li meets Tan and he recruits her as a spy, is tenuously linked to the Fifth Columnist, who sends fabricated reports of Ling-li’s activities to the Japanese.
- 51.
Ibid., 97–8.
- 52.
Ibid., 335.
- 53.
Philip Holden, “Histories of the Present: Reading Contemporary Singapore Novels between the Local and the Global,” Postcolonial Text 2.2 (2006), http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/431/833.
- 54.
Janet Shepherd, Striking a Balance: The Management of Language in Singapore (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005), 41.
- 55.
Ibid., 44–5.
- 56.
Lee Kwan Yew, qtd. in ibid., 116.
- 57.
Sally E. McWilliams, “Intervening in Trauma: Bodies, Violence, and Interpretive Possibilities in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 28.1 (2009), 154.
- 58.
Loh, Breaking the Tongue, 480.
- 59.
Ibid., 480.
- 60.
Ibid., “From the Author,” unpaginated. I would like to thank Hong Yuchen for his meticulous translation of the Chinese passages in the novel.
- 61.
Ibid., 480.
- 62.
For an especially engaging discussion on this topic, see Ien Ang , On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001). Ang discusses the problems of defining Chineseness with the Chinese language and disagrees that the latter is a necessary criteria in defining Chinese ethnicity.
- 63.
Kingsley Bolton and Bee Chin Ng, “The Dynamics of Multilingualism in Contemporary Singapore,” World Englishes 33.3 (2014), 308. For an overview of the Speak Mandarin Campaign and the limitations and problems of the policy, see Patrick Ng, “Language Planning in Action: Singapore’s Multilingual and Bilingual Policy,” Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific Journal 30 (2011): 1–12; John Newman, “Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign: The Educational Argument,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 14.2 (1986): 52–67; and Lionel Wee, “Language Policy Mistakes in Singapore: Governance, Expertise and the Deliberation of Language Ideologies,” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 21.2 (2011): 202–21. I am grateful to John Newman for sharing his expertise on the Speak Mandarin Campaign with me while I was writing this chapter.
- 64.
Ibid., 487–8.
- 65.
Yao Souchou, “Being Essentially Chinese,” Asian Ethnicity, 10.3 (2009), 258.
- 66.
Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lin Weiqiang, “Chinese Migration to Singapore: Discourses and Discontents in a Globalizing Nation-State,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 22.1 (2013): 46.
- 67.
“China should make Singapore pay over South China Sea dispute, says PLA adviser,” The Straits Times, Oct. 1, 2016, http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-should-make-singapore-pay-over-south-china-sea-dispute-says-pla-defence-adviser.
- 68.
Lee Kuan Yew , qtd. in Liu Hong, “Beyond Co-ethnicity,” 1229.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wong, J.Y.C. (2018). Contesting Chineseness in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue. In: Wong, J. (eds) Asia and the Historical Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-7400-4
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-7401-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)