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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252090080 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 865,797 |
| File size: | 432 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE Scent OF THE Gods
By FIONA CHEONG
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Fiona CheongAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07642-8
Introduction
Singapore/Girl LESLIE BOWWe must not cling on to things. If the government wants to take the land, they will take it. —Resident of Singapore's last kampong, 2009
Sister Katherine said that just because something was imaginary did not mean it could not have consequences in the real. She told us to write that down, and that when we were older we would understand. —Fiona Cheong, The Scent of the Gods
The imaginary does have consequence in the real. Or so the child narrator of Fiona Cheong's novel The Scent of the Gods is told in a lesson about the equator. The fictional Sister Katherine is most definitely correct in ways she may not have anticipated.
Depicting Singapore's growing pains as a nation, The Scent of the Gods won immediate critical praise when it was first published in 1991. Written from the perspective of a young girl, Cheong's novel was deemed "charged and poetic," her story "exquisitely poised between the specific and the mythic, delicately narrated and profoundly resonant" (Steinberg 44). This acclaim was particularly noteworthy as women of color began to find publishers in a newly receptive American literary market. However, located somewhat misleadingly in the tradition of Asian American writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, The Scent of the Gods did not find an overwhelming audience and was out of print by 2006. Set wholly in Southeast Asia and intimately interweaving narratives of sexual maturation and postindependence politics, the novel was perhaps before its time, prefiguring now the familiar academic and commercial categories of diasporic women's writing, postcolonial studies, and Anglophone Chinese literature.
For American readers, the novel's subject matter is little known; not much about Singapore circulates in the United States aside from an unfortunate association between that island nation and sexual exoticism, namely, the "Singapore Girl" airline advertising campaign ("Singapore Girl—You're a Great Way to Fly"). Dubbed the "Orient with plumbing," Singapore is held up as a model of modernization—with South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, one of Asia's four economic "dragons." Depicting the years following Singapore's expulsion from the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, the first anniversary of the republic in 1966, and the rise of the People's Action Party (PAP) in 1969, the novel engages Cold War politics as they played out in other arenas of Southeast Asia, despite American fixation on Vietnam. Nevertheless, it also seems to exude the timelessness of bildungsroman in its portrayal of a girl's transition between childhood and adulthood, innocence and its loss.
Esha, whose Chinese name is Su Yen, begins to understand that growing up female is characterized by impending threat and artificial constraint. Unlike her male cousins, she is subject to an emerging set of prohibitions: she must keep her knees together, her shirt on, and learn to walk like a girl. Evocative moments in this tutorial of womanhood stay with the reader well after the novel has been finished: a child forced to stand partially naked before her class as punishment; a disheveled woman escorted home by the police past the state-imposed curfew; a girl's first sighting of a surprisingly unremarkable, surprisingly defenseless penis. As we share Esha/Su Yen's glimpses into the "private" lives of the adults who make up her multigenerational Singaporean household, we are likewise struck by what is deliberately withheld from her: not the danger of sexuality, but its beauty. Under Cheong's skillful hand, each moment—minor transgressions between girls and boys on the playground, slight intimacies between grown-ups, the disclosure of her aunt's putative rape—becomes a piece of a puzzle that marks Esha's emerging awareness. "I had believed that the thing called sex was a thing only grown-ups understood, a thing only grown-ups could feel," (100–101) the child reflects. The body is not merely profane, subject to discipline and restriction, but an object of reverence and power of a different kind. As a consequence of multiple tragedies that culminate in her cloistering in a convent school at the novel's end, Cheong's protagonist comes to a familiarly childish yet poignant resolution: "I don't want to be a girl.... I want to be a boy" (200).
The Scent of the Gods joins the growing ranks of diasporic women's writing wherein girlhood is intimately entwined with the legacies of colonialism and political upheaval in the latter part of the twentieth century. Celebrated authors such as Marguerite Duras, Jamaica Kincaid, Marjane Satrapi, Le Ly Hayslip, Edwidge Dandicat, and Assia Djebar, to name a few, portray the effects of state politics not from its center, but from its margins, from the domestic sphere of the home. Their coming-of-age stories do not necessarily attest to the universality of women's experience or supplement incomplete historical records. Depicting the often violent transition between tradition and modernity or the uneasy transference of political power between specific regimes, these postcolonial writers establish women's stories as vehicles of state critique. The Scent of the Gods inscribes two seemingly separate narratives, one charting a girl's maturation, and another documenting the nation-building policies that come to divide the generations of a Chinese Singaporean household. How do the two merge and to what effect? Why depict a specifically historical story—in this case, the real or imagined threats to Singapore in an era of global flux and competing political philosophies—from the point of view of a child?
At first glance, Cheong's bildungsroman might be taken as an allegory of the nation's maturation, yet the complexity of her characterization and perspective exceeds simple, one-to-one correspondence. Both bildungsroman and allegory have somewhat controversial places in Asian American and postcolonial literary studies, respectively. Shelley Sunn Wong notes that Asian American autobiographies and novels inscribing developmental narratives of formation and self-discovery have been accorded over-generous reception to the detriment of writers who have eschewed the bildungsroman form. Originating in the Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility and typically charting a male protagonist's development and maturation, the genre's classic form is said to be Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In an ethnic American literary context, the privileging of the bildungsroman, Wong argues, stems from "historically determined frameworks of reception" in the American literary marketplace that measure the value of Asian American texts in terms of their ethnographic contributions, valorizing plotlines of individual reconciliation and social integration (129). In contrast to genre's potentially conservative function here, Frederic Jameson highlights an alternatively radical reading practice in regard to genre and postcolonial literature. For Jameson, the significance of "third-world" literature lies in its connection to the political, its overt encoding of national allegory. In contrast, the Western realist and modernist novel, he suggests, misguidedly reinforces a "radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power" (69). Within the literature of the developing world, he argues, "the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society" (69). Reading the "private" interiority of the Third World subject as an expression of the social, Jameson emphasizes literature's significance as critical commentary. This contrasts Wong's sense that coming-of-age stories can evacuate collective politics by resolving social contradiction within narratives of individual reintegration. Cheong's novel reconciles these debates over literary genre by highlighting the political import of coming-of-age narratives on the one hand, and the dialectical relationship between the individual's libidinal conflict and collective struggle on the other. The novel's exploration of Singapore's comprador status and yet-to-be-defined role in the era of multinational capitalism can be read through the child's maturing sexual consciousness.
The novel's faux naïf voice is particularly appropriate to its historical setting, conveying a certain disequilibrium born of limited knowledge. The narrator's partial understanding reflects that of Singapore's populace in the 1960s and comes to define the contemporary reader's relationship to the text. The Scent of the Gods is at times an enigmatic read: where has there been foul play and where is tragedy simply fated, the will of gods whose motives are unknown? Are the deaths of Esha's and her cousins' parents really accidental? Has an uncle voluntarily joined the socialist opposition or has he been "disappeared" by pro-government forces? We don't exactly know what precipitates the fate of the soldier-in-training, Li Shin, whose loyalty to the prime minister's projected goals of "peace, prosperity, and progress" are unshakeable. In effect, not knowing is part of the point. Indeed, the novel becomes a meditation on the politics of limited perspective, highlighting bildungsroman as a genre of overtly political significance.
Why, then, girlhood? The Scent of the Gods is not a novel that wears its feminism on its sleeve; like any number of her contemporaries, Cheong does not identify as a feminist writer per se. Yet gender is intrinsic to the novel's muted critique of Singapore's long-ruling PAP; in keeping with an emerging tradition of postcolonial women's writing, the novel erodes the division between public and private, drawing an implicit parallel between the repression of individual rights and the containment of women's sexuality. The novel questions what sacrifices one must make to secure the presumably benevolent protection of gods—or of men.
This reissue brings the novel back into the public eye at a time when the boundaries between Asian and Asian American literature and ethnic American and postcolonial writing do not retain an earlier territorial urgency. As importantly, The Scent of the Gods stands as a timely reminder of the trade-off between national security and civil liberties that once again emerge so forcefully—and ambiguously—across the globe. As Sister Katherine affirms, the imaginary does indeed have consequences in the real; The Scent of the Gods explores those consequences in ways that give "Singapore Girl" new meaning.
Homeland Security: Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the People's Action Party
"For the uninitiated," notes writer Justin Chin, "Singapore is a tiny island on the tip of the Malayan peninsula. It has absolutely no natural resources, so it lives on tourism, and has a reputation as a shrewd business hub; it has the busiest harbor and airport in the industrialized world" (164). "Shrewd" is perhaps an understatement. From 1965 to 1990, Singapore went from a place where "the riffraff of half the British empire converged" to a metropolitan city-state with the highest gross national product in Asia after Japan and a model for other newly industrialized countries (All-man 25). By 2008, it boasted the sixth-highest per capita gross domestic product in the world. In its success, the city-state has been likened to "a clean and efficient theme park," a description that is only partly complimentary (Allman 23).
As a means of assuring potential British investors after independence, the ruling People's Action Party located the origins of modern Singapore in the arrival of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company in 1819. The local chieftain or temenggong, Abdul Rahman of Johor, permitted Raffles to set up a trading post on what was then called Singapura. After successfully negotiating prior Dutch claims on the island in 1824, the British established Singapore as a crown colony in 1867, administering a territorial governance interrupted only by the Japanese occupation during World War II. In 1963, Singapore became part of the Federation of Malaysia until its explusion, declaring independence in 1965 under its first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. By 2009, Singapore's last remaining kampong, or village, was scheduled for demolition, marking the symbolic completion of one of the "world's most extreme national makeovers" (Mydans 5). This modern makeover is largely credited to—and scripted within—the postindependence policies of the PAP, led by Prime Minister Lee from 1959 to 1990 and, since 2004, by his son, Lee Hsien Loong. Indeed, this linear narrative, Singapore's movement from "mangrove backwater to metropolis," is one that has been self-consciously promoted by the PAP (Hong and Huang 15). Cheong's narrator reports with studied neutrality, "[In 1969, t]here was to be no more poverty in Singapore, no more slums. ... Singapore would industrialize, and become modern.... In a few years Prime Minister Lee would prove himself" (106–7).
While Singapore is held up as a model for development in the Third World, in the United States it has circulated somewhat more ambiguously. In 1994 American teenager Michael Fay faced corporal punishment for vandalism in Singapore; in the American press his caning was characterized as cruel and unusual punishment and as an abuse of human rights. The highly publicized case of "draconian justice" highlighted Singapore's other repressive laws: the death sentence for drug trafficking and murder; and jail or exile for tax evasion or libel. Moreover, in the West, Fay's punishment put a spotlight on the government micromanagement that became symbolic of the restricted freedoms of soft authoritarianism: bans on chewing gum, dancing, or smoking in public; and fines for littering, jaywalking, picking flowers, or eating on the subway. Technology served Big Brother's purpose in the form of "Urine Detectors" installed in elevators and automatic "Toilet Flushing Devices" in public restrooms. This will to ensure the collective good through surveillance, notes Chin, "becomes something quite sinister indeed" (165).
Novelist Fiona Cheong was born in Singapore a British subject in 1961, growing up with the nation. Her ethnically Chinese family identified as Straits Chinese or Peranakan prior to the Prime Minister's partly self-serving vision of what Cheong calls the "idea of the unracialized Singaporean." Cheong's family practiced Catholicism within a diverse and tolerant religious environment; she attended a Catholic girls' school where her mother also taught English and Art. Although her mother was fluent in Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay, and English, she deliberately spoke only English to her children "for the sake of [their] future." Nevertheless, Cheong notes that Malay was the common language in Straits Chinese households; she is fluent in both Malay and English. In The Scent of the Gods, Cheong envisioned the extended family household that her parents experienced: her father's family in Singapore and her mother's in Indonesia. Immigrating to the United States for college in 1979, Cheong received a BA in 1986 and an MFA in 1987, both from Cornell University. Cheong remained in the U.S. to teach at her alma mater until becoming a writing instructor at Howard University in 1988. By 1995, she had joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, where she currently teaches English. The Cheong family was not overtly political, although she has noted that her father "was what they called in those days a 'P.A.P. man.'" About the tumultuous time of her own coming of age, Cheong has said, "If there's anything congruent between the novel and my family's life, it's in that sense of the enormity of the world, the enormity of its mysterious nature."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE Scent OF THE Gods by FIONA CHEONG Copyright © 1991 by Fiona Cheong. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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