CURRENT ISSUE

Family Tree: Joyce Chung interviews Marcel Goh

"Lanterns" is a story about migration and transition, both yours (from Singapore to Canada and back again) and your predecessors’ (from China to Singapore). I experienced a distinct feeling of being adrift when I first read it. Is this a theme you explore often in your writing? What did it feel like to return to Singapore after moving to Canada and what’s your relationship with selfhood and place?

I wouldn’t say most of what I’ve written is about being Asian Canadian, yet these stories make up the majority of what I’ve published. Maybe exploring this theme is a strong suit of mine, though I suspect it has a bit to do with current publishing trends as well. In any case, I do find it creatively rewarding to ponder those transition periods in my life. Throughout my childhood we visited Singapore at least every two or three years, so it wasn’t a total culture shock to go back there after high school. But it never became a place I felt totally at home, especially since my return there was not by choice. As some weak form of protest, for the whole two years I was in the army, living with my grandmother on weekends, I kept all my civilian clothes in a suitcase instead of properly moving into the spare room.

However, during those first couple weeks in Singapore, I took a keen interest in family ancestry, interrogating various relatives (some of whom I hadn’t seen since I was very small) at gatherings and collecting my findings in a notebook. The oral record only goes back so far though: some older members of my family don’t even know their parents’ full names, let alone when they were born! Written records are even more difficult to mine—many official records were destroyed during the Japanese Occupation, and ships’ passenger lists published in newspapers often only contained names of European passengers.

I am not sure what compelled me to search so deeply for details about my ancestors when I first got to Singapore. Maybe I was trying to put down roots in a place where I felt I had few. In any case, the family tree I’ve compiled is an ongoing project—I get the occasional message from relatives reporting recent births and deaths they know about, and sometimes leads as to where I could find more information about specific branches.

I find your ability to integrate other languages masterful, especially when you make the distinction between your Hokkien Ah Gong and Cantonese Ah Gong through the vowel ‘o.’ I’m Cantonese myself and though I’ve never called either of my grandfathers Ah Gong, it was a joy to be able to hear the name (and the Singlish!) come through so clearly. How easy or challenging do you find it to make the sounds of one language heard in another, especially if it's a language your readers might not have heard before?

That particular sentence was probably the one I had the most trouble with in the piece! I must have changed it a dozen times in the editing stage, and even reading it now I feel there’s something clunky about it. I’m quite the linguistics geek (I wish I could have just written /a kɔŋ/ for the Hokkien Ah Gong, /a koŋ/ for the Cantonese one) and I really enjoy playing around with languages in my writing. I think my goal is to represent the cadence and syntax of a language in a way that makes the reader feel, for the duration of the piece, like they are a speaker of that language. I’ve done this for French dialogue before, by translating phrases as directly as possible, even if the result sounds awkward in English. The interesting thing is that I have had my parents read some of my drafts in Singlish and they are always appalled at how incomprehensible it looks when written (even in Singapore, Singlish is rarely written out, except in abbreviated fragments such as text messages). They say there’s no way a non-Singlish speaker would be able to follow. On the other hand, my girlfriend, who has read Singlish stuff I’ve written without much trouble, has a lot more difficulty understanding it spoken.

Ah Gong and your family are often depicted as showing love and care through the ability to provide materially, which was another thing I found familiar from a cultural standpoint. Juxtaposed with the lack of emotional support and abuse we see displayed time and time again, do you think making a point of having purchasing power was compensatory or coincidental?

My personal opinion is that it was probably coincidental, or if it compensated for the lack of emotional support, it was not expressly meant to. Putting aside the abuse for a bit, I’m not sure that emotional support is even seen as a duty of the parent in very traditional Chinese circles. The breadwinner of the family, be it Ah Gong or his father or his grandmother in the story, has to provide financially. Any failure to do so is judged seriously, whereas other aspects like emotional tenderness are certainly seen as nice things but a bit ancillary to the cause. When confronted with the Western alternative, the classical defence is played: “White parents hug and kiss their kids and say they love them, but make them get jobs when they are teenagers and kick them out of the house when they become adults. White kids hug and kiss their parents and say they love them, but when they get old they don’t take them in to live with them; rather, they send them to an old folks’ home. What’s really better?” In writing “Lanterns” I wasn’t trying to make a case for or against traditional Asian familial structure as opposed to a Western one. I tried my best to tell the facts of the story and keep the personal commentary restrained. But of course some always seeps in.

While reading your work, I found myself thinking about addiction and the extent or limits of empathy. I got the sense that the cycle of addiction was, as you write, “inevitable,” but you still manage to create immense empathy for Ah Gong by describing his difficult upbringing and especially through the monologue at the very end that finally gave him his own voice. Do you think this work mirrors the habit of telling Ah Gong’s story with that ever-present “but”?

That was certainly one intention, yes. In fact, this is a good time to bring up a possible error that made it into the story. In the scene where my uncle steps between Ah Gong and Por Por and berates Ah Gong, it is written (or at the very least strongly implied) that my grandfather physically abused my grandmother. Over the recent holiday, after “Lanterns” had already been put to print, my family was discussing the story as a whole and my mother said she wasn’t totally sure if Ah Gong ever actually laid a hand on her. It is almost hard to believe he didn’t, since he certainly raised his hand against her often and he was abusive in many other ways. But maybe he didn’t. There’s the word “but” again. At the very least, Ah Gong’s choice never to beat his kids was, I feel, one way that he tried to break the cycle, and in that specific respect he probably did. (My uncle is a pretty mellow dad as far as I know.)

I notice that you’re currently working through your doctorate program in mathematics at McGill University. Do your educational background and your work as a mathematician and researcher inform your writing and creative process in any way?

Mathematicians are primarily in the business of writing proofs, which are formal arguments that a statement (usually called a theorem) is true. To win the respect of one’s reader though, it is not enough to show that a theorem is true. It must be done in the most elegant way possible. People have different ideas of what constitutes elegance. For many, the most elegant proof is the one that is the shortest or most straightforward. Some like proofs that crescendo methodically to a beautiful punchline, while others like ones that are roundabout but illustrate some surprising connection to a seemingly unrelated branch of mathematics.

To me, writing a short story is a lot like writing a proof. Getting from the beginning to the end is difficult enough (my primary emotion when finishing a story is usually relief). Now, how can I get from here to here in one sentence instead of one paragraph? What does this portion have to do with that portion and how can I make the reader see that? There seems to be too big a jump between this part here and that part there; what can I do to link the two?

Maybe I’m pontificating about links that aren’t there; ultimately, I’m still little more than an apprentice in both trades. What I do know is that writing stories and writing proofs both give me the same sort of thrill, a level of obsessive mania I don’t get from anything else.

What’s next for you? What are you reading and working on?

Well, the primary goal for me right now is to finish my Ph.D., but I try to make time for writing as much as I can. At the moment my productivity in this department is rather sad—I get a decent idea only about two or three times a year. Each time this happens is a colossal event and I put aside all other things to get the story out within a day or two. Editing is something I do much more slowly, in short passes over the course of weeks, to let the changes really stew. I guess this workflow technically qualifies as “working on a short story collection,” so I’ll let that be my official answer. I also helped start a little literary magazine called Ahoy—our second issue is launching this month. As for reading, I try to switch often between classics and newer stuff, though not in any rigid way. The most recent book I finished was Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh, and now I’m reading The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro, which I’m realising is quite similar to “Lanterns” thematically.

 

 

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