Notes
#sg-literature 4/5 rating.
Quotes
pg 10: The kampong was still destroyed, not swallowed whole by the waves in accordance with some angry god’s decree, as the villagers had always feared, but taken to pieces and sold for parts by the inhabitants themselves.
pg 12: Tradition was the stick against which he was constantly measured, against which, time and time again, he came up short.
pg 29: The distant horizon on the steely sea, the chafing of cicadas in the bushes, the echo of the koel bird in the early mornings — ouh-ouuuh, ouh-ouuhh.
pg 40: How to talk of the moment where the seas he’d known all his life suddenly conspired against him, throwing up not just unusual weather or odd currents, but an entire looming landmass where there should have been none?
pg 96: The island would be renamed Syonan-To, Light of the South Island. Said quickly, the qords became Shou Nan Dao, Mandarin for Island of Pain.
pg 110: And so the years of Syonan-To began. “Asia for Asians!” the Jipunlang proclaimed, before bayoneting Chinese babies, beheading Indian soldiers, filling Malay guts with water until they splattered and burst. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would be wrung from the necks of the island’s inhabitants, built of its flesh, nourished by its blood.
pg 111: Jipunlang flags were folded up and stored carefully in biscuit tins, lest the tides of history should shift and loyalties had to be proven once again.
pg 141: Somewhere along the way, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago, their forefathers had decided to send their children to the schools set up by the Ang Moh nuns, to learn French, English, how to eat with a fork and knife, the history of Western philosophy.
pg 178: The Gah Men, having come into power, now distanced themselves from the union that had made their election possible in the first place. Even though the union heroes had been freed from prison, they’d been sidelined to secretarial roles within the party.
pg 194: The sea had once felt like a vast adventure; now he saw that vastness could be a kind of claustrophobia.
pg 265: For years afterward, she’d dreamed of that endless walk. The dreams added and subtracted from reality; in them, the walks ended in the lairs of ghost tigers, at the edges of sheer cliffes, by the shores of infinite lakes. In all of them, she was searching for another little girl with long, fine hair just like hers, trying to find her before she starved.
pg 300: Yet he knew this: Thirty, forty years in the future, even if he was a man like Mr. Yik - house in a leafy estate, servants, a car of his own - a sheen of unreality would continue to glisten over the surface of his life, like morning dew on the leaves of tree, too pervasive and innocuous to shake off.
pg 346: The years fell away like leaves from an old tree, their love for each other, impossibly, still as deeply rooted as it had been two decades ago.
pg 372: She had demanded the same sacrifices from him as she had from herself, and he had declined to make them. He was unwilling to be a martyr, would not let her slip away with Eng Soon and Yang to live her life far away from him. She had asked too much of him, had dented him a wound too deep. And as angry as she was, she understood his hurt, his fierce, selfish love. A wave of grief washed over her.