If on a winter's night a traveller...
I have been talking about it in Singapore with Yeng Pway Ngon, a writer, poet, painter, bookseller, intellectual and free thinker with a difficult life. His latest book, L’Atelier, has just been released in Italy. The English-language translation (The Studio) by Singaporeans Loh Guan Liang and Goh Beng Choo is expected to hit the market in January 2014.
It's a novel of overlapping stories “on love, on art. On life,” says Yeng. The book is not similar to Calvino, yet, like him, Yeng also seems to want to go back in time to cancel out the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition.
So Yeng's story and his life become metaphors for Singapore, on the very fine line separating Utopia from Dystopia. This was one of the central themes at the recently held Writers Festival.
"The system has stabilised," says Yeng. Which means that control can be loosened, even culturally. The problem, according to this author who calls himself an “existentialist”, is that if that has happened it is because the system has achieved its goal, i.e. mental assimilation to a preset model of thought. Singaporeans, by now, are definitively “kiasu”: “afraid of loss”. And it is not freedom that is at stake. "Once Mao's books were forbidden. Now you can sell them, but no one will buy them," he says.
He gets worked up as we talk, switching from hesitant English to Cantonese (immediately translated by the ever-smiling Goh Beng Choo, his wife of 36 years). What irritates him is cultural conformism caused by loss of culture. Beginning with one's language. Chinese, his Chinese (he writes in Mandarin interspersed with various dialects), has become an “economic” language. People speak it but don't know how to write it; they don't know the characters. We agree that illiteracy is a global problem, even the real consequence of a globalisation of values and ideas. We are all becoming a bit kiasu.
"It takes courage. Moral courage," says Yeng.
If on a winter's night – and, let's remember, it is winter now in Singapore – the world changed, other visions appear that seem to contradict what Yeng has to say. They can be seen at “If The World Changed”, the title of the Singapore Biennale. The city-state's museums, universities and galleries are exhibiting collective and solo shows by Southeast Asian artists. The idea is to mark out the region as a corridor of ideas. Personally, it's a chance for me to discover some artists I did not know, such as Wu Guanzhong, one of the greatest contemporary Chinese painters, or Hong Zhu An.
The comparison with some young experimenters is pitiless. As always, on occasions like these, Plato's Cave comes to mind. In the allegory, many cannot distinguish shadows from reality, the opinion self-induced by knowledge. But this idea of the Cave, of fluid, shady knowledge, has generated some of the most interesting installations at the event. Such as the interactive digital installation by the Japanese teamLab or the digital images by Vietnamese Nguyen Trinh Thi, who presents “living” tableaus of women and men from Hanoi.
If on a winter's night - and it's winter in Thailand too - you take a look at Bangkok, “the best you can expect is that you avoid the worst”. Because the traveller has gone from the utopia-dystopia of Singapore to the chaos of a metropolis whose charm lies in its very chaos.
As in Calvino's book, its stories are intertwined. What is happening in Bangkok, yet more anti-government demonstrations - even though the party now in power are former protesters and the current protesters used to be in power – which may lead to yet another coup d'état, leads back to my conversation with Yeng Pway Ngon about control and democracy. Only, here, the system has not stabilised; it has become dysfunctional: control without democracy or uncontrollable democracy.
In this intersecting plot of paradoxes and oxymorons, the opposition, which condemns the “tyranny of the majority”, inferring a political philosophy of limited or unlimited democracy (a little like that in Singapore) and seeming to augur a military coup, has chosen the V for Vendetta mask as its symbol, epitomising the anti-establishment hero.
I am tempted to make that mask my own. V for Voyager.