By Jasmine Goh

Patient History
Tricia Tan
Ethos Books (2024) / 116 pages / SGD 16

I put down Patient History at the Toast Box by the atrium of Tan Tock Seng Hospital, while waiting for my husband to complete his clinics for the day. Despite being a hospital with one of the highest patient loads in Singapore, the air feels anything but stale or clinical. A long and bustling queue has formed behind the counter, a nurse in line speaking animatedly to the gown-clad patient in front of him. Piano notes to the soundtrack for the movie Interstellar rise through the hollowed-out ceiling. A pair of toddlers chase each other while gripping onto "get-well-soon" balloons in the foyer, presumably, to be gifted to someone in the wards in the floors above – I know the atmosphere there would be markedly different.

These are the worlds that Tricia Tan traverses in Patient History – the depths of anxieties associated with her mother's cancer diagnosis, alongside a celebration of a bright childhood spent together. What one would wish to be separate become inextricable – a glowing world of memories now braided with the dread of chemotherapy, the language of lymphoma, the monotony of hospital visits. In her opening poem, 'birth cert for my mother's cancer', Tan introduces to the reader the perspective that she would inhabit throughout the collection – that of a daughter, a child, comprehending her mother's illness through the lens of her girlhood:

I wondered then if cancer could be construed
as pregnancy: a little body of cells leaving

another body
with joy.

I wondered if the surgeons would raise
the excavated tumour like a faceless Simba,
chalking circles of life in the OT sky.  

And yet, despite the threat of disease, Tan's collection is permeated by an ebullient playfulness. Tan chooses a quote by Serbian-American poet Charles Simic for the epigraph of her debut collection: "If the sky falls, we shall have clouds for supper." True to this effervescence, the collection is peppered with several whimsical, delightful and interactive pieces – abecedarians that create dreams out of diagnosis, a 'Build a Patient History Poem' reminiscent of a Build-A-Bear Workshop, and an interactive cootie catcher – paper fortune tellers against an uncertain future.

In 'figure 2. Patient History in gachapon', memories overlap in anachronistic, transparent waves, allowing the reader to pull together threads of the past, present and an imagined future. The poem delightfully mimics the experience of using a toy vending machine, requiring the reader to turn their head at an angle or hold the book upside-down, as if squinting into the blurred kaleidoscope of a gachapon machine, wondering about the surprise item that would fall into the palm of hand:

"2020: Everything was always plural with the CT scan. We flipped glow-in-the-dark coins at 2am in the ward"
"2007: Crying in 7-Eleven after the chip bag rips. We race to Harajuku street from pretend police"
"2021: When the nurses packed gauze into her like a fragile vase we were moving"
"2002: Piled onto her shoulders with a crown of Mickey Mouse ears, fireworks a burst of Disney light"

Still, the lightness that suffuses most of the collection is not effortless – the reader gets the sense that this cheer is intentionally laboured at and grounded in loss. The poems that speak to the emotional depth of Tan's experience strike me as the most poignant. In 'who is memory?', Tan's vulnerability reveals the grief for a childhood forever tainted by her mother's cancer, as she confesses that she is "parenting / both my memories and / yours / releasing them / foolscap ships in a blue foam sea". Similarly, in 'in the beginning', one reads of a childlike, honest portrait of an ill mother:

The end comes reaching; but you are all run-
on sentences and enjambed escape;
you speak simple poetry in your faith
healing. We thought the cancer did you in

yet here you are in the parentheses
of body ardour and soft marrow
surviving simply.

In 'explain like I'm five: ptsd', Tan makes a list for an "Obstacle Course in a Subclinical Wish Factory", each item reflecting the permanent stain on childhood joy: "Hospital bracelet strips folded to origami stars" / "Ski trip down milky ice kacang from the hospital kopitiam" / "Dodgeball with crushed GWS! cards from the neighbouring school". In another piece, 'drafting advanced care plans while watching a spider at starbucks', Tan's conversation with her mother reveals the roles of mother and child heartbreakingly blurred:

Following the fifth surgery:
M still praying. Will u home soon?

I hold your text bubbles
like a child holds bath foam.

Tan's poem 'i never thought we would smile through the chemo' brings to mind 'We Lived Happily during the War', a poem by Ukrainian-born poet, Ilya Kaminsky. While Kaminsky grapples with the luxury of choosing to remain wilfully blind to the throes of disaster and violence, Tan's work clings to the fleeting delights during an unimaginable season of suffering – happiness is a "premonition of blessing", "a plastic garden overgrown / with the scent of spring".

The specificity of Tan's childhood experience reflects the richness of her histories, providing the reader a glimpse into the strength of her relationship with her mother and the depth of the pain of witnessing her suffering. For this reason, I found that the poems that relied most on the lightness of pop culture references and names of Disney-Pixar movies to be more lacking. Though these are undeniably inextricable aspects of a childhood, the quick turning of a reader's mind to the generality of such images felt loosely connected to the collection's emotional nucleus. It is in the moments where Tan traces the threads of these memories with tightness to the collection's core that Tan demonstrates her greatest mastery.

 Patient History acknowledges that mortal as we are, one can experience joy that endures. Tan's poetry takes all that is tainted and makes it a little more beautiful – filling the gap between life and the fear of death with the wonderment of a full childhood and a rich history of memories. Borrowing from Louise Glück's words in her essay, 'The Culture of Healing', Tan's poems are a "revenge on loss, which has been forced to yield to a new form, a thing that hadn't existed in the world before". Tan gives to her grief a joyous shape, transcribing a great and uncertain future into the history of a child's love, offering amidst brokenness a tender and steadfast hope.

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