By Dylan Kwok

The Waiting Room
Choo Yi Feng
Epigram Books (2024) / 157 pages / SGD 20.90

In one scene of the title story, a young man on death row instructs his sister on how to wrap up his unfinished business for him, while he sits in a cell awaiting his doom, whiling away his hours in conversation with the spirit of the story's protagonist. It's a poignant moment, but what drives the heartbreak home is the controlled brevity with which author Choo Yi Feng sets the scene. There are emotions and details better left for the reader to imagine themselves, and Choo demonstrates remarkable restraint by limiting his narration in this painful moment.

It is unfortunate, then, that this restraint only occurs several times in Choo's debut collection, and that his maturity in dealing with pain and loss is not as evident in some of the stories that need it more. In 'Voice on the Line', a story narrated through a series of one-sided calls to a helpline from a sexual assault survivor, the narrator, to put it simply, is overly verbose, and the story reads more like a diary than a conversation, with the rawness of talking aloud lost in a sea of flowery vocabulary. In 'Spider Hunters', a story about childhood friendship and taboo love, a recurring motif about spiders spirals out of control, to the point it becomes hard to tell whether the story is about the characters or a legendary spider. While Choo has his moments of economy, many of his stories are bogged down by ornate language and unneeded commentary.

But where a heftier volume may have survived an editorial liposuction, cutting all the fat off Choo's stories means a shortage of pages for actual plot. With 13 stories packed into 157 pages, the longest stories only stretch a mere 16 pages, which leave some of them feeling unfinished – an effect compounded by the speculative fiction nature of the collection. In 'Parlour', a story within a story about a young man who frequents an ice cream parlour, the frame narrative is forgotten once the embedded narrative begins, and the ordinary setting jumps to speculative fiction only in the last two pages, catching the reader by surprise and leaving them with whiplash. Another story, 'Sentosa Forever', feels like an excerpt of a much bigger universe, but abridged in a way that confuses rather than piques interest. The brevity of Choo's tales, combined with his long sentences and longer paragraphs, makes for a rather claustrophobic read.

But wordiness has its place, and one story does find its footing from Choo's cramped style. 'An Investor's Guide to Abyssal Burial', an experimental story about burying funeral barges on the ocean floor, hits the nail precisely because it strikes the balance between its abstract narrative and corporate copywriting, feeling real and surreal at the same time.

In his other stories, however, Choo struggles to balance the real and the speculative. It isn't that he is unable to blend the paranormal and normal, but rather that many stories feel like they don't need the speculative element at all, and that they are shoehorned in so the collection would sit better on a speculative fiction bookshelf. In 'Voice on the Line', the narrator has a mysterious ailment which festers and grows as the story progresses, which appears to be a heavy-handed symbol of the trauma she faced as a sexual assault survivor. 'Paper Beats Stone' feels vaguely like a rehashing of the 1980s AIDS epidemic in the United States, replacing HIV with a mysterious skin disease and relocated to 2020s Singapore. 'The Last Days of the Van Kleef Aquarium', too, seems like an obvious attempt to use both mermaids and the old aquarium as metaphors for trans people. Only one story near the end, 'Hotun', seems free of speculative elements, but it feels like more of the other stories would have its narrative impact had they just shed their speculative sarcophagi.

There is a certain rush amongst young Singaporean authors these days to hurry their way to publication, and ironically for a collection entitled The Waiting Room, it feels as though Choo should have let his stories develop just a bit longer before publication, or at least added more stories written outside the constraints of creative writing classes at his alma mater. There is a constrained air hanging over many of the tales that feels like residue from rubric requirements, like the oddly consistent length of the stories, and several stories feel like they have been spawned from the same prompt. Two particularly similarly themed tales – 'The Last Days of the Van Kleef Aquarium' and 'Paper Beats Stone' – are unfortunately arranged consecutively in the collection, which blend the stories in my memory.

But to publish 13 stories at his age is no mean achievement, and while there is unevenness in Choo's first offering, the gleams of brilliance justify his early debut. In the title story, the deceased protagonist – who committed suicide at 17 – is asked if he knew and regretted that he had missed many good years of life. He replies: "There was no real answer to this, of course, but by then everything was done, and here we were." Perhaps there is no point wondering what the collection could have been with a bit more time. The Waiting Room is done, and here we are, waiting for Choo's next work.

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