By Philip Holden

The Colour of Twilight
Yeng Pway Ngon, translated by Jeremy Tiang
City Book Room (2026) / 261 pages / SGD 20

I read Yeng Pway Ngon's last novel, The Colour of Twilight, in its recent translation by Jeremy Tiang, with an uncanny sense of double vision. Its protagonist, Ming Wai, is 63 at the beginning of the narrative, and frequently commutes from the HDB heartland to the new National Library building on Victoria Street and a Chinese-language bookshop in Bras Brash Complex next door to it. He reads, writes, and has anticipated and unanticipated meetings with friends and figures from his past, before returning to his flat in the evening. In Singapore in the last year, at precisely the same age as Ming Wai, I followed the same rhythm, also commuting from a heartland flat to the National Library to work, and occasionally, when conscience stuck me about the inadequacy of my Chinese, haunting bookstores such as Maha Yu Yi in Bras Basah Complex. And yet my world and the world of the novel are incommensurate.

This experience of stereoscopy, or double sight, is perhaps a useful way of thinking of the relationship between Sinophone and Anglophone writing in Singapore. In a concluding translator's note to Yeng's novel, Tiang writes that the author's works, despite their historical scope and political acuteness, have not been "widely read in Singapore or as big a part of the literary conversation as they deserve to be". Thanks to the labour of translators such as Tiang and publishers such as City Book Room, a substantial amount of Yeng's work is now available in English, including seven novels: A Man Like Me (1987; translated 1993), Lonely Face (1989; translated 2019), Art Studio (2001; translated 2014), Unrest (2002; translated 2012), Trivialities About Me and Myself (2006; translated 2014), Costume (2015; translated 2019) and the novel presently under review. The number of novels in English, indeed, now surpasses the output of the only English-language novelist of Yeng's generation whose oeuvre might compare to him in terms of depth, breadth and historical resonance – fellow Cultural Medallion recipient Suchen Christine Lim.

Yeng's last novel moves back from the geographical and historical sweep of Art Studio, Unrest and Costume to the more confined stories of A Man Like Me and Lonely Face, with their focus on the tortured inner life of a male protagonist looking back with regret and guilt on failed marriages and other broken relationships. Yeng's protagonists in these novels, published in the 1980s, were in their 30s, and Ming Wai is of the same generation as them, now reaching retirement age after living through 30 more years of Singapore's history. Yeng's protagonist is the author of a well-regarded novel and several short-story collections, and writes a regular column for a Chinese newspaper. Chance meetings cause him to reflect on his past: his self-centred behaviour in his marriage to the poet Hwee Ying and her untimely death through cancer, and his relationships with his English-educated brother Ming Yin, and with friends such as the actor Yi Fan and publisher Yan Ru. Through another encounter, he reconnects with his early love Mei Fong, trapped in an abusive relationship with Sai Hung, the man she chose to marry instead of him. Remembering the past, for Ming Wai, also becomes a process of narrativisation in which he must choose between competing versions of events, or revisit them and understand them in a new light. The novel ends with Yan Ru telling of a newspaper report of Sai Hung's brutal assault on Mei Fong that has left her hospitalised and possibly dead; Ming Wai, sitting with him at a kopitiam, wonders if his friend is mistaken, while the sun sets in the "twilit sky behind the orderly buildings", its last rays, the colour of dusk, taking on the colour of blood.

What forms of double sight does the novel offer us? The first is, as with all Yeng's work, the tracing of the experiences of the Chinese-educated in post-independence Singapore. In the narrative present of the novel, this is a story of loss, epitomised by the title of Ming Wai's first novel, Hollow Remembrance. Open Book, the Chinese-language bookstore Ming Wai haunts, finally closes down; "Not… many young people here can read literature in Chinese," he notes, "and most of the ones who can are immigrants" who are not interested in Singapore-based writing. Feng, the owner's assistant, who Ming Wai guesses must be in his early 70s, takes a job cleaning tables at a food court when the store closes. His fate, Ming Wai reflects, is like that of many elderly Chinese-educated Singaporeans of his generation who never managed to learn enough English to fully enter an Anglophone workplace. The leftist politics embraced by many of the Chinese-educated in the struggle for decolonisation is now almost forgotten; Yan Ru still frets about government control and one-party dominance, but he is unable to conceive of the possibility of change.

The experience of the Chinese-educated explored in The Colour of Twilight, however, reaches out beyond a specific community to engage with other forms of social loss in Singapore. Ming Wai is conscious of changes in the built environment, and a dissociation from the natural world. He remembers how he played on a beach as a child, gazing out over a seemingly endless sea, dotted with ships. The sea has been filled in and tall buildings built on it; a new generation of Singaporeans no longer see the ocean from the places in which they live and will "never hear waves slapping across the shore or smell salt in the air". Ming Wai's migration further inland, "further from the water", into the HDB heartland, thus doesn't simply promote nostalgia; rather, it points to an impoverished national imaginary of survival in which the nation-state is delinked from regional cultural flows.

A second theme with wider resonance is the place of artistic practice in contemporary Singapore, and in particular an artistic practice that is not commodified. The novel illustrates the cosmopolitan lifeworld of Chinese-educated intellectuals in Singapore. There are cultural influences from a wider Sinophone world: Teresa Teng's music, classical Chinese novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber, writers of the May Fourth movement, modernist fiction writers such as Eileen Chang, and contemporary Taiwanese poets, as well as 1960s wu xia movies starring Cheng Pei-Pei. Ming Wai and his friends, however, read much more widely. The narrative begins with the protagonist immersed in the world of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's proto-magical realist novel Pedro Páramo: he makes reference during its course to Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Albert Camus, Leo Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence and John Updike, among others. What's most interesting is how these literary references become an everyday part of the protagonist's and his companions' senses of self and are used as a way of reflecting on their own life stories. This extends to a process of writing, Ming Wai spending "most of each day hanging out with my fictional characters", and using the process of writing his previous novel, and the new one he is working on, as a form of catharsis. In a Singapore and global literary network marked by festivals, MFA programmes, and the expectation that writers engage in relentless self-promotion and networking, there's something grounding about this internal literary landscape of the heart that resists neoliberal economic flows.

"Being a Sinophone writer in Singapore," Ming Wai muses, "means having pretty much no market value." The figure of the artist remaining true to a commitment to a vision of practice and self-exploration, regardless of the expectations of wider society and the marketplace, might in one perspective seem outdated in contemporary Singapore. Yet it's also a repetitive theme in Anglophone writing in various genres: one thinks of Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and, in a slightly different vein, Suchen Lim's Fistful of Colours. And the arc of Ming Wai's life as artistic practice also brings us to a further facet of the novel: its focus on the process of ageing. Singapore, as we know, is now a rapidly ageing society, and the 'young old' such as myself, in that limbo between access to CPF savings at 55 and CPF Life payments at 65, find themselves caught in two narratives. The first is a traditional one of ageing as a process of decline in health and cognitive abilities. The second, more recent, stresses active ageing, exercise and continued sociability, all worthy goals in themselves. Yet neither narrative opens the full possibilities for reflection and acceptance that ageing might potentially bring. The Colour of Twilight, as its title suggests, unflinchingly opens this space of reflection. Ageing is not easy on the body: Ming Wai has high blood pressure and cholesterol, and avoids further check-ups because he does not know how he will pay for healthcare costs. His body aches, and he is becoming more absent-minded.  Nor is it easy on the soul: much of the novel, despite the experiences of comfort in meeting friends in the bookstore, kopitiam or market, is about loneliness and regret that friendships in the present cannot fully assuage. The new novel that Ming Wai is writing, he tells us, is about the experience of ageing, in which the protagonist lives on so long that all his friends pass away, and only a younger generation survives with whom communication is difficult. Remembering his friends, he now lives, as Ming Wai does, with "living people and dead people existing side by side".

Perhaps the most acute element of Yeng's exploration of ageing is in his depiction of stories of wounded masculinity. While reading Yeng's novel, I also attended the recent Albatross File exhibition, also in the National Library in Victoria Street, again in the very same space that Ming Wai inhabits. The story it told almost exclusively featured male protagonists, with a tiny part for Kwa Geok Choo. In the filmic reconstruction that formed a central part of the exhibition, the actors who played Singapore's founding fathers on separation were impossibly young and glamorous. The actor who played S. Rajaratnam seemed to be in his late 20s, even though Raja was 50 at the time. A youthful Goh Keng Swee sported a suitably pruned version of a broccoli haircut, very different from the famous receding hairline that was already visible in 1965. And the story that was told was also one that was implicitly gendered, with rational thought and action cooling the feminised passions of emotional ties. Yeng's male characters, in contrast, are not immortal, and do not operate from a privileged position of self-knowledge. They labour with and are often conditioned by gendered social expectations, struggling to live up to expected social roles such as those of breadwinner in a marriage. Yeng read deeply regarding gender issues, as evinced by the breadth of reference in his March 1990 article on feminism in Lianhe Zaobao. We might thus see The Colour of Twilight as a final chapter of an ethnography of masculinity that provides a counterpoint to the celebratory stories of lives of politicians and businessmen tied to the rise of the nation-state; in the novel, as in Yeng's earlier works, we have stories of uncertainty, doubt, regret, introspection and loss.

At the beginning of The Colour of Twilight, Ming Wai is immersed in reading a novel so deeply that he finds it difficult to tear himself away. By the narrative's end, he is writing his own, second novel: he has almost finished the first draft, although he is not yet sure how the story will end. His first novel will soon be translated into English. Metafictional elements in which art and life intersect cluster here, drawing us out into Yeng's own life and the composition of this, his last novel, that also does not quite have a conventional ending and has now been translated into English. Above all, perhaps, the double sight that The Colour of Twilight promotes, as dusk falls, asks us to look inside the self and find the social there, and prefigures the dawn of more complex and reflective stories of Singapore.

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