By Toh Hsien Min

What does twenty mean to me?  Not much.  I can't think of a life event involving the number.  Nothing seemed to happen when I was twenty, which was possibly the fault of being in national service, when nothing happens.  My first book came out when I was nineteen, and then the year after the number conventionally held in British English to be the last that should be written in letters rather than numerals, after I turned 21, I left Singapore for four years in the UK.  Nor are there surrounding events in which the number is significant - none of my immediate family or my best friends' birthdays fall on the 20th, I think, although I've always been terrible at remembering birthdays (the reason I message one dear friend happy birthday on the morning of 31st October is that it's the 30th in New York where she is, and I'm only certain that it's one of these two days).  Twenty seems the sort of wholly innocuous number that I might pick in the 0-100 drinking game, because nobody ever thinks of picking twenty.  Even the year 2020 passed by in a flatness of lockdowns.  Most unusually, what my mind kept wandering back to was a mining engineer called Dr Twentyman-Jones in Wilbur Smith's page-turner Power of the Sword, which I had read in secondary school.  Flipping through those pages again, I now see his numbered name positioned him from the get-go as distinctly minor relative to the leading lady Centaine de Thiry.

This may be why I struggle to write an editorial on QLRS turning twenty.  Which we theoretically did in August, but which makes this our anniversary issue.  It seems a long time, and that's about that.  This makes the journal longer-lived than the Afghanistan war, longer than the sum total education needed to qualify as a medical doctor, longer than Lee Hsien Loong's term as Prime Minister.  We've also now just about overtaken our predecessor as Singapore's literary journal, Singa, in longevity.

Similarly, when it came to how to commemorate our twentieth year, it wasn't obvious what or even whether to do so.  We could put out a special issue, sure, but putting out an issue was what we would have done anyway.  In pre-Covid times, it might have been easy; find a venue, do a reading, ply people with finger food and wine (which was what happened when we turned ten).  As it happens, we will be doing a small panel discussion with the National Library Board on 2 Dec 2021, although at this point we don't know if it can be held in-person or only via Zoom, and the one thing we are sure of is that there will not be refreshments.  But to cut to the chase, after some discussion I allowed Kai Chai, Shu Hoong and publisher Fong Hoe Fang to convince me to compile some of the most memorable pieces in the journal's twenty-year history along with some new commissions into a commemorative four-book boxset titled Quiet Loving, Ravaging Search, which will be released in December.  Look out for it!

Returning to this issue, I'm not sure if we discussed at any length making it a special issue or leaving it an issue just like any other.  Perhaps, with the conclusion on the boxset, this became a question that didn't have to be asked.  Nevertheless, we have ended up with an issue of which we can be proud.  There are some excellent poems, along with a couple for which I felt I was taking a (justifiable) risk.  The three short stories are all beguiling in their own way, drawing the reader into their miniature worlds.  They also happen to all celebrate Singapore, like one or arguably both of the essays, and then to top it all off, our Extra Media section presents a doublebill on Singapore music, as a reminder again of the community that we serve.  Even as we look out to the world, we gaze in on our homeground, which has inspired and pushed and needled us for twenty years.  If hindsight is 20-20, then let us look forward with open and curious eyes, towards however large a number we can reach.

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