By Jeremy Tiang

Yeng Pway Ngon's last novel, The Colour of Twilight, tells the story of an ageing writer who has devoted his life to literature, yet can't stop questioning his role in society. What place is there for a Sinophone author in a country as capitalist, Westernised and English-dominated as Singapore? What does it mean to be an artist in a world that cares so little about art? This question runs through not just much of Yeng's writing, but also his whole existence.

Yeng's accomplishments were astonishing in their breadth. He wrote poetry, essays, short stories and novels, as well as plays for the stage and radio; he published literary journals and established the iconic bookstore, Grassroots Book Room. He had a dogged, fierce intelligence. He was incredibly kind and generous to those he took under his wing, myself included.

I began translating because there were books from Singapore that I wanted to make available to people who did not read Chinese, and Yeng's novels are responsible for a large part of this fascination; from the epic scale of Unrest or Art Studio to the intimate revelations of Lonely Face or Trivialities About Me and Myself, they manage to be deeply personal, uncompromisingly political and historically engaged all at once. Yet for all their brilliance, they are not particularly widely read in Singapore, or as big a part of the literary conversation as they deserve to be. As a character Chan Siu Wah reflects in Yeng's Costume, "very few people in Singapore read Chinese books, and Chinese-language writers here mostly do it as a hobby. It's all but impossible to make a living."

In The Non-Existent Lover, translated by his wife Goh Beng Choo, a fictional character complains to her creator, "This is not a conducive place for creative endeavours, not for a writer like you. Don't you think this place is dead and suffocating?" To which the writer replies, "I know my works and I are not suited to this place, but it's my country. I was born and bred here. I love my country. I love this land."

Did his country love him back? On one hand, there were the honours (a Cultural Medallion, three Singapore Literature Prizes, and regionally, the S.E.A. Write Award). He was feted at the Singapore Writers Festival and invited to attend residencies locally and abroad. On the other hand, he was detained without trial for suspected Communist sympathies, and as a Sinophone writer, he found himself more and more on the fringes of an increasingly English-centred literary sphere. Like so many of his characters, he was sidelined by a shifting society, yet persisted in recording his view from the margins with great clarity, even as his life dwindled.

There is a passage in The Colour of Twilight that I feel I must quote in full:

Why are human beings so afraid of death? Because it means losing everything you possess, including your body. What happens afterwards? That's a question for religion. Death isn't something you can come back from, and because no one's ever returned to tell us what to expect, everyone's experience is theirs alone. Everyone faces this sooner or later. What we actually fear is the slow march towards the end. Although life is a procession towards death, young people are able to talk about it with the same nonchalance as when they debate the existence of god. But to an old person, so close to the coffin, death becomes an intimate question, and the gap between weakening and dying is filled with loneliness and pain.

Yeng Pway Ngon passed away on January 10, 2021. He was a better writer than Singapore deserved, and I hope one day we come to appreciate that. We were so very lucky to have had him with us.

(An addendum: I fear I have made Yeng sound dour, which he absolutely was not. As a corrective, here's his theory of shit from Unrest: "Most people do this, omit the shit from their lives. It sits there in their intestines, but when it comes to their thoughts, it doesn't exist. The strange thing is, shit itself isn't satisfied with being left in this position. It longs to be part of human discourse, even to play a dominant role." He took great scatological glee in making sure we saw the shit, and I loved him for it.)

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