By Yeow Kai Chai

As Christine Chia herself readily admits, people who meet her for the first time are often taken aback by how warm she is in person. Her conviviality bely the ways dualities shade and shadow her tough-as-nails narratives, meshing autobiography, journalism, fiction and poetic imagination.

Her first poetry collection, The Law of Second Marriages (2011), invites you into a house of mirrors and hitherto unopened rooms, reflecting and refracting fragments of her storied life – a father's untimely passing, a mother's abuse and child abandonment, and a second mother. In fact, she had described her family history in an earlier interview "as a locked room that you locked so that your guests won't think you are an incurable, infectious mess and shun you forever." Her second verse collection, Separation: A History (2014), zooms in on her father's life and justxaposes it against the political divorce between Singapore and Malay.

A former educator who taught at Victoria Junior College, she  also co-edited a series of poetry anthologies, namely, A Luxury We Cannot Afford (2014) and A Luxury We Must Afford (2016), both from Math Paper Press, and Lines Spark Code (Ethos Books, 2017), the latter of which was commissioned by the Ministry of Education to help spark Singaporean students' interest in Singaporean poetry.

Chia has been featured at various editions of Singapore Writers Festival, as well as the Singapore Literature Festival in New York, and has contributed her poetry to journals such as Prairie Schooner, Softblow, Washington Square Review, and Blue Lyra Review. She is drafting her first speculative fiction novel and revising her first play, We Cannot Bring Money When We Die, after its first read at Centre 42. 

  1) What are you reading right now?
  Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad; Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen; Micropolitics, a translated collection of four contemporary Thai performance scripts; and The Waves by Virginia Woolf.    

2) If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
  Any of the heroines in Shakespeare's comedies. They get great lines and a happy ending. What's not to love about that?    

3) What is the greatest misconception about you?
  I think most people who don't know me are surprised by how friendly and approachable I am in person. I'm "cold" on the page. Millions of young people in China use an interesting expression that I would like to borrow. Frustrated by the convivial customs of Chinese culture, they want to declare themselves "spiritually Finnish". I'm "spiritually Finnish" in that way too. I prefer winter to summer.  

4) Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
  I can't think of a living writer I can identify with but I LOVE so many living writers. I try to read their books and 'fangirl' them while they are still alive. I'm incredibly lucky that Mark Strand and John Ashbery were still alive when I was in New York and I almost can't believe that I can look forward to more books by Sharon Olds, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Jericho Brown, Ilya Kaminsky, Franny Choi, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Helen Oyeyemi, and Valeria Luiselli. For a dead writer, I identify with the childhood of Charles Dickens, and his need to walk off his emotions and excess energy, but not anything else about his life.      

5) Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
  Writer's block can be due to so many things. I become a detective – did I mess up my sleep? Am I stalling because my subconscious knows I'm in the wrong direction? I'm a big believer in sleeping on the problem, and getting enough sleep. Our body keeps the score, and is quite often smarter than our mind. The subconscious is my co-creator.    

6) What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
  Compassion, imagination, discipline and ruthlessness. All are necessary for good writing and editing.    

7) What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
  I do not separate writers from their humanity. I deplore poverty of spirit in any human.  

  8) Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
  "Call me Ishmael."    

9) Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
   am good at keeping other people's secrets.  

10) At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
  Comedy. Life is already an action thriller, and bad luck could easily turn it into a tragedy.    

11) What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
  I don't have any favourite or detested words. When I'm editing, it's quite clear which word is a pet word of the author's and I try not to have favourites now. Maybe you can tell me if I have a pet word. These things are often invisible to oneself.      

12) Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: reconciliation, drift, alien.

The mother bird doesn't nag; reconciliation 
to disappointment unnecessary when you can drift-tip the nest/alien air station   

13) What object is indispensable to you when you write?
  My laptop, and a quiet room.  

14) What is the best time of the day for writing?
  Any time when I have a solid chunk of time and can be undisturbed.  

15) If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
  Jesus, the originator of the last supper, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton. I know Jericho Brown loves Lucile Clifton the person and her work so they'll get along fabulously, and Jesus is a signficant inspiration for both of them. I love the work of Clifton and Brown, and Jesus will bless all of us.  

16) Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard spills the beans about his family in the six-volume auto-fiction series My Struggle. It is critically acclaimed but half his family won't speak to him. You yourself have wrestled with your family history in your two poetry collections. How do you decide on the subjects for your poems, and do you draw a line on privacy?
  I have two contradictory impulses. The first is to err on the side of kindness, to cover up, to silence myself. The second impulse is taken from Anne Lamott: "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."    

17) What would you write on your own tombstone?
  "Beloved, Blessed"  

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