By Yeow Kai Chai

As a writer and editor of poetry and creative prose, Jonathan Chan is a nascent voice, but there is absolute seriousness in his craft, every word hewn from patience and observation.

Published in 2022 by Landmark Books, his debut poetry collection, going home, announces a promising talent who, as he avers, "has an abiding interest in faith, identity, and creative expression." He cites the works of Eugene Peterson, Robert Macfarlane, and Jamaica Kincaid as inspiration, and it's no surprise to find out that he has an affinity for Jakarta-born Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee, who shares a similar spiritual mission, and an itinerant and multi-cultural background.

Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, Chan was raised in Singapore, and had previously read for an undergraduate degree in English Literature at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a graduate degree in East Asian Studies at Yale University.

In an interview with Suspect Journal, he explains that the poem '5 foundings' "was an attempt to imagine my family establishing itself five times in different locales across time and space." In going home, he makes a persuasive case for reckoning with the "questions of roots, belonging, home, and culture" first before making an adequate turn in the collection to himself.

The poem '5 foundings' will appear in Roots: Korean Diaspora (Providence, Rhode Island, 2023), while other poems will appear in the indie press anthologies, Sunday Mornings at the River Spring 2023 (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, March 2023); Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Diary 2024 (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, October 2023); and Truthtellers: FVR Anthology 2022 (United Kingdom, 2023).

Chan has garnered several accolades, with the poem 'milton mansion' nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2023 by Free Verse Revolution; the poem 'atelophobia' awarded Honorable Mention at the Fare Forward Poetry Competition in September 2022; and the poem 'terra ujong' nominated for The 2021 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry by Singapore Unbound.

In 2023, he continues to edit poetry and possibly non-fiction for PR&TA, and read poetry for The Plentitudes.

1. What are you reading right now?
Lurching out of Singapore Writers Festival, I've been reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, alongside The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker.

I recently finished Christian Wiman's essay collection Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Ben Lerner's long essay The Hatred of Poetry, Spencer Reece's memoir The Secret Gospel of Mark, Noah Arhm Choi's poetry collection Cut to Bloom, and anthropologist Erik Harms' book Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I once thought myself close to the Protestant minister Isak in Min Jin Lee's Pachinko but realised I'm probably closer to his son Noa, riven by literary yearning and a split identity.  Maybe also the whisky priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory or Rodrigues in Shūsaku Endō's Silence. I have often identified with many of the speakers in Boey Kim Cheng's poems as well.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I am constricted in my writing to questions of identity, as is the cliché of any writer of the 'diaspora'.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
Identification is always imperfect and any comparison risks affectation. Two writers whose writing I've seen myself reflected in are Li-Young Lee, for his examinations of memory and family, and R. S. Thomas, in whom faith and doubt are locked in an embrace.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
If one believes that the will to write is something to be activated, then yes. I have lines and ideas stashed on a page on my Notes app. Some poems take time to gestate, others tumble out in moments of need. I find that reading widely helps to provide the engagement that causes images and conceits to churn.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Integrity, honesty, and attention to technique.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Selfishness.  

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?

'Things take the time they take.
Don't worry.'

– Mary Oliver

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
sang as an undergraduate in the finals of a gospel choir concert that was broadcast on the BBC. One of our judges was Rick Astley.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
I'm partial to all of them. Sometimes a film might be all three, like the Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once or Bong Joon-ho's Parasite.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Ironically, while I've often used the word 'animated' in recent writing, as in how something is 'animated' by something else, I've grown to dislike the excessive use of the word 'resonate'.

12. Please compose a rhyming couplet with the following words: spork, sampan, tteokbokki.

staving off death, tteokbokki glazed in a shimmer,
a wooden spork snapped. the sampan had sunken at winter.

  13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A glass of water.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
When I have space to be alone – most often in the evenings.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Langston Hughes, Arundhati Roy, and Wang Gungwu. For the opportunity to listen and to learn.

16. At your debut book launch in July 2022, you concluded that the notion of 'home' is "amorphous, complex, and studded with varying points of weight and familiarity." In an age of increasing globalisation, mobility and digital connection, how important, as a third culture kid, do you think a sense of self is still tied to familial and (trans-)national legacy, or do you feel you could freely chart your own peculiar identity?
For me, the ability to chart that peculiar singularity has arisen from a grasp and understanding of the familial, the national, as well as the spiritual. Understanding every place my family has called 'home' has allowed me to see how different elements cohere in how I think of myself. I would hazard to say that 'third culture' is perhaps inadequate as a manner of describing myself, especially as my parents are both 'third culture kids' in their own right. Having been born in one country and raised in another, neither of which my parents are from, some other term might function better.

I suspect that there are more and more people like me in Singapore and elsewhere than we may think, each trying to understand how they are placed in relation to their histories and generational ties, in relation to the places they have lived in, and in relation to the compulsions they hold. Digitalisation has allowed all of us to feel less distant from the many places we have known and loved. Hopefully, this does coalesce not as a some kind of inchoate morass. Rather, I hope it yields ways of seeing ourselves that are distinctive and rich with meaning.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
He served as he loved.

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