By Yeow Kai Chai

In July 2022, Clara Chow accomplished a feat not achieved before in the history of the Singapore Literature Prize – she is the first writer to be shortlisted in three categories across two different languages.

Her nominations were for her travelogue New Orleans (Hermit Press, 2020) in the English creative non-fiction category; a collection of short stories Not Great, But At Least Something (Hermit Press, 2021) in English fiction; and a bilingual verse collection Lousy Love Poems (几首烂情诗) (Hermit Press, 2021) in Chinese poetry.

Chow was not expecting the triple nominations, as she was not sure she had a readership. As she said in an interview: "To be honest, I was just asking myself: Why am I doing this? It got to a point where I felt very happy when I was not thinking about writing. I was considering becoming a painter instead."

Those who know her as a friend as well as a colleague from The Straits Times understand her sentiments. A journalist for most of her life, she only surfaced in the literary community in 2016 with her debut title, Dream Storeys (Ethos Books), written after interviewing nine architects about chimeric structures and setting her short stories in them. In 2020, another collection of short fiction, Modern Myths (Math Paper Press, 2018), was shortlisted for English fiction; and in 2022, she released Tales from the K-pop (Hermit Press).

For better or worse, she's often perceived as the oddity, an outlier who does not belong to any tribe – not young enough to be accepted by certain 'woke' quarters, and not established enough to be revered. She isn't easily categorisable either. According to her weebly.com bio, her works-in-progress "involve typewriters, joss paper, disappearing ink, Chinese poetry, East-Asian TV dramas, tarot cards, Rolodexes, cowboys, samizdat, honey, baroque music, acts of female fandom, over-policing of museum visitors, bone-folders, motherhood, orchids, A.I. translation and self-care."

In short, she marches to the beat of her own drum beat.

The pandemic proved to be a particularly fruitful time. In 2020, she launched her own imprint Hermit Press and released two travelogues New Orleans and Caves. She handled everything from start to finish – layout, cover design, editing, print-readying, marketing, and knocking on doors to distribute her books. They are the actualisation of what makes Clara Chow Clara Chow – she'd find a way to make things work for her, come what may.

The books have  also been a boon for others during the past couple of years. With the world in the throes of a lockdown, these travelogues were a wonderful source of escapism and wish fulfilment, but also a conduit for deep, meaningful self-reflection, to exorcise some ghosts, and, yes, came closer to who we are.

Yeow Kai Chai (YKC): Travelogues are a familiar, if well-worn, genre over the centuries – Marco Polo's Silk Road accounts are the stuff of legends, and in China, 遊記文學 (yóujì wénxué) or 'travel record literature' from the Song Dynasty onwards have long incorporated detailed social and topographical information. What is the appeal of the travelogue or travel writing to you?

Clara Chow (CC): For me, every journey has a 'ready-made' narrative arc: you start from Point A, and then make your way to Point B, and hopefully by the end you've reached an actual different place, and quite possibly a different emotional and mental state. Maybe it's even possible to write a travelogue about a trip to the supermarket, if the 'traveller' is sufficiently altered by the end of that excursion. I've written about going to Yishun before, for a travel writing course and anthology under the mentorship of Boey Kim Cheng, who taught me that it's not so much the destination that is important, but the individual quest. It's a process of discovery.

Sometimes, the writer herself is not altered by the journey, but it's also worth examining what that kind of psychological stasis means and how our socio-cultural environment gives rise to it. In that way, what changes is one's perspective of one's unchanged circumstances. And I think that has happened in at least one of my books.

But going back to your question: I think travelogues appeal to me first and foremost as an opportunity for me to go somewhere new and experience the unknown – whether through working on my own or vicariously through the writers I read. I've lived all my life in Singapore, which is to say I have been going round and round on this island for 45 years. I've always wondered what kind of person I would be if I lived elsewhere, so each travelogue is a way for me to test out another life. To imagine a parallel self.

Some destinations are definitely easier to write about than others – there's something so attractive about exotic locales, and t the writer's experience of them which jostle against that whole bank of associations in art and popular culture. But I also like the un-obvious places, the ones that have been visited a million times and shunned by seasoned travellers. A travelogue isn't a practical guide, so it's just fun to be a complete tourist and document your own silly, inimitable and giddy reactions. You are that new, undiscovered thing in a strange land.

YKC: You wrote your first travel book, New Orleans, in the middle of lockdown in 2020 as the Covid raged all over the world. What inspired you to write New Orleans? Was the decision to write it made before the trip? Did the pandemic and the launch of your own imprint Hermit Press have anything to do with it?

CC: There was a prior agreement with the person I travelled with to each write a little book when we went on the quick trip to New Orleans. And I think New Orleans would have been a very different book if the pandemic hadn't happened. It might have just been a hodgepodge of photos or a chatty list of recommendations.

But writing it during the Circuit Breaker, when we were all home-bound and it seemed like everything was going to recede into chaos – I think that gave a sort of nostalgic poignancy to the way I wrote. For about two or three weeks (about five times as long as the actual trip to New Orleans itself), I would get up in the morning and write longhand in a Moleskine notebook. It made me feel a little like Bruce Chatwin. It was like surgical reconstruction of a beautiful, innocent time after collective traumatic injury. Everything became that much more precious. I was taking comfort in small details, just finding sanity in the physical act of moving the pen. The ink I used was called Raven Noir and it reminded me on some level of Edgar Allen Poe and his The Masque of the Red Death.

So when the thing was done, I thought I'd just publish it myself. It felt like the sort of world in which we were doing everything by ourselves anyway. Hermit Press was basically cooked up to give an umbrella for New Orleans. I just kept using it after that.

YKC: As a fellow alumnus of the Iowa Writing Program (IWP) Fall Residency, I savoured reading New Orleans, finding myself chuckling ever so often. Your account is relatable, sometimes poignant, but overall very funny. The tone is a tricky thing. How do you ascertain it, without coming across as self-indulgent?

CC: I think I was a very funny person in New Orleans. You should have seen me; I was a hoot. We were doubled over laughing in the streets. And really, what could be more ridiculous than a Singaporean-Chinese auntie strutting around with her foldable umbrella, high-fiving all these colourful American characters? The city has that kind of energy and resilience. It brings out the power in you.

My friend and fellow traveller Santiago Loza had a lot to do with it, too. We were communicating in English, which is not his first language, so a lot of what we were discussing had to be couched in the most essential way. And that gave our conversation a very odd, child-like quality, even though what we talked about was not childish. I think I picked up some cadences from his Spanish syntax and lively turns of phrases. And there is also, of course, his very refusal to self-pity, his absolute defiance of the stupid things in life. I think all of that contributed to how the book ended up sounding.

YKC: The trip down South was merely a few days long, yet you managed to capture the warmth of the place and its people. Did you assiduously document your observations as the trip progressed – or was everything recalled in hindsight? I couldn't imagine you didn't take down specific notes, especially with some snippets of actual dialogue between you and the other IWP writers?

CC: I really didn't take notes – no time! – except for the last night when I went back to the hotel and scribbled down the exchange which closed the book. Truman Capote famously didn't take notes or use tape-recordings when he did interviews, and I guess I was maybe subconsciously taking this New Orleans son's cue and letting myself rely on my sieve-like memory? But everything was so fast and fresh, it was easy to remember stuff. I love quoting Stephen King on how "the writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalise bad ideas," and I take it to mean that if it's good, you're not going to be able to forget it even if you tried.

YKC: Did you verify/check/countercheck with your fellow travellers and rewrite your narrative, or you didn't care and kept it as an entirely subjective story? In any case, what did the characters in your account, such as Santiago Loza and 'Dead Cat', say about the book, assuming they have read the finished book?

CC: Haha, I felt a little nervous when I first read this question, because you and I used to work in the same newspaper office and it is a big no-no for a journalist not to fact-check. But creative non-fiction is a different ball game and I didn't feel like I needed to counter-check with other people (especially when I didn't name them in full or say anything libellous) as the events were recent – as opposed to memoirs when you have to call your mother or ex-boyfriend to make sure it really happened like you remembered 20 years ago. The gap between reality and what you subjectively remember will always be there. I felt it was small enough in this instance that I could live with it.

But the other thing was, I was actually very anxious about letting anybody read the book. I sent the proof to Santiago to read – I wanted to make sure he was okay with the way I'd portrayed him. And he was. But then I got into this state, just after I sent the book to print, where I didn't want it to be sold. I didn't want anyone to see it, because I had put so much of myself in there. I think that kind of cold feet is probably a sign that you've been as honest as you can.

Side note: I recently read The Sun Also Rises, and looked up the real-life woman who inspired Lady Brett Ashley. And apparently she had been rather upset by the book, because of the way Hemingway portrayed her and the way he didn't bother to disguise the people the characters were based on. Lesley M.M. Blume wrote a book about this, and quotes Donald Stewart, on whom the character of Bill Gorton was based, as calling the book "nothing but a report on what happened… journalism". Lady Duff, the blueprint for Lady Brett Ashley, was said to call the novel cruel and a nasty trick played on her and the others. And I think there is always that kind of risk and ethical consideration in any kind of writing, where the people who inspired the work are then put under scrutiny. I think it's important to acknowledge that one writer's filtering of reality does not constitute the whole truth. And I hope I have been fair and kind.

YKC: Writing about strangers or acquaintances is very different from writing about people you know intimately, what more fellow pesky and equally opinionated writers. Did writing about Santiago et al create an extra burden, i.e. trying to get their consent and nod of approval?

CC: As mentioned before, I sent the manuscript to Santiago just so he wouldn't be nastily surprised when it came out. I think a version of me appears in one of his recent books, Nadadores Lentos, but I haven't read it because I'm pretty okay with whatever literary liberties people want to take with me, and told him so. I will wait for it to be translated from Spanish into English.

YKC: New Orleans isn't set in a distant past, but the exacting conditions of the pandemic have lent the story an unintended glow of nostalgia, a romance of an unlikely couple from Singapore and Argentina, on the run from the toads of reality. A fair description?

CC: I'm glad you see it this way. I won't disagree. The only thing is the phrase "on the run." I suffer from joint pains and a whole host of weird ailments, so it was more like brisk walk, at best. And maybe we were brisk-walking towards, around and together with the toads of reality and kissing them so they could turn into frogs.

YKC: Travel writing can lapse easily into sentimentality, and you are archly aware of it. On pages 4 and 5, you explicate the function of crying and on page 80, you admit that "Reliving a journey…you are reminded how beautiful it was, and how, now, it's over" and that it has become "a mirage…populated by fictional characters – yourself included." Were there parts of the experience you chose to leave out, because they would be, well, too much?

CC: Haha, not to be arch, but if I said yes, that would mean people would keep asking me what those juicy excised bits were, right? So, no.

That said, I only had so few days to draw on. In the face of such paucity of information, you can be sure that if the material were good, I wouldn't have held out on you.

YKC: I was intrigued by your venture into "dark tourism" – a visit to the Whitney Plantation, the only former plantation site in Louisiana with a focus on slavery and where generations of Africans were enslaved to establish and maintain indigo, rice, and sugar crops (pages 27 – 38). Santiago confessed his "white guilt" and you critiqued Singapore's own complicity in keeping migrant workers in dormitories at the height of the Covid infections. And then there was a moment you were called out for singing in an arbour. Tell us more about how you and your fellow writers navigate the moral complexities of such a visit.

CC: The visit to the plantation was arranged by IWP, and Sarah Elgatian, who organised the trip, told me she chose the Whitney for the way it redressed the plantation narrative and told it from the perspectives of the enslaved people. So, in a way, that decision was fortuitously made for us and I'm grateful that we were not given white-washed, photogenic experiences and rightly so made to confront uncomfortable issues. But it was also, like most thought-provoking experiences, not didactic.

The visit was respectful, and I found it very interesting to observe other tour group members' reactions and behaviour – what we are not conscious of doing is the most revealing. And then, ironically, I am the one doing that weird sub-conscious thing of singing. But it was really hard not to – the plantation grounds today are actually very beautiful and peaceful. So I just think that moral complexities aren't something you are even aware of negotiating. You cannot help acting out what you've been trained your whole life to do. The thing is to then pull up, pause, and examine that behaviour once you are made aware of it, and let that new knowledge change and guide you going forward.

To a certain extent, I don't think self-righteous finger-wagging to police people into politically-correct behaviour and speech is effective either. That's just posturing. I like the way the Whitney presented you with their point of view and then left you to draw your own conclusions. It's by no means a neutral point of view, but it is an antidote to a lot of falseness and avoidance being peddled out there. I want to be the sort of person capable of drawing logical, compassionate conclusions.

YKC: I love the way you end New Orleans, with two good friends, Santiago and you, chatting about plans for further travel and writing. Something he said about you rings true: "When you go back home everything is going to be different. Your career. Your life. Everything." It's 2023 now. Looking back, how have four brief days in New Orleans changed your perspective?

CC: There are many days when I lie in bed and moan. Many days in which I don't understand why we are put on this Earth. And when that happens, I try to think about New Orleans and how, if you just get through the bad bits, there will be good bits that make being alive worth it.

Before New Orleans, I had been sad over the fact that nobody seemed to believe in me. We live in a society where a lot of emphasis is put on track records and hitting targets and demonstrating capability. And after a few years of writing, I felt like I had nothing very concrete to show. Certainly, well-meaning friends and relatives are always asking why I don't get a job. But in Santiago, I found a frank, objective friend who showed me that it didn't matter if nobody cared, as long as I did. I had to believe in myself.

We went to Washington DC after New Orleans, and I bought a keychain that said: BELIEVE IN YOUR FUCKING SELF. It's like one of those motel room key-tags, with gold embossed letters. I carried my car keys on it for a while, but I don't need a visual reminder any more.

YKC: New Orleans comprises 28 untitled chapters, which make the whole thing feel like a series of episodes or vignettes. Your second travel book, Caves, felt more staccato, divided into 13 titled chapters: 'The Page of Pentacles,' 'Ipoh,' 'Vault,' Sniffing the sublime,' Life is a tortoise fight,' 'Kitsch and ghosts,' 'Shadows,' 'Colonialism's haunted landscape,' 'Man-cave,' 'Nobody,' 'The emptiness of pavements,' 'Alone,' and 'Vista.' How did you arrive at the structure of each book?

CC: I have a bad back so after a couple of hours in my lousy office chair, I would need to stretch or lie down. So writing is also about how long I can stand being in a chair. And I think that might have resulted in short chapters and short books. With the travelogues, I think about certain key scenes I want to write, and then I proceed in a more or less chronological order.

YKC: Caves is tonally quite different too. New Orleans feels like a wonderfully communal trip/romance which is too good to be true; a rollercoaster of highs and lows. Caves is, in comparison, a solo, pandemic-era trip to a sleepy Malaysian town, Ipoh. Whereas the American trip is fuelled by bonhomie, the second feels more tentative and low-key, albeit closer to home. Is that a fair reading?

CC: They are polar opposites, aren't they? One is so sociable and filled with people, and the other is so quiet and maybe a little lonely. Lonely in a good way. One is an extrovert, the other an introvert.

I used to think that most people loved New Orleans more, but then I met someone who said Caves made him cry and he took it with him when he went to Ipoh to visit his maternal family. And I felt so glad and grateful that there's space for both these books in the world and readers' affections.

YKC: Much of Caves is an interior monologue where you try to work out your own issues. In fact, on page 13, you state: "I think of myself using the trip to Ipoh as a way of looking into the mirror; to discover the person I've become." By the end of the trip, you say: "Everything is a vista./A feeling of clarity comes over me." Can you elaborate on what that "vista" means for you?

CC: Maybe it's a little like when you roll the boulder away from the entrance of the cave, and suddenly you are free? You can see much further and get out of your own way. You were the one who put that big rock there in the first place because you wanted to feel safe in your cave. But safety also gets in the way of growth.

YKC: The cave motif is evidenced in the preponderance of safes and cave temples in your narrative. The most surprising example, however, comes on page 41: "We have been going through caves all our lives – starting with the birth canal. Born and reborn./Sometimes, the only way is through. We best remember this in our darkest hour." I know you didn't touch on parenthood or motherhood much in these two books, but how does being a parent affect your travel writing?

CC: I recently went on a 12-day trip to Seoul with my husband and 16-year-old son. And by the end of the trip, he was so sick of us. Imagine being stuck in a hotel room in winter with your snoring, farting, middle-aged parents. But who knows? There might be a mother-son Seoul travelogue out of all this.

But for the longest time, when my two sons were small, parenting and travelling were two competing, incompatible impulses. To travel was to go away from my kids for weeks on end. And there was always this sense of guilt. And yet, travelling was also when I could be myself again, away from the responsibility and lens of motherhood that everyone inevitably viewed me through. If I wasn't a parent, I would probably travel more but write less because the difference between my stay-at-home self and my abroad self won't be so stark.

We did travel a lot with the kids before they became so busy with their own schedules. I maintain that travel is the best education, and I want the boys to be able to find their own way through the world. Not by air-conditioned coach and packaged tours, but by gnarly, unreliable public transport. So that they know there is a gazillion ways to do things, to get somewhere. To communicate with people even though they only have a handful of phrases in a new language. I look forward to the day they travel on their own.

YKC: You name the book Caves, and not Ipoh, after the town. It's really not so much about that specific place per se, but more about its caves operating as an objective correlative to represent the writer's own set of emotions and prejudices?

CC: I sometimes wonder if it were easier if I had just named it Ipoh. Some days, I forget and am tempted to call it that myself. But yes, I felt it was more a thematic sort of book, rather than about a straightforward destination. Also, I did go to Ipoh to look specifically at caves. I saw the cave temples on the Internet, and I was like, wah, I need to go there. So it was a cave-skewed trip, and it would be false-advertising to call it Ipoh. People would be like, but why you never talk about the tau gay, the horfun, this and that? Ipoh has a lot to offer and I didn't feel like I covered it properly. I need to go back.

YKC: Let's talk about the light/dark dichotomy when it comes to the cave motif. In the chapter 'Shadows' (pages 65 – 70), you allude to Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave' in his work Republic, where the philosopher likens people untutored to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. At the same time, as you come in from the outside, the darkness also draws you in, and frightens you, such as when you freak out in one tunnel in Sam Poh Tong (page 50): "I'm scared. Let's turn back." Would it be accurate to say that the cave possesses an ambiguous appeal – it comforts denizens and disciples, but can also unnerve first-time visitors?

CC: Oh, yes, definitely. You want to go in but you're also apprehensive of what might be lurking in there. It's primal. Homo sapiens knew that there were predators in unknown caves. You got to go in, kill whatever is in there, and take over. Command and conquer. After civilisation, it is the self that needs to be confronted and conquered. Always, the shifu in martial arts novels will need to go to the cave for 49 days to cultivate his skills, then emerge more powerful and invincible. Jesus rose from the dead from a cave tomb. People get trapped in caves and have to be rescued. Caves are the sites of rebirth, resurrection and reprieve. Liminal spaces. They are awesome. There are so many caves I want to see. Batu, Dunhuang, Petra… It's not so bad if there are many other tourists around – I won't run out screaming.

YKC: By the end of Caves, I glean you have come to terms with your own contradictions – reaching out for new, fresh, exciting experiences, but also looking forward to a time when you are "standing apart, standing self-sufficient, in the new normal." Going forward, what other places do you intend to travel to and write about, and why them? And, oh, isn't it true that you and Santiago had intended to do another trip, this time to Asia? What happened?

CC: I'm thinking of renting a house on Jeju on a shoe-string budget and just spending each day walking, going to the beach and writing. Not so much to write about Jeju per se, but just to be. I went in 2016 and it's a very relaxing island.

China has relaxed its border policies, and I'm always longing to go there and pretend I'm in some sort of historical fantasy. I drink too much tea, and when I met Taiwanese tea expert and author Wu Te-liang at the Singapore Writers Festival last year, I shamelessly asked if I could tag along when he next went on a pu'er-drinking expedition along the Ancient Tea Horse Road. But even if I don't get to go with him and his hordes of fans, I'm going to go to Yunnan at some point and make my way via my beloved Chengdu up north.

I also want to visit every country in Asean at least once, because it's important to understand the region we are in. Timor-Leste, Laos, Myanmar and Brunei are outstanding on my list.

I'm considering going to Argentina because it's such a diverse place, and who can resist channelling Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung dancing the tango in Buenos Aires? But Santiago and I have always met on 'neutral territory', so I'm not sure what our dynamic would be like if I looked him up on his home turf. We were supposed to be in Shanghai together on another writing residency in 2020, but then the pandemic happened, and that has been postponed for a couple of years. I'm hopeful that it will happen soon.

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