By Jonathan Chan

Waves Rising: Collected Works of Ho Poh Fun & Responses
Edited by Ann Ang
Pagesetter Services (2024) / 360 pages / SGD 28  

The memory of an eccentric, complex teacher with exacting standards is invariably complicated. The adolescent gaze renders inscrutable the tendencies and foibles of an authority figure much older, especially when that figure acts in ways that are unnerving, discomfiting or vexing. Honouring such a memory introduces the complication of death: containing the impulse to speak ill of the dead, only to present that which is praiseworthy and good, is a reflex that can never truly be sharpened. It is a strange kinship that I share with many of the writers featured in Waves Rising: Collected Works of Ho Poh Fun & Responses, having lost a literature teacher I had not long ago. 

Of late, Pagesetters Services has seen the release of several new books that are either republications, or compilations of the works of authors alongside critical or unpublished literary material. Some of these projects are driven and shaped by the families of authors whose work has been published posthumously. Mervin Mirapuri's long poem A Walk with my Pig, ambitious in its ambit, was published by Pagesetters after bundles of manuscripts were sent to the publisher by the Mirapuri family. Stitched through the forensic work of Gwee Li Sui, the publication of Pig was an act of recovery that has breathed new life into Mirapuri's poetic legacy in Australia and Singapore. Pagesetters' imprint Ethos Books published a new version of Wong May's A Bad Girl's Book of Animals, first published in the United States in 1969 and reissued by Ethos in Singapore in 2023, with a new foreword by Tse Hao Guang. There are parallels with an older strategy pursued by Epigram, where the rights to publish old books were secured so they could be reissued. Yet many of these projects from Pagesetters are additive, supplementing previously published work with new critical or reflective material. Implicit is a certain judgment of which Singaporean poets and writers deserve new or refreshed critical attention, with these books' editors serving as these poets' largest champions. 

For Waves Rising, that editor is Ann Ang. The book finds a parallel with Pig, to the extent that both are projects supported by the families of deceased poets. Yet, while Pig was a long poem that had never been published, Waves Rising contains not only the entirety of Ho's single poetry collection Katong (1994), now seemingly prescient in its focus on climatological, botanical and environmental subjects, but also Ho's short stories and poems that had been published elsewhere. Interspersed among Ho's pieces in the anthology are an array of responses. Some are creative, poems and short stories written in response to Ho's own. Some are critical pieces, essays that cast a more academic eye on the mechanics of Ho's poetry and fiction, the latter of which has received less focus from commentators on her work. 

And some read as neither. Rather, they are reflections by Ho's former students of her influence and presence in their lives. Ho was a stalwart teacher of English Literature at Raffles Junior College for many years, where she also headed its Creative Writing Club, which counts among its alumni prominent writers, poets, novelists and playwrights such as Alfian Sa'at, Ng Yi-Sheng, Joshua Ip, Sharlene Teo and Aaron Maniam. All these writers came under Ho's authority at one point or another, whether as students of literature or participants in the club. Ang was one of them as a member of the Creative Writing Club. These reflective pieces eschew the creative and the critical, presenting a portrait of Ho in ways entwined with the nostalgias of teenage memory and anxiety, at the adolescent precipice of literary aspiration and pretension. Of course, these fall within the contours of an elite institution and, while creative writing pedagogy and programmes are somewhat more accessible and widespread in Singapore now, they were a rarity in the '90s. They were the preserve of a few schools that had access to the Creative Arts Programme or teachers capable of facilitating literary activity within the schools themselves. At the centre of the development of RJC's writers was Ho herself. 

It was not until I read the volume's penultimate piece, Ng Yi-Sheng's reflective piece 'Matriarchal Swordtail', that I felt that I understood this properly. Ho's oeuvre consists not just of her poems and fiction. It also includes the many students she educated, guided, frustrated and mentored. Engaging with the memory of a teacher who has been dismissive, cantankerous, eccentric, strict, encouraging and fiercely proud of their students is invariably difficult. Famously, Ho is perhaps one of the first victims of a public backlash enabled by the Internet, with her unusually erudite dressing down of one of her students being circulated on YouTube in 2007. Couple this with the pro-establishment nature of Ho's politics, her abiding love for the locality of Katong and pioneering position as a poet of environmental change and solastalgia, her keen attention to issues of modern femininity, and a nagging undercurrent of East Asian superiority. These make for a portrait of a poet and educator that is complex, a particular glimpse of a life shaped by the forces of the 20th century in Singapore in particular ways. 

Ng's essay recounts the beginnings of his relationship with Ho, identified by her as the future Chairman of its Creative Writing Club before even setting foot in RJC. Ng recounts points of tension with Ho as the club's teacher-in-charge, a "manic mother" figure who would scold and nag her students, wax nostalgic about studying under Arthur Yap at the National University of Singapore, and remain out of step with the world changing around her. She would refer to herself in the third person as "Miss Ho", which is taken up and peppered throughout the book, such as in Joshua Ip's poem 'YES MISS HO' or Andrew Gan's poem '#misshosays'. Ng's described modes of little rebellion include leaving her speaking on a phone line while Ng went elsewhere, eating a carnation during a performance, and countering a haiku workshop with a limerick workshop. These are recollections that reflect a teenage mischief yet underscore the privileges of access to creative writing pedagogy for RJC's students at the time. 

Where Ng's essay turns, sharpening the distinction between Ng and Ho generationally, while preserving the enduring power dynamic of teacher and student, is in his description of a panel Ho participated in at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2016. He writes:

I recall a 2016 panel at the Arts House Chamber: 'Singlit 101, Season 3: Poetry and Existence', hosted by Gwee Li Sui, pairing her off with her old student Alfian Sa'at as fellow poets of the nineties. She spent the hour defending the PAP's illiberal policies, lecturing us on racial politics, proclaiming a binary distinction between the survivalist culture of the Chinese and the land ties of the Malays, and insisting that racial discrimination wasn't a thing in Singapore. And what did Alfian – the activist, the firebrand, the enfant terrible – do? He kept to his seat, gently explaining his counter-perspective, even as she talked over him, even as the audience muttered about this white-haired no-name daring to eclipse the famed playwright they'd come to see.

I had no such patience. I sat in my seat, squirming at the microaggressions, prepping to post them on social media. 

Ng goes on, describing the process of getting Ho to sit for an archival recording for poetry.sg:

I cashed in my credit as favourite. I marched up to my old teacher and ordered her to get into a corner for the recordings, so future generations might get to hear her voice. 

I'm not proud of this. By then, by almost all metrics, I outranked her in the literary scene. I was a more recognisable name and had published and edited my books; this on top of the privileges I already enjoyed from my gender and relative youth. I wasn't a little fish fighting back; I had become the bully.

And yet – for my generation, at least – there's something indelible about a teacher-student relationship that makes two brief years in uniform matter so much more than any future metamorphoses of status and power. 

This, to me, is the crux of Waves Rising. It speaks to the ways that a lineage can be traced by way of pedagogy, Ng or Alfian to Ho to Arthur Yap, for instance, but also the ways that certain dynamics between teacher and student can remain so thoroughly entrenched, even years after a student graduates. Alfian's seeming acquiescence to Ho as presented through Ng's account illustrates this vividly, bearing in mind his history of contending against discrimination against Singapore's Malay community. That Ng presents a subversion of this through his cultural capital, with the use of the words "metrics" and "outranked" suggesting an ironic adherence to indicators of literary prestige, speaks to the muddled entanglements of cultural politics within Singapore's Anglophone literary community. And yet, there is a degree to which it seems that Ho has never had such prestige as a prevailing concern in her life of writing.

I enjoyed encountering Ho's poems again, having previously read Katong and understood her to be a progenitor of an ecologically, environmentally engaged writing in Singapore. Ann Ang's essay helps to situate Katong helpfully in context, outlining Ho's formative years in Marine Parade and Katong, a sense of intimacy and familiarity present not only in her poems but also her short stories 'East Coast Story', 'Family', 'Moving Pictures' and 'When the Tabebuia Bloomed at Soo Show Gardens'. Ang also describes Ho's matriculation as a mature student at the National University of Singapore at the age of 34, eventually completing graduate studies in 1987. The years leading to the publication of Katong dovetail with the emergence of discourse on climate change, culminating in the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 to reduce the onset of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In this light, while Ho's poems may seem unusually prescient, they reveal something of the era's currents of thought. In her poetry, Ho advances a notion that has often felt like a gap in discourse on environmental conservation and the climate crisis in Singapore: a precondition to caring about the effects of climate change is a love for one's environment itself.

This love makes itself evident repeatedly in Ho's poems. The poem 'katong' recalls the turtles that lent the neighbourhood its name and grapples with the visible effects of urbanisation and land reclamation. Here, Ho both anticipates and finds a kinship with the similarly solastalgic poetry of Boey Kim Cheng. The writer Leonard Yip has written that in Ho's writing: 

land by the sea is reclaimed and the coastlines of the titular neighbourhood are crumbled into something altogether unrecognisable. Ho's imagery, recalling the lushness of her surrounding ecologies, does not summon back their presence so much as it underscores their irreclaimable loss – 'no turtle advances […] beneath steep palms / and tall windbreaking casuarinas', and 'no lallang field is ever set ablaze / nor cocks crow – resonating dawn'. These images are echoes of a past that the present has collapsed, giving way to the 'new rhythms of life pervading' what the developed stretches of Katong have now become.

Her cluster of poems under the section 'Climatological Reports' engages with discernible changes in Singapore's weather, long before the extremities of heat, wind and rain we experience today. Take 'heat wave', for example, written on a day in April in 1983, where Singapore's temperatures exceeded 35 degrees Celsius, the highest in 35 years: 

            to the concrete thirst unquenched
            add to the particle-built heat
            some ill-bearing wind brought
            flinging across the island
            a gauze of haze

            against thin visibility – the haze
            infiltrating into every curl of citizen concern 

Descriptions of heat are not new in Singapore, but the intrusion of a scientific lexis, overlaid with images not out of place in a hospital – "unquenched", "ill", "gauze" – as well as its positioning as a 'Climatological Report' speak to a developing understanding of the evidence base for unusual spikes in heat. Ho's writing precedes the relative normalisation of the idea of the urban heating effect in common parlance today, anticipating the poems, essays and non-fiction about the ongoing climate crisis contextualised to Singapore. Or perhaps 'this morning the sky', at once resisting and succumbing to the seduction of pathetic fallacy:

            i had heard of beaks pecking up a sky

            or had it paled to a shade
            reflecting an emptiness
            hope grown hysterical
            to the last worn flutter of lash?
 
            i had seen the ground open to take men in

            this morning the sky
            fragmented into an uneven grey
            gave no way
            as always

            weaving silence upon silence upon silence

The skies, in their temperamental movements from heat to rain, from sunshine to grey, induce a kind of metaphysical response, "a supreme fiction" presented to the viewer, perhaps of legibility, perhaps of meaning. This collides with the reality of a persisting "silence", the allure of imputing meaning where there need not be any. Ho's style, at its best, is spare and unrelenting, as immersed in the world of lower-case letters as the work of e.e. cummings is. 

In other poems, sudden encounters with flora and fauna become part of a sequence titled 'From a Naturalist's Notebook', recalling but rejecting Heaney. Poems titled 'caladium', 'moth', 'dragonfly'. These are not incantatory poems in the way that the poems of Robert Macfarlane would later be. Each contains a meditation on a different animal, a different flower, save for the three swordtail poems: 'courting swordtail', 'territory-conscious swordtail', 'matriarchal swordtail'. In his essay, Ng Yi-Sheng identifies 'matriarchal swordtail' as the poem of Ho that he circulated at the time of her death, taken by its description of a swordtail dying on the floor of an aquarium: 

            even in death
            she retained her rich colouring
            with all her gills and fins intact
            and so finely arranged and laid
            they defined any fish to draw close
            to salvage at her remains

            as if they dared!

            until she was removed
            she continued to arrest the eye

            a splendid even sculpture
            of burnished orange
            capable of holding all in
            with the nerve-tingling sparkle
            of steel pins

The grandeur of the swordtail is juxtaposed against the end of its life, redolent and defiant despite the circumstances of its death, the aquarium a symbol of the enclosure of nature on strictly human terms. Ho's poem 'stephanotis' is also illustrative: 

            from tip cutting
            you have lengthened
            into such luxuriance

            a climber stretched round
            and round a pot frame
            holding tight clusters

            now spilling wild

            […]

            tonight i shall wait
            from the seedpods to burst
            as i think of an answer
            to our silent love

Similarly concerned with some notion of enclosure, 'stephanotis' juxtaposes the act of trimming and gardening with the unfettered growth of the plant, Ho's speaker waiting in anticipation for its flowers to bloom. The passage of time, anticipating the "burst" of the "seedpods", is mapped against the speaker's waiting for a response to an unrequited love. 

Or consider Ho's poem 'anthurium', proceeding from a description of the growing plant "sticky / with tiny petal dots", before moving to "the woman / waxing enigmatic / over nature's / inflorescence". As the woman continues to tend to her flowers, the poem brings into focus her interiority:

            potted families now
            multiplying and
            mooting diligently
            in groups

            she thinks of a spathe
            the primaeval ache
            to rouse
            to soothe

            body arched
            back broken

            beyond memory and remorse

            the desire

            to rock
            to cradle

            the once ever angry
            wind swung shoot

            a spadix
            now a stump

            rising aerially

            wind roping close unfeelingly

Gardening assumes a therapeutic quality, a balm for an ageing body, the loss of flowers that have been cut down. This is what Ann Ang describes as "a somatic iconography of feminine experience", where "the textures and contours of the female body – its urges and its cycles – are expressed through its turning outwards of hidden anatomies and rendering of what could be ordinarily invisible through the extended symbolism of botanical cycles." Such a parallel between the cycles of growth and flowering and experiences of grief and affection is also present in Mok Zining's The Orchid Folios (2020), albeit through the prism of the relationship between a mother and a daughter. 

The intimacy Ho describes with the land, its flora and its fauna, especially in Katong and the East Coast, rest uneasily against her racial politics, as noted by Ng Yi-Sheng above. In '#misshosays', Andrew Gan reproduces an observation from Ho: "you know why alfian writes as well as he does? he has an axe to grind… being a racial minority." One detects a thinly veiled dismissiveness in Ho's argument, an ars poetica that emerges from resentment. Ho's writings reflect both a valorisation of the Hakka community, readily acknowledging their historic identity as 'guests' across China and later in Singapore, as well as an enduring affection with her environs. In the short story 'Guest', Ho assumes the perspective of a Singaporean anthropologist, drawing parallels between the Hakkas and the Hmong and Karen, the latter two communities having historically been dispersed between China, Thailand and Lao PDR as people of the hills. Ho's protagonist writes: 

The notion of 'guest' looms large in ethnic memory – among my immediate ancestors were the Hakkas, persons literally referenced as 'guest' in the records of territories they were to reside. Prompted by needs of survival, escaping from scenarios endangering to life, they were subjects of huge migratory waves across epochs and dynastic cycles in China, expanding in numbers across wide terrain – north to south – from undulating hinterland to busy port, from fertile plain or ubiquitous lowland to hostile hill and inhospitable mountain top. 

As a descendant of Hakkas who had crossed rivers and seas to settle on island and mainland Southeast Asia, as an obligatory subscriber to an ethnic group driven without choice to impose on the goodwill of people of a different cultural creed, I cannot escape carrying the ethos which defines what is intrinsic in me – an astuteness beyond inscrutability – a trait that must have become an indissoluble part of the mindsets of 'guests' everywhere.             

Ho's short story was written after attending the ASEAN Writers' Workshop: Fiction in 1995 in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, ostensibly inspiring an observed similarity between the Hakkas and the hill peoples of mainland Southeast Asia. The decision to adopt the lens of an anthropologist protagonist provides neat cover for the impulse to explicate, while also providing the most straightforward articulation of Ho's relationship with an ethnic identity. The poem 'chrysanthemum', a long poem that extends across six pages, includes the lines:

            all through those years
            the silences that were kept
            our harbouring the knowledge
            the guilt of forceful abandonment
            the symbol the flower and
            its petrified existence
            the ancestral cause revived
            now and again in another name
            its regionally sensitive motives re-defined
            its essence cautiously restored, diminished
            time and again, re-distinguished

            what rationale for joviality
            re-emerging this afternoon
            with the occasion for tea? 

Through the image of a cup of chrysanthemum tea, the speaker reflects on the historic suspicions held towards the Chinese in Southeast Asia, amidst the shifting loyalties and tensions under the political fracture of China between dynastic, nationalist and communist politics. Some poems display a particular fascination not just with Chinese, but Japanese culture and history, forms of orientalism or even Japonisme in poems such as 'legend of emperor qian long', 'the fragrance box' and 'the return'. 

This East Asian fascination is wedded to a familiarity with Katong, perhaps not a feeling of intimacy with the land as might be understood in other discourses of indigeneity, but one that observes the transformations wrought by urbanisation; in the poem 'katong' describing the halting eruptions of "a community centre – a cinema – / a multi-storey carpark – a poly-clinic", or in the short story 'Moving Pictures', where an Indian immigrant to Singapore traces the transformations along Ean Kiam Place to Joo Chiat Road with shophouses transformed from residential areas into commercial buildings, with Ceylon Road "now clogged with pedestrians and waiting cars". 'Moving Pictures' illustrates the phenomenon of Chinese and Indian merchants in Singapore remitting money to extended families in their respective countries of origin. One might imagine this within the schema of Heidegger's notion of "dasein", literally meaning "being-there", an involvement and care for the immediate world in which one lives, a deepening sense of the self in relation to the environment. The jump to a legitimisation of Chinese belonging to Singapore, in a way that privileges such belonging over Malay indigeneity, may be too spurious a claim to make. Yet, in returning to Ng's account of Ho's remarks at the 2015 Singapore Writers Festival, rehashing racialist rhetoric by Lee Kuan Yew juxtaposing the "placid society" of the native Malays, of the Malays that do not "seek gold as tenaciously as the immigrants" as he outlined in a speech in 1965, one cannot wonder about the uneasy slide between extolling the virtues of an immigrant community at the expense of an indigenous one. This, too, is enmeshed in Ho's literary and educational legacy. 

Perhaps a more charitable view can be taken when Ho's life is situated in its context. Ng Yi-Sheng writes: 

As I've grown older, I've begun to appreciate the revolutions of Miss Ho's own life. As a boomer, born in 1946, she would've been part of the first wave of Singapore women to become university-educated intellectuals. Through state-mandated education, they were given the gift of fluency in the once-colonial tongue of English; at the University of Malaya, they were promised the right to describe their new nation in poetry, prose and drama; an opportunity their mothers never had.

Ho is of the generation succeeding its revolutionary predecessor, that of university students swept up in the tides of decolonial fervour, struggling for the realisation of a new nation. Ho would come of age in a newly independent Singapore, bearing witness to the waves of urban transformation and modernisation that would sweep the city-state, with its conveniences and comforts. Ho's eye was cast not only to a Singapore in which many ethnicities would live alongside one another, her views on racial difference notwithstanding, but also onto the social transformation she observed of women in Singapore. This is taken up in short stories such as 'East Coast Story', with its depiction of a separated couple with the woman having left Singapore for Australia; 'Family', with its female protagonist reminiscing over the marital tensions between her parents in their second home in Loyang; and the bildungsroman 'Rite of Passage'. Ho's female figures navigate tensions between domesticity and the workplace, of an increasing agency against entrenched societal expectations and norms. The poem 'shopping' introduces shopping as one such activity according economic agency to women. It serves as a seeming endorsement of the PAP's policies as perhaps progressive for its time, its speaker articulating of her father:

            he regrets having voted a party in
            more than thirty years ago
            supporting a government that gave
            equal opportunity for development
            in work as well as in education
            to daughters as well as sons
            over and above being ill at ease

            shopping

            he's ill at ease with the New Woman! 

More acerbically, Ho writes in her poem 'thoughtscapes singapore': 

         though I've learnt well the lesson
         that work is good for the soul
         yearly they still see fit
         to serve the reminder
         that i must be courteous
         at an age when discretion
         is better than valour
         i am taking no chances
         (my peers already think
         they have books enough to crush the bones
         and sweat to flood the sahara)
         vigilance is the password
         to continued strength
         and stability being the true singaporean
         i shall show dedication of service
         in the army
         and teach my sisters
         how to uphold total defence
         when i graduate from the university
         i shall marry a graduate
         so that i can sire intelligent babies
         in the meantime
         i shall continue to be exemplary
         would you like to have a look at my report card?

Both poems are found in the third section of Katong, titled 'Evocations in Mood and Gesture'. Placed here are Ho's ruminations on various themes beyond the climate and nature. One might sense a shift between the positions outlined in both poems in relation to the PAP, though one could chart this shift between the Women's Charter of 1961 to the Graduate Mothers' Scheme of 1984, which Ho critiques in 'thoughtscapes singapore'. Ho ironises governmental rhetoric, critiquing the continued expectations of female deference in the workplace, of the overbearing weight of an engineered pragmatism and civic duty, and of course the tightening link between academic performance, professional credentialing and a eugenicist social policy. In her own way, Ho defied the expectations that might've been placed upon her at the time, never having had children of her own, yet as recounted in the poem '#misshosays' was "grateful her mother pushed her to buy an apartment in her 40s so she is now financially independent… you should learn from this." 

The sum of the pieces collected in Waves Rising, between Ho's poems and short fiction, the reflective responses of her students, and the creative responses of those who did not know her, such as Euginia Tan and Desmond Kon, is a full, complex portrait of Ho herself. It is not a hagiography, not a sanitised portrait by any means. It is an attempt to grapple with the fullness of Ho herself, expressed through the totality of her life's work as a writer and educator. There are some quibbles one could have regarding typos and the arrangement of the pieces, in some instances moving directly from a piece of Ho's to an essay critiquing that piece immediately, between forthrightly personal pieces about Ho as an educator followed by poems responding to Ho's work as a poet rather than as a person. 

The view of Ho's family emerges, with some tenderness, sparingly in the collection. Such views come from Ho's extended family, such as in the pairing between Ho's short story 'When the Tabebuia Bloomed at Soo Chow Gardens' and a poem from 14-year-old Hannah de Lang-Ho titled 'Endless Embrace'. The former centres on an elderly man caring for his granddaughter at his home in Soo Chow Gardens as his son and daughter-in-law work as his executives, with passing mention of the youngest daughter who is "a teacher in the afternoon school". 'Endless Embrace' is set in Soo Chow Gardens, its speaker recounting the love of a Yeh Yeh that "blooms in tender light", Soo Chow Gardens as a place where "hearts entwine". We are told that Hannah's world was "coloured by the presence of her Grand Aunty Ho Poh Fun".

Waves Rising is not merely a Ho Poh Fun reader, but fulfils a certain elegiac function, first for Ho's family and students, second for those who have encountered Ho's writing before. Beyond that, it will have its function in introducing Ho's work to a new audience, in the words of others, as well as her own: 

still, with resilience and tenacity true –
by disposition disciplined to a fault,

how like us to be persuaded,
shouldering the contingencies
of every cause propagated –
convinced, won over, rolled under,
even to our dismay;

succumb to life's unbridgeable silences
and to the elements in flux,
disperse fresh calcium from our clay. 

(Ho Poh Fun, 'existential', 1995)

_____