Editorial Long Day's Journey Into Flight
By Toh Hsien Min I don't read every word of every article published in QLRS. There are articles where I just skim, to satisfy myself that the contents do what they say on the label and that I would not have to engage the services of my cousin barrister. With as good an editorial team as I am privileged to work with at the moment, there's virtually no necessity for me to add another layer of editing, so when I'm marking up for publication I'm pretty much reading at the same time. Unsurprisingly my tastes differ from those of my fellow editors, so sometimes I catch myself going, hmmm... not sure what XXX was thinking when he/she picked this... In those cases, it's easy to concentrate on the marking up. There's no need to actually read anything to put paragraph tags, line breaks, italics and quotation indents in the right place (we have a very simple style, but Microsoft tags are most unwieldy and we have to strip them all away). Other times, I do this typesetting almost through muscle memory only because of workday exhaustion. As is the case today. I haven't had to do midnights yet, but this January has featured an extraordinary large number of 9pm and 10pm EODs. In spite of this, I must have been reading Stephanie Ye's review of Balik Kampung reasonably closely for I picked up her citation of Verena Tay walking around the Marina Bay Financial Centre and feeling lost, unhappy and somehow not at home. It made me think again about what I thought about the place where I spend so much of my week. All my old complaints were still there: the sunlight still comes in harshly through the useless blinds (even after a change of seat), it is still hopelessly unfriendly to pedestrians who want to walk outside canned air (and, yes, I know, sunshine), and the food options are still restricted (although the opening of a foodcourt in Tower 3 has been the single biggest enhancement to the quality of MBFC life index in the past two years). While it hasn't been Battery Road or my Suntec City experience of the early 2000s, MBFC has been on the whole neutral, a place that generally works as a place to work. Much like Singapore to many expats. The key reason for my perspective being different from Verena's is that MBFC does have a clear association for me, and yet one that, balancing out the triumphs and frustrations of the work, has sunk a root without being particularly strong. Perhaps I'm not quite as clear about the rather deliberate nature of this ambivalence as I might otherwise be on a night that hasn't followed quite as tiring a day at work, but I think of my cousin barrister who happens to be in town for an extended period this quarter. It's the first time he's spent more than a calendar month in Singapore. He's properly lived in - in sequence - Melbourne where he was born, Sydney, London, New York, Oxford, Tokyo, and back to London. At a couple of dinners, the subject of where he felt most at home has come up. The first time, his answer was New York, which was where his formative teen years were. But the second time, just earlier this evening, he said that Singapore had to be in the mix, because his family always came back to Singapore, where the extended family considers home, every year. And that's enough to make it home. It's a long way around to get to the point that I'm not sure I would agree with the premise of Balik Kampung, as set out in the requirement for its contributing authors to write about a place where they have lived for at least ten years. I think the key is rather the depth of the emotional engagement that one has with a place than the length of time one has spent in it. My own peregrinations have not had the scale of cousin barrister's but, four years in Oxford aside, even now of all the parts of Singapore I've lived in (Macpherson, Dover, Hillview, Newton and Mount Sophia), I'm unambiguously most at home in the latter, which has only just pushed Newton into second-last place for length of time. It's where I would have written about, had I been writing for the anthology.
I'm not sure it would be fair to say I would not have written for Balik Kampung on account of an ambivalence about short stories, but it is nevertheless true that the single thing about this issue that I'm most pleased about is that the essays have outnumbered the short stories. It's easier, I think, to put one narrative action after another in sequence – I think Cyril in his review of Felix Cheong is absolutely right to suspect that the short story is trending higher these days because it's easier both to write and to read – and less so to put one finely weighted, reflected thought after another in a coherent whole. Certainly when we look at the number of submissions, they make an obvious case for the ease-to-attractiveness ratio of the different sections. Often I think of the quality of each issue through the quality of the non-fiction pieces. I would hope that QLRS could continue to be a natural home for that, and to be this for many years to come. QLRS Vol. 12 No. 1 Jan 2013_____
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