Clara Chow 1
Details
Clara Chow 1
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Clara Chow 1: Clip 1 |
| Name | Clara Chow |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | clara chow interview 1 |
| Abstract | In this interview, Clara Chow and Dr. Joanne Leow discuss the various islands that belong to Singapore and are barred from public access in regards to Chow's short story "The Wheel" (from her collection Dream Storeys). |
| Extent | 6:49 |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Clara Chow: I’m Clara Chow, and I’m a writer. I’m Singaporean. The official propaganda or whatever is the official Singapore narrative hardly ever factors in the southern islands. I mean they tell us about Sentosa, and then, that’s about it. And everything else was sort of not talked about. And actually, Singapore has a lot of southern islands, and I started wondering why do we not have this connection to our islands? And I think that, if you don’t talk about the islands, then the islands themselves lend themselves to other uses that you don’t have to justify to the public. I mean, for a while Pulau Tekong was where this—it is still, where— [0:43] Joanne Leow: It is still, yeah. Clara Chow: Yeah, where, you know, you train your NS men. Bukom is where you refine oil. You could use these islands to do things that you don’t want to do on the mainland, and then you don’t have to justify it to anybody because it’s just off everybody’s radar. So, I thought, okay, if that is the case then if you decide to have political prisoners and they want to go away, then the islands would be the not-talked-about space where they can go, too. And they can kind of co-opt this—I mean it works both ways, right, like if the authorities can do this then the rebels can do that too. [1:20] Joanne Leow: They did detain a political prisoner on Sentosa for— Clara Chow: Yeah. Joanne Leow: —many many years, right. Clara Chow: Yes. Correct. Joanne Leow: So that’s also a thing, even though Sentosa is used for tourism. And then you find out, obviously, at the end—I hate to spoil this—but that it’s been all this reality TV show, which is really fascinating to me, because this idea that, yes you’re saying this weird space of the islands, but it’s also a space of surveillance, in the end. [1:43] Clara Chow: That was, again, the husband came out with it, right, but I liked it because I thought, this is this nihilistic view where you think that you can make a difference, you think you can break out of the cycle, but then actually, “no, lah, there’s no such thing.” So, it’s kind of, like, hopeless. You can say, “let’s rage against the machine!” But at the end of the day, the system is so much bigger than you are, and you kind of get sucked right into it. This is a really early story. At the time I was kind of feeling a little bit like that, maybe because, you know, as a writer I was still finding my way, and I thought, it’s so hard to do this fulltime, because the Singapore environment doesn’t really understand someone who wants to write fiction and be penniless, right? Over the years I’ve kind of changed, and I think that I’ve revised my views. I don’t think it’s that hopeless after all. I think that if you do want to be an activist, you do want to campaign for something, you can make change. You can really make a difference. So that was just the worst-case scenario. [2:50] Joanne Leow: And yet that story’s last. So, I was really interested in the placement as well, right. Clara Chow: It was probably the first to be written. The book is chronological, so, the shopping mall story is the first one, and it kind of just went that way. But if I put “The Wheel” as the first one, even though it was written first, it would be, kind of a very sad note. So, move it to the back (laughing). 3:13 Joanne Leow: To end on a sad note (laughing) That is so funny. I want to talk a little bit more about two things, I guess, about that short story first, maybe. First about the role of Pulau Hantu. So we talked a little bit about how you—they displace things at the other island…obviously the name as well, I mean, what is it about the coastline of those particular islands that makes us think about spectrality, about ghosts, about haunting? [3:37] Clara Chow: Yeah, when I was looking for a southern island to set the rest of the story in it was a toss-up between Hantu and Senang, because Senang had that whole prison riot thing, and that was a very real and bloody part of our history, which, again, I think a lot of young people don’t know. But then the name Hantu is always special to us, because Ghost Island, right, so haunted, right, so scary. And I like the idea that there were two Hantus, it was Pulau Hantu Besar, the big one, and then Pulau Hantu Kechil, the small one. And I thought, how interesting that we—okay, at least I—didn’t know that there were two islands, we just thought, oh it’s just one big island. So even the island itself resists your stereotyping of it; it splits into two, right, it’s just like history splits into two and you can have this version and that version, so you can have the Kechil version, the Besar version. So, I thought, okay, really interesting, Pulau Hantu, in terms of symbolism. And then the fact that Hantu, from Hantu you can see Bukom, because it’s really that near. So, geographically, Hantu served its purpose, in terms of how they can just move from point to point. [4:51] Joanne Leow: And I was thinking of that ending, right, that really bleak ending, right, but then that ending is also really aware of the kind of ecology, that almost man-made ecology, and you were saying Bukom is so close. So, what do you think of when you think of that space then? You know, it’s not just a natural space, not just an island that you go off, but there’s something as well incredibly industrial about it, what were you trying to convey? [5:16] Clara Chow: It started when I used to have this friend in JC and she was dating someone whose father worked for Shell, and then they would all live on Bukom, and then he would have to—like, they would go on dates, and then he would have to rush for the last ferry to go back to Bukom, so their dates could not go past ten o’clock or something like that. So, I always was fascinated like, why, how come, some people can live on Bukom, right. And then over the years I would read—I would hear about people who worked at Shell, or I would have relatives who worked there, and this idea of Bukom as kind of like a private, corporatized island, it belongs to Shell. But then, this didn’t gel with me, because it belongs to us Singaporeans, right, but then it’s kind of been sold to Shell in a way. And if we are not authorized we can’t go to Bukom. There’s no way ever that I can ever get on Bukom unless Shell invites me. So I thought, what if, at some point, this corporatization of Singapore ends, because there are a lot of spaces in Singapore that are also like that, like the Google headquarters, right, it’s just this quasi-public but actually corporate space, and it’s a huge chunk. What if they all pull out at some point, and then what are you going to be left with? You’re just going to be left with this corporate ruins. I was thinking of that when I wrote about Bukom. And then how it ends with her going in that direction, so how can we reclaim that—at some point, right—how can we reclaim those spaces. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | Asia--Singapore------Singapore |
| Subject Local Name | ----Myth--Pacific Ocean----Nation Building--economy |