Jeremy Tiang: Hi there, I’m Jeremy Tiang. I’m a Singaporean writer and translator. [0:05] Jeremy Tiang: I think I wanted to write about an offshore island for awhile, because when you’re living in Singapore it’s very easy to think of it as a city, and then you think of it as being like other cities, but it’s an island. And we forget that, until you get off the coast and then you can’t forget it. And I’d also been wanting to write about construction workers. I mean, that’s a bit of a theme in the book. A number of the stories involve invisible labour, the people who help run Singapore and help build Singapore and aren’t really acknowledged or thought about that much. And the two elements came together very organically when I had the idea of, well what if some of these workers went to this island where they’re not supposed to be. Because when you go to Saint John’s—and I got the ferry out and sort of hung out there for a bit—it was very noticeable that it was a hundred percent middle class Chinese Singaporeans. Even though anyone could go, and a ticket isn’t that expensive to get the boat. It felt a bit like there are these places where only certain classes have the leisure to go, and so a group of construction workers I thought would feel quite out of place there. And many of the stories, I think all of the stories actually, involve people being out of place. So, I often take people and put them where they, in a way don’t belong or don’t feel they belong or don’t feel comfortable, because that’s a really good way to start asking the question, well who gets to belong, who decides who belongs where, and how wide can the boundaries stretch of things like community or country. I wanted to interrogate what would happen if I brought these two things into collision, this group of people and this place. And the story that came out surprised me in some ways. I didn’t expect it to take quite that dark turn at the end but then by the time I got to that point it felt like it couldn’t end any other way. [2:11] Joanne Leow: And I noticed that perspective, obviously, is really important in the story, both narrative, obviously because you choose to use that first person plural, but also a spatial perspective, right, because you’ve seen the main island not—in a way that you’ve never seen it, in a sense, before, so could you, can you just talk a little bit more about that? [2:28] Jeremy Tiang: Well, about the narrative perspective, I didn’t feel that I could inhabit the voice of a migrant worker. So, I tried to think a way around that; I did a lot of research, and then it still felt like I didn’t have the right to tell that story from that point of view. But a group perspective felt somehow okay—then it’s not an individual and I’m not saying this is what it feels like, it’s more like a group consciousness which felt a bit more like I was able to do it. And for the point of view, that came out of just getting the boat to Saint John’s and realizing that, oh Singapore looks really different from this angle. Everything feels and looks different. It’s still Singapore, but we’re not accustomed to seeing it in this way. The people on the boat were looking ahead and I was looking back at the mainland. We don’t see it from this direction. I guess because I’ve spent so much time outside of Singapore it always feels a little bit unfamiliar to me anyway, but this felt particularly like a way that Singapore doesn’t present itself. There are these iconic pictures of Singapore but they’re always taken from certain angles, and so when you can get outside of that, outside of that framing, then you start to realize that are some aspects of the country that are more hidden away. And I’ve always been interested in ferreting those out. [3:56] Joanne Leow: And which specific things that you were thinking of that’ve been hidden away? because one of the things that this project is really interested in is that coastline, that shifting, changing coastline, and your story, you know, is one of the few that looks at that human cost of changing that coastline. [4:09] Jeremy Tiang: The pollution, for a start. We don’t really talk about how dirty the waters of Singapore are, but they’re filthy. And we’ve sort of quietly dropped this idea of Singapore as a beach paradise, like you go to Sentosa and that, these designated beach areas where you can swim, but the era of “we’ll all go to East Coast Park and have a picnic and swim in the sea,” that’s quietly gone away, it’s like, no one does that anymore, and it’s kind of dropped from all the iconography, so we’ve lost a lot of that. And I mean that’s partly land reclamation, and partly just the sheer number of ships you see on the horizon. I can’t find any numbers, but I’m pretty sure when I was a kid and we used to go to the beach there were not that many ships and the water was cleaner. I can’t quite express this, but it feels like it’s not really built on a human scale anymore. There’s a lot of elements of the coastline that feel to me like they were built to be photographed or built to be seen but not really lived in or worked in. So, in November I was at the Writers Festival, I was on a panel with a Malaysian writer, and she kept talking about the Stonehenge in Singapore, and I was like what Stonehenge? And she was like “just go outside and turn right.” So, after the panel we did and of course it was the casino and it was the three pillars, the thing on top. That was a really interesting way to look at it. I think she, being Malaysian, maybe saw Singapore for what it is, which is some kind of Fantasia, like she was like, it’s not a real place, she kept saying “this is not a real place.” I think she’s very local in a way Singaporeans aren’t really anymore, like when the moderators said to her, oh you’re a KL writer and she was like “no I live in PJ.” Singapore has become so homogenized that we do not feel territorial in that way. People don’t choose to live anywhere, right, it’s just where you get allocated a flat. And then every neighbourhood looks the same as every other neighbourhood, so we don’t have that sense of belonging. And that’s this thing about the MRT being this circle, and so you sort of ride around on it and wherever you go you’re somewhere on the circle, so you go from Yishun to Orchard or Braddell to Sembawang or whatever, and you’re still going to these same viewpoints, and above every station is a mall with the same shops, but if you can break out of that circle then you’re pretty much on the coast or in the sea, and the whole place starts to look different. And occasionally these places like on Kusu Island or Sisters’ Islands or…I was going to say Sentosa but no. [6:57] Joanne Leow: Not Sentosa. Jeremy Tiang: Not Sentosa, but—and Saint John’s itself, you can see glimpses of what Singapore used to be. Though increasingly that’s going away. I think they’ve cleared all the residents from Pulau Ubin haven’t they?