Preface
“Irrealism” and “fantastika” are just two faces on the multi-sided die of Non-Realist Literature. This type of literature combines the tropes of fiction that imitates reality (mimetic) with that which explores the magical and unexplainable (fantastic); other labels that have been used at one point or another to describe this kind of cross-genre writing include, among others, magic realism, fabulism, interstitial fiction, and (my personal favorite) slipstream. Teasing out the nuances between these labels, including geospecific applications (magic realism hails from South America, while fantastika originated in Eastern Europe), goes beyond the scope of an author’s preface, and can be accomplished with a cursory Wikipedia search. All of which is to say that however you label it, this is fiction in which the strange is made normal and the normal is made strange.
Which is, perhaps not coincidentally, how I feel about living and working in Singapore.
As of this writing, I have now lived in the equatorial island republic for just over four years, and I am still occasionally taken aback by cultural assumptions that do not match my own. Corporate workers or civil servants are expected to devote their entire lives to their jobs, staying sometimes past seven o’clock in the evening (or later), to the point that the government had to declare “Eat With Your Family Day” so that parents could see their children during dinner time at least once during the year. This mindset (of workaholism, not eating with one’s family) rankles against anyone who values their personal and family time. What good is working 60 hours a week to scrabble after promotions if you can’t take the time to enjoy the fruits of your labors?
I live in Geylang East, a neighborhood only about 20 minutes’ walk from the legal red-light district, an area that hosts as many temples, mosques, and churches as it does brothels, and which gathers some of the best food in the entire country; my Western friends who know of Geylang only connect it with the sex trade, but my Singaporean colleagues and the taxi drivers who may ferry me home don’t bat an eye. That such an area is left to flourish under governmental regulation still feels odd in a place that prides itself on moralistic conservatism.
Artistic endeavors are highly touted for their cultural importance and prestige, but whenever an art exhibit or theatrical run or dance event is covered in the newspapers, they are primarily assessed for their supposed monetary worth and/or the attention garnered for the country’s tourism (which further translates into dollar value). For a nation that yearns to be a centre of arts and culture in Southeast Asia, like Renaissance Venice, it is dispiriting to see so much focus on these more vulgar concerns rather than on aesthetic appreciation.
But, as readers of speculative fiction are probably already aware, the world can always be made stranger, and that’s what I’ve attempted to do with this humble collection of stories. Bookended by longer fictions, with various shorter pieces inbetween, Red Dot Irreal is a palindrome in terms of story lengths, and an outsider’s exploration of what it means to live in this part of the world. Four years is still too few to get a handle on one’s destination of migration, but it is enough to reveal how I have been changed by the experience.
Thanks go to Karen Wai and Kenny Leck for having faith in my writing and agreeing to originally publish this volume in dead tree format, and for running the best independent literary bookshop in Singapore; to Toh Hsien Min and Yeow Kai Chai for publishing several of these pieces in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and for making me feel like a legitimate member of Singapore’s literary community; to Bill Schafer and Daren Shiau & Lee Wei Fen for separately buying two of these stories and allowing them to be published here first; to Rudi Dornemann for establishing the long-running website The Daily Cabal and inviting me to submit my flash fiction as a contribution. But most importantly, I must thank my wife, Janet Jia-Ee Chui, for introducing me to her homeland eight years ago, and our daughter Anya, for showing it to me through new eyes every single day; I am ever-inspired by their love and their ways of looking at the world.
Jason Erik Lundberg
June 2011, Singapore