Nature-writing: On Translating Hai Fan
by JEREMY TIANG
In November 2023, Hai Fan participated in the Singapore Writers Festival. Given that he writes almost exclusively about his experiences as a guerrilla in the Malayan Communist Party, I was surprised to see his name on the list of speakers—there is not much room for positive depictions of the MCP in Singapore’s official narrative. Then I read the (surprisingly ungrammatical) event description and burst out laughing: “A Tour by Writer: Wonders of the Rainforest. Writer Hai Fan brings you through wonders of the forest. Immerse in the greens that run through Singapore and Malaysia and the stories that stem from the islands.” The following year, he appeared once again in an event titled “Eco Writing in the Chinese Literary Scene” to talk about “environmental and ecological themes” and “issues related to sustainability, climate change, and the relationship between humans and nature.”
Accustomed as I am to the many ways Singapore keeps a rein on its artists, this felt like an astonishing distortion. And sure, Hai Fan was becoming too prominent an author to ignore—his short story collection had been named one of Asia Weekly’s Ten Best Books of the Year, and its English translation became the first ever book from Singapore to receive a PEN Translates grant from English PEN; his first novel, Out of the Rainforest, won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024—so he had to be co-opted somehow. Yet I never foresaw that he would be presented as a writer shorn of political context, his Communist past completely erased, so the establishment could present him under the label of nature writing.
Great propaganda begins with a kernel of truth, and the same is true here: Hai Fan is an excellent chronicler of the natural world, with which he possesses a connection that most Singaporeans lack. How could we, when Singapore largely sees nature as something to be dominated, in need of taming? We refuse to accept the boundaries of our island, extending them through land reclamation, and bulldoze natural vegetation to create Gardens by the Bay, a “horticultural destination” in which artificial constructions known “supertrees” tower over the actual plants.
Even Singapore’s reputation as a “garden city” is presented as being an improvement over the “concrete jungle” it would otherwise be, replacing actual nature with something manufactured and easier to control. (Chan Heng Chee: “Lee himself picked out the creeper that would grow and cover the overhead flyovers and bridges and I remember we called it the ‘Lee Kuan Yew creeper.’”) All of this comes at a tremendous human cost; Joanne Leow has written about the “inconceivable amounts of work to keep this tropicality in check, to groom and shape the plants into submission” and the labour behind it, “the planning, the man hours, human time, and effort… the repetitive strain that must be part of that back-breaking crouching, cutting, weeding, trimming.”
In translating Hai Fan’s short story collection Delicious Hunger, I encountered a radically different mode of life in tropics, in which the comrades seek to co-exist with nature rather than to subjugate it, working with the indigenous Orang Asli population to grow crops and understand the rhythms of the rainforest, sustaining themselves on fish from the river and wild fruits and vegetables, using plants as medicine. “You just need to recognise the leaves,” says one of the characters, explaining how she is able to instantly identify all the trees around her in what looks like an undifferentiated verdant sea. “Different trees have different shapes and sizes. Different shades of green too. …You’ll know when you’ve been here long enough!”
Hai Fan regularly goes on long walks in Singapore’s nature reserves—at least once a week, he tells me. Whenever I am back home, I try to join him for one of these. With the caveat that these bear little resemblance to the place where he spent thirteen years as a guerrilla (which was primary rainforest, whereas Singapore only has secondary rainforest left), he points out things I would never have noticed on my own. That divot in the ground, half-full of rainwater? That’s a wild boar hoofprint. Look, there’s an oil palm over there—that means there’ll be mousedeer and monkeys nearby. (One of the stories in Delicious Hunger revolves around the comrades trapping a wild boar for food, and another has them killing a bear and her cub for their paws, a delicacy; on the other hand, there’s also a story about a guerrilla capturing a mousedeer but letting it go out of empathy.)
In an interview with Lianhe Zaobao, Hai Fan mentioned that he’d taken me to “experience the rainforest” because he thought it might help my translation. “The events of these stories are fiction,” he said, “but the details are real.” To be fair, I needed this education. Like many Singaporeans, I did not know nearly enough about the natural world, and my limited encounters with the rainforest (blundering around the few wild areas of Singapore during National Service; childhood holidays in Cameron Highlands) had not particularly equipped me to understand the world of the MCP guerrillas.
“In the rainforest, you couldn’t see more than twenty meters ahead of you,” Hai Fan called over his shoulder on one of these expeditions. “When we saw the foliage up ahead moving, we would hide behind the nearest tree.” The last person in the detachment would sweep a stick behind them to cover up their footprints, and Hai Fan’s role was to walk just ahead of the sweeper, rifle at the ready, covering for them. Now, as we hiked along the nature reserve path, middle-aged men on BMX bikes whizzed past us. Hai Fan continued dispensing nuggets of wisdom from his guerrilla days: “You need to know where the water is. Camp near your water source, but not right next to it, the enemy will find you there.” At one point he used google lens to identify some lingzhi mushrooms on a log, then said wistfully, “I wish we’d had google back then. There are plants that only exist in my memory—I don’t see them around anymore.”
While translating, I tried to ask Hai Fan what certain plants were called, but in some cases he could only tell me the names the comrades had used, sometimes as vague as “that yellow bush.” (From Delicious Hunger: “All around I saw plants I couldn’t name, vivid explosions of yellow flowers, emanating heavy dark scents.”) Other times, he went into a lot of detail, such as the tree known as “bama” or “dama” in his text, which we decided must be the one commonly known as “meranti.” The first time we met, he presented me with a piece of meranti resin so I would know what it looked like, and exhaustively detailed its many uses—but couldn’t tell me where the name came from.
Months later, he texted me: “I was reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago and he mentions that Dutch people bought something called ‘gum-dammer’ on the island. I looked this up online, and felt it was like the ‘dama’ I mentioned in my short stories—it can be burnt in torches or used to coat food containers to make them waterproof. In the rainforest we called this substance ‘dama,’ and it turns out this comes from ‘dammer.’”
In his essay collection Fallen Fragrance, Hai Fan talks about being at one with nature: “Alone with a hunting rifle in the desolate hilltops, a person won’t be lonely at all. You feel like you’re melting into the forest and will never extricate yourself. Highly focused and alert, you’re both relaxed and on edge. All your senses, every cell, is activated.” I know I will never be this attuned with nature, but my interactions with Han Fan have given me a glimpse of what this could feel like, and that’s a state I try to channel when I’m translating him.
In a brief afterword to the piece above, Hai Fan adds, “When this essay was first published, many people thought it was a short story. To city folk, hunting in the rainforest is something that could only belong in the realm of fiction.” He is aware that his life is not that of most Singaporeans, but he will not apologise for that, and simply seeks to make us understand there are more ways to live than narrow minds may conceive of. In the Zaobao interview, Hai Fan acknowledges that he is known as an “MCP writer,” and urges readers to not just treat these stories as curiosities, but also to “see a different way of life.”
In an essay putting the SG50 celebrations in a larger context, Hai Fan notes that “Over hundreds of years, this hot equatorial soil has been lashed by wind and rain and sea. How many of our forebears’ footsteps lie hidden beneath the impenetrable treetops?” Stepping back and looking at the sweep of history, the brevity of human lives compared to the longevity of the rainforest, provides a sense of proportion.
By the 1970s, when he entered the rainforest, it would have seemed very unlikely that Malaya was going to turn Communist—and yet the MCP guerrillas persisted. Merely existing and living the lives they did, outside of mainstream society, showed that an alternate way of existence was possible, and that alone was radical. The years that the comrades spent in the rainforest were not wasted time. In another essay, Hai Fan puts the struggle in perspective: “Our individual lives are specks of ocean foam, droplets of dew in the vastness of time, short and minuscule. 20, 30 and 70 or 80 are all ultimately like a skein of smoke, turn back and you’ll see there isn’t much difference between them. What matters are the values and meaning we create through living.”
Jeremy Tiang (he/ they) is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. He has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Lo Yi-Chin, Liu Xinwu and Zhang Yueran. Most recently, his translation of Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. His plays include Salesman之死 (Obie Award for Outstanding New Play) and A Dream of Red Pavilions, and translations of plays by Chen Si’an and Wei Yu-Chia. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and his short story collection It Never Rains on National Day was shortlisted for the same prize. He is the co-editor with Dr. Kavita Bhanot of Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. In 2022, Tiang was the Princeton University Translator-in-Residence and an International Booker Prize judge. He has also served as a judge for the National Book Award (Translated Literature). Originally from Singapore, he now lives in Flushing, Queens.