Refraction Through a Prism: Xinyu/Haifan and the Countryside/Rainforest/City
Zaobao Literary Festival Lecture, June 1, 2023
Excerpted and translated from Hai Fan, Fallen Fragrance (Luo Xiang)
Chair: Lin Kang
Author: Xin Yu/Hai Fan/Hong Tianfa (1=2=3)
Speaker: Lin Kang
Sunlight passing through a transparent glass prism refracts into the seven colours of the rainbow. Just as prismatic lenses prescribed for spectacles can restore good vision to eyes with lesions or which are deteriorating with age, viewing life through the prism of literature can break through assumed realities, bringing to the fore a spectrum of feelings or moods long forgotten, possibly with greater depth and clarity.
The present author’s life is refracted into the two persona: Xin Yu and Hai Fan at different times of his life and different spaces: the countryside, the rainforest and the city.
The basic prism has three sides; as it happens, the author’s names constitute a trinity, completed by the official name of the person behind the pen names Xin Yu and Hai Fan.
Speaker: Xin Yu
A true country boy
My appearing in 2007 as the writer Xin Yu happened quite by chance.
I have loved to read since I was a child. As a student in a rural school, I wrote the occasional essay or story. For several reasons, I did not pick up the pen until 2007, fifteen years after my return to Singapore. The most basic was the pressure of making a living, especially with the birth of my first child in 1998. I had to provide food and shelter for my family of three. At the time, I figured that I would write in twenty years’ time, when my financial responsibilities would have eased. Then in 2007, my second daughter was born, ten years after her sister. I was 54 years old at the time, and couldn’t imagine starting out doing what I loved only when I reached 74. With the mortgage on the home paid off and some degree of financial stability, I got down to writing short articles for publication and joined a literary group with a friend’s encouragement.
I chose ‘Xin Yu’ as a pen name as my life had been one of hard work and hardship (辛); ‘yu’ is written with two ‘xi’ radicals (羽, study). A semi-centenarian embarking on writing, I needed to remind myself that I had to study and learn all over again.
I often say that I am a country boy for I grew up in the countryside with its somewhat hilly terrain. I was born in the post-war 50s, when the island was still ruled as a British Crown Colony. It was mostly covered with greenery. The city was only the area around the banks of the Singapore River. The entire island was dotted with villages. Five arterial roads fanned from the heart of the city to the rural areas.
For the first 20 years or so of my life, my world was simply divided into the hilly countryside, and the city ‘downhill’. Our school textbooks told us that we lived in the countryside, with hills and water, trees and flowers, fish and prawns in the ponds, beans and melons growing in the fields. We would say that we were going ‘down the hill to city’, which we did only a few times a year.
I regarded myself and my neighbourhood pals as kids from the hilltop. Although there are no mountains in Singapore, the countryside in those days was undulating land. Roads were covered with yellow mud; we walked and cycled along the slopes lined with trees, to the sounds of cicadas and birds. This world formed my earliest happy memory of life.
When I started writing in 2007, these memories came to the fore. My first two collections of miscellaneous essays were nostalgia for rural life and the natural surroundings. I wrote of mulberry trees, cassava, African tulip trees, fireflies….
I miss the countryside I grew up in; I love nature, and feel at ease with the simple, trusting character of the rural folk and their readiness to render mutual help. These memories of my hometown sustained me through the desolation I faced on my return.
The growth of cities with their industrial production and cultural and spiritual sophistication cannot be reversed. In such a system, the individual can survive without interacting with others. However the presence of the countryside can ameliorate the indifference and utilitarianism of city life.
Speaker: Lin Kang
Going against the flow forty years ago
That we have today’s Hai Fan is the outcome of his decision to leave home forty years ago. He disappeared without a trace.
The story has to be set in the history of Singapore. In 1948, the British colonial authorities declared a state of emergency throughout Malaya (including Singapore), setting off the armed struggle of the CPM.
With the end of World War II, a popular movement to free the country from colonial rule emerged. In the minds of the anti-colonial, independence-minded people, Malaya had always included Singapore. The anti-colonial forces retreated northwards for greater safety. Even though the war became more distant from Singapore, the unity of Malaya and Singapore remained in the imagination of the anti-colonial youth. When these youths decided to take to arms, they set off to the north, where the troops were based. This was the route taken by the author when he made the decision to leave home in 1976, more than forty years ago.
Speaker: Hai Fan
When I decided to join the guerrilla warfare in the mountains in 1976, Singapore had been independent for 10 years, and catching the wave of the third worldwide industrial transfer though multinational companies. Singapore was preparing to take off economically; the standard of living was improving. Instead of eagerly participating in this development, I went against the tide and headed north for the rainforest.
In the 1960s and 70s Japan, Germany and Western European countries transferred labor-intensive industries such as electronics, textile and wood processing factories, etc., to countries like Singapore and Malaysia, where land, and labour cost was lower. The economy grew but so did class contradictions and oppression. Newly independent states emerging from colonialism could not ignore socialism as an ideology, practice and system which centred on fighting for the working class. This period saw the Cultural Revolution in China; 1975 witnessed the reunification of Vietnam, and communist regimes coming to power in Laos and Cambodia.
I was about 20 years old, and was working out the issues of inequality, the need for social justice, and the direction my life should take.
Looking back, my decision then to join the war against the system and forces of capitalist exploitation was neither accidental nor abrupt. It was the prevailing ideological trend that guided how I understood the world—that our existence was inseparable from our ideals; a life of hard work, perseverance, discipline and dedication would result in the fulfilment of our vision.
I took the journey against the flow, from the countryside to the jungle.
With that, Xin Yu and later his alter-ego, Hai Fan emerged.
Speaker: Lin Kang
Walking away against the flow and the formation of Hai Fan
That journey of going against the flow led to Hai Fan, author of CPM literary writings—stories on life and death as participants in the guerilla war waged in the northern reaches of the Malay peninsula.
Since What the Rainforest Tells You (2014), Hai Fan has had a new publication every two years or so: the short story collection Delicious Hunger (2017); the essay collection The Tumultuous Hills (2019); the short story collection Wild Pathways (2021); the full-length novel Out of the Rainforest (2023).
For a full decade (2014-2023) he wrote stories based on his life experiences, and those of his comrades. In so doing, Hai Fan formed a narrative chain of three generations of writers who were CPM members—Jin Zhi Mang, born in 1912; He Jin, born in 1935; Hai Fan, born in 1953. Together they cover a span of 40 years of story-telling as testimony about the CPM rainforest. Was this development a chance occurrence, or the outcome of certain forces already in place?
Speaker: Hai Fan
Hai Fan didn’t make an appearance officially until 2015. It was not pre-destined.
Writings on the CPM had begun to appear in the first two decades of the present century. They include memoirs, most prominently party chairman Chin Peng’s Our History published in Chinese in 2004; other expositions on the history of the CPM have also been penned, as well as Magong literature, the term for CPM creative literary writings. With some of these accounts being at odds with what we lived through, I was prompted to publish a collection comprising six stories I had written while in the mountains, and diary entries in the early days of our return to civilian lives, including the setting up of the Peace Village. I had no intention to write another book as Hai Fan, the pen name I had used for lyrics I composed for CPM songs that we had sung. I had no intention to write another book as Hai Fan. What the Rainforest Tells You was meant to be my gesture of farewell to the past.
Not long after the publication of the book, I received an email from a well-known author who wanted to write a novel about the MCP and hoped to interview me. She knew me as Xin Yu, who had been in the rainforest. I was happy to oblige.
We talked for hours at my house. When we parted, I gave her a copy of What the Rainforest Tells You, saying that it might have materials she might find useful. Following that, she urged me to continue writing, and supported the publishing of my work in the literary supplement “ Annals of the Arts and Literature” of Sin Chew Daily, a Malaysian newspaper, and introduced me to a Malaysian publishing house.
I thus found myself at a fork in the road.
Should I continue to write as Xin Yu, or as Haifan? I had become accustomed to expressing my ideas in writing, and decided to make a start again with Hai Fan. The following year, in mid-2015, Sin Chew Daily’s literary supplement published my short story “Cherry-red Ivory”.
I was slowly making headway with Malaysian readers.
If not for Li Zi Shu, there would not be Hai Fan.
The struggle led by the MCP was a social movement that lasted almost half a century. It should be integral to the social and political history of Singapore and Malaysia, and even the region.
Putting together the short stories into a volume in 2014, more than thirty years after returning to mainstream society, I realised that what I have is insight into the lives of members of a very special social organization. Our experiences should not be distorted or forgotten, buried by the trivialities and mediocrity of regular life. Our stories can provide materials for retrospection, reflection and the learning process, not fuel for ideological or political ends.
Speaker: Lin Kang
We have been introduced to ‘Xin Yu’ and ‘Hai Fan’. The author now has free rein to tell us more about who he is.
Speaker: [Ang Tiam Huat]
I returned on that hot April day in 1992. My parents were living in a high-rise HDB estate. When I reached the block, a wake was being held at the void deck. I asked my brother whose family it was. He had no idea. I was shocked, and realised that I had returned to a completely foreign place. In the past, weddings and funerals in the countryside was everyone’s business. I found myself being confused and disconcerted.
One of my former classmates tried to cheer me up: “Don’t worry, you can live your own life. Now no one is afraid of anyone”. For good measure, he added, “And no one cares about anyone!”
I slowly got used to the heat and coldness of the city, caught in the tangle of rapid changes that ‘urbanization’ and ‘modernization’ brought, a world so different from the past I knew.
After ten years, I have settled in and overcome the strangeness and confusion I had been troubled by, especially when I started to write microfiction on aspects of HDB living, foreign workers, new citizens, Meet the People sessions, polyclinics, public transport congestion, the education system in schools….
I wrote “That Day”, spurred on by the results of the 2011 general election that saw for the first time the loss of a GRC by the ruling party. My short story “The afterglow of Hong Lim” inspired by the more than 2,500 signatures on the petition relating to Chinese education at the rally held at Hong Lim Park was written a year earlier. It became the title of Xin Yu’s first collection of short stories. I grew familiar with the city, and felt alive—feeling, observing, and thinking in relation to it.
The more than ten years of hardship in the rain forest was a process of searching for the meaning of life. It was a choice I made, but as with such choices, it was not a completely independent one, but also shaped by the times. That fateful decision has shaped the person I have turned out to be no less.
If I hadn’t chosen to leave the countryside for the rainforest in the mid-70s, I might have gone from being a ‘country boy’ to another HDB resident, like many of my friends.
For the more than ten years in the wilderness, I was one of a group of people whose existence was almost ignored or forgotten by mainstream discourse though we constituted an aspect of history which should have its place. Such groups and individuals often end tragically in the geopolitical games.
As for myself, I place my focus on the joys and sorrows of that group of people that I was part of, and which connected us.
I see life in all its complexity as the source of literature, and that writing should be located at the edge which the vulnerable, the neglected, and the abandoned occupy. We should be awakened to these lives.
The countryside, the rainforest parts of my life are behind me, the streets of the city stretch out in front. I aim to share the scenery along the way and hope that my journey will resonate with readers.
