In Jeremy Tiang’s debut novel, State of Emergency, which won the Singapore Literature Prize, a young couple meet and marry in 1950s Singapore, only to choose dramatically different political paths as the country and neighboring Malaya seek independence from their British colonizers. The wife joins the Communists’ anticolonial struggle as a guerrilla soldier in the rainforest; the husband is left behind to raise their young children. Decades later, their niece is unjustly imprisoned, accused of conspiring against the Singapore government, and their estranged son tries to piece together his fragmented family history and learn about the mother he never knew. As the novel follows these characters and others over five decades, it illuminates their often wrenching decisions to hew to their political ideals, despite the emotional and sometimes physical costs involved.

Jeremy has also translated Delicious Hunger, a collection of short stories originally written in Chinese by Hai Fan (the pen name of Singaporean writer Ang Tiam Huat), who was one such Communist soldier for thirteen years in the same rainforest. In these stories, a group of impassioned freedom fighters struggle not only against the better equipped British and later Malaysian armies, but also against hunger, romantic “bourgeois” love, and the quotidian frictions of guerrilla life that complicate their vision of a liberatory future. Delicious Hunger zooms in on these characters’ lives as they’re deployed from one secret camp to another, one mission to another, committed to an unglamorous political struggle and its stark, physically demanding rigors.

I’ve known Jeremy for well over a decade, since before either book project materialized. We spoke on Zoom about what drew him to write and translate fiction about these political movements, why women are such significant characters in both works, and how these stories might inform our understanding of the current political moment.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: You started writing State of Emergency more than ten years ago. How did the novel come about?

Jeremy Tiang: It started as a novel about the Macdonald House bombing [in 1965], and that’s still the very first thing that happens in the novel. But as I started looking into the histories of Singapore and Malaysia, it felt a bit like pulling on threads to see what would unravel. Ultimately, the strand that I kept following was about the Communist insurrection and the related leftist movements, mostly around Singapore, and the guerrillas in the rainforests of Malaya. The novel coalesced around this layer of history, which I couldn’t really engage with without also talking about Singapore and Malaysia’s history of detention without trial—how there’s a kind of continuity with British colonial rule and the actions of the post-independence governments, and a kind of continuity in the repression that was enacted during the Malayan Emergency and subsequently through the first decades of independence. These related things became the backbone of the story. 

YB: How much of it is fiction, and how much is drawn from research? 

JT: That’s difficult to answer because it’s all imagined. There aren’t any real people in it. Historical figures are mentioned, but none of them put in an appearance. However, if an election happened on a certain date or if the British enacted a particular policy, then that’s all factual. The characters are composites of historical figures that I researched or groups of historical individuals that I aggregated. A little bit of someone’s detention story, a little bit of someone else’s, and then imagination to join the gaps between them. I would say it feels true to me. It’s all fiction, but it’s also consistent with historical events so it could have happened this way. 

YB: State of Emergency is also about one specific family who is touched by certain political choices made throughout the years. How did you arrive at this as your way into the story? 

JT: One of the first aspects of research I undertook was talking to my parents and other family members, so I think family became a starting point for me. We tend to know a bit more about who the people involved in the struggle were in their public lives, be they government officials or leftist activists or guerrillas in the rainforest. We know less about who they were privately. The tension between the public and the private is always very rich to explore, so it made sense for the novel to be about a single family. There are different time periods and narrators with different leanings, but the fact that they’re connected by blood or marriage makes the novel feel more like a single, coherent journey rather than a disparate collection of individuals. 

YB: It’s concentrated. The choices made by an individual that seem personal have huge political repercussions across the decades on the family. 

JT: That’s a favorite threat of authoritarian governments, isn’t it? How could you do this? Think about your family. The family becomes a weaponized site for oppression. None of these people exist in a vacuum, even if they would like to think of themselves that way. 

YB: When the character Stella is being interrogated by the government, the interrogators bring up her immediate family, who is not politically active, and then her aunt, Siew Li, a soldier in the rainforest whom she never knew. 

JT: Yes, your family connections can be inherently suspicious. When I was growing up in Singapore, I remember people who were on blacklists, and their family members would find it difficult to find jobs. It still happens today, just in different forms. 

YB: Can you talk about your decision to write from six points of view? In particular, you focus on women who are politically active. How did these characters come to you? And did anything from your interviews with family members make its way into the novel?

JT: No one is remotely based on my family, who are very apolitical. Talking to them was more about texture: What did you have for breakfast? How did you get to school? What was it like to take a taxi? It built up the world. 

There had to be many points of view because I was trying to cover so much ground. Han Suyin’s novel, And The Rain My Drink, was very influential on me. She lived through this historical period, and her novel weaves together many points of view of people living side by side yet having very different political views of the world. She and I have very different vibes, but she writes in a way that I had never seen before, the astonishing way she’s able to see the entire tapestry and every level of the conflict at the same time.

In my novel, I wanted to have both the English-educated and Chinese-educated perspectives. I wanted us to be in different places: Singapore, Malaysia and London. It was freeing to jump like that. It was more about what I thought the big flashpoints were rather than starting with the people. For example, I knew I had to write about the massacre at Batang Kali [where British soldiers killed unarmed civilians in 1948], and it was more about who was there and whose perspective would I inhabit. For other parts of the novel: who got detained by the Internal Security Department in Singapore, who was in the rainforest fighting? Identifying the storylines I wanted to investigate, then the individuals in each strand to use for their point of view. Then finding ways that these lines would intersect so there would be continuity.

I should say a lot of this is me rationalizing it after the fact. None of this was going through my mind at the time of writing. It was very much about what felt right or necessary at each moment. 

YB: Conventional accounts of this historical period are very male-dominated. In your novel, the three female narrators are the ones who really feel pressure from the state, from the patriarchy or the dominant narrative. Like Revathi—people don’t want her to talk about the Batang Kali massacre, but she’s determined to keep digging on her own.

JT: I don’t think the women in all these political movements have been given as much prominence as the men, but there were a lot of them. Early in my research, I read Agnes Khoo’s oral history of the female comrades, Life As the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-Colonial Struggle. There were also many female politicians on both sides of the government. There were many female student activists. Among the 1987 detainees in Singapore were many women. Conventionally these would be male-dominated narratives, but that was not borne out by my research. I ended up fifty-fifty, three male and three female narrators. I didn’t stop and think, oh, I need more women here. I did the research, and that’s how the story unfolded.

YB: Who did you write this novel for? 

JT: I wrote it for myself, in the sense that these were the things I wanted to unravel and think through. I knew about these individual pockets of history but not how they all joined together. I had to write the novel to find those connections, to make sense of it all and to spend a sustained period of time in that world. Even if it had never gotten published and never found readers, it would still have been worthwhile because it was a process I wanted to go through. 

I almost never start out wanting to tell a particular story. I’m kind of figuring out what it is as I go. If I started out already knowing the story, if I know where I’m going to go, I don’t need to write ninety thousand words to get there. I want to get somewhere new that I didn’t know was at the end of the path. I don’t even necessarily know what the path is. 

YB: Do you remember what you did not know about that path as you were writing? 

JT: I went back and read some early drafts, and I had no memory of them. I think when I found the thing that worked, it became the story, and I mentally discarded any other version. In previous drafts, there were false starts and things that didn’t work or that were going in the wrong direction. But I don’t think I could at those points have said, oh, this is what I don’t know. It really is just stumbling through a field full of fog, and you have no idea what you’re groaning towards until you are. 

YB: It’s very interesting to hear you say that, because the final version that we read seems intentional.

JT: A lot of art is the thing that you didn’t know that you were heading towards until you found it. Then it feels so right and natural that it must always have been this way. The reader hopefully never knows. It seems effortless, it seems to just have always existed in the shape of that. You know when you’ve found the right one, so you have to forget all the other things.

YB: Okay, let’s turn to Delicious Hunger. How did you come across Hai Fan’s writing? 

JT: Delicious Hunger was different to any literature I’d seen before about the Malayan Communist Party. Hai Fan wrote it long after everything else that dealt with the topic. It’s not like the Jin Zimang or He Jin stuff from fifty years ago. The idea that in 2017, there was a new work of literature about that history out—obviously, I’m going to be fascinated. 

Hai Fan wrote when he was in the rainforest, and he’s still producing new work, writing one book every couple of years. To be translating him as he’s writing—like, why wouldn’t I? 

YB: What were the literary qualities in the Chinese that attracted you? 

JT: There’s a directness and lack of pretension that I really enjoy. It’s also very human. None of the characters are mouthpieces for ideology. At the same time, none of them are there to be reflexively cynical or critical of their circumstances. It’s a very honest depiction of how life was in the rainforest for everyone who sincerely believes in what they’re doing and what they’re fighting for. But it’s also very clear-eyed about the difficulties surrounding them. They get into petty disagreements with their comrades and are unhappy about the conditions of their lives and have feelings that are unruly. All the while, they’re surrounded by this gorgeously realized rainforest that never feels overwritten. 

Related to your point about women in political movements, there are a lot of women in Delicious Hunger. I don’t think that’s a contrivance by Hai Fan. There were a lot of female comrades.

YB: Delicious Hunger feels like it takes place in an enclosed world, a microcosm with its own rules and expectations. 

JT: That’s all good fiction, the world has its own internal logic. It’s also Hai Fan’s view of that part of his life. 

YB: I was wondering how much of the grueling difficulties he experienced. 

JT: There wasn’t a lot of individualism in the rainforest. Comrades were almost never alone, you were always with other people. It was a very communal life. I don’t know if he would say, this character is me. I think he would say these people are us. 

YB: Can you talk broadly about how you translate, not just Chinese into English, but also in approaching a historical context like this?

JT: Whether you’re writing or translating, if you’re embodying any kind of minoritized perspective or challenging the official narrative in any way, it’s really easy to slip into using the official lexicon. Like people in Singapore use the term, “Hock Lee Bus riots.” It’s the phrase we’re used to, without stopping to think how calling it a riot is already making a value judgment or positioning it in a certain way. I like to interrogate these uses of words. Am I bolstering certain ideas or narratives by using a particular vocabulary, and is there a simple adjustment I can make that would pull away from that? Because there’s such a dominant narrative in Singapore, a singular point of view that’s been enshrined at so many levels of society that it’s really easy to fall into that way of thinking, that use of language and not even realize you’re doing it. 

In my essay in the Margins about translating Delicious Hunger, I talked about using the word rainforest instead of jungle. I agreed with the analysis that jungle has resonances that aren’t helpful. I also realized that Hai Fan has consistently used yŭlín (雨林), which literally means rainforest. Then I thought, should I go back and change all the instances of jungle in State of Emergency? I didn’t because I think the book is the book, and if I start pulling on threads, it would all unravel and I’d have to write it again from scratch. 

YB: How much did you explain political context while still keeping the story true to Hai Fan’s voice? 

JT: I didn’t do much scaffolding at all. The comrades were very wrapped up in their day-to-day lives and what they were doing at the moment. Anything that needed to be explained, Hai Fan explained, because it’s not like present-day Chinese-language readers are necessarily aware of that history. 

YB: I wonder whether that’s why the stories reverberate so deeply. Even if you don’t know anything about Malaya or that period, everything the characters are going through is very real.

JT: They’re living difficult lives, and the conflicts are very, very clear. There’s no ennui. No one has the time to be depressed or vaguely dissatisfied or feel empty. They have very concrete goals. How are we going to carry this wild boar back to camp? How am I going to find food to survive? How are we going to escape those snipers? Definitely we get to know what’s going on inside them, their inner lives, but I think it does push against a certain genre of contemporary literature, about the upper middle class person whose life appears to be going great, but they feel empty inside. Those books often become very interior. The characters are going to Whole Foods, but inside they’re struggling. 

YB: You were involved in the cover design for both books. Can you tell us about them?

JT: The Singaporean artist, Sim Chi Yin, has some amazing photographs related to the Malayan Emergency and the rainforest. I love all of Chi Yin’s photography, and I suggested her work to Tilted Axis for Delicious Hunger. I’m very happy with the prosthetic limb on the cover. A lot of prosthetic limbs are mentioned in the book because there were landmines in this war. Without that cover, when you read prosthetic limb, you might envision something more contemporary and professionally produced, not this essentially handmade prosthetic limb that they rigged out of whatever materials they could get their hands on in the rainforest. 

For the cover of State of Emergency, World Editions wanted to use a mural that I photographed when I was at the Friendship Village [in Thailand, where former Communist soldiers now live]. It’s very representative of the comrades, for sure. 

YB: How do you think State of Emergency and Delicious Hunger speak to our present political moment? 

JT: Both of them are set in periods of history that are very different to the world we’re in now. Both are about people who believe very much in something and fight very hard to make that thing happen. There’s a tendency to think that the struggle failed because they didn’t turn Malaya Communist, but I don’t think the comrades see it that way. They created a society in the rainforest that wasn’t in thrall to capitalism and that allowed them to live communally on their own terms, and they did that for decades. I think they created the society they wanted to see in the world, and they got to live out their principles, which most of us don’t get to do. 

Perhaps that’s a useful corrective to today’s focus on outcomes. We often think about where we want to end up and focus very hard on that, rather than on seeing your life as a kind of intentional practice and living your life according to the principles you want to espouse.