Essay

Goh Beng Choo (吴明珠), 70, is a bilingual writer and translator. She has published 10 books in English translation, including A Man Like Me, an award-winning novel by Yeng Pway Ngon (英培安). She writes occasionally for 源 – a Chinese community magazine.

 

Trivialities about Me and Yeng Pway Ngon  (1英培安1947-2021) 

 

I first met Pway Ngon when I was 16. Then a Sec. 4 student at St. Nicholas Girls’ School, I was close to a classmate named Wu Xiaodie. Xiaodie loved literature and wrote poetry. One day she told me about a gathering of famous poets at a book shop, which we could observe. I went with her. It was on that occasion that I met him. His fine Mandarin and kind appearance were very attractive to me. After the gathering, the poets chatted with us for a little while. I took the opportunity to ask him for his address.

We started writing letters to each other, in which he would share his knowledge of Chinese culture and literature with me. I started visiting him at his house on North Bridge Road, on the second floor of a two-storey building that he shared with his parents and younger sister. As well as all the literary books stacked up there, I was impressed by a life-size oil painting he had produced of a famous Japanese singer.

Yeng Pway Ngon was my only boyfriend until we got married in 1976. We have a daughter and two grandsons aged five and nine. Yeng started writing poetry when he was a teenager. He had been writing for 50 years when he passed away in January 2021 from cancer. He was a graduate of the Chinese Language Department of the former Ngee Ann College (now the Ngee Ann Polytechnic). After his National Service in the 1970s, he opened a bookshop selling literature imported from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He also wrote a column for a local Chinese newspaper, as well as social commentaries on various issues in Singapore. He had a large following thanks to his humorous, satirical style. Twenty collections of his social commentaries had been published.

His first novel, A Man Like Me, was published in 1987, and won him the Book Award for Chinese Fiction from the then National Book Development Council. He went on to win the Singapore Literature Prize – the highest literary award in the country – for his novels Art Studio 画室, Trivialities About Me and Myself 我与我自己的二三事, Unrest骚动, and Costume 戏服. He has written two other novels – Lonely Face 孤寂的脸and Colour of Twilight 黄昏的颜色. Art Studio has been translated into English by Loh Guan Liang and Goh Beng Choo, Unrest and Costume by Jeremy Tiang, Trivialities About Me and Myself  by Howard Goldblatt, and Lonely Face by Natascha Bruce.

My husband also wrote some 120 poems. Some of them have been published in On The Operating Table手术台上，Rootless String无根的弦，Daily Life日常生活, and Boulder石头. Fifty four of his poems have been published in five volumes in a bilingual edition by the Literary Centre. His poetry features a wide range of subjects. Some pieces depict the loneliness of a Chinese scholar lost in the modern material world, while others use film-like techniques. For example, his On The Operating Table is 150 lines long and offers a panoramic view of what life is like in modern society. He also composed poems for children, which are rich in imagination and fantasy. In poems like Flood Taming and Aftermath, he shared his concerns about freedom and democracy.

 

Flood Taming

he has various methods, strategies at his disposal

for staunching any river that may flow

contrary to his will; he has all manner of ingenious mechanisms

for plugging all kinds of

loopholes

 

and all the

all the mouths

 

he’s the modern Xia Yu,[1] or so he says

the skilful tamer of floods

if he predicts

that a river will flood, the river will flood

even if the riverbed is parched to the bone

he is Xia Yu, and flood-taming is his

dominion, plugging loopholes his responsibility

plugging every loophole

 

he who opens his mouth

will wake to find his roof gone

then his bed

his arms and legs

and

his tongue          

 

Yeng’s literary critique Journey of Reading阅读旅程 presents unique and bold commentaries on the Chinese classic红楼梦Dream of The Red Chamber, as well as various Western works. His short story collection titled 不存在的情人contains 17 pieces of short fiction that are full of absurdity and satire.

In the 1980s, he wrote three plays titled Man and Bronze Statue, Misdelivered Mail, and Love Story. All the three were staged by the then Singapore Broadway Play House and directed by Eric Chia, the founder and director of the theatre company.

Yeng read voraciously, favouring books on Western philosophers and novels by Noble Laureates. His favourite writers were Saul Bellow, J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, and the poet T. S. Elliot. Among Asian authors, he liked novelists Xi Xi西西 and 也斯 Ye Si, and poets Yang Mu杨牧 and Ya Xian瘂弦.

His novels revolve around the plight of human beings, especially low-income people struggling to make a living in Singapore. In novels such as A Man Like Me and Lonely Face, he profiled intelligent women who stand up for themselves.

Yeng was a firm believer in Existentialism – a philosophy that stresses the present as well as the human courage to cope with adversities. He admired Jean-Paul Sartre and Eric Fromm, and particularly favoured Fromm’s book The Art of Loving, often speaking about his philosophy in his talks. However, he was also an advocate of Confucianism, especially the sage’s focus on self-cultivation, or self-discipline. He wrote articles about how one can turn ordinary life into something meaningful: by recognising one’s strength and pursuing one’s dream.

Yeng received the Cultural Medallion and SEAWrite Award, as well as being honoured by The Art’s House as Pioneer Writer of Singapore in 2018. Most of his books and  English-language translations of his novels are available at City Book Room 城市书房. He ran a bookshop called Grassroot Book Room 草根书室for 20 years. Inspired by him, his assistant Tan Waln Ching opened her own book shop at the same spot six years ago.

All the years that we lived together, I held full-time jobs to support our family. I was a social worker in the 1970s and early ’80s, and a journalist with The Straits Times from 1983 to 1993. We communicated well; there was nothing we would not talk about. Whenever he wrote something, I was always his first reader. I learned a lot about literature from him. After retirement I did freelance translation, translating A Man Like Me and Art Studio in collaboration with Loh Guan Liang, 54 poems, and a short story collection titled The Non-existent Love and other Stories.

When Yeng Pway Ngon  passed away from pancreatic cancer, scores of commemorating articles appeared in newspapers and journals. At his book shop over the years, he had met a wide variety of people, and had influenced some of them. Li Qingsong is a fine example. Initially a non-reader, Li was introduced to literature by Yeng, and eventually published a 200,000-word novel. Yeng also inspired several others to create imagistic poetry online.

In November 2021, I made a documentary about my husband with film-maker Tay Kah Beng, centring on his writing and life. Titled 活在当下—怀念作家英培安 (Living The Moment: Remembering a Singapore Literary Giant Yeng Pway Ngon), it is available on YouTube.

In the 1990s, Yeng was invited by the Minister of Culture of Taiwan to take part in a writers’ literary camp in Taipei, involving authors from various countries. He was also the first author to participate in the writer-in-residence programme, where he taught creative writing to students at the Chinese Language Department of Nanyang Technological University for one semester in 2013 from January to May.

Yeng left behind 30 books in various genres, including poetry, fiction, short stories, social commentaries, and book reviews.

 

 

[1] A legendary ancient emperor who was famous for stopping floods.

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