Whoever said print is dead is wrong. It was at the closing weekend of the Singapore Writers Festival, when I was making my way through a group of women in elaborate saris that I noticed something that stopped me in my tracks. People, especially children, reading. The festival bookstore was small but cozy, and the cafe next to it serving iced milos provided a relaxing spot to indulge in a good book.
The Lion City may be known more for its immaculate sidewalks free from bubblegum stains than its literature, but sometimes it takes such structure and orderliness to pull together the gargantuan feat of hosting a writers festival. Organized by the National Arts Council, this year’s festival, which ran from Oct. 30 to Nov. 8 was centered on the theme “Island of Dreams,” and aimed to promote Singapore’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, as well as inviting authors from around the world to cultivate the country’s reputation as an international literary hub.
Launched in 1986 as a biannual event, the festival has since grown to become a yearly affair housing over 300 events in and around the Arts House, a breezy, two-story colonial-style structure which served as Singapore’s first parliament building in 1826. Featured speakers included children’s book authors, cartoonists and poets, alongside a smattering of pop concerts, theatrical performances and visual arts exhibitions. Events were conducted mostly in English, but there were also panels in Chinese, Malay and Hindi.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
These are lofty goals for a tiny country — goals that are hard to quantify. What the festival succeeded at doing was keeping a love for literature alive and hope that one can still eke out a living drawing cartoons or composing sonnets, both childhood dreams of mine, and apparently for some of the children at the bookstore.
FOR THE YOUNG AND YOUNG AT HEART
It was the cute illustrated cover that caught my eye. A little boy in a yellow jumpsuit marching through Shilin Night Market (士林夜市), bubble tea in one hand and fried squid pierced in a skewer in another. Behind him is the Modern Toilet restaurant and a sign selling frog eggs. Lost in Taipei is part of the new series, The Travel Diary of Amos Lee penned by Singaporean children’s book author Adeline Foo (楊惠媚). When I meet with the best-selling author outside the bookstore, she greets me with a warm smile and tells me how much she’s enjoyed her trips to Taiwan.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
The book, Foo says, was inspired by her then 13-year-old son’s “cultural immersion” trip to Taipei to learn Chinese.
“His response was, ‘mom, I’m going to run away and get my teacher in trouble,’” Foo says.
In the book, the protagonist Amos and his friends break free from the Mandarin Language Center only to end up in one unfortunate situation after another, leaving them penniless and washing dishes in exchange for food.
Photo courtesy of Julian Kam
Foo is optimistic that books aren’t dead. She admits, however, that it’s hard to get her sons interested in reading since “boys are more attracted to things that are fast.” So her decision to launch the Amos series was, in part, an attempt to introduce them to reading.
“Children enjoy topics that are taboo — like poop and farts,” she says. This was her inspiration for another one of her books, Poop Fiction.
Although Foo is glad to see her books selling well — they’re especially popular among international school students in Singapore — it’s no secret that it’s difficult to earn a living as a full-time writer. She wishes that there were more children’s book authors writing full-time as there needs to be consistency when publishing a series so that young readers won’t lose interest.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
As for Amos, he’ll be embarking on a journey to Australia to save the environment in Foo’s next book.
LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE
I finished three-quarters of Lost in Taipei on the plane ride back to Taipei. Needless to say, children’s books are not just for children. Another panelist with a similar outlook is Hong Kong’s Joseph Wong (王澤). The cartoonist took over his father’s Chinese-language comic series, Old Master Q (老夫子), which was first published in 1960.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
“Why is it that we only read comics when we are young and not when we’re adults?” Wong asks the audience at his panel “Old Master Q and Me,” which drew a full house.
He says that his father was criticized by family and friends for drawing comics at a time when many people in the Hong Kong were starving, though the elder Wong’s intentions were simply to bring laughter to people going through tough times. Little did he know that the comics were going to be read by fans from Canada to South Africa.
“The world needs comics and people need to laugh,” Wong says. “It’s like visual Aspirin.”
Throughout the decades, Old Master Q has found himself in humorous situations such as painting the Eiffel Tower in a beret at a Parisian cafe or taking a selfie with basketball star Yao Ming (姚明).
It hasn’t always been smooth-sailing. Wong was shocked to discover that pirated versions of some of his father’s old comics were printed and sold in other parts of Asia.
However, Wong still firmly believes that “doing comics is really the happiest job on earth.”
Malaysian cartoonist Julian “Lefty” Kam (甘承耀) who spoke at the panel, “The Appeal of the Undead,” agrees. His comic series, Major Zombie, is about a zombie that operates behind an old motorbike workshop in Penang, Malaysia.
“I guess the reason I love zombie culture is because it’s simple, has a certain comedic effect and yet, is tragic,” he says.
Kam, who hails from Penang, which is famous for its beaches and history as a thriving commercial port during the colonial era, was part of the “Making George Town” project where artists painted over walls and created installations alongside old historic buildings to draw attention to the history of the neighborhood.
Different artists have their own style, but Kam uses a single-panel format with a humorous tone to attract people to stop and read.
“When people understand the significance of these streets, they will appreciate it more,” Kam says.
REALITY CHECK
Other panelists were more cynical. Dylan Jones, editor-in-chief of GQ magazine in the UK, mentioned at his panel “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” that Conde Nast is hoping to expand their reach into Asian markets.
“It’s just more interesting to work here,” he says.
He adds that although centers of production are shifting eastwards, there are still individuals in the industry who have “old, imperialistic outlooks” on what they consider to be new markets.
When I speak to Jones in person over a latte, he’s even more straightforward and opinionated — refreshingly so. Print will never be dead, he says, and magazines like GQ have good writers to ensure that. Jones is proud of the fact that they rarely kill stories — a result of his steadfast belief that if you hire good writers who are well-versed in the subjects they’re writing about, then there should be no need to kill a story.
“I’ve seen many editors who spend their lives editing and re-writing and it’s basically to justify their own existence,” Jones says.
As for those seeking to break into the industry, he thinks that blogs aren’t exactly the right place to start.
“With blogs, you have to develop a personality very quickly. Some people don’t have a personality and they shouldn’t,” he says.
In fact, cold pitching is a better approach. Jones says he can count on one hand the number of unsolicited submissions he receives per month and is surprised why there aren’t more if there are so many young, aspiring journalists vying for bylines.
That being said, as obvious as it may seem, it’s best to have something new to say rather than hash out old cliches and trite tropes. This was a general consensus at the festival, and no one demonstrated it more than Canadian experimental poet Christian Bok.
Bok, who has spent over a decade trying to inject poems into the genome of a living organism that can then replicate itself in outer space, believes that people only think poetry is dead because poets are writing about the same topics over and over again.
“There are so many great scientific discoveries going on in the world, but people are writing poems about divorces,” Bok says at his panel, “Christian Bok Goes Interstellar.”
He adds that there were no epic poems written about the first moon walk in 1969, but that if the Ancient Greeks had sent someone to the moon, they would have wrote dozens of sonnets about it.
As for his own project, the Xenotext Experiment, Bok is immortalizing written language in his own way.
“When people tell me that poetry is dead, my response is to create a poem that will live on forever in DNA,” he says.
LITERATURE AS NOURISHMENT
While other events — such as the 12-hour non-stop reading of Meira Chand’s A Different Sky or a cooking demonstration and talk on food writing that was attended primarily by hungry old ladies groveling for free mee siam or “Siamese noodles” — could have been orchestrated better, the festival on a whole did much to rekindle a love for literature and the arts for the kid in me who doodled and wrote haikus inside of science textbooks.
As I sat in the old chamber of the Arts House listening to the closing debate on the role that dreams play in constructing national identity, it became clear that literary festivals aren’t simply about pushing book sales.
At the same time, however, how many people will be so inspired by the festival that they’ll open their laptops and start typing a best-selling novel? It’s hard to say. What the festival did well though, was highlight the calming and introspective nature of the arts, and relatedly, how we need to take time off our busy lives to reflect.
It’s the little stories — Amos getting lost on the streets of Taipei, Old Master Q taking a selfie with Yao Ming — that stick out to us the most and makes us stop and think of the bigger picture. Indeed, the tangible items — the books, magazines and comic strips — are all part and parcel of the construction of the narratives that societies, identities and cultures are built upon.
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