Reading Mammon Inc. by Hwee Hwee Tan, one gets a sense of deja vu from the turn of the millennium boom economy in which an army of swaggering twenty-something yuppies looked poised for world domination.
This debut novel depicts the mental wrestling of a young Singaporean woman named Chia Deng who finds herself at a crossroads in life having recently graduated from Oxford University. She's torn by her obviously bright job prospects, by the idealism she acquired in college and by the irrefutable bonds of culture and family, all of which pull her in different directions.
After years of comfortable seclusion in her ivory tower, she now faces the choice of a high-powered job complete with its material trimmings or the more cerebral pursuit of becoming an assistant to a famous professor in his research into an obscure Christian mystical text.
What gives this book its frenetic pace and dark tone is the omnipresence of the Big Brother-like mega-conglomerate Mammon CorpS, which wants to recruit Chia Deng as a so-called "adapter," a type of cultural competency consultant. Her job would be to train the corporation's executives to be culturally fluent where ever they carry out their operations. Straddling East and West, Chia Deng is viewed as the ultimate candidate.
Tan deftly handles the hesitations experienced by Chia Deng, who realizes her decision will place her firmly on one side of the cultural fence on which she sits. The Chinese side of her tells her to take the high-paying job, while her youthful, Western intellectual side tells her to reject the evil capitalist Mammon CorpS.
Chia Deng's family, portrayed as a conventional Chinese clan, is jubilant that their prodigy daughter will work for Mammon CorpS, bringing with it the five C's so prized in Singapore: car, credit card, country club membership, cash and career. Tan goes to great lengths to convey the impression that Chinese culture has little patience for individualistic pursuits such as a personally fulfilling job and expects that now that Chia Deng has her degree, it's time she fell in line with what her family, society and culture demand of her -- namely, obedience.
The conflict between East and West, however, is painfully forced in many sections of this novel. The two main Western characters in the book -- Steve, Chia Deng's British roommate at Oxford, and Tock Seng, her high school sweetheart who is a fluent Chinese-speaking Anglo-American who grew up in Singapore -- are hoisted with so many Western bohemian cliches it's surprising there's no scene with one of them pensively writing poetry in a smoky coffee shop.
By far the most blatant and upsetting generalizations, however, are reserved for Chinese, or more specifically Singaporean, culture.
Chia Deng's portrayal of her sister borders on caricature. She is obsessively thrifty, or kia su in Singlish, passionate about KTV and brandname clothes, and seemingly oblivious to any concern loftier than her next meal. Her parents, meanwhile, are narrow-minded bigots who assume Steve has AIDS simply because he's a Westerner. One section has Chia Deng musing on a Singaporean joke: "How many Singaporeans does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. They'd hire a foreigner to do it." Ha, ha.
In short, Singaporeans are made out to be shallow, materialistic people and Tan seems to declare this almost as a challenge to the reader.
Mammon Inc. is above all a novel about morphing cultural identities in an age of global capitalism, particularly among the jet set, as well as the degree to which some people simply are impervious to change. Reading this book, one immediately recognizes the high-octane yuppie energy of the late 1990s and even 2000, when Tan wrote the novel. Reading it in the post-bubble period makes the book seem practically retro.
All those surrounding Chia Deng, with the exception of Tock Seng, are hopelessly racist and ignorant and seem perfectly comfortable this way. Chia Deng, on the other hand, is too uprooted to lose her objectivity vis-a-vis any culture, which makes her perfectly suited to be an "adapter."
Mammon CorpS runs Chia Deng through a series of tests in her recruitment phase in which she is asked to remake herself, or adapt in Mammon CorpS terms, as a New York socialite and then adapt Steve as a Singaporean and her sister as a typical, anglo Oxford student. The tests involving Steve and Chia Deng's sister's end in utter failure, as both come up against unshakable prejudice. This improbable recruitment process smacks of gimmickry, but it nonetheless allows Tan to expose and exaggerate latent racism and also provides for the oddest and ultimately pivotal scene, the test in New York.
During Chia Deng's adaptation process in New York, the city is described as a type of high-tech, hellish, Philip K. Dick megalopolis, perpetually dark and dominated by cold towers housing the great powermongers of the world. Chia Deng is at once drawn and intimidated by the malevolent energy of the city. This is in stark contrast to the poetic elegance used to describe the Medieval town of Oxford or the polished sophistication of Singapore.
Through wild coincidences and grating fast-talk dialog that test the reader's patience, Chia Deng weasels her way into an exclusive party hosted by the hipster magazine Gen-Vex, an apparent take on England's two main definers of cool The Face and Q. There, she is surrounded by the world's most attractive and successful movers and shakers and, to her surprise, they accept her despite her glaring Chineseness. Among the glitterati she claims to have found her "tribe," and as superficial as they may be, the sense of community she feels overcomes any revulsion she may feel toward them.
Far from a paean to the American melting pot, Chia Deng's easy assimilation into New York society is due more to the city's full-bore pursuit of materialism and narcissism, where no one cares where you're from but only cares about your line of work and how up-to-date you are on the latest trends and gadgets.
Chia Deng discovers in the end that the Gen-Vex scene is a type of simulacrum of Singapore, with the same materialistic values and she finds that this familiarity promises comfort.
Mammon Inc.'s success is in complicating the voice of the young, cosmopolitan elite. They are ambitious, polyglot and move effortlessly between cultures. But despite their surface sophistication, Tan forces one to question whether they are truly as enlightened as they seem.
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