I find it fascinating that many places we now call home or
office in Singapore used to be the sea just a few decades ago. Reclamation
is the term for the process where geo-engineering is used to create new land
where the sea once lapped at the shore. Entire districts have arisen this way,
and more will follow given Singapore’s ambitious plans. And with it, what was
once a beach road retreats inland.
What has always struck me is the word itself. Reclamation.
It carries a sense of assertion, as though we are simply taking back what was
ours from the sea. But from another perspective, it may be the reverse: perhaps
it is the sea that has been forced to surrender what has always been its own,
in the name of progress. I am not complaining, just fascinated by the
semantics.
Simon Tay’s City of Small Blessings helped me
appreciate this “other side” perspective. Told through the lives of two
generations, a father and a son, it spans decades. From the father’s childhood
to the son’s adulthood. The novel reflects on change, its pace, and how memory,
though personal and mosaic-like, is often painted over by the broad brush of
history, leaving a grander but less nuanced canvas.
Without giving away too much, the book is a story of loss
and identity, and how physical places serve as artifacts in that journey. The
central conflict is the loss of an estate, taken by the powers that be to be
redeveloped for foreign interests. For most of us, it makes sense. There is progress,
efficiency, development. But for those living there, especially the aging
protagonist, it is the taking away of home.
The novel is rich and layered. Through flashbacks, it
recalls Singapore’s wartime hardships, the forging of national resilience, and
the protagonist’s own rise as a respected educationist which mirrors the
nation’s growth from a fishing village to a global cosmopolis. Yet by the
2000s, progress has become institutionalized, a steady hum of growth that often
masks in data and statistics, the living memories of those it displaces. The
retired protagonist, ousted from his home, becomes a symbol of this tension.
The narrative alternates between father and son,
highlighting generational shifts. The son represents a global, hybrid identity.
One that is cosmopolitan, yet detached from the pioneer spirit. His loyalties
are not to what the pioneers built, but more to the individuals themselves. Their
sacrifices, and their worldview, his father’s in particular. What remains for
his generation is not so much the physical place, but the personalities and the
stories that shaped them.
Amidst the reclamation of the estate, there is the same
justification as with land reclamation: progress, executed efficiently and
rationally. Yet the novel made me feel that the protagonist is like the sea
itself. Pushed back, encroached upon, but no less Singaporean than the land
that rises in its place.
One passage captures this beautifully, when the protagonist
protests the redevelopment:
The unplanned is a hedge, an insurance policy in times of revolutionary change. The unplanned also has its value…
The places we think peripheral influence and shape evolution in the mainstream.
The unplanned provides surprise, texture and serendipity.
This can be physical. In a modern city, a conserved building, or in the heart of an old city, a gleaming tower. It can be mental and social. In a busy business day in a consumer-centered, rational society, an hour for coffee with a person with an interesting story—or even the prospect of falling in love, like the famous photograph by Robert Doisneau. Amidst the milling, bustling crowd, a couple kisses. The planned schedules are disrupted, put on hold, for something—romance—that no one can really plan for, even if we can hope for it. We can plan our lives, but what happens, will happen. And if we are blessed, what happens will be beyond our grandest plans.
City of Small Blessings itself feels like such an
“unplanned” gift. A hidden garden tucked between skyscrapers, a quiet refuge of
memory and meaning in the tide of progress. And as the review by the Quarterly
Literary Review said, ‘an important marker in the history of the Singapore
novel’.
