BOOK NOTE: City of Small Blessings - Simon Tay

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’.