Somerset Maugham Scandalises 1920s Singapore

Tracey
He nearly died twice when he was here.

Jimmy
Did he?

Tracey
Yeah, he did. He was on a river down in Sarawak. And this bore, really bizarre bore tidal wave they have sometimes coming through the river, came down and washed him out and Gerald. And Gerald actually had a heart attack.

Jimmy
Oh my God.

Tracey
No, it was really horrific. Oh, when I think about it now, everything had just… you can imagine, they’re on this kind of barge thing, and they’re down with like there are 15 people that are taking care of them. And then this wave comes out of nowhere. They have no idea about it. Then they’re all washed out. Maugham comes up for air, and he can see Gerald, and he can see that he’s panicking and so he grabs him, takes him to the shore, and then Gerald Haxton has a heart attack, and he nearly loses him.

Jimmy
Oh my goodness.

Tracey
And Maugham thankfully is a doctor and resuscitates him, and he’s okay. But that really did a lot of… I can imagine that would have been quite traumatic. And then also in Bangkok, in Thailand, he got malaria and he nearly died. So, yeah, I definitely think these trips definitely changed him. They also gave him a great insight and perception into life here.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You are listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

When the well-known writer Somerset Maugham came to this region in the early 1920s, he was welcomed by the expatriate community here. They were pleased to have a celebrity writer and playwright in their midst. However, after his collection of short stories was published, they were less pleased. The people in his stories, expats living in Malaya, don’t come off looking too good.

Cowardice, snobbery, drink, adultery, murder. Great stuff to read about, not so great if this is what you and your friends are going to be known for. Tracey Morton, an Irish-Australian writer based in Singapore, is a fan of Maugham. She has written short stories, as well as a radio play about him. She has also written about Maugham in BiblioAsia, and she is here today to share with us about Maugham and about his relationship with Singapore.

Welcome to BiblioAsia+, Tracey. How have you been?

Tracey
I’m really good. Thank you, Jimmy. Thanks so much for having me.

Jimmy
Thank you for coming down. It’s really a pleasure. I love Someone Is Coming. I love how it’s written. And I’m really glad that you were able to write about Maugham for us, for BiblioAsia. I think, you know, it’s definitely fair to say that Maugham’s not so well-known now as he was before the war. So maybe you can tell our listeners a little bit more about Maugham and why you think we should pay attention to him.

Tracey
So, I don’t think he’s well-known here after the war, but I think elsewhere in the world, he was well-known after the war. Actually, he wrote The Razor’s Edge. That came out just after the Second World War. And that really is seen as one of the best novels he’s ever written. Then he went on to write a lot of his non-fiction, where he’s discussing his own working routines with the summing up, and he releases the writer’s notebook and there’s a lot that comes after the war. But I understand why he’s not well-known here after the Second World War and that’s partly to do with what he did when he came here.

So Maugham was actually born in France, to English parents. He lived there for the first 10 years of his life. And then he went to live in England. Unfortunately, his parents both passed away. Then he was sent to live in Whitstable in the UK. He struggled a bit with his language because he was brought up speaking French. And unfortunately, when he speaks English, he stammers. So he has a bit of a speech impediment. Anyway, despite all that, over the course of his life, he’s written 20 novels, published 9 collections of short stories, written 31 plays.

Jimmy
Very, very prolific.

Tracey
Oh my God, incredible. I mean, his work ethic is just insane. So, he was really well-known. Actually, just before he came here, he’d just published The Moon and Sixpence, which is a beautiful novel that I’d love to read, go back and have a good look at again. And it’s about Paul Gauguin, the painter, and he went down to the South Seas, just before he got here and researched that kind of story and got the idea and then wrote that book. So when he came here, they were showing his plays in the Victoria Theatre, so everyone knew who he was.

Jimmy
Right. Okay, so he was well-known by the time he got here. Why was he here though, by the way?

Tracey
Because he was in search of his “Eastern Colour”, according to the Straits Times. I think he came here for many different reasons, but he really loved travelling. And he was here with his partner, Gerald Haxton. Maugham was a homosexual, but he was married to a woman called Syrie Wellcome. But it was a very unhappy marriage, and I think Maugham had actually believed that she had kind of trapped him into marriage because she became pregnant with his child.

And so unfortunately, she was very much in love with him. And he did not love her so much. So it was quite tragic for her, but she ended up creating her life for herself. She was a great interior designer. My mother is an interior designer. Maugham kind of crosses our paths. Syrie Maugham actually is claimed with inventing the white room.

Jimmy
What’s that?

Tracey
So the idea that you paint your walls white, and you have very white furniture and this kind of minimalist space almost. So yeah, she was, and she was the first one to really start painting furniture and bringing this to London, which before then was very full of heavy woods and tweeds and yeah, wallpapers and William Morris. So she kind of shifted that. So Maugham came here really as this kind of way of trying to, making excuses to travel a lot. And because he was a homosexual, there was a certain freedom in travelling with his partner at that particular time, especially in Asia, they were very open to you being, to coming with your partner.

Jimmy
His partner wasn’t allowed into the UK, was he?

Tracey
Yeah, no, so he was arrested for gross indecency, back in 1915, not with Maugham. Maugham was off travelling at that stage. And he actually was banned then from going to the United Kingdom. He was an American himself. Gerald Haxton is from San Francisco. He was also previously married and had a child. But unfortunately, there’s hardly anything we can find in the archives about him.

So they came together here and they’d actually been a few years previous to the South Seas. And they’d gone to, down to Polynesia, Tahiti, Hawaii, and they spent a lot of time together. And that’s the kind of time where Maugham kind of really fell in love with Gerald Haxton. And they decided that Gerald Haxton would be his private secretary and would travel around with him and aid him. Because Maugham was a very shy man. He was a snob, which isn’t very likable. But Haxton was the kind of polar opposite, incredibly handsome, dashing, liked to drink, liked to laugh, liked to gamble. And he was the one that would spend all the time in the bars and in the clubs talking to everybody, and Maugham was just off in his room writing and reading.

Jimmy
Oh, right.

Tracey
So, in a way, Haxton was the one that went out and got Maugham all the stories, and then it was up to Maugham to write them.

Jimmy
Right. Maugham wrote The Casuarina Tree, and there were six stories. Well, of the six, which ones really had impact over here?

Tracey
Yeah. He’d actually got in trouble with The Painted Veil, which is another novel of his where he based it in Hong Kong, and that’s where he did not change the names at all. He was actually sued for not changing the name. So he had to pay this poor man that he’d taken his life and reworked and shown everything and paid him $250. On top of that, the Hong Kong government got very upset with the depiction of Hong Kong and turned around and said we don’t want you to refer to Hong Kong like this. We are not this kind of frivolous society. How dare you project us as this?

Jimmy
Hang on, all this happened before he came to Singapore?

Tracey
No, so this happened actually on his second trip. This would have happened in ’25. And, we demand that you change the name of Hong Kong.

Jimmy
Wow. Does he?

Tracey
Yeah, he has to.

Jimmy
Yeah, so what was it changed to?

Tracey
Tching-Yen.

Jimmy
Alright, so he creates a completely fictitious city. But it was said that as a writer, he wasn’t particularly stylish. He had a tendency towards cliché. Was that true, I mean?

Tracey
Yeah, I mean horribly, there he was referred to as class two, division one by the Bloomsbury squad. I think about that particular time, yeah. But I think for a modern-day audience, they would love him. One of the greatest compliments that Maugham ever got in his life was when he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver, and he was in Flanders.

Jimmy
World War One.

Tracey
Yeah, he would take the soldiers back, and then sometimes he would stay and he would go to soldiers, and they would dictate letters for him to write home. Anyway, one of the soldiers got wind that he was the famous Somerset Maugham. Could you even imagine sitting there as a famous author?

Jimmy
“Dear Mum.”

Tracey
Yeah! You can’t believe he’s writing this letter to you. And then, he said, “Oh, Mr. Maugham, I didn’t realise it was you.” And he said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “You know, I just love, I love, love, love your stories.” And he said, “Oh, thank you very much.” And he said, “Because you know why? I don’t have to pick up a dictionary to read them.”

And I do think there’s a lot of truth in that. So he really wrote for the common man, as pretentious as that sounds now, probably. But he liked to show people for what they were. He was very observant. He trained as a doctor. He was an avid note-taker. He really wanted to highlight the flaws in us. And I think that’s because of how he felt internally and how flawed he felt from being a homosexual. He was deathly afraid of being imprisoned. And I think that’s partly to do with the fact that he grew up, when he was young, that Oscar Wilde had gone through that.

Jimmy
So he witnessed what happened to Oscar Wilde?

Tracey
I don’t think he met Wilde. But he knew Henry James and they were all deathly afraid. They were so afraid about being imprisoned. So that was the whole idea. So I feel like Maugham hid a lot of himself. And in his way, the way he writes is that he’s trying to really highlight the flaws that we all have as individuals that don’t come to the surface. And even though we want to make changes and do things, sometimes we don’t because of just who we are as humans.

It’s really interesting. I mean, he is referred to as, you know, looking at people like as cases almost like they’re in a laboratory. But as like someone that’s really into history and loves source material, I think what he’s given us is a gift, because the depiction of what we get is very true to what really happened and how these people really live their lives.

Jimmy
Do you think in today’s society, his work, if it had been written this way, how do you think it would be received?

Tracey
I feel like today, I think it’d be received pretty well. We get away with a lot more now. If he’d written about real people, they could’ve, they’d probably be spinning it to their own way, you know, to their own advantage. They would be making TikToks about it. Hashtag Maugham represented by Maugham hashtag, you know, like, but you know, the younger audience for sure. I mean, they’re so clever about twisting things, right? And looking at stuff. So I think in a way people would enjoy that. I mean, obviously there’s certain generations who would be horrified that he’d written about them in that particular way. But that’s the great thing about modern society, right? Is that we can manipulate things to any way that we really want to be perceived.

Jimmy
He was very well-known for his short stories that were based in Asia, but beyond that, do you think this time in Asia changed him, do you think?

Tracey
Absolutely. He nearly died twice when he was here.

Jimmy
Did he?

Tracey
Yeah, he did. He was on a river down in Sarawak. And this bore, bizarre bore tidal wave they have sometimes coming through the river, came down, and washed him out and Gerald. And Gerald actually had a heart attack.

Jimmy
Oh my God.

Tracey
No, it was really horrific. Oh, when I think about it now, everything had just… you can imagine they’re on this kind of barge thing and they’re down with like, there are 15 people that are taking care of them. And then this wave comes out of nowhere. They have no idea about it. Then they’re all washed out. Maugham comes up for air, and he can see Gerald, and he can see that he’s panicking, and so he grabs him, takes him to the shore, and then Gerald Haxton has a heart attack, and he nearly loses him.

Jimmy
Oh my goodness.

Tracey
And Maugham thankfully is a doctor and resuscitates him and he’s okay. But that really did a lot of, I can imagine that would have been quite traumatic. And then also in Bangkok, in Thailand, he got malaria and he nearly died. So, yeah, I definitely think these trips definitely changed him. They also gave him a great insight and perception into life here. And he came out with, I think, probably the best, some of the best literature he’s ever written and probably some of the most critical.

Now the thing is about Maugham, like most people don’t think he’s being very critical. He was also heavily criticised in the UK when these stories came out because he’d taken people at their value. But they’d also said on the other side, because, you know, everyone’s always has to have the complaint about something, that he wasn’t critical enough of the English government out here. He wasn’t critical enough of the colonials.

And funny, because when I read it, I think he’s incredibly critical of the colonial. And I mean, there’s also people saying that he didn’t represent the locals enough, which, you know, is fair. But then I would say to counteract that, I think the way that he actually projects the locals, they always seem to have the upper hand. They have this inner knowledge of how to live in this world, you know, with their whole voodoo and their supernatural spells and the Bhoma. But they always seem to be able to, to know really what’s going on and to manipulate those kind of English colonials who are running around trying to rule them. But they always seem to have this upper hand.

Jimmy
Just because of their sort of local knowledge.

Tracey
Yeah, exactly. And from having the environment, but also people weren’t stupid. You know, and he always makes out too, that the local Chinese population, they were like so superior almost that they believed that they were almost superior to the English Colonials. I mean, they had their own club, right? The millionaires’ club here in Singapore. I mean, that’s back then. That’s a pretty snobby name for a club. You have to be a millionaire to be part of this club, right?

Jimmy
Sadly, not a club I will ever be in.

Tracey
Not me either!

Jimmy
How did you become interested in Maugham? It seemed like an odd sort of thing to be odd sort of writer to be interested in.

Tracey
First time I read Maugham, I was living in Hong Kong. My husband decided that we should go to Paris. We didn’t have a child by then. So we went off to Paris. My parents came down, walking along. I mean, it’s a typical story. I mean, it’s so cliché. It’s such a Maugham story, actually. And I was walking along and then I see the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, which is world-famous, incredible bookshop. And we’re outside and they have a second-hand rail and every book is one euro. And I’m standing there and I’m like, “Ooh, let me go and have a look.”

And by that stat, I was really into Graham Greene at that particular time and Orwell. So they always make claim that Maugham was so inspiring to them. And then I see The Razor’s Edge by Maugham and I pick it up and it’s probably, I don’t know, it’s falling apart, the edition. And I’m like, you know what, I’m going to give it a try anyway I read it, and it just changed my life and just thought, “Oh my God, this guy can write.” And the way that he told the story, what happens to the characters. I mean, it’s just beautiful.

Anyway, I went back to Hong Kong, and I said to some of my friends who are great readers, and I said, “Oh, have you guys read this?” and they’re like, “Yeah, have you read the Far Eastern Tales?” And I went, no. And then I read them and thought, Oh my God. And you know what really clinched it for me is he was writing about characters back in the 1920s that I still felt, still felt like I was meeting them.

Jimmy
Oh, right. Okay.

Tracey
And today even, like there were certain instances when you come across expats and there’s a slight, there is something very Maugham about them and their perception. And I’m Irish, by the way, I’m not English in that way, but I do think that there is this whole, very closed expatriate communities. And it’s not just, it’s across the board. It’s not just the English or the Irish or whatever.

And I just thought, gosh, he’s really got them. Really incredibly perceptive writer, like, without really even having a background in psychology, but he really just gets people. And that’s because the way that he could observe people, and the way they sat, and the way they said things, and the way they didn’t say things, and the mannerisms, it’s incredibly insightful. And also great for a writer starting off to read him. You know, it’s always Raymond Carver, and it’s always Chekhov, and I mean, they’re both incredible writers, but I think sometimes Maugham’s lost when he shouldn’t be.

Jimmy
But of course, he was writing at a time where other major English writers like D. H. Lawrence.

Tracey
Yeah, Lawrence was a big critic of Maugham, but Virginia Woolf too, right? But he loved all that though, and he loved writing about them, and he loved reading them and there’s a lovely story about him and having dinner with Virginia Woolf one night. And this is towards the end of her life unfortunately and he felt like she was a bit sensitive and a bit off, so he asked to walk her home.

And she said, “No, no, I’m fine. I’m fine.” But he just felt like there was something a bit strange. So he actually followed her home. He kept a distance. No, just to make sure that he was okay, because he could feel like there was something maybe going on with her. That’s the observation of him being really sensitive and aware of what other people, and I largely think that’s down to, you know, his childhood, what he went through as a child, and his young life, and him being closeted homosexual, unfortunately kind of in a way, but not really, and just being aware of how fragile we are.

Jimmy
You’ve been inspired to write short stories by Maugham. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve written?

Tracey
Yeah, so I’ve written quite a lot actually, and I’m constantly writing it off and on for 10 years now, where it’s actually, we’re having conversations together, he’s teaching me how to write where he’s pulling me up on things a lot of the time.

Jimmy
Really?

Tracey
And yeah, but then we have arguments and then he leaves the room and then I don’t see him for a couple of months and then he comes back. So it’s like that, but it’s a nice thing that I have with him.

I wrote “Willie’s Chinese Funeral Urn”, which was in the Best Asian Short Stories. I actually told it from the point of view of this ceramic jar that he buys that is a funeral urn. And this funeral urn watches him instead and observes him and stays with him in his life and he buys him in Singapore, and then he takes him all the way back to his house in France, and Gerald Haxton is still alive.

And then the Second World War comes, Maugham has to shut down the house in France, and he goes to America for a period of time. And then when Maugham unwraps the vase at the funeral towards the end, he starts crying because he realised he remembers Singapore and Gerald and their time here. And he’s very emotional. And the urn is just looking at him like, “Oh, I’m so glad to see somebody else and not be stuck away.” And then eventually when Maugham dies and he’s cremated, then the ashes are put in the urn and then they’re buried together at Maugham’s old school in Canterbury. So I really wanted to do that because I really wanted to play around with different voices, using items that, you know.

Jimmy
It is a bit unusual.

Tracey
No, it is. It is. But I like kind of like unusual ways to go into stories because most stories have been told, right? So it’s trying to tell a story in a different kind of way.

Jimmy
Okay, we’re going to get back into that, but because you write crime fiction and you also teach crime fiction writing. And you also write historical fiction and obviously with historical fiction, one needs to do a lot of research. But I think in one of your crime fiction writing courses, you also mentioned that historical research is also important. Why is that? Why is historical research important in crime fiction writing?

Tracey
I think it is mainly for inspiration, to help us form [ideas], especially as crime writers, because I think if you look at past crimes, then they’re kind of plotted out for you, so you don’t really have to get stuck there with a plot, because a lot of crime writing is to do with plotting. So I think that looking at old historical cases, cold cases, everything like that is so fascinating. How people died, if they disappeared, what happened, who was involved. And I think there’s a wealth of information there for writers and it helps you to determine kind of what crime story you’re going to tell yourself.

So I taught a course with the Singapore Book Council, and we came here to work in the archives to try and find old cases. And the idea behind that was to go into the archives, find old cases, or maybe cold cases from the past, and look at them, think about writing how we would reinterpret them for modern day or not, or if we take them and work with them in another time period.

One of the girls who came, she found this really great kind of case about girl gangs in the 1950s here in Singapore. And Singapore wasn’t like Singapore is now, right? So it’s a bit, it’s a bit different. Yeah, a bit dodgy. So she also came out with a statistic saying that only like 47 percent of people said they felt safe. So I really feel like that’s amazing compared to now where we feel so safe.

So anyway, she found these girl gangs. They, I think, I can’t remember the colour, but they all had the same tattoo of having a black butterfly or red butterfly. And they were notorious. Apparently they all got together, and it was started with the idea that it was for girls that had been done wrong by, like, you know, that they went after their ex-partners or their ex-boyfriends and they attacked them and they all came together and did it.

So it’s kind of incredibly feminist, bizarre, volatile movement that was quickly shut down, obviously, because the girls got pretty powerful pretty fast and got a big following, as you can imagine. So then we sat with that and we talked about that and she was going to work on that. She was actually a playwright. And then we were talking about different ways of telling that story. And I said, you know, you could actually take that story now and write from the point of view of the woman’s granddaughter finding this out about her grandmother, wouldn’t that be a great story?

I mean, I found a really good case recently too, about a Detective Williams, who was one of the first detectives here in Singapore. I actually found the photograph and everything. I’m so excited.

Jimmy
This is an actual person?

Tracey
Yeah! He was in the first detective branch here. I found this really cool case of him, and back then they wrote really small crime reports. They weren’t big, so they weren’t great about giving you information. I think it’s 1897 and he’s just hanging out in Tanjong Pagar at the ports, and then suddenly he looks at this guy and he thinks, “Oh, I know that guy. He’s been wanted for murder for the last 10 years.” And then he picks them up and he arrests him. And it is that guy that murdered two people in Penang back in, you know.

Jimmy
Wow!

Tracey
And I was thinking, oh, because that’s a very Sherlock Holmes thing to do, right? The power of deduction. But then also like how, what kind of skill did he have? But then it turns out that this man had a big scar from the knife fight. So then I was like, oh okay. But still it was a nice way to get into an idea. And then I worked with him and now I’m working with him in this new novel that I’m writing.

Jimmy
Fantastic. Your new novel is going to be set in Singapore then?

Tracey
Yeah, it is. So it’s set in Singapore and in Australia.

Jimmy
What period?

Tracey
So just after the Second World War. Yeah, it’s a very chaotic time. I want it really chaotic. We were talking about that too, about crime writing, is that technology, is it our friend or foe when we come to crime writing? Because especially in Singapore, when we’re inundated with cameras everywhere.

Jimmy
Right, right, right. And your watchers are tracking you.

Tracey
Exactly, I mean, god, you know, how can they get away with anything anymore, right? But I mean, there are ways. I think there’s a great novel to be written about scams, scam centers, the call centers. I think that’s a really good novel to come out of that soon, I would hope. I think that’s a really interesting way of looking about how they manipulate or tick, but I’m just not that tech-savvy to sit there and write that.

Jimmy
I’d like to ask you about Someone Is Coming. It was published in 2022 and has been optioned. And it’s very interesting to me for a number of reasons, because one, it’s also set in the same period that a lot of Maugham’s stories are set. I think I remember Maugham was mentioned in the novella.

Tracey
He is.

Jimmy
And also, one of the main literary devices is that an interviewer from the oral history archive goes around and interviews the main protagonists in this story, which is quite interesting because I don’t think the oral history interviewers typically get so much ink. Tell me how this idea came to you and how it all spilled out.

Tracey
So, this whole book was inspired just by a lecture I was doing my master’s at Cambridge in crime and thriller writing, and they were talking about the unreliable narrator. And I started thinking about that. And I was writing another book at the time, but anyway, because I’d done so much research on Maugham, because I was doing a documentary about him, I had all this information in my head, but also I was thinking about where did Maugham get his inspiration from? And then I go to the archives and I’m searching up like plantations, because there’s a lot of plantation managers who were murdered in the stories. And so I started researching that, came up with like 16 cases in a 20-year period.

Jimmy
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just ridiculous, right?

Tracey
Of plantation managers who were murdered. That’s insane. It’s a lot of people to be murdered. So I started looking at that. And as I said before, they weren’t massive write-ups about what was really happening.

But then, you know, you could read between the lines. Some of them apparently were apparent suicide, but they always love to blame a Chinese gang. Then I began thinking, like, God, come on, like, there has to be something else going here. Like, it’s something really weird. Maybe there’s something more sinister going on.

And I was reading a lot about the young children being trafficked up and down the streets too. That was a massive thing from the orphanages. And yeah, it was a really strange time. It was like the Wild West, I feel, that particular time, unfortunately.

Anyway, during this time too, I was listening to a lot of oral testimonies. I was trying to grab everything I could from the Singapore archives, and I was living in Copenhagen at that particular time, it was before I moved here. But I had been coming here often, and it was during COVID, and thank God for those archives being online. I was listening every day.

Jimmy
So were you listening, or were you reading them?

Tracey
I was [doing] both. It was a lot of materials, from the newspapers, but then I was also listening and I feel like there’s so much in the oral archives. Testimonies. I just love it. And I love it for so many reasons. I think Maugham would also really love it. But I love listening to how people are being interviewed. I love how it’s like Maugham, you know, like what people are saying, how they’re saying it, if they pause, what they’re not saying. If they get uncomfortable, they clear their throat. Sometimes they get angry with the interviewer, which I think is really fascinating, too, especially the old ones. Like, they’re really good. You can just see this older person gets, you know, “I don’t want to talk about that.” Like, “I said that already.” But they’re really interesting. So I started thinking about that.

There was a few of them that were particularly good about remembering growing up in plantations. And there was one where he was a very frail man and he was remembering about snakes and the tigers. And then I was just listening and it was really gripping for me. And I just thought, God, this is so amazing.

And what’s he going to say next? And, oh, wow, I would love to interview someone like this. And then I thought, that’s a great way of trying to get someone to talk about the past, especially sometimes people can agree to do something like that. But then when they’re there, it’s very different, and especially I’ve been listening to the ones recently about the Second World War, and there’s a lot of tears by very proud men, which is really also quite harrowing to listen to. But really important. And so I began to think this is a really good way of… because oral testimonies are stories. It’s a good source. I mean, it is the source material, even though it’s a lot many years later, but there’s so much in it.

Jimmy
No, it’s lovely. It’s very rich.

Tracey
But the thing is, what I also remembered was how we interpret memory. I know that certain things from my childhood, you know, I would make claim that I was wearing a pink dress, but then if I looked at a photograph, it was a blue dress. And I feel like small stuff like that, where you do misinterpret memories, and how much do you really remember? And how much do you suppress?

Jimmy
You’ve got a book coming up, The Coffee Shop Masquerade, in which you’ve included a quote from Maugham at the beginning. It goes, “Culture is a mask that hides their faces, here people show themselves bare.” So here, meaning Hong Kong.

Tracey
Yep. It’s the kind of idea that when you’re away from home, you become somebody else.

Jimmy
Somebody you hope to be?

Tracey
Well, I don’t know.

Jimmy
Or is it the filth thing?

Tracey
I don’t know. I mean, I feel like you’re not bound by your social constraints at home, by the certain ways of....

Jimmy
You reinvent yourself.

Tracey
Yeah, you can reinvent yourself, for sure, in a good way, in a bad way. And then also, you probably put on a bit more of a mask because you’re a bit vulnerable. You’re away from home, you’re in a different situation, things are different, you’re coming across different sorts of people that you don’t normally come across. And how that does really interact and play with, you know, and especially particular times in your life and how you’re feeling. So I really wanted to work with that whole idea. It is a very literary, contemporary novel.

Jimmy
Tell us about it.

Tracey
Well, it’s full of a lot of different characters.

Jimmy
Is it a novel?

Tracey
It is a novel. There is a mask actually that features in it and this mask has a spirit inside and he’s kind of overlooking. He’s left in the coffee shop one day, and he’s looking about what’s going on.

And so it’s working with an object too, that’s looking at us instead of us looking at it. Every chapter has a quote from the Tao Te Ching, the Tao.

Jimmy
Okay.

Tracey
So one of the chapters is called “Sincere Words Are Not Pretty, Pretty Words Are Not Sincere”. And there’s another chapter called “Good Travellers Need No Tracks”. And I really wanted to kind of use that to kind of show how we are, how strange kind of forces, that sometimes we’re not really conscious of, but still kind of lead us in our life.

Jimmy
Is it set in a contemporary period?

Tracey
So it is. I did set it in a contemporary period. It was kind of working with the idea about Maugham. There’s a mixture of people in it. It’s expats, it’s locals [and it’s] the mask. We have this crazy character called the Monkey King, who’s running around trying to find the mask. And he’s linking them all. It sounds really crazy and abstract, but I hope it has relevance to where we are today. And just about the idea of letting go of probably the myths of our past, like the gods that we used to worship. So I really, I wanted to look at that. I really, I like that kind of idea myth. I actually put that in Someone Is Coming as well about the Pied Piper.

Jimmy
So The Coffee Shop Masquerade is scheduled to come out in 2025?

Tracey
Yeah, 2025. I’m hoping that we’ll launch it at the Hong Kong Literary Festival.

Jimmy
Okay. Well, good luck. We’ve sort of come to the end of like the substantial part of the podcast interview, which is where we just sit down and we just talk about things. So you’re a podcast host yourself. Tell us about The Asian Bookshelf.

Tracey
We set it up for the Southeast Asia literary scene. We wanted to go into every different region and to talk about what was being written and who’s running the kind of literary scene here. So the first season was based in Singapore. We discussed some great novels that are written. We talked to some writers, we talked to Alex from the Book Bar and William from the Book Council. And we ended up talking to LaSalle about creative writing. So we kind of want to get like a whole thing. It’s also interesting when you’re doing a podcast about what’s lacking in Singapore literary scene.

Jimmy
So what is lacking?

Tracey
Money.

Jimmy
Yes, I was going to say that. Isn’t that true everywhere?

Tracey
I know, right? Oh my God. Bookshops!

Jimmy
Yeah. Oh my God. Yes.

Tracey
I’m really scared about that. And you know what, and we were talking before and I think that, you know, when you go to somewhere like Kinokuniya on the weekends, and it is packed. It’s not like there’s not a demand.

And I actually think what Alex is doing at the Book Bar is really amazing. He’s setting up events and he’s setting up events where you come together and you read, well you buy a ticket, you come together, I think it’s called Bookworm Banter. Come together, buy a ticket, and you sit and you read for 45 minutes.

Then you can talk for 15 minutes. Then you’re back to reading again. And then you talk more. So the idea is that it’s a safe space to come and talk about literature without being in a bar. I mean, you can drink, alcohol is served there, or you don’t have to drink and there’s no pressure, right? And you’re taking away from the materialism of Singapore, you know, like shops and clothes buying, and it kind of puts you in a different space where you can actually come and talk about literature.

Jimmy
Or you can share?

Tracey
Yeah, but exactly. And I feel like there should be more of that, because we do have a lot of younger generation that need that interaction with each other. I mean, there’s a loneliness epidemic, right? Everywhere. And I think that it really helps to come together, especially if you’re into graphic novels or if you’re into any kind of literature. If you’re starting off wanting to write yourself, you’re doing poetry. I mean, it’s so powerful, right? To come together and talk.

Jimmy
I agree. I mean, there’s definitely a problem in Singapore where, you know, bookshops are dying left, right and centre. We’re left with very, very few.

Tracey
Yeah. I mean, but you have the amazing library though, right?

Jimmy
We do. Thank you very much for entirely my effort.

Tracey
You did so well. No, but I mean, it’s such an incredible, I mean, it’s a wonderful library. I’ve used it so many times and just sat there for hours and I do love it. It’s a different kind of energy. So when you’re in the library, you’re kind of more focused and you’re sitting there. It’s also like working here in the archives, like there’s a different kind of energy and it would depend on what you want to do.

Jimmy
No, but it is different because when you go to a bookshop, you can like, “Oh, I can buy this book.” I end up spending a lot of money because my daughter will take me to a bookshop. And [I’m] like, “Can’t you just borrow it from the library? Please, please just borrow it.” “No, no, I want to own it.” It’s like, oh my God, this is so expensive.

Tracey
I know.

Jimmy
But yes, I do buy books as well. You’re a podcast host. I’m learning to be a podcast host. So give me some of your tips.

Tracey
I think you do exceptionally well. Like I’ve listened to a few of them recently. And no, they’re good.

Jimmy
They’re particularly good if you need to sleep.

Tracey
Oh, no, no, no. Come on.

Jimmy
You need to be lulled into.

Tracey
No, I actually think, I just love the fact you’re even wanting to have the conversations about, you know, these kind of aspects of Singapore. I mean, it’s so incredible. I think that sometimes podcast hosts, especially modern-day podcast hosts, who probably don’t talk about literature or talking about other things, like to make it about themselves. It becomes very kind of egotistical, because I think when you’re a podcast host, your ego has to be left at the door, really. It’s really about your guest coming there to shine. Do you know what I mean?

Jimmy
I’m very humble.

Tracey
You are, incredibly. You let me talk. We’ve never met before today, but I feel like I know you, Jimmy, so it’s fine. But like, you know, meeting people beforehand, making sure that they want to talk about these certain things, because you never know what you’re going to get, and unfortunately, like academics for most of the time, they’re lovely and writers are great. But sometimes we can be really introverted and strange and very off about things and very nervous.

Jimmy
I personally think it’s that chemistry really makes a difference, because I think people can hear it as well, if two people are talking to get along.

Tracey
Yeah, 100 percent.

Jimmy
Okay, here’s a question. If you could have dinner with Somerset Maugham, what would you ask him?

Tracey
I would ask him if he wasn’t so afraid of being outed, what would he have done differently? I’m sure he would have travelled though. I don’t know how much life would have changed for him. But would he have written things differently? Because I feel like part of the reason that he wasn’t so critical of the British here and the government and the way things were run was because he was afraid of then going back to the UK and being destroyed and being imprisoned or arrested.

I know that he regretted not going to India and spending more time. He regrets not hiring a whole train, like renting a whole train, so he could have gone up and down India. That’s one of his things. No, I mean, I feel like I’ve read about him so much and gone through such a rabbit hole with him that I feel like I do know quite a lot, but I do think that, if he wasn’t afraid…

Jimmy
But he would have written things very, very differently, and maybe not to our benefit, right?

Tracey
Maybe, but maybe he would have pushed himself then and been a bit more of the contemporaries around that time. Maybe he would have been more of a modernist writer instead, it’s just like he really kept within this kind of realism realm. Actually, my favourite short story from him is called “The Unconquered”, which isn’t based here. It’s a really weird, dark story from Maugham, and it’s about a German soldier going to a French village.

Jimmy
During the Second World War?

Tracey
During the Second World War, and he’s trying to, well he’s not trying, he gets the French girl where he attacks her, but then he kind of wants her to fall in love with him and get married to him, and he can’t really understand why she’s not agreeing to this. She should be flattered, I mean, he’s amazing. And that story is really powerful. And I think it’s the first time and probably one of the only really times that I’ve seen a man write about a man in that way, where he just got it. Like how you can have a certain male who thinks they’re entitled to you without question and he’s so unapologetic. And there’s such truth in that, but that’s up to, you know, that was obviously inspired by something he’d seen and these individuals that he’d seen, and it’s really harrowing. It’s a really difficult story and very unlike him.

Jimmy
Okay. What’s the title of the story?

Tracey
The Unconquered.

Jimmy
Okay, last question. Crime writing is...

Tracey
Oh, crime writing is fun. I really like crime writing. I didn’t start off initially as a crime writer. Okay. I wanted to be a literary fiction person.

Jimmy
Obviously there’s much more credibility, right?

Tracey
I know, but I write a lot. But I have to say, so I got to be really honest here. When I went to do my master’s in crime, I did that to get away from Maugham.

Jimmy
Ah, okay.

Tracey: So, I really, I was really bogged down, I was doing the documentary and I just thought no one’s interested in him, nobody wants to know about him anymore. I’m running around like doing talks about him everywhere. So what? And academics like it because they’re not really looking at him, but they kind of like having some relevance to him.

So when I started doing the crime writing, I just thought, you know what I really like? I like the genre. I really love true crime podcasts. I love Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I think it’s one of the best things ever written. And I just thought, you know, I’ll go down here and I’ll see. You never know, right?

It’s commercially successful compared to anything else. Let’s try and make some money for once. You know, instead of like, slaving away.

Jimmy
Okay, yes, yes.

Tracey
And so, when I started doing the crime writing, I loved it. So inspired. As you can see, Someone Is Coming. I’ve written another one too that I’m still working on, and I just want to do something completely different. Of course, the first time we get to do an essay, we had to pick a subject to write an essay for. And I pick...

Jimmy
You pick Maugham.

Tracey
I do. And I’m like, can some of his Far Eastern Tales be considered crime fiction?

Jimmy
Right.

Tracey
Which they can. I argued that. Oh my God, though. But I don’t know what it is. It’s like something won’t let me go. I don’t know. Yeah, but it’s an obsession, but then, you know, we kind of fall out of favour with each other, I feel sometimes.

Jimmy
What I love about crime fiction is understanding motives.

Tracey
Yeah.

Jimmy
Right? So the how is not so interesting. It’s really the why’s that are very interesting.

Tracey
I mean, crime writing is huge, right? There’s so many different genres within the genre. And so, like you have the whodunits, the puzzle books.

Jimmy
That’s always fun.

Tracey
Yeah, the thrillers. You know, the psychological, thriller, Silence of the Lambs kind of, you know, stuff. But then you have the Golden Age, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes. I mean, there’s so much there. But that’s what’s amazing about it. The new things that are coming through, AI crime fiction.

Jimmy
There’s AI crime fiction?

Tracey
Yeah, you could ask AI. How can we commit a crime? Climate crime is also coming through.

Jimmy
Climate crime? Oh, wow.

Tracey
About the crimes we do to the environment. But I think crime writing is so fun and it’s so huge and it’s probably the only genre where you can actually just do anything. Romance is probably similar, right? You can set romance anywhere in the world. Yes. And it’s the same with crime, but I do like, I’m also really into why. I mean, I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts. I listen to a lot of cold cases. I love a good cold case.

I’m also trying to figure out like why people, you know, disappear and what goes on. And I love all that. Because I’m like, why? What happened there? Or what did they miss? And especially, what’s so great to live in this particular time is that, like, we do have the ability to look back on old cases with a fresh pair of eyes and beyond even the DNA, right? And beyond the scientific stuff, we get to figure out, like, what was society saying back then? What did we miss, you know?

Jimmy
I have an important question. Do the Menendez brothers deserve to be in jail?

Tracey
That’s exactly what I was thinking about when I was doing this. Personally, no, I don’t think they really, I don’t think they really belong in jail. Not anymore.

Jimmy
Okay.

Tracey
I feel like they’ve paid their dues. I do feel like they did deserve to go to jail. They did shoot their parents.

Jimmy
There’s no question, right? They killed their parents. It’s just, you know.

Tracey
Yeah. I don’t know. What do you think, Jimmy? You think they should be let out, though?

Jimmy
When you watch these documentaries, you feel a lot of sympathy for them, right? But then the question is, how much credence do you give to the accounts of abuse? And, you know, were they abused? And you don’t want to, in the MeToo or post-MeToo period, you know, necessarily cast doubts on that, but at the same time, just because they say it happened, doesn’t mean necessarily it did happen.

Tracey
No, exactly. I totally agree with you. I didn’t know enough about the case. Obviously, I was younger. I knew more about OJ [Simpson], but I think that’s just the way the media was interpreted back in Europe back then. But I will say that I was kind of shocked [that] sexual abuse for young boys was not really considered.

Nobody ever thought about that back then when it’s been going on since the Greeks. I mean, it’s on the vases, the pottery and the Romans. So I found that was really strange. But then I don’t know many children that were, people were being abused in the 1980s and ’70s, and people didn’t report it, right? Obviously, I just feel like they seem to be good citizens in prison. You know, they’re always helping out everybody.

Jimmy
Right. Yeah, I’m torn.

Tracey
Yeah, no, I understand. I’m also kind of annoyed that this has taken so long for us to have this conversation about them. I’m just kind of like, why haven’t we had this before? And that’s the TikTok generation, apparently, that is bringing this all out, you know.

Jimmy
And true crime podcasts and all that. They’re just, you know, looking into cold cases and making it, bringing it to light.

Tracey
Yeah, there’s really good ones. Up and Vanished in the States is probably my favourite.

Jimmy
Oh, I’ve not heard that one.

Tracey
It’s incredibly powerful and wonderful. But America’s so good at that. They’re so good at podcasts.

Jimmy
I think that’s because there’s a lot of crime there.

Tracey
I know. And people go missing.

Jimmy
I know, right?

Tracey
But I do get fatigue.

Jimmy
Do you?

Tracey
I do. From crime. I do get fatigue. Actually, during our masters, we were offered therapy and counselling, if we ever needed it, because we do get, when you are looking at, you have to explain that you could be triggered, it can really get to you. I mean, I can feel sometimes when I’ve reached a certain level of watching documentaries.

Jimmy
Yeah, it’s terrible, right? The things that people are capable of.

Tracey
It’s a lot. No, it is. And there’s certain things where I can’t watch. Jeffrey Dahmer, the one, the new one, I can’t. And I’m really good. Like, I’m pretty good with really dark stuff, but that was the one thing that I really couldn’t. I tried to, but I couldn’t go there. No, because you have to realise that’s somebody’s tragedy. You know, for entertainment purposes. It’s actually really messed up.

Jimmy
Over eight hours or something.

Tracey
I know, of your life that you’re sitting there watching the documentary thinking, what am I doing with my life here? You know, how’s this really aiding me in my mental health?

Jimmy
No, it’s definitely not aiding in my mental health.

Tracey
No.

Jimmy
Tracey, thank you very much for joining me on BiblioAsia+. To learn more about Maugham, do check out the BiblioAsia article “W. Somerset Maugham: Secrets from the Outstations” on the BiblioAsia website. Of course, you have to buy or borrow Tracey’s book Someone Is Coming. And watch out for her upcoming novel The Coffee Shop Masquerade. Tracey, once again, thank you for coming and good luck on The Coffee Shop Masquerade.

Tracey
Thank you so much, Jimmy. Thanks so much for having me.

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thanks for joining us on BiblioAsia+.

T.A. Morton, "W. Somerset Maugham: Secrets from the Outstations," BiblioAsia 20, no. 4 (January–March 2025).

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (Vintage International, 2011; first published 1944 by Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc.).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Doppler Soundlab. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by  Chords Haven. Special thanks to Tracey for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.