The Great Reclamation: A Singaporean Historical Epic

[Music playing]

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

Gek Han
Hi everyone, I’m Gek Han, and I’m an editor of BiblioAsia, a publication by the National Library of Singapore. Today we’re talking to Rachel Heng about her new novel, The Great Reclamation, a fascinating piece of historical fiction set in Singapore. It’s a story of land reclamation and resettlement. It’s also a love story. The book has been named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and a Best Book of 2023 So Far by the New Yorker and Amazon Books. Hi, Rachel. Welcome to BiblioAsia+!

Rachel
Hi Gek Han, thank you so much for having me here.

Gek Han
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us. It’s really thrilling to see a book set in Singapore by a local writer getting such rave reviews worldwide and at home. How has it been like for you?

Rachel
Oh, it’s been wonderful. Yeah, I never dared expect it, I guess. When I first started writing the book, maybe five or six years ago, a part of me worried that no one would want to publish, let alone read a book that was you know – essentially, when I started writing it, I thought of it as a book about land reclamation in 1960s Singapore, which is quite a departure from my first book, which was speculative fiction, and it’s a bit more flashy. And it has all these like sci-fi concepts. And this was deep historical fiction, essentially, and very specifically Singaporean setting. But thankfully, you know, it did get published, obviously, and has received a pretty great response, both in Singapore as well as abroad. And the story seems to be pretty universal in some ways, and has spoken to a wide cross-section of people across the world.

Gek Han
I saw on Instagram you said, exactly what you said just now, that you weren’t sure if this book will be well received, and it’s clearly very beloved. And you’ve done a lot of book tours. Do you think there has been a difference between the local reception and international ones?

Rachel
I think it maybe there’s definitely a difference in terms of the context and people, because when I do events here, I have to explain a lot less. So that’s been really nice being able to do an event and not have to say, well, you know, Singapore is a really small country. And so because of that land reclamation isn’t, you know, doing all that. Everyone kind of comes into the room already with this knowledge and similar knowledge, similar experiences in some way that I had growing up. And even intimidatingly, perhaps more knowledge than I have, because they’re often people from older generations there who have lived through this or have seen this or have experienced other parts of it that I personally have never experienced. So it’s both intimidating and exhilarating, because I get to speak to people who really get it, who really lived through it. And I’ve been very grateful and heartened by the fact that it seems to ring true to a lot of people here as well. That was what I set out to do. When I started writing the book, I wanted it to be read widely and across the world. But my primary audience or the audience I had in mind when I was reading it was someone like myself or someone like the people I knew growing up and my friends and family.

Gek Han
Yeah, that’s great. Before we get further, can I get you to tell us what the book is about?

Rachel
Yes, certainly. So The Great Reclamation is a book that set in the 20 years before Singapore gains independence from the British, and it follows a young boy. When we meet him, he’s seven years old, and his name is Lee Ah Boon. He’s growing up in a kampong on the eastern coast of Singapore. And through his life, we sort of see the political and the physical changes that Singapore is going through in this time period filtered through his eyes. And it’s a coming-of-age story. I think of it as both a coming of age of Ah Boon, as this young boy growing up and learning to find his place in the world, making decisions on who he wants to be, but also a coming-of-age story of Singapore itself as it kind of marches towards independence and has to make some choices about you know, the way that the country is going to be set up and build.

Gek Han
Can you read us something from your book, please?

Rachel
So I’m going to read from right from the beginning of the book, so this is where it starts.

[Excerpt from The Great Reclamation]

Decades later, the kampong would trace it all back to this very hour, waves draining the light from this slim, hungry moon. Decades later, they would wonder what could have been had the Lees simply turned back, had some sickness come upon the father manning the outboard motor, or some screaming fit befallen the youngest, forcing them to abandon the day's work and steer their small wooden craft home. Decades later, they would wonder if any difference could have been made at all.

Or would past still coalesce into present: The uncle dying the way he did, an outcast burned to blackened bone in a house some said was never his anyway. The kampong still destroyed, not swallowed whole by the waves in accordance with some angry god's decree, as the villagers had always feared, but taken to pieces and sold for parts by the inhabitants themselves. If the little boy, the sweetest, most sensitive boy in the kampong, would nevertheless have become a man who so easily bent the future to his will.

Perhaps he would have; perhaps this had nothing to do with the hour, the boat, the sea, and everything to do with the boy. But these questions could only be asked after the wars had been fought and the nation born and the sea—once thought of as dependable, eternal—stopped with ton upon ton of sand. These questions would not occur to anyone until the events had fully passed them by, until there was nothing to be done, all were fossils, all was calcified history.

For now, though, the year was still 1941, the territory of Singapore still governed by the Ang Mohs as it had been for the past century, and the boy, very little, very afraid, still crouched in the back of his father's fishing boat.

Lee Ah Boon was seven, already a year late, as Hia liked to remind him. Hia, now nine, had taken his first trip on his sixth birthday. But while Hia at six had been a boy with plump, tanned arms and strong calves like springs that could propel him over the low wooden fence at the perimeter of the kampong, Ah Boon at seven was still cave-chested, with the scrawny limbs and delicate hands of a girl. Despite as much time spent in the sun as his brother, Ah Boon's skin retained its milky pallor, as fine as the white flesh of an expensive fish steamed to perfection. Hence his nickname.

"Bawal!"

At the sound of his brother's voice, Ah Boon sprang away from the boat's side. In the weak moonlight the sea around them appeared as viscous black oil, roiling gently in the breeze. He shuddered to think what could be waiting beneath its pleated surface.

"Scared, ah, Bawal?"

Hia clambered toward Ah Boon, stepping over the ropes and nets that littered the floor of the small boat. He moved with a careless, threatening ease, like the foot-long monitor lizards that scuttled through the tall grass around the kampong. Hia grabbed Ah Boon's shoulders, turning his torso out toward the sea.

"Wah, so brave!"

Hia pushed his brother suddenly, as if to tip him out of the boat. The sea lurched up toward Ah Boon's face and he clawed at the side, letting out a small whimper.

"You know," Hia said. "Pa never tell you everything about your first trip out. He never tell you about the night swim, hor?"

Rachel
Thank you.

Gek Han
I want to clap. I don’t know if I’m allowed to with the mic. That’s really wonderful.

Rachel
Thank you.

Gek Han
You’ve really made history come alive. And you’ve made it personal, which is what’s important. And we’ve read about, you know, land reclamation and people resettling. But with these characters, you can really feel the emotions. What gave you the idea to write about this topic?

Rachel
So I’ve always been interested in land reclamation, I think, and I shared this titbit as maybe the origin story, but I went to Ngee Ann Primary, which is built on reclaimed land. As you know, it’s in Marine Parade. And I remember being in probably Primary One, and the teacher saying, “This floor that we’re on right now, this used to be the sea.” And that’s kind of quite a magical, but also a terrifying thing for a child to hear, because you can’t understand the concept of it. You know, this land seems so solid. And this idea that it didn’t used to be there quite recently, or that you could make land where there wasn’t land. It just seemed really exhilarating, but also frightening thing for a child to hear. And I think that, that seed of that feeling kind of persisted through my life in Singapore, because you do see the landscape shift so much when you grow up here, and probably less so in my generation certainly, much more so in the past. But even just living here in the ’80s and ’90s, you know, seeing the ways in which like, buildings that you’ve grown up with, or that you were so familiar with would get torn down really quickly. Or living in HDB flats, when things get en bloc, and then one day you walk by and everything’s been razed, and now it’s just grass, right? So one of the flats I grew up in, you know, the government took it back, and they knocked them down. And I remember when I returned, it was just grass grown over. And the only thing, the only trace of the buildings were the trees that remained and you could see the trees tracing the outline of the buildings, and that struck me as being a really poignant thing, that something that was so solid and so filled with the lives of various people was now gone, and only you know, in place, the only remnant being these trees that surrounded what used to be there. And so I think that I wrote this book very much out of that feeling of the ambition and the belief that drives these changes and the desire for something better, the desire for progress, but the ways in which that is tinged with loss and grief and is sort of a double-edged sword in many ways, right? So land reclamation was the central idea, the driving force of the narrative in a way, because this family that we follow – Ah Boon’s family – has live on this course for decades, and then suddenly are faced with this enormous change that, on the one hand promises so much, because they’re being told, “Oh, you’re going to live in these modern flats. You’ll have water, electricity, good schools for your children. It’s going to be a sanitary, healthy environment.” It’s really exciting, right? On the other hand, they’re being told, “Well, this, you know, the way of life that you’ve followed for decades, for generations – that’s it. It’s gone. And you just kind of have to deal with it. Isn’t it great; you’re gonna get all these other things?” And so the book really dives into that dilemma and kind of the split in the community through the course of these 30 years.

Gek Han
So The Great Reclamation is your second novel, and it’s your first historical fiction work. What do you find challenging or interesting about writing historical fiction?

Rachel
I really loved writing it, I think because it was on a topic that I was interested in. And you should probably only write novels on things you’re interested in, because they take a very long time and require a lot of, you know, involve a lot of ups and downs, many downs. And so having the pigheaded persistence to continue, even when you feel like your project is going nowhere, and you will never be able to figure it out. You have to be pretty interested in the subject matter. So I loved doing the research for this book. I had to like force myself to stop researching, because it was just stuff that I didn’t really know, or I knew the bare bones of it, like the social studies version. And I was a kid. I wasn’t paying attention in social studies. So I didn’t even know that really. But being able to dive into the research, and, you know, I read a lot of oral history interviews, a lot of amazing resources on the BiblioAsia website, and you know, reading history books, looking at old photographs, stuff like that. It was really fascinating to me to learn all of this. But then when it came to writing the book, I think the challenge was putting aside all of the facts, and all the data that I had collected, which was quite overwhelming, because there was so much of it, and to try and construct a coherent narrative that felt intimate and personal and filtered through the characters’ perspectives. Because I think ultimately, that’s what fiction is about, right? Fiction is about inhabiting someone’s consciousness. And that’s the beauty of fiction – that it’s a story. And that you can live this reality that’s been created through the character’s eyes. So trying to forget about all of the facts instead of, I think there’s a temptation when you’ve done that much work, you’re like, oh, I have to put all of it in, but doesn’t make for a fun novel. You know, it’s not a textbook. It’s ultimately a novel; it’s a story. And I want it to evoke emotion. So being able to balance that, including enough, but not too much. That was definitely challenging.

Gek Han
It was very obvious to me that you spent a lot of time doing research, but how much time did you spend researching?

Rachel
I spent about a year just doing research. So just reading, just thinking, and, you know, going visiting places. I live in the US, so when I come back, I would visit the sites. I would go to the schools I would go to. I went out to Chek Jawa a few times just to see what an unspoiled coastline in Singapore might have looked like in the past. And there is a detail from one of the signboards there that I actually kept in the book, which was that the seagrass, like the fields of seagrass used to be so abundant that dugongs would come and graze around the coasts, which to me was mind boggling, because, you know, the East Coast I grew up with was filled with ships, and the water was fairly murky. So to think that it used to look a different way, you know, it was quite surprising. And so, I would do kind of, I guess, you call it like, in the field research, I could go out and experience the places to refresh my memory. And before I even started writing a single word, I think I spent about a year just doing that. And then while I was writing, obviously I had to then go back to you know, refer to certain things I would run into a roadblock and like then have to be like, oh, I need to write read an entire book about like, what happened in 1953 with XYZ and stuff like that. So there was there was then the research that happened during the writing. And then during the revision process, again, going through that process and like iteratively you know, looking at like what I needed to fix or change or add more nuance to and usually that involves some form of research as well. So probably five years of research. The entire process of writing was also research.

Gek Han
Wow, that is a very long time. And did you personally interview people for your research?

Rachel
I interviewed some people, mostly family members, and those when that was in the early stages where I was really just trying to get a lay of the land. So I, you know, I interviewed my mom extensively. She’s the youngest of four. So Well, four sisters, and then she has brothers as well. But so I interviewed all of my aunts as well. Not really, when I say interview, I mean, like, we have coffee, and then I would ask them questions, and they would kind of talk amongst themselves, and I would take notes. So it’s very informal, definitely not like oral history interviews. And then I relied heavily on the oral history interviews that were in the National Archives, that fortunately, many of them are digitised, and you can get them online. So that was a really amazing resource to have.

Gek Han
And in your long research process, is there anything that surprised you about Singapore history?

Rachel
I don’t know that it’s anything that surprised me so much as there were many striking details, I would say. One of them that did make it into the book was that during the land reclamation project in the early phases, they actually built a conveyor belt to move the sand from the Bedok hill that they cut out of the ground, that is today the reservoir, to move that fill material as they call it to the coasts. And I saw the photos of that, and it looks like science fiction. Look, someone asked me, “Well, your last book was speculative. And now you’re writing historical fiction. Is that a big leap?” And I was like, “Not really, because the history is almost science fictional.” The way in which the transformation was so audacious and so kind of, you know, like, involved technology to that extent, at that time, I think. When you look at the photos, it looks like something out of Blade Runner or something. You know, it’s really fascinating. So I think that details like that really struck me. The specifics of you know, how things happen. I knew the generalities I learnt in school, like, oh, there was land reclamation that happened on the East Coast, the main facts, but then going into the details, which you’d need for fiction – that was really interesting to me.

Gek Han
I feel like I can almost hear the clank of the conveyor belt. You can feel the dust in the air; you can smell the salty sea. Your description of the natural landscape and just the environment in general is just amazing. Can you tell us about the research you did on environmental history?

Rachel
Yeah. Well, they are amazing environmental historians working in Singapore, I had the good fortune to link up with a professor at NUS named Tim Barnard, who has written a number of amazing books, one of them, which isn’t directly linked to this, but was an anthology titled Nature Contained. That’s a wonderful book with a series of essays about environmental history in Singapore. And also speaking to other experts on like, mangroves, the mangrove development and swamps that used to be here. I spoke with a geography professor, also at NUS about the shifting coastlines. And one of the facts I learned there, which I didn’t know, was that the famous temple in Telok Ayer is a sea temple. And the reason for that is the coast used to be there. And so they would bless the boats before they set off. But that’s mind boggling to me, because it’s in the middle of the CBD now. And so really speaking to the professors and other experts in this field about those specifics was really helpful in my research.

Gek Han
And one of the many things I appreciate about your book is that you showed the nuances of moving into HDB apartments. It’s not black and white. Like some characters like it; some don’t. Some move because of the children. And in your research, do you get a sense that it was a generational divide?

Rachel
I think it was something that didn’t normally come up in my research, but from just speaking to family members. You know, I think that I definitely heard about the excitement. So you know, my mom would say she grew up on one of the crowded wooden houses on the five-footway kind of growing up, growing up very close, and very much in community of many people. And she said whenever someone on the street got an HDB flat, it would be like a big thing. And the whole street would go and look at the flat when they moved in. And she knew all these details, like, oh, it comes with linoleum, but if you can, you should put tiles or like the windows were a certain way, but you could change them. And then people would put like tarps on the kitchen window. All of these titbits of that experience. And that was obviously much later. That wasn’t in the time period depicted in the book. That must have been in like the ’70s or ’80s versus the ’60s. But still I imagined the gist of the feeling must have been similar or even more so here, because in the book, this is the very beginning of that. And then again reading interviews, and listening to some of the recorded interviews, the sense of excitement, but also a kind of ambivalence or fear. I read about and also know older relatives who are afraid of lifts. They don’t want to take the lift. They don’t want to be high up. My mom only wanted to live on a low floor for a long time, because they’re not used to being that high up. And then just extrapolating as a fiction writer, right, thinking about what it must have felt like when this is your reality, your entire life. Your family has lived this way for so long. And now suddenly, you’re plunged into a completely different reality, which arguably, is the best setup for fiction, because that is what fiction is about. It’s about characters being pushed out of their comfort zone, and how they deal with that. So I think I tried to represent a range of experiences in the book, as you mentioned, very kindly, that some of the characters are totally for it. They’re like, “This is the way forward. We’re really excited.” And then other characters are deeply against it: they see it as a destruction of their way of life, they feel it as a violence almost, and they feel betrayed, that everyone is going along with it. And then you have a whole range of characters who are somewhere in between, right, where they sort of can’t decide how they feel, but either go along or don’t go along, for whatever personal reason. And I think the reason why I wrote it that way, is that I believe that politics are deeply personal. As much as we like to believe we are, you know, fully objective human beings who are capable of coming to intellectual abstract conclusions in a vacuum. You know, it’s just not true. When you talk to people, when you exist in the world, you see how your where you come from, what your family background is, the path of your life, where you find acceptance, where you don’t, all these things are things that shape our political beliefs, what we believe a society should look like, what we believe it means to live in a society with other people. And the ways in which so much of that is really, really deeply rooted and almost inextricable, that the characters aren’t even aware of the ways in which they are shaped by this. And so I want it to have a wide range of voices of people who really came from different places, and just either agree, couldn’t agree, and how a lot of the stories like working that out how they find their ways into, you know, either compromise or not compromise and what that does to them as individuals.

Gek Han
I think you showed a lot of empathy in the book, and even down to the linguistics, right? You use Singlish, and you use the terms “Gah Men”, “Gah Woman”. And as a local reader, I find it so delightful to read these things, especially “Gah Men”, because it’s kind of like how I pronounce it in my mind when I read it. Were you afraid of alienating your international readers?

Rachel
I didn’t think about it when I was writing the book. I think when I first wrote it, I came to it with the attitude that I was going to write the book that I wanted to write and that I wanted to read, that I would want to read as a Singaporean reader. And if I’m going to write about this subject, it has to be something that feels true to me, you know, as someone who grew up here and who has family here and roots here. And then I think in the revision process, and after it sold for publication, then there were more of those conversations about like, okay, what is legible or understandable or what is more difficult, and then trying to maybe find a balance and contextualising certain things without necessarily making it feel like you’re holding the hand of the reader too much, or that you are explaining for an external audience. So these questions were very, very much front of mind when I was revising the book, certainly not so much the first draft when I was writing it. I just kind of went for it and wrote it how I thought it should be written. But I did, as you observed, there’s a lot of Singlish in the book. Many of the words are untranslated. And I mean, as someone who reads widely across other cultures – I grew up reading like British and French novels, and there would be words in there that I didn’t understand or have any context for, and I figured it out. So I think readers are much smarter than we give them credit for hopefully, and you know, context does a lot when you’re reading a book. So I think I think it’s been fine. I think people have mostly been on board with it.

Gek Han
This book portrays Singapore in a grassroots kind of way versus Crazy Rich Asians. And one feels a sense of affection for the protagonist Ah Boon of course, and also the other minor characters like the shopkeeper. This is a book that helps someone understand how Singapore came into its own during the nation-building years. What informed you to write about Singapore in the way that you did?

Rachel
I don’t know that I could have written any other way. People ask me that a lot, that if it’s like a response to the way Singapore has been presented in other ways, but books take a very long time to write, and I will say that I had only really become aware of the Crazy Rich Asians representation with the movie, which came up when I had already finished writing this book. So it’s not really in conversation as much as everything came out roughly the same time. But I guess these are the people that I know. And so I can only write from that perspective. I don’t know, anyone who’s like a crazy rich Asian. I just I couldn’t write about that. I just don’t know about it. So in a way, the version here is the version that I grew up, the Singapore that I grew up knowing, hearing about, reading about the people that I know, in my everyday life that I meet. Even if they aren’t exactly fishermen, they came from pretty humble beginnings. My grandfather was a scrap collector, and he actually would go out and collect scraps from the street and sell them. And my grandparents were illiterate. And then, you know, my parents’ generation was the first to go to school. So this was very much the story of Singapore that I knew, that I grew up with, and so that naturally, I guess, found its way into the perspective of the book.

Gek Han
For our listeners who want to learn more about the period you write about, can you recommend us three history resources that you used?

Rachel
Okay, so I’m gonna name Singapore: A Biography by Mark Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. Do they have to be nonfiction?

Gek Han
Anything.

Rachel
Anything? Okay, and then Jeremy Tiang’s novel State of Emergency.

Gek Han
I love that one.

Rachel
Yeah, it’s fantastic. And then another novel kind of related, I guess is Isa Kamari’s Rawa. And I’ve actually have an extensive acknowledgments section for many of the books that inspired me that I relied on. I can name many more, actually. But you said three. Maybe I name a few. And then you can go check. I also really enjoyed Lee’s Lieutenants by Lam Peng Er and Kevin Tan. And then there was another one, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore by Brenda Yeoh and Lily Kong. I really liked that. That was fascinating. My Grandfather’s Road by Neo Kim Seng, which is kind of a memoir, a really short memoir that was about also related to resettlement and land reclamation. Yeah, and many, many more in the acknowledgments.

Gek Han
Okay. And now we’ve come to the part on quickfire questions. So don’t think too much. One-word answer. Which historical figure would you like to have dinner with?

Rachel
In Singapore or anywhere in the world? Okay. Wow. This is terrible. Because I’m actually very bad at history.

Gek Han
Okay in Singapore, then.

Rachel
I would love to have dinner with Maria Hertogh. Which is not really historical, I guess, because she was still alive for many years. Yeah, I just wonder how she must have felt being a child living through all of that, and how it must have been. I mean, I have watched documentaries actually interviewing her as an adult. And I know it was pretty traumatic. And so yeah, I think I would have wanted to talk to her to hear from her perspective. The firestorm of media that we saw on the other side, you know. What it was like living through that for such a young person?

Gek Han
Good answer. Most underrated or intriguing period of history.

Rachel
I think the precolonial period is very interesting, because I think a lot of what we learn about in school is, you know, that old modern Singapore started in 1819. But obviously, there was a lengthy history and it was a pretty significant part of like many other empires and quite a big trading pot and civilisation going on before that, which actually the National Museum does a good job of capturing now in its permanent exhibition. So yeah, that was really interesting for me to learn personally, and I would love to read more books are set in like the precolonial period, or like the 14th–15th century. I think that would be really fascinating.

Gek Han
Cool. And which book is on your nightstand?

Rachel
I’m currently reading Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier. And he’s a local author, and the book’s published by Epigram, I think. It’s a contemporary novel about a group of friends and the way in which their lives intersect after the passing of a comet and unexpected comet in the sky. And it’s sort of slightly surreal, slightly hallucinatory. It’s hard to say what it’s about, but essentially it is about friendship and love and the choices that we make.

Gek Han
Do you have a favourite genre?

Rachel
No, I don’t. I read very omnivorously. I have an affection for 19th century French novels, I would say. And this book was loosely based on the structure of the novel The Red and the Black by Stendhal, which is about a young French boy growing up in the countryside who wants to model his life on Napoleon.

Gek Han
History is…

Rachel
Fascinating.

Gek Han
BiblioAsia is…

Rachel
A valuable resource.

Gek Han
Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you so much, Rachel, for your time.

Rachel
Thank you.

Gek Han
I’ve really enjoyed your book, and it’s a pleasure talking to you.

Rachel
Thank you so much. I’m very honored and appreciative to be here.

Gek Han
I mean, you know, I hope this book gets into the syllabus for local literature. And I’m rooting for you to win the Singapore Literature Prize.

Rachel
Thank you. Thank you.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter.

Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation (New York : Riverhead Books, 2023).

Lim Tin Seng, "Land from Sand: Singapore’s Reclamation Story," BiblioAsia 13(1), 2017.

Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Singapore: A Biography (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2009).

Lily Kong and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of "Nation" (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

Neo Kim Seng, My Grandfather's Road (Singapore: Cake Theatrical Productions Ltd, 2015)

Kevin YL Tan and Lam Peng Er, ed., Lee's Lieutenants: Singapore's Old Guard, rev. ed. (Singapore: Straits Times Press Pte Ltd, 2018).

Jeremy Tiang, State of Emergency (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2017).

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

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