
Paperback, 326 pages
ISBN: 9789811829437
$25 CAD (from the Canadian distributor)
After the fiction of my master’s Creative Writing students at Lasalle College of the Arts (Singapore) was regularly chosen to The Best Asian Short Stories from 2018 to 2021, and a story of mine was chosen to BASS 2020, I was appointed the editor for 2022. I’m honoured to have chosen these superb writers, including transnational Afghan refugee Sahib Nazari, and that nearly one quarter of writers are LGTBQ+.
Here’s a reprint of my introduction:
Chope: An Introduction
Should you try a general google search for a definition of chope instead of consulting an online Southeast Asian dictionary like SinglishDictionary.com, you will almost certainly, and rather fittingly, meet any number of restaurant reservation sites or apps, most in the island/city/country of Singapore. Restaurant reservations are not irrelevant here when a full third of these superb Asian stories involve food and eating.
To chope is to reserve something for yourself, such as a seat on a bus, or at a hawker centre, or even a book at the library. Singapore’s busy, crowded hawker centres and the delicious food they serve were recently (and deservedly) inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The tables of these food courts, often open-air, usually have little packets of tissues or a compact umbrella left on top to mark that someone else has already reserved a particular seat. Artists and writers also need to reserve space, to leave their mark, in the busy, noisy public sphere. An anthology is also a kind of shared public meal, a collection of delicacies enjoyed with hungry strangers perched either side of you. Tuck in!
Like any proper introduction to an anthology of short fiction, this one is a celebration of, indeed a valentine to, the short story. One way we know we have read a great short story, as you will here again and again, is the recurrent, delicious mistake of feeling like we have actually just read a novel. I am not here committing that cardinal sin in fiction of pretending that short stories are ‘just’ mini novels or, as is too often the expectation in publishing, training ground for writing a novel. Short stories are dense and compact; novels are, by definition, loose and baggy. To read a short story in one sitting, as we are so often tempted to do, is to have the artistic equivalent of expanding a compressed computer file. So much life comes pouring out, jack-in-the-box or clown-car style, of these meticulously crafted sentences and scenes. One such computing tool for file compression is (or was) known as a “CODEC,” an acronym for compression-decompression. These brave, talented, unforgeable writers from the Philippines, Afghanistan, India, Japan and Singapore have compressed so much life, so much hard-fought wisdom, battered grace, and sweet delight, into these seventeen moving stories in alluring voices.
Fittingly for any contemporary fiction anthology and especially for one devoted to a continent as large and diverse as Asia but also of only those Asian stories written in English—even listing the nationalities of our worldly, hyper-educated contributors is far from straightforward. One of the countless spot-on moments in David Nicholls’s perfect novel One Day finds the recently graduated Emma Morley in a conversation with a new work acquaintance about what his “stroke” [or ‘slash’] is: “Everyone who works here has a stroke. Waiter-stroke-artist, waiter-stroke-actor. Paddy the bartender claims to be a model, but frankly I’m doubtful.” Peter Morgan, who closes our show, is a legal citizen of 2.5 countries, including Permanent Residency in Singapore. Sarah Soh has lived on three continents. Dawn Lo is in a lifelong elastic relationship with China, once again living in the Hong Kong of her birth after living for years in Canada and Singapore. Mia Aureus and Reginald Kent appear to like to pair new countries with new degrees, moving, for the former, from the Philippines to Singapore for a writing master’s then to New Zealand for film school, while the latter is doubling-down on an addiction to Creative Writing programmes, following an MA at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Institute with an MFA in the States. Our two contributors from Japan, Suzanne Kamata and Simon Rowe, have lived there for decades. Even within the strong contingent of Singaporean writers—an inevitability given this anthology’s focus on English-language Asian fiction and the acceleration of formal Creative Writing educations there—I am delighted to introduce Mohamed Shaker, a Malay-Singaporean writing of and from one of Singapore’s founding cultures but one many lamentas under-represented in dynamic, vibrant SingLit.
Speaking of hybridity, of strokes and slashes, our strong concentration of Singaporean writers also gives this anthology plenty of that other famous Singaporean dish: Singlish. Joanne Tan’s remarkable story speaks for several here when it warns of social expectations that might make us “go crazy one.” Reginald Kent’s Singaporean characters warn each other that they “cannot expect to figure out so fast one,” while Adeline Tan’s haunting story includes the thrifty advice, “Still can use!” No collection of Asian writing would be complete without someone cooking, as Joanne Tan and Ken Lye’s do, in the agak-agak style of measuring by guesstimating. A more sombre state of hybridity comes from our Indian contributors, most of whom were writing from Singapore while worrying about loved ones back in India here in the worst year of COVID.
With art holding its mirror up to nature, COVID is certainly a recurrent issue here in these stories of the moment, with titles like Anisha Ralhan’s Alone Together and Kevin Wong’s We’re in This Together.
An anthology is such a beautiful way to come together, to gather and share. Best Asian Short Stories 2022 also probably marks a lifetime high for me, my third book in three years. My 2020 climate-crisis novel Our Sands, from Penguin Random House, still feels like it hit Asian bookstore shelves just yesterday. My first anthology, Routledge’s Teaching Creative Writing in Asia (2021), also brings together writers from India, the Philippines, Canada, Australia and the United States. Where I break new pedagogical ground with that first anthology on Creative Writing pedagogy in Asia, it is heartening to see that, thematically, the anthology in your hands is both timeless and current.
I believe it was last century that Salman Rushdie lamented that if he could sum his novels up in the twenty-second sound bites media expected of him he would write twenty-second sound bites, not novels of 100,000-words and more; all that was before the tyranny of the hashtag. Still, memory is its own kind of hashtag network. As I read the scores of submissions here, I would invariably recall stories by certain recurrent themes. Here, as always, are stories of love, death, displacement, transformation, desire, ambition, connection, and dysfunctional families (excuse the redundancy). Crucially, those same themes thrum through the work of the numerous brave and honest gay writers collected here, often from countries that legally do not recognize their love as love. Art is daring, these writers remind us; art dares and cares.
Anisha Ralhan’s Alone Together is a heart-warming story of warming hearts (and other body parts) that is an obvious show-opener as we collectively crawl out from two years sequestered in our apartments (and worries).
I could not be more proud than to include a story by Sahib Nazari, transplanted as he is from his native Afghanistan to Australia (via Pakistan). Far more than a story of his war-ravaged Afghanistan, his Kochi is a vibrant reminder of how fiction prefers life’s moral grey areas, not black and white. The “fieldcraft” of Nazari’s war-torn development workers balances keeping people alive with a version of Malcolm X’s victory “by whatever means necessary.” Whereas my Routledge anthology worries whether English-language fiction is universal or imperialist in its fixation on conflict and the transformed protagonist, Nazari shows that the social-emotional grammar of storytelling really is universal.
While other characters connect metaphorically, Simon Rowe’s vibrant Paris Match finds two transplanted Japanese strangers in Paris, each looking to hit the romantic and professional restart button.
Short stories by and about the hard choices made my wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and aunts recur in most miscellaneous anthologies of good fiction, including this one, although here we are blessed to have one written by a man, Singapore’s Mohamed Shaker. His Barren Sands repeatedly won that quietest and most secret of literary prizes, an editor, me, getting up from my groaning desk to pause work and seek out my wife so I could read her some of Shaker’s brilliant lines. Not once but twice, I had to stop everything I was doing to find my beloved and stun her with Shaker’s arresting depiction of pregnancy:
Pregnancy is a dam. You are the water. The dam holds you back and your water churns, ebbs, flows, crashes in on itself like waves on the shore and then new life breaks through the surface of your lake and emerges gasping, crying, sobbing, your water leaking out of its eyes.
I am so privileged to help midwife all these stories into print, especially for new writers like Mohamed Shaker.
As with other stories of the heart here, Sarah Soh’s pitch-perfect Pineapple Fengshui reminds us that in love we are parliaments of emotion, not monarchies. Some decisions of the heart, Soh and others warn, maybe made by only a slim majority, with a disgruntled minority ready to sweep to future power. The voice in Sarah’s fiction helps us feel a world, a character, and a soul through one crystalline word sewn against the next.
No one who reads Mia Aureus’ Home will be surprised to learn that she divides her creative life between writing and film-making. While she also writes with a warm voice as palpable as it is audible, we are treated here to a movie unrolling in our minds. I would detail her story’s allure more thoroughly, but—spoiler-alert!
In The Shadow, Prachi Topiwala-Agarwal continues the run of relationship stories that dominate this rich anthology. Prachi dares to map the peaks and valleys of a long-term romance as a couple chases career dreams, never equally, across three countries on three continents. As with so many of the romantic protagonists here, Topiwala-Agarwal’s know that with love, and its shiny counterfeits, we might seek ruin as much as we seek release.
Joanne Tan’s complex and multi-layered engagement with the expectations faced by women both permits and laments me saying that if we are going to have an anthology of Asian writing, it is fitting to have at least one story set in a kitchen with multiple generations of women cooking. Joanne’s superb Mei-Mei also provides fiction’s great “one-for-one deal” (to use the Singlish version of what is elsewhere called a “two for one” deal): we see a world through a voice we hear (and one we keep hearing long after we stop reading).
Although writing takes place in such profound, abyssal solitude, one of the playlist or mixed-tape joys of compiling an anthology is finding not just great stories but great stories that will wind up playing well together. While most of these stories concern love and/or death and/or displacement, two stories braid those themes (and more) into the legally curtailed lives of gay Singaporean men. Kevin Nicholas Wong’s aptly named We’re in This Together documents in fiction Singapore’s annual gay pride event Pink Dot (a pun on Singapore’s nickname as “the little red dot,” a country not much bigger on some maps than the red dot used to denote it). Art is a much slower dating app, yet a SingLit Grindr message is waiting to fly between Wong’s story and Reginald Kent’s Babi Pongteh. Where Joanne Tan’s kitchen story charts the horrors of a departing matriarch, Kent’s soy-sauce elegy is for one already departed.
Romantic relationships wax and wane in the Wong and Kent stories but burst into first bloom with Suzanne Kamata’s What Lurks Beneath. Both our Japanese meet-cute stories find characters coming together unexpectedly. With so many of these writers living, thinking and working in multiple languages, it is fitting to see Kamata’s characters literally pass translations back and forth.
Vicky Chong’s story Transplanted Love further explores the intersections, and oppositions, of romantic and/versus familial love. With all the languages spoken by these writers from seven-plus countries, does any language make the wise distinction and use different verbs for loving a family member versus being in romantic love?
Nash Colundalur’s The Mourners shifts its grief from the biological family to the artistic version of Armistead Maupin’s “logical family.” Colundalur reminds us that artists also have their chosen families, their tribes. Here, too, a beautifully doomed meal finds its cast coming together and falling apart.
Jinendra Jain’s Impossible Innocence knows acutely that stories love and need change. Like the country-hopping, career-chasing characters of Prachi Topiwala-Agarwal and Peter Morgan, Jain’s bankers trade more than investments, finding that loyalty, too, has a different price when buying or selling.
Adeline Tan is a professional video editor who has appeared now in more than one edition of Best Asian Short Stories. When a video editor, that narrative professional, switches to fiction, we can feel the palpable delight Adeline takes in language. Her moving story may involve a literal last breath, but her art keeps breathing.
For Ken Lye’s characters, transformation comes in a tiffin box. All losses in this superb anthology are not just death; Mr Lye is wise to recognise just how many people lost their jobs in this global pandemic. Here, too, the biological family meets the logical (but, fittingly, deliciously, with a little more butter).
The most apt and exciting phrases I could write about Peter Morgan’s arresting story First Draft: David in Singapore, Maureen in Wales, phrases devoted to literature’s most recurrent themes, would spoil this tender, affecting story. More indirectly, and to celebrate this story that, like so many here, fuses cultures, landscapes, and languages, I close by resurrecting an under-appreciated literary term. While many of us who keep a professional eye on word count and varying our vocabulary can replace the phrase “coming of age story” with the originally German Bildungsroman, a lesser known German literary term is Künstlerroman, for the story of someone becoming an artist.
My life has had few joys more profound than having watched many of these ferociously talented Asian writers becoming published writers and artists. I am so thrilled to collect and edit their stories and share them with you. Ars longa, vita brevis.
Buy The Best Asian Short Stories 2022 from the Canadian distributor