Around that time, I also wrote ‘A Mound of Gold’ during one Chinese New Year season as I stacked mandarin oranges in a bowl to make a mound of golden fruit.
It is customary to have lots of mandarin oranges in the home, because the Cantonese words for gold and oranges sound almost identical. .... It's aspirational (as in ‘may you have plenty / wealth in the coming year.’) As a Christian, I would have prayed a prayer that the family - and my home/country - would be rich in harmony, peace, unity, joy, love, etc. and also that my family would walk with God in the coming year.
It's also a ‘count your blessings’ poem. When you use gratitude to brush up what seems insignificant (dust), God adds His blessing and you find that you hold a Mound of Gold in the palm of your hand.
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Singapore was, until 1965, a British colony. Generations of us were brought up on a diet of English literature which was itself a vessel of British culture. Many young writers in Singapore tended to set their fiction in an English landscape, using objects and references to things British. The landscape of home – Singapore, and Malaysia which had always been culturally close to us – did not feature comfortably in our writings. The landscape had not yet been “ratified” in our imagination.
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Gwee Li Sui is a poet, a graphic artist, and a literary critic. His works of verse include Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998), One Thousand and One Nights (2014), Who Wants to Buy an Expanded Edition of a Book of Poems? (2015), The Other Merlion and Friends (2015), Haikuku (2017), and Death Wish (2017). He wrote Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel in English Myth of the Stone back in 1993, which was re-released in an expanded twentieth-anniversary edition in 2013. A familiar name in Singapore’s cultural scene, Gwee has further edited acclaimed literary anthologies and written and lectured on a range of subjects. He also wrote FEAR NO POETRY!: An Essential Guide to Close Reading (2014) and Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate (2017).
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JF: There seems to be a shift of style from your first book to the second.
There was definitely a shift in the style in Bitter Punch. With Transparent Strangers, the poetic voice was more detached, I was looking at things from a distance. With Bitter Punch, I was dealing with a lot more intimate, personal content. At the same time, I think the whole experimentation runs through both books. It is just that with Bitter Punch, I guess,there is a bit more confidence in terms of the experimentation. The other thing I also noticed – I mean, after the book came out – is that Bitter Punch has a section that deals with very personal things that have happened in my life. That really is the break from the usual detached, distant urban observation.
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JF: I heard you were detained in 1977 for almost four months?
Oh yes, it is true. In an operation that roped in suspected communists, I was detained among a group of people. I had a close friend who was a communist, and the government suspected that he had roped me into the organization because of our friendship. I was cleared and released subsequently.
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