Catherine Lim has dominated the literary scene in Singapore for so long that one almost forgets that the island nation has some other important writers. One of the most distinguished is Goh Poh Seng, 64, who won the National Book Development Council of Singapore Award for Fiction in 1976 and the Singapore Cultural Medallion in 1983. He remains one of modern Singapore's most prolific writers and poets.
But the dates on those awards provide a clue that he has not been part of the Singapore cultural scene for some time. For that matter, he hasn't even been living in Singapore. Goh chose exile in Canada in 1986. The circumstances of his fall from grace in the mid-1980s have been obscured by time. Even Goh, speaking from his home in Vancouver, initially said they were rather "trivial." Then he elaborates. "Being a loud-mouthed poet, it was probably inevitable [that he would leave]."
In those days, Goh was a cultural live wire, for sure. In the early 1960s, he pioneered Singapore drama in English, producing and writing three plays of his own. He was appointed an early chairman of the National Theater, during which time he laid the groundwork for the formation of the Singapore National Symphony, the Chinese Orchestra and Singapore Dance Company.
The mid-1980s were a time of cultural politics. Much of it had to do with language - whether to use Chinese at a time when the government was promoting it as a national language, or English. Goh was never a political dissident, but possibly a little naïve. "Anybody in the limelight would probably offend the government," he now allows. "I thought I was being innocuous." Anyhow, he left Singapore and a thriving medical practice to become a doctor in a remote corner of the Canadian province of Newfoundland.
"I was broke, and nobody else wanted to go there," he recalls. But he also found the place exciting and professionally stimulating, taking care of the patients in three small villages in the bleak Atlantic province. He was the only foreigner - and certainly the only Chinese - for miles around. Later he moved to Vancouver, which is more like his natural habitat. "I enjoy living on the [Pacific] Rim. Vancouver has become very much an Asian city."
Goh has published two volumes of poetry in Canada and has recently begun to receive recognition in North American literary circles. He was invited to participate in the Winnipeg Writers' Festival in October and received an invitation to read at the Doe Library of the University of California at Berkeley this year. The Doe Library readings are under the direction of Robert Hass, the former poet laureate of the United States. Only three readers are invited each year.
But Goh says he has never really left his country emotionally. The setting of his soon-to-be released new novel, Dance With White Clouds, though technically an unnamed country, would be instantly recognizable as Singapore or Malaysia. What he calls a "fable for grownups" has actually had a long gestation. "I started it when I was living in Penang in the 1980s." The main character, simply the "old man," is in his 60s. He living a "predictably happy life."
Equally predictably, he is vaguely unhappy. So he gets on a bus randomly and starts to wander. The driver points out a small village where he alights, settles, marries the Widow Li and becomes wealthy and happy again . . . but then he feels that nagging dissatisfaction. A fable of modern Singapore? Goh won't say. And it is a fair question whether somebody who has been away for 15 years can still write about his former country with any sense of authenticity, especially with a mind still stuck in the "boiling cauldron" of the 1980s.
Singapore has supposedly loosened its controls on freedom of expression in recent years. As far as Goh knows, there is no official prohibition on his returning. His works are not banned. Indeed, his last novel, Dance With Moths (1998), was published in Singapore and got good reviews, he says. The latest novel will be released by Hong Kong Publisher Asia2000 to coincide with the Hong Kong Literary Festival in May. So Goh will be in the neighborhood. Will he return to Singapore? He hesitates, and then says: "I have no immediate plans."
