SINGAPORE – Reading two of Catherine Lim’s 1980s short story collections some 40 years since they were published, one is struck by her insistence – to use one of her favourite turns of phrase – on highlighting the “blemish(es) on the fair face of our nation”.
The doyenne, who is now 84 and still active – her last short story collection is The Loving And The Dead: Tales Of The Supernatural in 2019 – has no qualms zeroing in like a fruit fly on the rot, which one senses she revels in.
It is a very pointed sort of self-mockery, and maybe even pride at the resilience of human nature and tradition, during a time of concerted national efforts in developing Singapore.
The overwhelming sense is of bathos and the anti-climax. People’s values cannot be shaped top-down, her stories insist. They will be selfish, delusional, stuck in their ways, and what of that?
Or Else, The Lightning God & Other Stories (1980) has been the work most associated with Lim, making history as the first Singapore text on the international O-level examination syllabus in 1989 and 1990.
This meant students in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the rest of Asia were holding that slim volume in their hands when they read about grovelling Margaret in the titular story, who could not help but be traumatised by her mother-in-law’s curse despite dismissing the old gods as dead.
With schadenfreude, they may have rooted for the usurping schemes of maidservant Puay Ah Moi notwithstanding the beneficence of her employer. Or slapped their thighs in laughter at one of Lim’s most memorable creations, A.P. Velloo, who sees in each personal rejection a violation of democracy and finally decides upon the proportionate response of running for Parliament as an independent candidate.
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