{"id":96678,"date":"2026-10-31T09:56:03","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T01:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=96678"},"modified":"2026-10-31T09:56:03","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T01:56:03","slug":"reading-catherine-lims-or-else-the-lightning-gods-and-o-singapore-40-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=96678","title":{"rendered":"Reading Catherine Lim\u2019s Or Else, The Lightning Gods and O Singapore! 40 years on"},"content":{"rendered":"


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SINGAPORE \u2013 Reading two of Catherine Lim\u2019s 1980s short story collections some 40 years since they were published, one is struck by her insistence \u2013 to use one of her favourite turns of phrase \u2013 on highlighting the \u201cblemish(es) on the fair face of our nation\u201d.<\/p>\n

The doyenne, who is now 84 and still active \u2013 her last short story collection is The Loving And The Dead: Tales Of The Supernatural in 2019 \u2013 has no qualms zeroing in like a fruit fly on the rot, which one senses she revels in.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The overwhelming sense is of bathos and the anti-climax. People\u2019s values cannot be shaped top-down, her stories insist. They will be selfish, delusional, stuck in their ways, and what of that?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s curse despite dismissing the old gods as dead.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Clearly, this was no great embassy for Singapore\u2019s soft power, but the Ministry of Education had no problem including Lim\u2019s debut Little Ironies: Stories Of Singapore (1978), written with similar wryness, in the national syllabus \u2013 later even reintroducing it in 2018.<\/p>\n

Lim, with her characters that come across as archetypal now, was chronicling a colloquial, and recognisable, side of Singapore, in bite-size, accessible chunks. These were vignettes in the same way that newspaper cartoons were vignettes; with milder caricature, they come with a speech bubble saying some ridiculous thing that instantly appeals to baser instincts.<\/p>\n

The collection at times feels outmoded. Lim\u2019s women today would be considered to be of a particular mould, vain and vindictive. She has a penchant for writing disputes between mothers and daughters-in-law, mistresses and bondservants.<\/p>\n

Other social structures are of another time. The institution of bondservants, for sure, or thieving vagrants who take all opportunities to make a quick buck, putting down newspapers in the Botanic Gardens for couples to make love.<\/p>\n

The kernel of truth that remains in these depictions is served well by the straightforward register Lim\u2019s prose inhabits. They offer a slice of unchanging Chinese Singapore, superstitious and petty.<\/p>\n

No such reservations need be applied to her collection of political satire O Singapore! Stories In Celebration (1989), which spreads Lim\u2019s wings in the realm of allegory.<\/p>\n

Here, she allows her humorist tendencies to blossom, often taking her satirical twists one turn more than the reader would expect, effectively satirising the satire. Her language turns arch to tell stories of a vice-consul prone to fits of \u201chigh-class\u201d lewd puns or a loyal civil servant whose malady stems from following too rigorously the dictates of government. (The solution is to send those with similar ailments across the Causeway for a vacation.)<\/p>\n

Everything Lim writes here feels more contemporary and inventive. Witness a mismatched couple by the Social Enhancement Unit appealing in imagined conversations with each other\u2019s role models, Confucius and William Shakespeare. Or an anthropological paper by one Professor Arthur A. Bremer on kiasuism, which traces the internationally renowned impulse back to hoarding and raiding instincts.<\/p>\n

These are stories of incomplete transformation, of people rowing against the nature documented in Or Else, The Lightning God. The key difference is that where the state was ignored, here it is an imperfect and hypocritical, but omnipresent force.<\/p>\n

In this regard, O Singapore! feels more of this time than Or Else, The Lightning God \u2013 another of Lim\u2019s stories, for example, takes aim at Singapore\u2019s fertility policies.<\/p>\n

But read together \u2013 the two collections mirroring Lim\u2019s own dual lives as writer and political commentator \u2013 the earlier collection also becomes a correction to the second, jolting the SingLit reader and writer. Even here, there is more worth writing about than the Government and the impact of its policies, or stories circumscribed by or drawing from national narratives.<\/p>\n

More importantly, ugliness is agency, but it is also something Freudian and ungovernable. It can feel petty, but truth-telling sometimes involves ditching the filters to hold up a mirror to count the face\u2019s pores.<\/p>\n

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