Ann Ang's Blog: Wingdings

In recent months I have been working on an article about St. John's Island for Poskod, an excellent online magazine about the lesser known spots in Singapore. In the course of a year, I visited the island 4 times.

For the first time as a writer, I found myself delving into the National Archives and dredging up oral recounts of the days when St John's Island was a quarantine station and a detention center for political prisoners.

Here's the link:


http://poskod.sg/Posts/2013/4/18/Sout...

In the course of my research, I also came across a recount by Richard B Corridon, then Head of the Political Section in the Singapore Police Force. After this article was published, I had the good fortune of having his daughter, Judy Corridon, thank me for bringing her memories of the island back to life. She used to visit the prisoners with her father as a young child.

Truly writing is a relationship.

I have had the good fortune of coming across a most eloquent review of Bang My Car, and written by an ex-student.

http://mercurialcascade.wordpress.com...

Very often also, I get asked how I began writing Bang My Car--

Bang My Car began when I was thinking of what an Uncle would say and how he would talk. Most Uncles (and fathers and men of that generation) don't really talk. Talking is for the weak, for people who can't use their hands or their wit. Good English was for sissies. Yet there was a niggling thought
at the back of my head that the people who speak Singlish are people I know--sure, we irritate each other when we crowd onto trains and generally Singlish has a bad reputation for being one of the more uncouth Englishes, lacking the full-bodied sea-salt twang of Carribean English or the political fieriness of African literature in English. But Singlish and the people who speak it are by turns angry and tender, excitable and indifferent. I wanted to see whether I could write as real people spoke in Singapore.

That’s why language and the limits of speaking are an important theme in Bang My Car. Silence is equally important and a refusal to talk is a big part of the work—that’s Singapore for me. Don’t waste my time, don’t get me involved, want me to talk for what. Likewise the title of the book usually gets the wrong reaction from people. They’re usually disappointed when they find out it’s just about a road bully. But that’s Uncle for you, you don’t understand me, too bad, your problem. But I think the book is written very simply, it’s people who are difficult about it.

Looking back on the book, it’s very slight but also very visceral in its insistence on the importance of place and how ways of talking are shaped by place. Most of the stories are someone talking to someone else, and unlike characters in your regular story, my characters are quite happy to shut up and walk away.

Welcome to my author's blog!

Occasionally I get a question from readers: is Bang My Car about a real person? Who inspired it?

The answer is (for the general public): every Uncle I've met and every Uncle whose story I've wondered about.

The answer (for the literary scholar) is: this is a question of whether fiction has any bearing on truth. It does, but only if, dear Reader, you find meaning in it.

The answer (for the incurably curious) may be found in the next blog post.