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In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel
The city-state of Singapore is small enough to fly over in three minutes, yet is also home to two of the "world's best", Changi Airport and Singapore Airlines. In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel presents poetry, short stories and essays inspired by that distinctly modern experience of coming and going by air, written by some of the most exciting voices in Singapore literature today. This collection takes readers from the depths of Changi Airport up to cruising altitudes half a world away, in the process exploring questions about travel, aspiration, belonging and home.
- GenresPoetryShort Stories
324 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2016
3 people are currently reading
72 people want to read
About the author
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
24 books40 followersYu-Mei Balasingamchow is the author of a novel, Names Have Been Changed (2026), co-author of a nonfiction book, Singapore: A Biography (2009, with Mark R. Frost), and co-editor of a literary collection, In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel (2016, with Zhang Ruihe). Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, selected for the Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series, and received a Pushcart Prize special mention.
She was born in Singapore and is currently based in Boston, where she worked as a bookseller at Papercuts Bookshop and now teaches writing workshops at GrubStreet. She was a 2015 honorary fellow in writing at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and a 2017 national writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Sewanee Writers Conference and National Arts Council of Singapore.
She was born in Singapore and is currently based in Boston, where she worked as a bookseller at Papercuts Bookshop and now teaches writing workshops at GrubStreet. She was a 2015 honorary fellow in writing at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and a 2017 national writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Sewanee Writers Conference and National Arts Council of Singapore.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 9, 2017
An overlong collection (not helped by the unnecessary page breaks between contributions) that could have done with higher editorial standards and a much more urgent or interesting reason to exist. Like the clichéd pictures on the cover, there are too many throwaway poems like "The Mouse", "Final Call", "Migratory Pattern", "Spread" and "Trajectory" and amateurish short stories such as "Pocket Cities", "Ramblings of a Trolley Uncle" and "The Poems of Horvalla". Unfortunately, the themes of airports and air travel seem to bring out the most cheaply whimsical and blandly pining sides of most writers, but at least there are the revelations of Philip Holden's short story, "Aeroplane", and the by-far-unparalleled essay, "Between Stations", by Boey Kim Cheng.
October 7, 2020
A very dear friend gave me this book when I was about to leave Singapore to start my undergraduate education. There is something perversely fitting that I have finished this (1) after I had to complete my final term of university and graduate in Singapore over a virtual platform (2) because of a global pandemic which has grounded all but essential travel and forced countless students to evacuate campus. I started this anthology before the onset of the pandemic, during one of the summer breaks when I was back in Singapore. I think I had planned to finish it overseas but forgot to bring it with me when I returned to campus. But this particular bout of absent-mindedness gave me the unique fortune of starting In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel, in a time when I frequently patronized both Changi Airport and Singapore Airlines, but finishing In Transit in a time when both these treasured national institutions are facing their most dire crisis of survival since their founding.
Reading this book before the outbreak of the pandemic and then after made for two very different reading experiences. If I had finished this before the pandemic, I would have probably just pointed out that - as with most anthologies - some entries are stronger than others. I would have shared that the drawback of this anthology and the gripe I have with its weakest entries both stem from the fact that this work is borne out of an experience of privilege - that of being able to afford flying out of Singapore and then to write about it. Most writers here are clearly drawing upon their own experience of flying out of the country: there are entries literally about writers flying overseas to attend writing programs, which really threatens to cross the line into self-indulgence. But the entries that try to write from the perspective of airport staff, foreign workers who work in the country, etc. made up some of the weaker entries because they occasionally felt forced and unnatural. That made it pretty evident that none of the writers were really staff at the airport or foreign workers themselves, and sometimes their work felt less like a compelling attempt to give voice precisely to those who aren't privileged enough to share the experience of flying that middle-income Singaporeans may have, and more of a general anti-government tirade of sorts, that criticizes the contrast between the glitz and glamour of our airports and the conditions of inequality, but never quite giving us a compelling vision of the human at the heart of these inequalities.
Reading this anthology in these COVID-times though, has made it more difficult for me to make the aforementioned critique without feeling like it somehow does the book a disservice. Before the pandemic, it would have been a lot easier for me to lay into the anthology's privileged perspectives and link it up to broader surrounding the accessibility of art in Singapore's context, because the strength of this book - its evocative and moving accounts of what it means to leave and to return - were experiences that I easily took for granted. But reading the entries now when I have begun to worry for the future of Changi Airport and Singapore Airlines; when I have begun to miss the odd and slightly disquieting calm of the airport; when I have begun to wonder when I would next feel the thud of a plane landing on a runway and knowing that I have arrived home, I think I appreciate and see the value of this anthology much more given that these experiences no longer feel possible. Maybe it's in this sense that COVID has made this anthology better, and made it feel a little bit more than just a group of local writers waxing lyrical about their own experiences.
But then again, maybe the pandemic hasn't really made this book more precious, or helped people like me appreciate its strengths better. I think it's more likely that the pandemic has forced me to recognize that for all that I may critique and question the problem of art and accessibility, and criticize writers for failing to humanize the underprivileged beyond flat stereotypes, I cannot deny that I am more like the writers and artists that I critique, and that is why what they write feel right and true to me on a deep and fundamental level that would not be true for anyone which did not belong in Singapore's middle / upper-middle class. This is especially because it's increasingly clear that being able to wax lyrical about travelling and airports is truly even more of a first-world problem during this pandemic than before, given the drastically disproportionate health and economic pains borne by the underprivileged, especially given the sheer scale of the COVID-19 outbreaks in the migrant worker dormitories in Singapore. I want to say that the pandemic has made me glad that this book exists, but I realize that that this sentiment really doesn't absolve the anthology of its flaws at all.
There really isn't a neat way to tie up all of these thoughts. I am thinking that perhaps, at this very moment, reading this book becomes a way to force ourselves to reflect about what Singlit is, what it should be and what it could be; who it speaks for, who it should speak for and who it could speak for. I have always loved Singlit for the way in which it speaks as and for Singaporeans, but, as my parents always like to remind me, the world is always and truly a multi-layered biscuit, and even within Singapore there are only ever more layers that we can peel back to question whose voices are present and whose aren't.
Reading this book before the outbreak of the pandemic and then after made for two very different reading experiences. If I had finished this before the pandemic, I would have probably just pointed out that - as with most anthologies - some entries are stronger than others. I would have shared that the drawback of this anthology and the gripe I have with its weakest entries both stem from the fact that this work is borne out of an experience of privilege - that of being able to afford flying out of Singapore and then to write about it. Most writers here are clearly drawing upon their own experience of flying out of the country: there are entries literally about writers flying overseas to attend writing programs, which really threatens to cross the line into self-indulgence. But the entries that try to write from the perspective of airport staff, foreign workers who work in the country, etc. made up some of the weaker entries because they occasionally felt forced and unnatural. That made it pretty evident that none of the writers were really staff at the airport or foreign workers themselves, and sometimes their work felt less like a compelling attempt to give voice precisely to those who aren't privileged enough to share the experience of flying that middle-income Singaporeans may have, and more of a general anti-government tirade of sorts, that criticizes the contrast between the glitz and glamour of our airports and the conditions of inequality, but never quite giving us a compelling vision of the human at the heart of these inequalities.
Reading this anthology in these COVID-times though, has made it more difficult for me to make the aforementioned critique without feeling like it somehow does the book a disservice. Before the pandemic, it would have been a lot easier for me to lay into the anthology's privileged perspectives and link it up to broader surrounding the accessibility of art in Singapore's context, because the strength of this book - its evocative and moving accounts of what it means to leave and to return - were experiences that I easily took for granted. But reading the entries now when I have begun to worry for the future of Changi Airport and Singapore Airlines; when I have begun to miss the odd and slightly disquieting calm of the airport; when I have begun to wonder when I would next feel the thud of a plane landing on a runway and knowing that I have arrived home, I think I appreciate and see the value of this anthology much more given that these experiences no longer feel possible. Maybe it's in this sense that COVID has made this anthology better, and made it feel a little bit more than just a group of local writers waxing lyrical about their own experiences.
But then again, maybe the pandemic hasn't really made this book more precious, or helped people like me appreciate its strengths better. I think it's more likely that the pandemic has forced me to recognize that for all that I may critique and question the problem of art and accessibility, and criticize writers for failing to humanize the underprivileged beyond flat stereotypes, I cannot deny that I am more like the writers and artists that I critique, and that is why what they write feel right and true to me on a deep and fundamental level that would not be true for anyone which did not belong in Singapore's middle / upper-middle class. This is especially because it's increasingly clear that being able to wax lyrical about travelling and airports is truly even more of a first-world problem during this pandemic than before, given the drastically disproportionate health and economic pains borne by the underprivileged, especially given the sheer scale of the COVID-19 outbreaks in the migrant worker dormitories in Singapore. I want to say that the pandemic has made me glad that this book exists, but I realize that that this sentiment really doesn't absolve the anthology of its flaws at all.
There really isn't a neat way to tie up all of these thoughts. I am thinking that perhaps, at this very moment, reading this book becomes a way to force ourselves to reflect about what Singlit is, what it should be and what it could be; who it speaks for, who it should speak for and who it could speak for. I have always loved Singlit for the way in which it speaks as and for Singaporeans, but, as my parents always like to remind me, the world is always and truly a multi-layered biscuit, and even within Singapore there are only ever more layers that we can peel back to question whose voices are present and whose aren't.
March 14, 2017
Heartfelt, poignant, resonant.
Loved all the prose and most of the poetry. A superb collection of SingLit.
Loved all the prose and most of the poetry. A superb collection of SingLit.
May 5, 2017
Kinda meh. (Sorry Ms Zhang.)
[Review 1 - 05/05/17.]
[Review 1 - 05/05/17.]
April 6, 2017
Spoke to my frame of mind as I'm between two homes. I enjoyed the mix between prose and poetry, and the editors did a nice job in ordering linked themes. Huge range on the quality of contributions.
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February 7, 2017Caveat: I'm refraining from giving a star rating as i have a short story published in this anthology.
This was pretty hit and miss, but there were some enjoyable stories in here. My favourites were JY Yang's Pocket Cities (plot was short on substance, but i liked the allegorical play), Jeremy Tiang's Terminal (he has the rare gift of being a funny writer when he wants to), Yeo Wei Wei's Chin Chin (although the ending was somewhat unsatisfying) and Boey Kim Cheng's Between Stations (what a fantastic exposition on home and belonging).
This was pretty hit and miss, but there were some enjoyable stories in here. My favourites were JY Yang's Pocket Cities (plot was short on substance, but i liked the allegorical play), Jeremy Tiang's Terminal (he has the rare gift of being a funny writer when he wants to), Yeo Wei Wei's Chin Chin (although the ending was somewhat unsatisfying) and Boey Kim Cheng's Between Stations (what a fantastic exposition on home and belonging).
December 21, 2016
A diverse and interesting collection of poems, short stories and essays of very high quality. One of my short stories, The Looker, can be found within its pages. Images from the launch at BooksActually can be found here: http://igloomelts.com/jongreshyahooco...
September 19, 2020
Borrowed this as I was intrigued by the theme of travel. A couple of story stories did impress me (“Meat Bone Tea”, “Between Stations”), but others simply rambled on. Besides the multiple mentions of Changi Airport, the pieces didn’t quite connect for me and the book could have been shorter.
February 28, 2020
The prose and essays were better than the poems, notwithstanding the fact that airport/aeroplane/travel/transit is already a hackneyed topic.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews