Unrest

by Yeng Pway Ngon

When the fervour of revolution is gone, what remains?

Four leftist teenagers in 1950s Malaya dedicate themselves to overthrowing colonialism and bringing about a better world. With time, their paths diverge — into capitalism, into adultery, into the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution. Disillusioned and middle-aged, they look back at their lives from the prosperous but soulless 1980s, wondering what has become of their dreams and ideals.

Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

Genres: Fiction, Asia, Literature, China, Asian Literature

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Yeng Pway Ngon 英培安—Chinese language poet, novelist, playwright and critic—is one of Singapore's most prolific authors, having published over 25 volumes of poetry, essays, fiction, plays and literary criticism. His work is noted for its examination of the modern human condition, and has been translated into English, Malay and Dutch. Yeng received the National Book Development Council of Singapore's Book Award in 1988, and the Singapore Literature Prize in 2004, 2008 and 2012. He was awarded the Cultural Medallion in 2003 for his contributions to literature in Singapore, and the SEA Write Award in 2013.

Reviews

[Roy Llh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the original mandarin text of "Unrest" and I was mesmerised by the author's manipulation of narrative voice. The constant switch in narrative voices served as an interruption to the reading experience. Every single character demanded equal attention (during the reading and writing process) and in doing so, each character seemed small and powerless in the ideological wave of their time. My favourite part was no doubt the chapters in which Zi Qin conversed with the author in a meta setting. It was quirky, strange and alienating. A severely experimental novel that is an experience to read. Not for the faint hearted or impatient.

[Whitaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unrest tells the story of Daming, Ziqin, Guoliang and Weikang. Their stories are told at two points in time: from around 1956 to 1965 when they were students and supporters of communism living in British colonial Malaya and some 30 years later in 1987. The novel explores different forms of unrest and by extension different forms of oppression: of the communists by the British, of the people by the people in China’s Cultural Revolution, of children by their parents, of wives by their husbands, of gay men by straight society, and of women by men.

Author Yeng Pway Ngon, a man, uses the device of having his main female protagonist, Ziqin, talk back to him in the narrative. She disappears at one point, a form of rebellion against his authorial control, and returns to dictate terms to him on how she wants him to end her story:

The writer’s design is for me to follow Daming to Canada. He had me betray my husband for the first time in Hong Kong, going to bed with another man. I don’t care about that, but he got it in his head that after this experience, I’ve broken resolutely from the cage of male perception, and am completely liberated – but I can’t agree with that. The writer’s idea is that in Canada, Daming and I would be man and wife in name, but I’d do as I please, dating other men, enjoying the sexual freedom described by Erica Jong. … But no, why would I do this? Is sexual freedom the freedom women need most? … why would I want to fulfil the writer’s sexual fantasies and have intercourse with all kinds of men? … if he tried to force me I would disappear from his novel once again.

It’s clever. But for me just a little too clever by half. I found it too didactically heavy handed even while I admired the idea. Still, as I've said elsewhere before, an experiment that is less than successful is always more interesting to read than a work which treads the same old safe paths.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unrest is a novel that follows the lives of four characters from the 1950's to the late 1980's who grow up in the same area in Malaya and who all take part in activities against the colonial government in their youth. The narrative isn't linear, so we begin the novel in 1987 when a few of the characters meet again and the interactions that ensue from this.

Of the four, Weikang was the most political and actually emigrated to China in the 60's and there are some fascinating chapters on the Cultural Revolution and what living in Mao's communist China was like at that time. Guoliang was more of a follower who had a hard childhood but drifted into a decent life while still holding a torch for Ziqin the only woman of the four while Ziqin followed Daming, the charismatic but hypocritical 'leader' to Hong Kong and thirty years later suffers through his constant womanizing.

More than the politics of the fifties and sixties though this is an exploration of these characters, of their marriages and what those mean, of where home is and what we are or are not prepared to give up for our ideologies. The writing about their childhoods, the poverty, their parental relationships and expectations were some of the strongest parts of the book. There is also a strong meta-aspect to the novel with the authorial voice often intruding to the point where he discusses being stuck in his writing because his female protagonist has disappeared and a discussion follows between the two of them about his sexist portrayal of her. I enjoyed these interludes and they made up for some slightly eye rolling writing about sex and attitudes towards women.

I'm a fan of multiple perspectives in a novel and really enjoyed the writing and the details and descriptions of life in Singapore and Hong Kong, particularly the food. If you spread out the reading experience as I did initially, I think the chronology can get confusing as it jumps around frequently although when reading the second half in one day, I didn't have this problem. This is the first novel I've read from Yeng Pway Ngon and although I had some issues with his writing, I'd be keen to try something else from him if anyone has recommendations.

[Ad Astra · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want a book that is ALL about character development, this is your novel. I really liked this book. It is about youth, and age. Where we started and how we ended up down roads we thought were stereotypical and not in our futures. It has a huge helping of meta.

It's not a book for everyone, and at first I couldn't keep track of the characters. But the whole book reads like a lost love letter from your past. I am not old enough or married long enough to have made mistakes and torn asunder my relationships. But the regret and longing they describe and these characters feel... this I remember. This is a book of feelings, and unlike anything I've read in a long while.

[Yong Feng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unrest centres on four characters whose lives intersect as they participate in the leftist movement in pre-independence Singapore, but then diverge as they grow up and betray or are betrayed by ideologies and each other. Yeng’s postmodernist prose parallels the uncertainty and powerlessness in the aftermath of the Communist dream, foregrounded by universal human experiences of love, loss and regret. I liked how the book focuses on an often unmentioned part of Singapore’s history and suggests how its effects still resonate today in some way. However, Yeng’s literary devices, such as having a character speak back to the author, felt excessive at times.

[Ami · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked it so much, but the last chapter was unnecesary and undid all of the book's commentary about how men write women. It was disappointing.

[Ishq · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finishing the book you can't help thinking this could have been a lot better. How a group of leftist-leaning chinese students in singapore/malaysia 1950s come to terms with their disillusionment, betrayal, exile and diasporic journey as they grew into their middle age. Grave topics are touched upon: the anti-communist purge, the disparity of propaganda of socialist china and lived experience of the cultural revolution, the relationship between politics and desire, the human factor that sustain political violence, traumatic memories, and the question of women emancipation, etc... and readers are lured to see how these grave issues play out in the characters' intertwining life choices and consequences. However i find the author's treatment is more like a film script than a novel, the scene changes rather fluidly across landscape (Chaah, Singapore, Hong Kong, Guangchao, rural parts of Mainland China) and chronology (1950s-1989), but each section tends to be very sparse and the psychology is often explained away rather simplistically, making the characters card-board like, and their actions/dilemma melodramatic. I am not sure if it's intentionally to be banal - Marguerite Duras deliberately wrote a banal story in Hiroshima Mon Amor to heightened the power of oblivion in surviving historical calamitiy, and the love story, as much as it is feign and ephemeral, offer a route or a space that explore the devastation of the capacity to love and the impossibility of memory in war traumas - but Yeng Pway Ngon seems failing to offer more insights into the disaster in latency as lived, instead we are only more convinced of the character flaws in these people. And the characterization is limited by a very questionable Freudian framework of sexuality, and worn binaries between men-women, individual-family, idealism-social reality are used to explain situations without too much nuances.

There are also meta-fiction tricks, like unreliable narrator, shifting points of view, a woman character refused to show up in the story, then directly addressing the "author" character about his depiction of women, but these seems a bit unsophisticated if not dated. And after all the authorial voice is not being challenged, the readers/characters are not gaining any more freedom from the singularly-told story, rather it become more obviously self same with the performative breaks.

I am not saying it's a bad read or a book not worth your time, but maybe I expected more. It is melodrama and perhaps it would make an interesting film in the formulaic love and revolution tradition? and yes there's a lot of sex, but nothing out of the cliche. I can see the political significance of the book, and credit to Yeng in his attempt to directly engage with some crucial issues the leftist sympathizing (disaporic chinese) community had been struggling to come to term with, namely, how do we see china's revolutionary legacy and its crackdown on its own people, its capitalistic turn, and destruction of the humanity in indivduals.

[AJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book that held my attention despite its rather ‘tell-y’ style (as opposed to ‘showy’). The history discussed is fascinating, and the loss of political ideology due to age, cynicism, and trauma is a captivating theme.

Yeng contemplates leftist politics and psychosexual tendencies, intertwining them and paralleling their repression (either governmental, via censorship and imprisonment, or personal). The reader and the author are both voyeurs, with the latter functioning as a kind of tour guide for his erotic set pieces; his characters are less individuals and more mannequins on a set, posed and tweaked by an obvious hand. Their ideologies are shunted to the side at times, and since their politics are ‘told’, not shown, it is difficult to see them as more than their sexual urges.

The author places himself into the text as a fallible, everyman god, and writes with the assurance that all his readers are as eager to peep in on his characters’ awkward sex scenes as he is. An author who inserts themselves into the narrative doesn’t necessarily bother me, but the way he ‘pulled back the curtain’ and discussed his struggles with plot decisions disagreed with my immersion. I’m not sure what purpose Yeng’s presence serves beyond reminding the reader that his characters are not real and are always at his mercy.

Yeng then tries to subvert this authority he has established for himself; Ziqin ‘takes over’ a chapter and redirects her plot line. But Ziqin’s narration reads like an attempt to excuse his frequent objectification and sidelining of female characters, as exemplified by this remark: “No, I’m not blaming the author, that’s not what I meant. He’s male and I can’t expect too much of his portrayal of female desire.” This leads to the following conclusion, however unintended it may be: if we can’t expect much from Yeng, why bother with this book at all?

[Paco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting stories about four characters whose lives coincided during their youth and went their separate ways. The hub of their storylines is the Singapore of the 1950s, still under British rule but not for much longer. Once they part ways, their individual journeys are enriched by different geographies such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Canada. Each one is moved by sex and politics which are the main themes the author tries to intertwine. I don't buy the author's thesis about the equivalent force of sex and politics, but it sure serves as the basis for a pretty, profoundly human story. I loved his descriptions of 1950s Malaysia and Singapore, the way he places his characters and constructs them, like a permanent, alive and fallible work in progress. Worth reading.

[Wayward Child · Rating 4 out of 5]

I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about the Cultural Revolution, but have always explored it as it pertains to China—the Four Olds, what Mao wanted, how he riled up an entire generation, where those young people are nowadays, how they feel about having humiliated and tortured their teachers, et cetera, et cetera… Hence, it came as a shock to learn that these ideals extended far beyond China’s borders. Which shouldn’t have really come as a surprise, given that the Chinese are Singapore’s biggest ethnic group.

Oh, and can we just take a moment to applaud dear old Chairman Mao for his unprecedented aptitude for catastrophically misnaming historical events and movements? The Cultural Revolution? Really? The Great Leap Forward? It was a great leap, all right, though I wouldn’t exactly call it forward.

I still distinctly remember sitting in my Uni amphitheatre for an American Lit lecture one day, when the professor said that the States’ counterculture movement was one of the biggest flops in its history. I distinctly remember how puzzled I was. Up until that point, I’d considered the hippie movement of the sixties and seventies one of the greatest things to have happened in recent history.

Unfortunately, he didn’t go into too much detail on this, but he did say the government took an entire generation’s youthful zeal and passion and redirected them so as to protect itself. Barring a few minor cosmetic changes, the establishment remained as it used to be, the people in power stayed in power, while the young people who’d fought for a new order were left traumatised, aimless and scraping a living doing menial jobs they were overqualified for.

The professor’s words stayed with me for years, forcing me to reassess the entire movement, to confront some uncomfortable questions that threatened to mar my idealised narrative. Questions like—what the hell does happen after a revolution’s over, successfully or otherwise? Where do revolutionaries go and what do they do? Does this new world they find themselves in reinforce or shatter their initial ideology?

That, in essence, is what Unrest is about. It’s about washed-up middle-aged people who once fought for quixotic ideals. It’s about the aftermath, once passions have simmered down and the fire of youth has been extinguished. It’s about reassessing those ideals, asking if they were justified, coming to terms with your role in the events that may or may not have been morally wrong.

The history of Singapore is long and beyond interesting. The period being discussed in the novel, the fifties and sixties, is particularly fascinating. There’s no time to go into detail, but suffice to say there were quite a few riots and demonstrations during this time.

Singapore was still reeling from the years of the Japanese occupation and was under the thumb of colonial Britain, its government cracking down hard on all communist activity. This sparked outrage among the Chinese populace, particularly students and working-class people, who idealised the CCP’s principles and wanted to create a socialist paradise reminiscent of the fatherland in Singapore.

In their youth, the protagonists were getting arrested and expelled from school for their subversive activities. Those same people are now living comfortably cocooned in the capitalist materialism of the nineteen-eighties, wondering what the hell it was all about and where their youth had gone. In an attempt to rediscover the purpose of those bygone days, they turn to empty marriages, work, adultery and other pursuits that end up taking them even further from who they are.

The novel allows us to observe the gap between expectations and reality. It treats us to a wonderfully delicious portrait of an idealist who comes to see the world for what it is for the first time, initially reluctant to admit there might be a discrepancy there.

There’s a world of difference between championing certain tenets and living them out for yourself. When the anguish and the suffering looming on the horizon drive paralysing fear into your bones, it’s no longer so easy to stick to the beliefs you used to espouse. When faced with actual lack, these armchair philosophers are forced to quickly course correct, scrambling for excuses as to why their plans changed.

Unrest is about the human spirit in retreat. It is also about acute loneliness and the inherent difficulty of connecting in a world that’s become too broad. It’s about the inability to read others and, more alarmingly, the inability to accurately read ourselves. The loyal husband, the steadfast wife, the soldier of the fatherland… Unrest exposes just how hollow the words we use to describe ourselves really are.

If I had to describe the writing style, I’d call it experimental. The prose jumps from past to present, alternating between the first- and third-person voice. There are quite a few meta elements, with the author discussing the novel’s progress and even conversing with the characters. While highly captivating, the prose can also be confusing. There were times when I wasn’t sure which timeline I was in, which character I was following, who’s who, etc.

All that aside, I think Unrest is a gem of a book that deftly explores the themes of loneliness, aging, nationalism and love. It concerns itself with young characters, but has the audacity to follow them into their fifties, to sift through the preceding three decades and explore the circumstances that shaped them. It’s quotable af, the language highly sensuous and poetic. In short, a warm recommendation.

[Pongson · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel relates the stories of four characters, three men and a woman, who attended the same Chinese high school in a small Malaya village during the 1950s. Fast forward to the present, they reunited 30 years later, each settled down in various distant lands other than their home.

Set in the political landscape of 1960-1980, the leftist male protagonists of the novel, living under the British colonialism in Malaya, saw their glimpse of hope in the ideology of socialism. Back home, they passionately took part in student protests, longing for one day to leave for the utopian future that their political leader promised is taking shape in China, their fatherland. As the turns of fate and harsh reality crush their dream and political idealism, the men seek comfort, intimacy, and pleasure derived from sex with their woman companion.

Sex acts aren’t cheap thrills in this literary piece. They were real, raw and sensual. Their existence is instrumental to explore the protagonists’ emotions in greater depth. For the most part, women played a passive background role in the bedroom and life, depending on the husband entirely and enduring his blatant infidelity for years.

Flipping through the pages of unrest, I found myself delving into the complexity of four characters’ inner worlds, uncovering their desires and struggles, man’s and woman’s. As a woman, it is easy to relate to the desire to be taken care of, to be fondled and touched by man. The subtlety in expression in love and sex of a young woman during the 60s was captured with accuracy in the initial shyness, the coy invitation, the weak rejection, and the tears. In the end, each woman has realised the conflict from within and formed individual paths of their own. Ziqin left her promiscuous husband for a single life in Hongkong. Mindy, the modern and sexually liberated divorcée, wondered about the meaning of her existence in her multiple lovers’ lives as she grieved for her ex-husband. Guoliang’s wife resisted and pushed away from her intoxicating old flame’s sexual advances. That is the first step, a gradual and realistic shift considering their internalised oppression and imbued traditional values.

[lesenwanderer · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 characters & their lives intertwined, spanning decades weaved into a tumultuous and (somewhat) twisted tale about coming to terms with decisions made in the height of their youth. Throw in striking references of political intricacies during the era and you have a story.

This was a relatively easy read, but somehow very few details stuck with me. I struggled to make links amongst the larger political struggles about communism, capitalism, colonialism and Cultural Revolution, and how that affected lives of the 4 characters. Perhaps restless is the state of their minds as they continue to struggle through the banality of life and infidelity post the height of ideals during those periods of change and revolution- those youthful moments when every pore of their being stood up for something - even if it’s an elusive one like an ideal.

Much has also been said about the translation, but this book again highlights the challenges of English-Chinese translations. The literal translation of Chinese idioms were pretty stark but that said, it was a really good attempt as this English version captured the spectrum of thoughts and emotions strongly. Still, it is time for me to pick up the Chinese version to see if the story gets any better!

[Nish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book about four young Malayan/Singaporean socialists Guoliang, Weikang, Daming and Ziqin and the way their lives were altered by the political upheavals of the 50s and 60s. The disappointment of the four adult protagonists, as they reflect on the promise of their youth, is palpable and heartbreaking.

I also loved the meta narrative elements of the book, for example, the sections where the author engages in direct dialogue with his own fictional characters.

[غبار · Rating 2 out of 5]

this should win the bad sex writing award....

[Grant Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The metafiction in this book was wild!

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

- 突破第四堵牆，作者、角色可以直接與讀者說話，感覺神奇，應該沒有其他人做過，藝高人膽大- 作者仿佛帶領讀者操控故事角色命運，像讀者有權置喙一般- 微鹹，但恰到好處- 以燈蛾撲火形容自海外回到中國的左派分子，貼切不過- 關於香港的若干事件日子記得不大清，似與現實有出入- 2021年逝世的他，值得更多人認識- 節錄部分妙句妙段如下：- 「偉康不但知道，要躲開災難，不能愚忠，他還看清了一樣事實，要無時無刻表現出一種虛假的忠。他十分清楚，如果他在肉體上要活得像一個人，精神上就得忘記自己是一個人，換句話說，就是要完全背叛自己，服從在權勢下指揮的群眾。所謂完全背叛自己，就是背叛自己的價值觀和思想。」- 「為了自保，為了要對當權派的紅五類表現出他的忠誠，連友情甚至連人格，偉康都幾乎可以丟棄，思想與真理，自然就更不用說了。」- 「只要思索的人忘了用腦筋而用大腸，糞便也會發笑，因為這時候它就有機會潛入或滲入人們的思想裡，以致思索的人不知道他的思想是糞便或大部分是糞便。」

[unperspicacious · Rating 2 out of 5]

An indulgent mess. It could be a translation issue, or me not being able to understand Nanyang sensibilities. But the characterisations lacked authenticity, and the author's efforts to deal with this by going postmodern reinforced this further - a fatal judgement in a novel that was so character=driven to begin with.