Costume

by 英培安, Yeng Pway Ngon, Jeremy Tiang (Translator)

In the 1910s, thirteen-year-old Leong Ping Hung comes to Singapore from China to seek his fortune. Decades later, he is a lonely old man mourning his shattered dreams. His granddaughter Yu Sau struggles to take care of him while trying to make sense of her own life in a rapidly changing country. He speaks Cantonese, and she Mandarin – but will they be able to find common ground through a shared love of Cantonese opera? As Yu Sau looks to her family’s past to understand her present, she begins to uncover the secrets that went missing along with the old man’s cherished opera costume.

Genres: China

269 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2015

Reviews

[Whitaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeng Pway Ngon's Costume tells the stories of three generations of a family. The first generation comprises Leong Ping Hung. Ping Hung, at the urging of his friend, Tak Chai, migrates to Singapore together with Tak Chai in search of a better life. They find work at a local coffee shop owned by a childless couple. While Tak Chai eventually joins a Chinese opera troupe, Ping Hung stays behind to work in the coffee shop, too afraid of the uncertain future of the life of an itinerant performer.

The second generation, Ping Hung's children, are barely touched upon. One son becomes a wastrel, one daughter gets involved in leftist politics and is deported to communist China, leaving one more son to engender the third generation.

Of the third generation, we meet first Ping Hung's granddaughter, Leong Yu Sau, who is looking after him in his feeble and senile old age. Her two brothers, both much older than her, are not around. The eldest, Leong Kim Chau, has left to join a Chinese opera troupe. He was encouraged in this by his grandfather who sought to live through his grandson the forsaken dreams of his youth. The second brother followed in the footsteps of his aunt to join the leftist cause and was also deported to China. Only Yu Sau remained with the family and got a respectable, well-earning job in the financial industry, which enabled her to look after her mother dying of cancer and eventually her aging grandfather. Her own story is of her relationships as she enters her middle years, and her disappointments and hopes in those love affairs.

In its telling of the leftist struggle and of the struggle with love, Costume in terms of the stories it tells covers some of the same ground as Unrest, the other work of Mr Yeng's that I have read. However, while Unrest dealt with oppression and repression, Costume deals with hopes and failed dreams, compromises with the practicalities of life and what happens when ideals run headlong into reality. The theme is regret, and also what survives after regret.

I found Costume more accessible and more moving a work, eschewing as it does the metafictional devices of Unrest, and focusing on the emotional arcs of the characters.

However, while I say that Costume was more accessible, this is only because I read it in translation. Costume is actually composed in two languages, Cantonese and Mandarin. This was done to highlight one of the key losses dealt with in the novel, the loss of language and the loss of intergenerational communication. Translated wholly into English, the impact of this bilingual text in showing this loss is, well, lost.

Ping Hung came from Guangzhou or Canton and his mother tongue is Cantonese. His granddaughter speaks Mandarin, with a passable ability to speak Cantonese. They have difficulties communicating with each other. As explained more fully in the comments section below, Mr Yung embodies this communication difficulty in the text by writing the Cantonese dialogue as Cantonese, in a text which is otherwise written in Mandarin.

Interestingly, Tolstoy does something similar in War and Peace. In 18th century Russia, in addition to Russian, the aristocrats spoke French with each other as this was the reigning language of sophistication. This of course ran into problems when Napolean invaded and Tolstoy wished to emphasise the rich irony of this worship of all things French. He therefore wrote the French dialogue sequences in French rather than Russian. On the page, this would be even more striking, French using the Latin alphabet and Russian using the Cyrillic.

Translators of War and Peace into English of course have to decide what to do with these two languages. The Pevear / Voholonsky translation makes the choice of leaving the French in French, translating the text into English in a footnote. The more usual solution is to translate both the Russian and the French into English. Jeremy Tiang, the translator, uses this method with the Mandarin and Cantonese here, translating both into English and indicating the use of Cantonese by italicising the English text.

There is, of course, a certain loss in this method of translation. Imagine if you will an English language novel where a grandparent speaks in German to a grandchild, the German being written out in German and left untranslated, and the grandchild replying back in English. Imagine then that same scene where everything is written in English with the German distinguished by the use of italics. The immediacy of the incomprehension and language barrier is lost.

Nevertheless, even without the direct impact of the theme of language loss that the original text dealt with, I enjoyed Costume and was moved by its stories of loss and regret.

[Roy Llh · Rating 5 out of 5]

《戏服》 offers an important glimpse into the history of Chineseness in Singapore. The book materialises the broad abstract theme of Chinese diaspora through the events in Liang Bing Hong's life, and documents the decline of Chinese education and Chinese culture through the eyes of Liang's granddaughter Liang Ru Xiu. The book is a textbook on the lushness of Nanyang-Chinese culture and it does not shy away from sensitive topics of identity politics. It is not difficult to see why 《戏服》 is an important inclusion in the alternative narrative of a post-SG50 national discourse.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Firmly in the realist vein and artist milieu of Art Studio, rather than the experimental or post-modern Trivialities About Me and Myself and Unrest, Costume unfortunately sets itself a too-broad scope of three generations and countries, over nearly a century, to do proper justice to. Like the mere snatches of Cantonese opera peppered here and there, the novel feels more sketched than lived-in; old-fashioned than sweeping (not helped by the Victorian-style sub-headings). Even the elegiac ruminations on the cost of artistic dreams are quite undone by the rushed ending, which brings about a distracting and unsatisfactory revelation. Broad ambitions take careful work, which Yeng Pway Ngon has shown himself much more capable of in Art Studio.

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

遺憾和倔強是經，粵劇是緯，編織成星港兩城的故事。文中偶有簡體字或錯字，少許沙石。