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Between Stations
Kim Cheng Boey writes a travel memoir which explores the condition of the migrant writer, living between the place of his birth, his adopted country, and the wider world; between the past and the present; between the city he is in, and the cities that live in his memory and imagination. The book maps his trajectory through India, China, Pakistan, to Egypt and Morocco, during the year of his wandering between his native Singapore and his new home in Berowra. His essays offer memorable portraits of his parents and grandparents, friends and teachers, barbers and backpackers, the handicapped and the poor. Boey is a poet and he brings poetic sensibility to make this writing of the most powerful kind.
320 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2009
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189 people want to read
About the author
Boey Kim Cheng
27 books21 followersBoey Kim Cheng is a multi-award winning Singapore-born poet, and a 1996 recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. He emigrated to Australia in 1997, but returned in 2013 as one of Nanyang Technological University's writers-in-residence; he is currently Associate Professor in the NTU Division of English. He has published five collections of poetry, including Clear Brightness, which was selected by The Straits Times as one of the Best Books of 2012. His writing is frequently studied in tertiary and university institutions in Singapore and abroad.
Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. In 2017, Epigram Books reissued his celebrated travel memoir Between Stations, and released his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.
Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. In 2017, Epigram Books reissued his celebrated travel memoir Between Stations, and released his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 26, 2018
Recently, I told a friend that I tend to avoid reading the writing of those within reach. Doesn’t matter if the work is written by a friend, a professor, a writer-in-residence at the university I go to, but the matter feels too close for comfort, the ability to actually pass the author along a corridor or watch them drink a cup of coffee just two tables away from you...all of it seems too overwhelming. I have been wondering if this is a kind of cowardice, and have resolved to confront these books soon. I suspect this evasion is motivated by the same sort of emotion and logic behind why some Singaporean readers avoid Singapore literature altogether.
This book was assigned to the classes I teach, and having read all the other assigned texts, I finally could not delay the inevitable any longer. And I am so glad I did, even though the weight of Boey Kim Cheng’s words have also exhausted me thoroughly. It’s a good kind of exhaustion, and one reason for this exhaustion is how relevant and relatable the essays were to my own experience and circumstance. The writing is elegant, but accessible. The emotions are complex, yet so familiar. Each sentence articulating an experience elsewhere still inextricably refers back to Singapore in one way or another, yet it is not Singapore-obsessed. I have read a lot of writing about Singapore that’s written away from Singapore, but few capture the nuanced relationship we have with our country the way Between Stations does it.
Just moments before I finished the last few pages of this book, I happened to walk pass Boey Kim Cheng’s office as I was on my way to meet another professor. A light was on in his office. And it seemed odd that I knew so much more about the man behind the door than I did before. But for once, this knowledge didn’t feel invasive. Rather, it felt like in writing what he did, the man had first understood something intimate about all of us and without our knowing, he has managed to articulate the profound and inexplicable condition of our lives by simply articulating his own.
This book was assigned to the classes I teach, and having read all the other assigned texts, I finally could not delay the inevitable any longer. And I am so glad I did, even though the weight of Boey Kim Cheng’s words have also exhausted me thoroughly. It’s a good kind of exhaustion, and one reason for this exhaustion is how relevant and relatable the essays were to my own experience and circumstance. The writing is elegant, but accessible. The emotions are complex, yet so familiar. Each sentence articulating an experience elsewhere still inextricably refers back to Singapore in one way or another, yet it is not Singapore-obsessed. I have read a lot of writing about Singapore that’s written away from Singapore, but few capture the nuanced relationship we have with our country the way Between Stations does it.
Just moments before I finished the last few pages of this book, I happened to walk pass Boey Kim Cheng’s office as I was on my way to meet another professor. A light was on in his office. And it seemed odd that I knew so much more about the man behind the door than I did before. But for once, this knowledge didn’t feel invasive. Rather, it felt like in writing what he did, the man had first understood something intimate about all of us and without our knowing, he has managed to articulate the profound and inexplicable condition of our lives by simply articulating his own.
February 16, 2010
I knew from his poetry that Boey is a restless traveler, but I did not know how restless until I read his recently published collection of essays Between Stations (Giramondo, 2009). The essays range, with its backpacking author, from Xian in China to London, via Calcutta, Kashgar, Cairo and Alexandria. The essays and their migrant author finally settle in Australia. Despite the ground covered, the book is not so much about travel as the reasons we travel.
Boey has many reasons for leaving his native Singapore but his deepest reason is to find a Singapore he has lost. Calcutta, with its street life, reminds him of Singapore in the late 60s. The crumbling colonial buildings and the waterfront of Alexandria bring back Singapore's old Esplanade. And inextricably entangled with these childhood memories is the memory of a father who abandoned the family time and again, and reappeared each time to take the son on walks around the old haunts.
There are wonderful evocations of travel destinations in the book. The essays on Du Fu's Xian and Cavafy's Alexandria are particularly fine, both places presided over by Boey's tutelary spirits. Du Fu moved his family all over the country in order to feed them. Cavafy's poem "Ithaca" has a special place in Boey's heart. I will certainly be reading these two essays again.
The most valuable part of the book, however, is the restoration, in writing, of an older Singapore now rapidly forgotten in the drive towards modernization. This restoration is accomplished through direct and memorable appeal to sight, smell and hearing. We see Dinky's House of Russian Goods, one of many shops selling knickknacks of all sorts in the Change Alley Aerial Bridge. We smell the five spices Boey's grandmother loved to use in her cooking. We hear the sad yet hopeful tune of Guantanamera, that ruled the Singaporean airwaves in the late 60s.
Two essays take up the sensory experience of memory for their theme, "Passing Snapshots" and "The Smell of Memory." They provide a good change from the predominant approach of these essays, which interweaves descriptions of foreign cities with memories of Singapore. Some of these essays were written earlier for different newspapers and journals, and so show some overlap of material. For instance, the memory of sleeping besides a grandmother appears in two different essays. The repeated descriptions of the walks with his father could also bear some trimming. The language is usually supple, concrete and direct, except where the author is "fascinated" in too many places.
Seen another way, these essays reflect on the formation of a major Singaporean poet. Striking to me in this regard is the lack of reference to other Singaporean poets or writers. The poetic touchstones in this book are T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Lowell, John Montague, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Edward Thomas, besides the already-mentioned Du Fu and Cavafy. If I write about my own poetic development, I will show a similar lack of reference to Singaporean poetry. Poetry by Singaporeans just had not been a part of our growing up. Things may be changing but the change is slow, haphazard and uncertain. These essays by Boey Kim Cheng may help to make the change a little more permanent.
Boey has many reasons for leaving his native Singapore but his deepest reason is to find a Singapore he has lost. Calcutta, with its street life, reminds him of Singapore in the late 60s. The crumbling colonial buildings and the waterfront of Alexandria bring back Singapore's old Esplanade. And inextricably entangled with these childhood memories is the memory of a father who abandoned the family time and again, and reappeared each time to take the son on walks around the old haunts.
There are wonderful evocations of travel destinations in the book. The essays on Du Fu's Xian and Cavafy's Alexandria are particularly fine, both places presided over by Boey's tutelary spirits. Du Fu moved his family all over the country in order to feed them. Cavafy's poem "Ithaca" has a special place in Boey's heart. I will certainly be reading these two essays again.
The most valuable part of the book, however, is the restoration, in writing, of an older Singapore now rapidly forgotten in the drive towards modernization. This restoration is accomplished through direct and memorable appeal to sight, smell and hearing. We see Dinky's House of Russian Goods, one of many shops selling knickknacks of all sorts in the Change Alley Aerial Bridge. We smell the five spices Boey's grandmother loved to use in her cooking. We hear the sad yet hopeful tune of Guantanamera, that ruled the Singaporean airwaves in the late 60s.
Two essays take up the sensory experience of memory for their theme, "Passing Snapshots" and "The Smell of Memory." They provide a good change from the predominant approach of these essays, which interweaves descriptions of foreign cities with memories of Singapore. Some of these essays were written earlier for different newspapers and journals, and so show some overlap of material. For instance, the memory of sleeping besides a grandmother appears in two different essays. The repeated descriptions of the walks with his father could also bear some trimming. The language is usually supple, concrete and direct, except where the author is "fascinated" in too many places.
Seen another way, these essays reflect on the formation of a major Singaporean poet. Striking to me in this regard is the lack of reference to other Singaporean poets or writers. The poetic touchstones in this book are T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Lowell, John Montague, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Edward Thomas, besides the already-mentioned Du Fu and Cavafy. If I write about my own poetic development, I will show a similar lack of reference to Singaporean poetry. Poetry by Singaporeans just had not been a part of our growing up. Things may be changing but the change is slow, haphazard and uncertain. These essays by Boey Kim Cheng may help to make the change a little more permanent.
November 3, 2023
"When my prayers went unanswered I imagined him dead, and inhabiting that same empty space that I prayed towards. I think it sank into me at that time that life is always leaving, that things, time, people slide, and hobble like my father quietly out of existence."
Boey Kim Cheng mentions his father in almost every single essay in this book. It doesn't matter whether the essay is about his sojourns in Calcutta or Kashjar or Alexandria or Change Alley in Singapore. It doesn't matter if the essay is about cigarettes or the Tang dynasty Chinese poet Du Fu. His father's ghost haunts the book and we see that for all his meanderings around the globe and through his internal depths and even through time, it is the yearning for his father and the keen loss he feels that colours everything.
I started reading thinking it would be about the brutal rate of development in Singapore and the loss of places that hold memories for people. It is about that, as it is about his travels and the people he meets, his family, their histories, the jobs he had in prison (so interesting to read his observations of those on death row) which he couldn’t last long in, and then his migration to Australia. But for me, I am amazed to find how present and encompassing the presence of a parent can be even when they’re not really there. Boey Kim Cheng mentions his father a lot, and they are always the same set of memories, the same set of feelings. It is repetitive but it is sad, because one knows that these are all he has to cling on to from a father that wasn’t there a lot of the time.
The most touching part of the book, I find, is when Kim Cheng talks about the experience of being a father himself, and how in holding his son's hand, he feels as if he is taking the place of his father. In being present with his son, doing things for his son he wishes his father could have done for himself, he feels he is re-parenting himself. Healing his inner child.
This book feels so earnest in comparison to so much of Singaporean literature.
Boey Kim Cheng mentions his father in almost every single essay in this book. It doesn't matter whether the essay is about his sojourns in Calcutta or Kashjar or Alexandria or Change Alley in Singapore. It doesn't matter if the essay is about cigarettes or the Tang dynasty Chinese poet Du Fu. His father's ghost haunts the book and we see that for all his meanderings around the globe and through his internal depths and even through time, it is the yearning for his father and the keen loss he feels that colours everything.
I started reading thinking it would be about the brutal rate of development in Singapore and the loss of places that hold memories for people. It is about that, as it is about his travels and the people he meets, his family, their histories, the jobs he had in prison (so interesting to read his observations of those on death row) which he couldn’t last long in, and then his migration to Australia. But for me, I am amazed to find how present and encompassing the presence of a parent can be even when they’re not really there. Boey Kim Cheng mentions his father a lot, and they are always the same set of memories, the same set of feelings. It is repetitive but it is sad, because one knows that these are all he has to cling on to from a father that wasn’t there a lot of the time.
The most touching part of the book, I find, is when Kim Cheng talks about the experience of being a father himself, and how in holding his son's hand, he feels as if he is taking the place of his father. In being present with his son, doing things for his son he wishes his father could have done for himself, he feels he is re-parenting himself. Healing his inner child.
This book feels so earnest in comparison to so much of Singaporean literature.
July 22, 2021
During a semester abroad in Singapore, I had the privilege of studying creative writing with Boey Kim Cheng, and so whatever this review of his memoir will be, it will not be objective. Instead, it will be laced with the fascination of having met both the writer and protagonist of a narrative for real, and the wonder of watching a person you had a certain two-dimensional impression of into a three-dimensional diorama that spans from 1960s Singapore to Marrakesh hash. So, in short: if you know Prof. Boey personally, but only a professor, “Between Stations” will be a uniquely fascinating read because of its feat of complexification. If you don’t, it might feel slightly more abstract, but no less touching. This book, which is really a collection of personal essays rather than a memoir, interweaves recollections of Boey’s extensive travels (from India, China and Nepal through Iran, Egypt and Morocco) with his growing up in Singapore: games, friendships, characters from various cultures, family tragedies, sights and sounds and smells and places, most of which have since been demolished in the city’s money-fueled rush towards futurism, and replaced with corporate towers and air-conditioned shopping malls. There is a great deal of nostalgia here, and an equal sense of intrigue for those who know contemporary Singapore and find it rather mind-blowing that, only a few decades ago, there were still barren bits of land, unclaimed beaches, small-house neighborhoods and genuine wilderness on that island. Prominently in these recollections features the author’s father, who played an essential role in his childhood precisely through his numerous failings and absences. There were perpetual gambling debts, domestic violence, broken promises and unresolved feuds, and yet there is an equal amount in intimacy fostered on walks across these now eradicates sites, immersions in now displaced hawker streets, second-hand bookstores, cigarettes and music. Almost as prominently, these are joined by later, much more ephemeral but also more harmonic bonds with travelers on the road: expertly drawn sketches of backpackers, runaways, artists, idealists and ordinary people from every continent, many cultures. Boey’s writing is deeply poetic and often philosophical; he is singularly well read and thus often quotes Owen Wilson, Rilke and Walter Benjamin alongside aunts, uncles and chance acquaintances. If you want to charge him with sentimentality (though never pathos) or literary elitism (though never arrogance) you probably could, but those are subjective issues that never bothered me one bit. Instead, this book left me fascinated by a Singapore now confined solely to memory, moved by a deeply dysfunctional and yet perennial father-son-relationship, and, most of all, burning to go and fall into the world, to travel for people, scents, sounds and poems rather than prestige and tourist sights––to give myself to the Calcuttas, Cairos, Alexandrias and Xians of this world, and relish the imprints they will leave.
A perfect book for on the road, especially at the beginning of a journey. A perfect book for any student of creative non-fiction too. As for anyone else, its perfection will depend on your preferred mode of transport, what you expect from a city on the road, and what kind of books you generally carry in your backpack when you’re headed there.
A perfect book for on the road, especially at the beginning of a journey. A perfect book for any student of creative non-fiction too. As for anyone else, its perfection will depend on your preferred mode of transport, what you expect from a city on the road, and what kind of books you generally carry in your backpack when you’re headed there.
April 3, 2020
I don’t think I can read another book for the rest of 2019. This book has ruined the rest of the year for me. Trying to find another one to top this is going to be near impossible.
My friend loaned me this and there were actually a couple of false starts. But Mercury must have reversed its retrograde and this book broke the spell on my book slump.
Boey’s essays are of seeking and longing for a recognisable family unit, of in between-ness and being. Where is home? Is it still home if defined by physical and cultural markers that one was once familiar with, but is now no more in Singapore’s rapid urbanisation? It is the same emigrant/immigrant story of my grandparents to Singapore, and of my sister/cousins to UK, US, Australia.
“Somewhere between stations you forget the name of the place you have left behind, and the name of the place coming towards you is still indistinct. For that moment, you dwell in an autonomous state, a resting place between memory and imagination, between forgetting and remembering, between home and home.”
I don’t know where to start on why this book packs so much of an emotional punch. How Boey can evoke a Singapore of the 60s and 70s that I’ve never seen before (I was born mid-80s) but yet there’s a haunting familiarity to it. I feel as if I know the Modern Bookstore and New World of the 60s/70s, as I am familiar with Kinokuniya and Ion Orchard of today.
How does Boey do it?! The essays aren’t maudlin and cringey af. They make you want to pick up a whiskey and have a very long conversation with him about the ebb and flow in tides of changes, following the natural cadence of the essay.
If there was a local book to bulk buy for gifting, this is it.
My friend loaned me this and there were actually a couple of false starts. But Mercury must have reversed its retrograde and this book broke the spell on my book slump.
Boey’s essays are of seeking and longing for a recognisable family unit, of in between-ness and being. Where is home? Is it still home if defined by physical and cultural markers that one was once familiar with, but is now no more in Singapore’s rapid urbanisation? It is the same emigrant/immigrant story of my grandparents to Singapore, and of my sister/cousins to UK, US, Australia.
“Somewhere between stations you forget the name of the place you have left behind, and the name of the place coming towards you is still indistinct. For that moment, you dwell in an autonomous state, a resting place between memory and imagination, between forgetting and remembering, between home and home.”
I don’t know where to start on why this book packs so much of an emotional punch. How Boey can evoke a Singapore of the 60s and 70s that I’ve never seen before (I was born mid-80s) but yet there’s a haunting familiarity to it. I feel as if I know the Modern Bookstore and New World of the 60s/70s, as I am familiar with Kinokuniya and Ion Orchard of today.
How does Boey do it?! The essays aren’t maudlin and cringey af. They make you want to pick up a whiskey and have a very long conversation with him about the ebb and flow in tides of changes, following the natural cadence of the essay.
If there was a local book to bulk buy for gifting, this is it.
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August 15, 2021“Then the journeywork of the stars began to assume a familiar look, like a chart mapping my course. I think I felt the answer in the signaling stars. They had lived the question, and their arrival from so far seemed like a good answer.”
Easily one of my favorite Sing Lit books. Learned, searching, Montaignesque in spirit. Boey’s equivocal yearning for his father’s identity, memory, and the Singapore associated with it was very touching. “I grew up in my father’s absence; he died in mine.” Has there been a more devastating use of zeugma? I want to hug and/or grab a drink with the writer and my dad. I too will never know the sights and smells of the city my father grew up in.
Wander/wandrian (to err); saunter/sans terre (without land/home); essay/essai (attempt). In writing and attempting to write, and in due time, perhaps nostalgia will become its own analgesia.
Side note: wow NS really is Boey’s bête noire, but then again, who can blame him?
January 15, 2016
I don't usually review books but I feel like it this time since reading this felt particularly poignant as Kim Cheng Boey was my teacher for several semesters while I was studying Creative Writing/English Literature. I had this book sitting on one of my shelves for at least a good year or two after stumbling across it randomly in one of the many used bookstores I make my rounds at. After having just finished it today, I'm quite kicking myself about that now having finished my Bachelor of Arts a while ago because I really, really enjoyed it - especially since I don't usually read essay books - and can relate to a lot of what he was describing in relation to being a immigrant/emigrant as my family relocated to Australia as well (from Canada, rather then Singapore) when I was in my early teens. The way he was conveying the duality of belonging and not belonging in either country. The sense of wanting to return to that Mother country as you get a bit older but wondering if it's too late, if too much time has passed, too much has changed, if you've changed too much, for it to ever be possible again. This passage in particular really summed that up for me and resonated the most out of the various essays and I find myself doing this consciously and unconsciously all the time depending on who I'm talking too and what I'm talking about:
'One way to visualise this shifting ground is a mathematical trope you remember from problem sums you did in primary school. Circle A is for Australia and Circle S for Singapore. The overlap between the two circles is the shaded area where you dwell mostly. Determine what percentage belongs to A, and what to S. Sometimes the shaded area changes to the area excluding S; sometimes it migrates to the area excluding A. Most times it occupies the overlap between A and S, contracting and expanding by turns. In strange and uncanny moments the two circles come together, become one whole shaded area.
You are an emigrant to those you left behind and immigrant to your new friends.'
As I'm sure many other emigrants do too, there is a part of me that consciously stubbornly refuses to completely relinquish what Canadian strains still remain despite having spent nearly half of my life in Australia now. The way I talk, the words I use and still hang onto, the accent I continue to take pride in and have never once tried to water down and will away. But then there are other parts of that old life in Canada I know I've lost, it's been that long now, I was still young when we left, I can't remember places or faces anymore even if I try and will them up out of childhood memories. And that was where the point that Boey was making with circles really resonated as I know and can feel when those circles are shifting and I'm more Circle A or Circle C and those rare moments when they come together. I can't think of another passage I've read to date that's summed up those feelings as concisely and poignantly as that did.
This is absolutely a book I can see myself reading again in the future and recommending to others. I just wish I'd read this sooner so I could have talked to Boey about it in person when I'd had the chance.
'One way to visualise this shifting ground is a mathematical trope you remember from problem sums you did in primary school. Circle A is for Australia and Circle S for Singapore. The overlap between the two circles is the shaded area where you dwell mostly. Determine what percentage belongs to A, and what to S. Sometimes the shaded area changes to the area excluding S; sometimes it migrates to the area excluding A. Most times it occupies the overlap between A and S, contracting and expanding by turns. In strange and uncanny moments the two circles come together, become one whole shaded area.
You are an emigrant to those you left behind and immigrant to your new friends.'
As I'm sure many other emigrants do too, there is a part of me that consciously stubbornly refuses to completely relinquish what Canadian strains still remain despite having spent nearly half of my life in Australia now. The way I talk, the words I use and still hang onto, the accent I continue to take pride in and have never once tried to water down and will away. But then there are other parts of that old life in Canada I know I've lost, it's been that long now, I was still young when we left, I can't remember places or faces anymore even if I try and will them up out of childhood memories. And that was where the point that Boey was making with circles really resonated as I know and can feel when those circles are shifting and I'm more Circle A or Circle C and those rare moments when they come together. I can't think of another passage I've read to date that's summed up those feelings as concisely and poignantly as that did.
This is absolutely a book I can see myself reading again in the future and recommending to others. I just wish I'd read this sooner so I could have talked to Boey about it in person when I'd had the chance.
November 29, 2016
Heartfelt stories of places and memories associated with them. Includes many places in SG that have been destroyed.
June 14, 2019
Probably the best local literature has to offer. Also one of my favourite books to gift.
April 9, 2018
Hit close to home, nostalgia seeping into areas I never knew yearned for home.
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August 10, 2021Heartbreakingly beautiful writing.
June 16, 2023
I don't even know how to explain this book. You should read it though.
July 9, 2016
This is the first book that has so unequivocally captured my attention for the longest time. Maybe it's because I identify with him some of his feelings about the nature of childhood memories, of the irony of progress, and of the longing to return to a Home, untarnished and perennial. A must-read for those living in rapidly urbanizing cities; it will strike a chord with you.
May 18, 2020
charmingly heartbreaking.
November 27, 2025
i cannot put into words how seen this book makes me feel. it was amazing
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews