Real world in her sci-fi
a novel about time travel is informed by today’s headlines on the way immigrant workers are mistreated.
WHAT does time travel have to do with immigration? One is an interesting analogy of the other, says Singaporean writer Thea Lim, who links the two in her well-received debut novel, An Ocean Of Minutes (Quercus, 2018).
“When you leave a place, it often feels like you lose time,” says the 36-year-old over the phone from Toronto, where she lives.
Born in Canada to a Singaporean father and British mother, she moved to Singapore when she was eight before moving to Britain a decade later and then back to Canada. She has also lived in Texas, where she did a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Houston.
This itinerant lifestyle gave rise, in part, to her writing career.
“Trying to relay my life across great distance got me into the habit of telling stories about my life,” says Lim, who teaches creative writing. She has a daughter, aged two, with her Chinese-Canadian husband.
She began the novel in graduate school in 2011 and rewrote the first 40 pages 50 times. It took root from a grim thought: “I was thinking about how everyone we love will one day leave us or die. I am interested in how we do it, how we manage to hustle through this awareness and continue to fall in love anyway.”
Set mostly in the 1990s, her novel envisions a world in which a global epidemic decimates the population. Polly, a young upholsterer in Galveston, Texas, volunteers to travel forward in time so that her boyfriend Frank, who has been infected, can be bumped up the priority list to receive a cure.
She and Frank arrange to meet 12 years into the future, but she is re-routed mid-flight and when she gets there, he is nowhere to be found. She finds herself a bonded worker in a bureaucratic dystopia where the United States and America are now separate countries and she is in the less fortunate of the two.
Lim, who has had a “patchwork of jobs”, including freelance writing and working in restaurants, knows how a tiny bureaucratic slip can cause enormous ruin.
One of her jobs was as an elevator courier in a huge office building. Sometimes, she would deliver packages containing a great deal of money to a banking company on one of the floors.
“If the wrong room number was on the package, reception wouldn’t help me figure it out and I would have to run up and down to all these offices that looked the same. There is a lot of evil that happens in the world that isn’t by design but more because of incompetence and negligence.”
Her early drafts for the novel were set in the future, but she shifted it to the past to make a point.
“People said, ‘Oh, it’s really interesting that you’re creating a world in which one day we’re going to have migrant labourers treated in this way.’ And that really chilled me because the way that migrant workers are treated in my book is something that is happening now and has been happening for many decades.”
She drew details of her dystopian economy from real-world news reports, such as of factories in China where workers are charged for food they do not finish.
Growing up in Singapore in the 1990s, she became aware of how foreign workers were treated. At a construction site near where she lived, she watched workers build a small shack for themselves to stay in, which was made of unsafe, cheap materials. “It was vastly different from the house they were building.”
She recalls a domestic worker being offered a drink and her employer saying: “Don’t give her juice, just give her water.”
“There was clearly a different standard of living,” she says, adding that she does not want to single out Singapore for its treatment of migrant workers.
“There are so many issues in Canada and the US too.”
Singapore makes a brief appearance in the novel as a place that successfully beat the disease. It handed out free pharmaceuticals to all citizens and also sent medicine to Sri Lanka and Hong Kong, the nearest island states with large surviving populations, to ensure they would still have trading partners.
Lim wrote this in to push back against the way she has seen Singapore characterised in American media, as a “den of sin and iniquity” or a “scary backward town”, like in the Tom Waits song Singapore.
“It’s a place with a lot of resources and determination. I wouldn’t be surprised if Singapore survived the end of the world.”
She is glad to be among the many Singaporean female novelists putting out books internationally this year, joining Sharlene Teo, Rachel Heng, Clarissa Goenawan and Kirstin Chen.
“It’s fascinating how we’re so different in terms of genre, style and content, yet there are similarities. We’re all concerned with the past and trying to understand loss. It’s interesting to think of that as a hallmark of Singapore fiction, how to come to terms with where we are from and where we’re going.” – The Straits Times/Asia News Network