Soundtrack for a Book: This Is Where I Won't Be Alone playlist by Inez Tan

The title of my first collection is This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone, which is a line from the chorus of the song, “Home”, written by Dick Lee and made popular by Kit Chan:

This is home, surely
As my senses tell me
This is where I won’t be alone
For this is where I know it’s home

It’s a strangely melancholy song. I think that’s why it strikes a chord with so many of us. “Alone” and “home” are sung on the same note, but one line sounds secure, while the other is a plea full of yearning. And the two words aren’t perfect rhymes, so we end on some lingering uneasiness – is the question of home really as resolved as we want to say it is?

For years, I had grown up in Singapore feeling that because I had also lived elsewhere, I didn’t quite fit, I didn’t quite belong. But the more I’ve talked to family and friends, the more I’ve come to realise that is an experience many in Singapore share.

Living and travelling overseas is a significant part of Singaporean culture, and longing feverishly to belong somewhere and someone comes with the territory(ies).

Beyond that, the country changes so rapidly that the Singapore of my parents’ childhood was incredibly different from mine. It took me a long time to realise the extent of that. When I was growing up, very little local literature was available. I didn’t have stories about what living in Singapore was like, and I never thought I would see any.

 My own stories are a little weird and unconventional. Many of them are set in Singapore, with kiasu and kancheong characters navigating intergenerational conflict, struggling to stay sane in school, falling in and out of love, and trying to hold on to something while everything around us keeps moving.

But the story, “Oyster”, is narrated by a dried oyster who watches a Singaporean mother and daughter relationship; while in “Crawling” an unhappily retrenched man conducts a social experiment with ants. And another story, “On the Moon” is set in a future when we’ve colonised the moon.

The search for home is real, but it also requires the imagination, and that’s what I try to do in my fiction.

I think of these stories as stories about home and belonging that I would have liked to have when I was younger. I hope they can be that for someone else.

https://spoti.fi/2QF9Zu7