Alvin Pang
Alvin Pang’s in love; he’s in love with our city. Describing his first ever impression of York back in the early nineties, he says: “I was bowled over by the city – charmed by the landscape and the city, the picturesque campus and great outdoors, the cool Autumn… I felt a sense of heightened awareness.”
It was this sense of heightened awareness that went on to progress into an internationally recognised literary career for Pang. He didn’t experience the UK until his late teens, when he arrived here as an international Singaporean student: “It was my first visit to the UK – indeed, to a temperate climate – and my first extended stay in a country other than Singapore. I’m still in love, and visit almost every time I’m in the UK.”
Pang’s writing encapsulates his progression from a young Singaporean student to academically esteemed English literature graduate, fusing his Eastern roots with the Western culture: “I am fascinated by the contemporary Asian (by proxy: Singaporean) urban experience.
By now, more than half the world’s population live in cities, and in Asia, and this is set to grow. It will change the very nature of what we consider the baseline of human existence, our quality of life, and certainly our literature. We can’t really write pastoral literature anymore the way it might have been possible up to the early 20th century. I expect Asia to have the world’s largest English-speaking population (if it doesn’t already, counting India); certainly its largest readership. Looking at my native city of Singapore alone, I have seen a range and complexity of experience that is unique in the world – yet we have not developed our own idioms and metaphors; we borrow from tradition.”
Pang hesitates. His cultural and dialectical breadth of knowledge inevitably aligns him most acutely with another oppressively titled “convenient beast” – post-colonialism: “I don’t feel post-anything, nor do I consider myself a mongrel. I prefer to find our own names for our complex experience.
“What I have noticed is that fewer and fewer places in the world have a monocultural consciousness – many Asian and some European countries are comfortably multilingual; it shows in the writing. The Pakistani, Indian or Singaporean novel is a confluence of many different cultural strands because that’s what these places are; what the world is moving towards.”
Despite evading the professional pressure of a literary mode, Pang stillrecognises the disparity between cultural development in the East and the West: “There is tremendous diversity even within regions. Northern Europe has an altogether different attitude to world literature and to books in general than say the UK. Short stories don’t sell in Italy, but they are big in other places. Southeast Asia consists of cultures as diverse as Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines – all of which have their own unique literary traditions. Their histories are rich with exchanges and parallel stories.” He sees something unique in poetry, however, which unites cultural and political differences: “Our literary scenes may be different but at heart we are interested in the human story because it is our own.”
As Pang elaborates, it becomes clear that the colonial existence he has been raised into has both worked both for and against his career. Due to Singapore’s colonial past and an English-based education system, English has become the principal commercial and administrative language in Southeast Asia. Despite such ubiquity, Pang says, “mastery of the language and literature is of course relatively uncommon.” How exactly did Pang himself transcend the colossal task of not just mastering the language, but being able to become a core element of the contemporary canon? “I’d always been an avid reader as a child; back in the 1970s and 1980s it was perhaps one of the few ways to pass the time alone. This led to my scribbling down stories all the way through my school years. When I got to proper literature lessons, I was easily hooked into the art of poetry, of storytelling and of finely craftedwords. I remember thinking after my very first poetry class at age 13 (it was a comparison between Tennyson’s “Break Break Break” and some tropical island rendition of the Sea) – “I could do this”.
And that’s when I startedthinking of myself as wanting to be a poet and writer. Taking up literature at University was a natural progression from that; but I also wanted to be a Computer Scientist!”.
Computer Science is just one of Pangs other widening interests. Over his professional career, Pang has developed a variety of experience in otheroccupations, such as teaching and journalism. Amongst all this, is poetry his true passion – or just the thing, however coveted, he managed to be successful at? Pang won Young Artist of the Year in 2005 at the National Arts Council Singapore, and was named the Featured Poet in the Spring 2002 issue of the Atlanta Review: “It’s hard to say what one’s true calling is, and it would certainly not be a job title. But I’ve dealt with words and the possibilities of language for most of my working life – it has been the consistent thread. The language arts are like the culinary arts, and they all provide necessary nourishment. I still have plenty to learn, and perhaps I’ve not even begun to explore the frontiers of a skill and art which most of us use daily and take for granted, and which is yet full of rich possibilities.
Perhaps a ‘calling’ is just another word for ‘lifelong obsession’. We all have one, or more.”
Just how important is it for the contemporary poet to receive recognition for a ‘lifelong obsession’? Pang emphasises the extent of work and tenacity involved if one ever wants to cultivate an exterior sense of recognition from the industry: “It is always good to be acknowledged for one’s efforts, but the important thing to note is that awards and other forms of recognition are always after the fact – by the time you get around to being recognised institutionally, you’d already have to have been contributing for some time. So one cannot live for recognition, it always comes too late. Nevertheless, they can be useful in establishing a certain level of credibility, which can help with funding, publishing, grants etc. My priority is the integrity of my work. It’s just taken me longer, but so be it.”
Despite Pang’s retention of his “integrity” in a world of cultural disparity and fiscal competition, he still emphasises tenacity as the key to professional success: “Tenacity is definitely the most important attribute to possess in the industry… and a sense of imagination – in terms of how to approach different markets, how to make an impact and be heard. But I think it is important to be true to one’s vision and experience – a broad readership is only part of the game… So much of success is down to sheer dumb luck. There is also value in the smaller voice that inspires one’s immediate community. Who knows where that might lead?
“To paraphrase Heaney, the real job is listening out for the ‘music of what happens’. We can’t do that if our heads are full of book industry champagne parties all the time.”
Witnessing a young international student develop such an acclaimed literary career not only in a climate of economic doom, but mounting pressure from the internet and the technological revolution, gives one aspiring such an elusive career a dash a hope – as does Pang’s advice for all us inspiring (his words) “Yorkies”: “York is a wonderful place to be in for a creative person. You can do your homework and still have fun! As for after, the most important thing I’ve learnt about the creative industries, is that you pick things up when you least expect it. You form connections across subjects and between people. So maximise your range of experiences. It will show.”
Aubade
“My love, I fear the silence of your hands.” —Mahmoud Darwish
Overnight, my heart, the forest has grown cold
and every leaf shivers with the sure knowledge of its fall,
shivers yellow and maple-red and mauve, Summer remembered
in vermillion dying. When I walk the river now
it bears merely the lightest press of feet, my body swaying
to keep balance in the whetted breeze. I had to leave you
on the absent shore, a warm bloom nesting in the reeds,
an unfixed, iridescent eye. How we part
only the morning knows, and what we said already dew.
Tomorrow after tomorrow we will find the tongue to
remember our silences, or borrow words from the night’s
vocabulary of sighs. Grief will teach you new names
and I will answer, hollow, in drumbeats and echoes,
in footsteps and softly closed doors, never looking
at you, never back. I place these words now in the vault
of sleep before it comes. Before the burial and the blood.
Leave a Reply
Related Posts
Popular This Week
Polls
Loading ...