by Ho Zimin

The cover art for Balik Kampung 2B: Contemplations is a close-up of a row of metal mailboxes – the kind you get at the void decks of old HDB flats, the ones that needed padlocks and had tiny metal slit windows that clang loudly whenever the people whose jobs were to leave junk mail in your mailboxes push fliers into them with practiced ease. Already, Balik Kampung 2B: Contemplations is doing what it’s set out to do – giving fresh perspective to our view of Singapore. The collection is about mapping spaces in Singapore, not that of the merlion or the Keppel Bay view, but through images like HDB mailboxes, those of lived-in, tucked away neighborhoods.

The rest of Balik Kampung 2B: Contemplations is as compelling in its familiarity. A collection of nine tales by different authors, the collection is centered on neighborhoods in Singapore that the authors have lived in for at least ten years. Each short story is also accompanied by a paragraph by the writer on their connection to their respective neighborhood. Contemplations provides a more mediative and experimental collection of stories to its counterpart Balik Kampung 2A: People and Places. This mediative style is a seamless thread running through the short stories in this collection, stories that are geographically scattered yet all equally invocative of different but authentic Singaporean experiences.

The stories range from first-person childhood recollections to surrealist dreamscape explorations, from the protean urban landscape of River Valley to the aging estates of Balestier. My personal favorite would have to be ‘Such Great Heights’ by Zizi Azah – a story of friendship built around suppers at late-night eateries, of optimism in the face of the uncertainty of youth; a story that is the author’s ode to Bedok in thanks of its unwavering constancy.

And the streets still run the same way they do in the river of my memories. Overflowing with the sweetness of the past.

— ‘Such Great Heights’, Zizi Azah

The great thing about Balik Kampung 2B: Contemplations is that most of its tales eschew seeing the spaces they explore through rose-tinted glasses. There is little of the ‘old playgrounds turned novelty badges’-esque nostalgia, but rather rawness in the representation of what these spaces mean to the authors. In ‘The Vomiting Incident’, Cyril Wong writes of a void deck funeral and the strained familial relationships that occurred within the cramped space of his childhood home in Bedok. Tania De Rozario also explores the harsh reality of the trauamatic ongoings of broken families entrapped within the confines of the home in ‘Certainty’, a heart-wrenching tale that culminates in a mother killing her own newborn child.

Not to say that there are only hits and no misses within the collection – the occasional thinly-veiled political agenda and extended metaphor bathetically unfolding into tax-payer complaints evokes a laugh but nonetheless feels contrived, risking moments of incongruence with the easy rawness of the rest of the collection.

Balik Kampung 2B: Contemplations is a text that would be incredibly relatable for readers who have grown up in Singapore. Things like the confusing etymology of Ang Mo Kio and the ghosts of Choa Chu Kang are concepts that, I believe, permeate the everyday Singaporean consciousness to some extent. And to see writers take these notions and build narratives off of them is surprising and compelling. In addition, the diversity within this collection also throws into question the sometimes assumed heterogeneity of Singapore in mainstream representation of Singaporean spaces –are the residential landscapes of the East different from that of the West? Are all HDB flats just their void decks, are they all the same?

In some ways, the collection addresses what we’ve discussed in class about what makes up a national literature. This collection can be seen as a nuanced way of presenting a national literature spatially and temporally – it deals with the documentation of places in Singapore’s history but not in a contrived manner. Authors write narratives as shaped by territories and in this way the landscape of the nation is documented organically and honestly. Similarly, most tales are written in a vernacular that is authentically Singaporean without devising an overly formulated vocabulary of Singlish, dialects, and so on.

All in all, Balik Kampung 2B: Contemplations is about how spaces in Singapore shape people and how, like these authors, we re-shape these places for ourselves in our contemplations of them. Each author’s narratives are woven together to create an honest and unconventional map of Singapore and reading this collection is like taking a stroll through your childhood neighborhood but with a fresh pair of eyes – it is a simultaneous longing to rediscover what we’ve left behind and wanting to use this rediscovery as a means of negotiating our present and our future.