by Eleanor Ang

Upon browsing a few books at BooksActually, We Were Always Eating Expired Things by Cheryl Julia Lee caught my eye, as I somewhat recalled its book launch event being publicised on the blog. I was mostly drawn to it because the main theme seemed to be food – but also because, being a broke university student, I am going to admit that I do eat food way past its expiry date for the sake of saving a few here and there. Initially, given Lee’s clean, newly minted voice I was a little apprehensive, but I’ve found that this collection is the sort that you revisit over and over again, as it seeps inwards and takes an uneasy root in your stomach, much like an acquired taste for the acrid and sour.

FOOD: Instagramming the priorities of every Singaporean.

Eating is a social affair and it signifies the time where everyone gathers around the same table to eat. The image of the table where the family dines is important; in “This House Stands Divided”, Lee laments how “it takes five years, two houses, three tables, and my sixteen-year-old brother to point out that this is a toxic environment”. She speaks of assembling tables, such as DIY Ikea tables and chairs – the builders, people, are likened to furniture coming together like bits and pieces. By juxtaposing themes of basic survival and necessities Lee calls out the primal, innate desire in us for human connection to establish intimacy in the rapidly capitalist, concrete jungle of Singapore and our inevitable failure.

With a focus on the family unit, the collection opens with a poem aptly titled “Take Your Shoes Off Before Stepping Inside”, which details a traveller’s journey through “Lady London’s fickle rain”, “streets lined with Parisian bookcarts” and “Oslo next-door”, along sidewalks of “Portuguese stones” towards the “Mekong River”, “plied by Nara and swallowed up by Lethean mist” and finally ending with the “Yorta Yorta people, complete with pyrotechnics and sound effects” in Hawaii. She dips her brush into the mind’s eye, jumping off European streets into South East Asia, then towards East Asia and mystical lands of Greek consciousness – the passing warning of the river of forgetfulness is interesting for it mirrors Singapore’s collective erasure of the indigenous Malays as it rewrote its own history – before ending the reader’s journey among the aboriginal tribes of Hawaii. Not once does she mention a larger setting behind the dynamic, constantly changing landscape of her poem but given the speed of the background shift within the compactness of physical distance – “corridors”, “streets”, “next-door”, “church”, “in a corner” – one can guess that it refers to Singapore’s artificially imported cultures. She implores the city-state, as a traveller, to slow down:

Always, rushing past in napalm-soaked
excitement and recklessness, you see nothing,
but leave ruins and landmarks in your wake.
I cry for you to tread carefully but you
do not hear; your heartbeat pounds
louder than your feet.

Singapore’s fuel-driven, forward progress comes with hasty abandon; she cautions against this with a prudent Asian tradition that is still preserved today in Singapore for fear of leaving behind “landmarks” – an icon of a culture – and thus our remaining identity. We Were Always Eating Expired Things is a collection of poetry interspersed with prose that comes to life with a colourful hunger of its own, aching for human connection with a subtle, yet distinctly Singaporean fervour. She explores the theme of expiration, branching out with three major subthemes – childhood experiences, the dysfunctional family, and desensitization. One can read all the prose sections online (although they are labeled and broken up into strategic pieces in the book) to get a taste of the collection here.

Her poetry necessarily kneads expiration into many things: not just food, but also the death of her family members, breakage, and salvation.From local pasttimes to Science Center (followed by McDonald’s) field trips to caning methods of discipline, these various childhood experiences are extremely relatable to anyone who has grown up in Singapore – but in the midst of courting us with all this delightful nostalgia, she shapes up several painfully acute observations. Chronicling the different stages of a child growing up in “The Lemon Table”, she muses: “10 /I first look at a window /and wonder what it would be like to fall. /I’m already old enough to know I cannot fly.” Fast forward a few pages, and we find that the children on the Science Center school trip are curious about sex, but their teacher clumsily sidesteps the topic by declaring its exclusion from the syllabus; has oppression and censorship grown so strong in Singapore that a child has internalised this at the mere age of ten?

In the sixth prose entry, a humourous piece about cheap fifty-cent canes and sneakily hiding them in all sorts of places – on a side note, it is interesting how such discipline leads to ingenuity on the children’s part – draws lighthearted chuckles but we are made aware of how accessible Singapore makes its products: outwitting their mother never mattered much, because there was a tiny shop nearby which held sales on canes around examination time. For all its convenience, we are reminded that Singapore also places high expectations on us – future generations of model citizens carefully implanted into a civic realm. Another standout, yet unassuming poem was “Pappadum”. As a young student she struggles between quiet conformity and the allure of loud, crackling “risk”, tilting our eyes towards the sociopolitical connotations of Westernised food versus local foods.

Personally, this collection struck a chord with me because Lee focuses on the small, domestic things in the everyday context compared to a heavily politicalised backdrop; she treads on local issues lightly, with a child’s playful touch – this affords her a certain sort of forgivable brashness and emotional candidness in tone rather than profoundly veiled inferences, yet the impact of her poems are not lessened. The open question Lee trails behind – for me, at least – is this: like food, do people “go bad”? What defines the “expiry date” in Singapore’s modern progress?