Rice Bowl

Christine Lim Suchen

Description

Young, passionate and idealistic, Sister Marie rejects the conformity of her first love, Paul Tan, the police inspector. She embraces the liberalism of her second love, Hans Kuhn, the American missionary, and leads a group of students to question the values of a nation gripped by fear of the government and loss of their rice bowl. They organise a protest march against the Vietnam War, which leads to a riot, detention and deportation of the workers she tries to help. Ser Mei, her student and the daughter of a prostitute, meets a tragic death.

Informations

• Publié par: MarshallCavendishM
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814484411
• Langue: English

Extrait

When it first appeared in 1984, Suchen Christine Lim s Rice Bowl formed a landmark publication. One of the earliest fully-fledged novels of post-independence Singapore, it reflected the country s recent history, suggesting how its unique position in an increasingly globalised world, the complexities of its past, and a probing search for its traditions could be turned into the central motifs of an emergent nation s literature. Today, Lim s first novel represents a crucial part of Singapore s literary history, providing not only a vital example of the beginnings of the country s post-war fiction, but also important insight into a turbulent and yet often forgotten part of the history and culture in Southeast Asia.
Assistant Professor Tamara S Wagner Division of English, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Cast out from Malaysia and denied a hinterland, how was Singapore to survive? Was it by rational planning to feed the stomach or by learning to have a consciousness of the land and people, thereby feeding the mind, the spirit and the imagination? Opposing viewpoints fuel the tension between Marie and her first love, Paul. Is Sister Marie, the activist nun, naive in the face of controlling forces? A peaceful demonstration goes wrong and she is deported. Marie leaves Singapore with the experience of a raised awareness that takes in history and class. Paul is left alone with his rational development that cannot console his soul. Marie may be naive, but the novel is not. Rice Bowl speaks to us today, through powerful writing that instructs, educates and moves, showing how history can be retrieved and changed to release creative energies.
Peter Nazareth Professor of English, University of Iowa
Suchen Christine Lim s first novel, Rice Bowl , attempts to represent a totality of Singaporean society. It moves beyond the single communal entity to question the what and why of an evolving national identity. An identity novel and a bildungsroman ... it has a much broader sweep, moving to issues of national cohesion and national identity formation. ... Rice Bowl is also a campus narrative. The major character is a Westernised idealist who constructs an individualist s version of Singapore s identity. ... Marie is a complex character whose appealing idealism masks egotistical drives. ... Against this charismatic figure, the novel portrays a sceptical, cautious male whom Marie rejects as an inarticulate Singaporean male, limiting and rigid. The clash of ideological positions is figured in their eventual developments.
... In the midst of this debate are suffering individuals who need rescue. Ser Mei ... is forced into prostitution by a greedy mother and dies as a possible suicide; Mak, the male chauvinist and Communist agent-provocateur goes crazy in his attempts to radicalise the students-workers protest activities; Yean, rich and confused, is unable to stop her father from moving his entire family to California. ... The concluding scene when Paul leaves behind the avenue of consumerist vulgarity for a quiet war-memorial park, is one of separation and loss.
from Writing Against The Grain Shirley Geok-Lin Lim University of California, Santa Barbara
The late 60s and 70s were important for Suchen Christine Lim. She established and clarified her values and attitudes during those years, close after Singapore s independence and in the first flush of the country s development. Malaysia-born, she was conscious of having chosen Singapore as my nation. We were at the crossroads, trying to decide whether we should migrate. Would we have a future here? Not surprisingly, Rice Bowl captures the uncertainty, questioning and struggles of a group of young people in those early days.
Caroline Ngui The Straits Times , 1984

2009 Suchen Christine Lim
Cover art by OpalWorks Co. Ltd
First published 1984 by Times Books International. Reprinted 1989, 1991 and 2005.
This edition published 2009 by
Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd
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National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lim, Suchen Christine
Rice bowl / Suchen Christine Lim. - New ed. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2009.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978 981 4484 41 1
1. Youth - Singapore - Fiction. 2. Singapore - History - 1965-1990 - Fiction. I. Title.
PR9570.S53
S823 - dc22
OCN330911419
Printed in Singapore by KWF Printing Pte Ltd
For
Chi-Minh, Chi Sharn
and Shannan
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Professor Lucille Hosilos (retired), University of the Philippines, who was Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore at the time of the writing of this novel, and Mrs Rosalind Chan, former editor of Singapore University Press. Both gave me a desk and a private space to write this novel when I was still a student in the university.
Influences while I was writing the novel, more than 25 years ago, included The Cultural Revolution (1969) by Joan Robinson; Red Star Over China (1968) by Edgar Snow; the songs and hymns composed by Sister Miriam Therese Winter, Medical Mission Sisters, especially their groundbreaking Piano/Vocal Collection, Joy Is Like The Rain (1966); and the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), especially her poem, Friends .
Lines quoted in the book: I walked one morning by the sea ... from A Long Road to Freedom , song by Sister Miriam Therese Winter; Listen to this ... poem by Anonymous; and I fear it s very wrong of me ... from Friends , poem by Elizabeth Jennings.
I thank my editor, Lee Mei Lin, for working closely with me on this new edition.
A NOTE TO THE READER
It is 25 years since Rice Bowl was first published in 1984. Since then, the novel has had three reprints in 1989, 1991 and 2005. Instead of a fourth reprint this year, Marshall Cavendish decided to issue a new edition, and I thought it was a good opportunity for me to look at the novel again.
I must confess that I have not read Rice Bowl since its publication. Neither have I given a public reading of the novel. There were two reasons. The first was the scarcity of public literary readings in those days. The second reason was my secret shame. Parts of the novel read as though it was a poorly edited draft. There were errors in tense and punctuation, and some in sentence structure. Since these were in the printed novel, I felt responsible for them, and over the years, through the writing of other novels, I slowly forgave myself and put it down to my own poor vigilance during the editing process. I take this opportunity to thank my friends and readers for their kind silence. In Singapore, poor editing is one of the pitfalls that novice writers almost always fall into in our eagerness to get published.
Books were typewritten and typeset in the 1980s, and it cost too much to make changes once the book was printed. Besides, a novel with a small print run did not justify the cost. Today, technology has made it relatively cheap to scan a typeset page into the computer and turn it into a Word document for the author to edit, and this was done for the new edition of Rice Bowl .
I have never regarded my published works as sacred texts, or the author in me as an unchangeable entity. The author who wrote Rice Bowl 25 years ago is no longer the author writing today. If this older author is irked by a clumsy sentence or phrase, so will you, the reader. I regard it as a form of courtesy to my readers to iron out such irritations as far as I am able to do so.
I have also edited out, for copyright reasons, certain long quotes from songs and hymns, popular among Singapore s Catholic students in the university in the sixties. Twenty-five years ago, it was generally thought that as long as the author acknowledged the source it was all right. Today, international copyright agencies might argue otherwise.
I do not think that the editing has affected the substance and themes of the novel. It is still a powerful story of Singapore s youth who dared to question the values of a nation governed by fear, played out in the intense relationship between Paul Tan, the pragmatic Harvard scholar and police inspector, and Sister Marie, the idealistic novice nun who organised the protest march against the Vietnam War.
Now that I have re-read Rice Bowl , I daresay I am rather proud of that young teacher from Catholic Junior College who wrote this novel secretly on her Olivetti typewriter in a storeroom under the stairs of Yusoff