South-East Asia: Singapore and Malaysia

Abstract

South-East Asia is taken to include Malaysia and Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand. Following this book’s concern with writing from locations which once were under British colonial rule, this chapter concentrates on women’s writing in Malaysia and Singapore, looking at the ways in which women writers deal with tensions between town and rural, or kampong, life, how they view the importance of conventional family structures and the increasing contemporary demands of the rapid consumer materialism of the region, particularly of Singapore, and how they represent the lives of women. Education is viewed as a route to improvement but against this striving are set the very real difficulties of stress, artifice, hypocrisy and a sense of the superficiality of materialistic values. Many women writers both deal with these tensions, and revive the importance of the supernatural, of superstition and myth in understanding the legacy of the past and current values. The work of Catherine Lim and Shirley Geok-lin Lim is of particular importance here.

I read terrible stories — Hate, rage, futilities of will — And look for women, the small Sufficient swans, showers of stars

(Geok-lin Lim, 1996, p. 1)