Wu Qi: At Oxford, you sustain yourself through teaching, research, and chatting with friends. What work were you doing in Singapore?

Xiang Biao: Conferences, lots of academic activities. That year in Singapore was one of the happiest in my life. There were no burdens on me because no one knew who I was. I had finished my dissertation and was getting ready to publish it. At the same time, I learned a lot of new things about Southeast Asia. Material conditions in Singapore are excellent. The Asia Research Institute invited a lot of famous visiting scholars. Visiting scholars are always friendly, probably because they are free from routines at home and as guests, there are no fights over who gets what, and they can engage in pure intellectual exchange. Especially when Prasenjit Duara was there, many of the discussions were really interesting. We’d go swimming or go out to eat, and then start a discussion. For me, it was almost a feeling of enlightenment, as if all of a sudden I’d worked through my scholarly and political problems. Without my Singapore experience, I probably could not have written essays like “The World, Scholarship, and the Self.” I started to get a better understanding of the meaning of scholarship as a human practice; for example, people like Vani helped me to understand that scholarship is like movies, poetry, art, or folk songs, in that they are all means by which humanity expresses itself. It’s kind of embarrassing that it took me so long to understand that scholarship is a kind of praxis. My enlightenment did not occur until I was 30, and I had never understood that at Oxford. I had always seen scholarship as a vocation, and never thought about why we do it, had never considered that scholarship is like a fable or a song.

Wu Qi: It’s surprising to hear you talk about an enlightenment, because from Beida to Oxford, you had access to the best education in the world, in an age of enlightenment and openness, but you did not have that experience until after graduating, and in a relatively small community in Singapore.

Xiang Biao: We already talked about centers and margins. By the same token, big has its drawbacks, and sometimes you see more things because you are in a small place. This may sound strange because isn’t there more to discover in big places? It’s true. China is big and complicated, but one of China’s central concerns is to eliminate this complexity, to simplify it. But in a small place like Singapore, politics of course has to be unified, but in cultural terms, you have to live and let live.

Singapore cannot have a definitive identity, because its identity is defined by other people, and it has to constantly keep its eye on the world context and the regional context so that Singapore positions itself as a brokerage state. Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of such a small country (Singapore is smaller than Wenzhou—Wenzhou has a population of more than nine million, while Singapore’s is five million), had a considerable role to play and a reputation on the international stage and was quite close to other world leaders at the time. After Lee’s wife died, Henry Kissinger called him every week. Lee Kuan Yew had a clear vision of what Singapore is, and he knew that no one would pay attention to such a small country, which meant that Singapore had to pay attention to the larger world, starting with the world around it: its relations with Malaysia and Indonesia, and then as part of East Asia. It had to consider Britain’s perspective, America’s perspective, what relations Singapore should develop with mainland China and Taiwan, etc. In doing so, Singapore constantly plays the role of mediator. Singapore is small but smart and is constantly observing other people, and imbedding itself in different contexts in different ways because they always worry they will be abandoned by others. By way of contrast, big countries always start with themselves, define the rest of the world according to their own vision, opposing this and proclaiming that, getting less smart in the process.

It’s a good question: why I came to understand “enlightenment” in a small place. I think it was because it freed me from the way I used to think, which was through sort of self-serving symbols and formulas. Vani poked fun at me, because she saw through me right away, probably because she had already seen a lot of people like me. She said that I am the type of scholar who sort of drowns in their nations’ self-narrative: China is like this, China is like that. They are always eager to discuss big issues and put the nation before everything else without understanding the facts of the matter. Singapore can’t do that. Its history is relatively short, and does not have a common language or a common culture; it is a country that “probably should not have existed.” Even today, the government keeps reminding its citizens that “our very existence goes against the natural laws of history,” so they have to work hard to stay ahead of history. They can never take anything for granted.

For a lot of ordinary people in Singapore, the government is always doing this and that, which wears everybody out, but Singapore has come to a thorough understanding of what it means to be “marginal,” and they have capitalized on their marginality rather than cursing it. The whole region of Southeast Asia is fascinating. You’ve got these small, relatively weak countries, but people live quite well, so who says there’s no life outside of world centers?