[Genders]
 

Genders 36 2002
 

Embodied Modernities
Feminist Agency in Singapore Women's Literature

by ESHA NIYOGI DE

[1]   In this essay, I explore the form of feminist agency we encounter
in popular Anglophone women's literature from post-colonial Singapore
(Mingfong Ho's novel, Sing to the Dawn, 1975; Lee Tzu Pheng's poem "My
Country and My People, 1980; the novel, Serpent's Tooth [1982], and some
short stories [1990's] by Catherine Lim). All the stories address what
is a stock theme of Singaporean women's literature--how Western-educated
women deal with changing times and their different allegiances to modern
and traditional (neo-Confucian), urban and rural Asian values. To an
extent, the pieces conform to dominant nationalist narratives about the
benefits of modernity and role of tradition in contemporary Singaporean
women's lives. I argue that the seeming conformity to cultural
narratives in these popular expressions should not be read as
conventional women's submissiveness to patriarchal nationalist norms.
For intertwined in these acquiescent voices are strategies women adopt
to re-form the masculinist values and practices of the culture to which
they stake their loyalty. The difficulty of discerning these strategies,
it seems to me, has to do with the absence of an adequate framework for
reading the feminist claims that underlie nationalist women's voices.
Postcolonial theories of female identity and agency by and large fail to
account for the range and complexity of these feminist stances that
arise under anti-colonial nationalisms. Here, I sketch one framework for
discerning agency in these writers' imaginations, and discuss which
assumptions underlying postcolonial studies have to be rethought to
provide this account.

[2]   Influential historiographies of anti-colonial nationalism suggest
that women's cultural identities--laid out in codes by which they belong
to their kin group and share in its collective future--are determined by
the male elite's contentious relationship with imperialist modernity.
Elaborating on Subaltern historian Partha Chatterjee's argument, for
example, R. Radhakrishnan suggests that the nation's modern-educated new
woman becomes the symbolic resolution to men's "schizophrenic"
consciousness (85), their split reaction to a "temporality of modernity
[that] authorizes"(Bhabha, "Race, Time," 193) the progress-oriented
white male as the best form of human. The woman serves to repress this
schizophrenia and enable her nation's new people (men and women) to step
out into historical time to vie with Western man for material progress
by symbolically taking on the preservation of a timeless inner self.
Construed to be spiritually superior to the materialistic Westerner,
this traditional self posits an alternate racial-cultural hierarchy
against the dominant one. These Orientalist sexual politics of
nationalism give men some flexibility in experimenting with modern
concepts and tools (Kandiyoti, 379); but they confine the new woman's
identity in a spatiotemporal dichotomy. She has to keep tradition in the
home and community and superficially adapt to the nation's social and
economic teleologies in the private and public spheres. Kumari
Jayawardena suggests that although feminist ideas--women's education,
voting rights, sexual rights--enter anti-colonial contexts in the course
of nationalist reform movements, they do not necessarily enable women to
correct the dichotomous construction of femininity. Geraldine Heng goes
further to assert that women's issues are manipulated as "ideological
and political resources" in national liberation struggles, and that this
historical trend "commonly develops, in contemporary contexts, into the
manipulation of women themselves as socioeconomic resource in Third
World nation-states"(Heng, 31-32). The consensus is that in the phases
both of national liberation and nation- state development, the
modern-educated woman plays a central role in the male-dictated
patriotic 'causes' of competing with yet rising above dominant Western
temporality. Women who are embroiled in these identity politics of male
nationalism fail to command what is perceived to be the Western woman's
"politically enabling" marginal position in the nation--the margin from
which a feminist habitually critiques "centered capitalist
ideology"(Liu, 24).

[3]   The implication of such studies is that the new woman's investment
in her people's goals of gaining freedom from racial-masculinist
domination and building independent nations inhibits her ability to
self-actualize and intervene in patriarchal national history. This
raises the central question of this essay: To what extent can a woman
claim agency in her personal thought and practice and over her
historical role without discarding commitments to her cultural community
and its ongoing liberation struggle, during and after colonization? The
challenge to attaining this political stance within, not outside, the
communal realm is that the woman must stake her affiliation according to
the terms defined by a community-reconfigured-as-nation: she must define
herself and her role in terms of a past she shares with her people, and
a future she collectively imagines (Enloe, 45). However, the dominant
version of the past and future, distorted by contentions between
masculinities in an anti-colonial present, is precisely what imposes
contradictions on women's everyday spaces. If the modern woman is to
envision a feminist future in common with her people, she must speak
both to these distortions and contradictions and their ideological
premise, the schizophrenic split in male nationalist consciousness, but
also for her nation's principal ideals and goals. She must speak with
mainstream articulations of communal progress and cultural liberation
yet retain the reflexivity to critique the manipulative aspects of the
discourse and re-form its underlying ideology. Before I elaborate how
and to what extent the Singaporean women writers find this reflexive
voice, I consider why key assumptions of prevalent theories have to be
reworked before we are able to think feminist historical agency in these
terms.

[4]   One strand of postcolonial theory entirely depends on the
Foucauldian assumption that rational consciousness is a self-referential
product of linguistic and social power structures in modernity. On this
basis, some scholars suggest that women's acquiescence to imposed
symbolic and material roles indicates an outright loss of historical
agency. Through his reading of Indian women's texts Subaltern scholar
Partha Chatterjee, for example, attempts to expose the "subjection of
women"(140) to a double patriarchal regime in anti-colonial contexts. He
argues that Western-educated women's control over language "is doubly
vitiated [by their subordination] at one and the same time to
colonialism as well as to a nationalist patriarchy"(140). As a result,
women are even less capable than their male nationalist counterparts of
claiming an "autonomous subjectivity" that struggles against domination
and constitutes power as a relation (137). Chatterjee's framework
effectively recenters regimes of patriarchy, race, and class in emerging
nations by way of obliterating signs of women's dissenting
rationalities. As against this, many feminist postcolonial scholars
explore ways to theorize women's agency in nationalist contexts. They
also avoid Western postmodernists' liberalist faith in individual
agency, and the allied binary model in which feminist subjectivity is
"synthesized from fusions of outsider identities" (Haraway, 217)
positioned on the utopian margins of masculinist-racist regimes.
Instead, postcolonial feminists explore how knowledge/ power works
pervasively and invisibly in capitalist modernities, constituting and
"enabl[ing]" (Spivak, 147) every subject position--dominant,
subordinate, oppositional. Many concur with the argument that "to speak
from the margin is to be already complicit with the discourse of the
nation-state . . . that creates and censors the margins" (Alarcon,
Kaplan, Moallem, 8-9). Within this feminist poststructuralist paradigm,
agency is claimed through "muddying the pure positions"(Kaplan and
Grewal, 359). It has to do with demystifying all knowledge claims and
exposing how these are constructed through hegemonic discourse and its
various processes of centering the subject. It also is a matter of
"performing" (Bhabha, "Introduction"; Butler) in the Derridean interval
of historical time the contradictions and aporias in
masculinist-capitalist discursive forms.

[5]   This means, however, that postcolonial feminists tend toward yet
another binary paradigm. According to this, agency consists only of
subversively responding to a centered and all-encompassing episteme, and
not at all of reconceptualizing mainstream concepts and tools in more
empowering ways. Their rigidly anti-essentialist approach to the self
and rationality does not allow critics to attend to those uneven and
partial ways in which consciousness re-forms ideology, impelled by other
ways of knowing the present and connecting with the past that may exist
around the dominant. This approach denies that the development of agency
has a cognitive component--that any political struggle to re-vision
oppressive conditions has to be accompanied by a moral epistemological
one. It fails, that is, to acknowledge that the possibility of
"accurately interpreting our world," and grasping what is going wrong in
it, "fundamentally depends on our coming to know what it would take to
change it"(Mohanty, 214). The extent of a subject's political agency
depends on her coming to rationally think about which social
arrangements and cultural practices manipulate her reality together with
her community's, and how else these may be rearranged in "more
productive ways"(Mohanty, 214). It depends, in a nutshell, on an at
least partial re-orientation of both thought and practice. The
poststructuralist denial of this moral cognitive component of political
agency quite commonly leads to a reaffirmation of binarism. Failing to
account for the complex and uneven processes through which a subject
struggles toward epistemic agency, critics tend to settle for
differentiating already politicized agents from interpellated subjects.
Some scholars do emphasize that "ideological boundaries" surround
feminists of color, and that it is important in the interest of
progressive politics to reconstruct differently "the raced and gendered
'I's' and 'We's'"(Alarcon, 71). But in general, postcolonial studies of
feminist agency fail to elaborate on the extents and limits of
self-reconstruction and epistemic re-orientation. Critics do not address
how subjects break out of dominant nationalist ideologies, what the
material and emotional constraints are to the reconstruction of female
identities and roles, and how oppositional knowledge conducing positive
change in the lives and worlds of women arises from within these
constraints.

[6]   These postcolonial models do not allow me to explain the way that
popular Singaporean writers address women's traditional and modern
selves. For the writers look upon women's dominant identities and roles
not so much as confusing fabrications that must be disrupted, or exposed
for their constructedness. They treat them as repositories of practical
knowledge about how women struggle under dominant values and commitments
but also strategically select from the old and the new to empower
themselves together with their communities. In these literary
representations, the women writers, together with reading publics who
consume and enjoy the narratives, engage in minimally systematic
reinterpretations of the existing life conditions of modern Singaporean
women. The stories constitute a site for rethinking women's worlds--on
the basis both of traditions (organic and reinvented) and of modern
innovative ideas--in more productive and empowering ways. It seems to me
that we can provide an account of how these narratives develop feminist
agency if we begin by considering, as Geraldine Heng suggests, how
women's "adaptations" of modern feminism are "mediated" by their social
roles and cultural identities in anti-colonial nationalist contexts
(30). An emphasis on cultural mediation requires that we attend to both
visible and submerged ways of knowing the self in relation to the
present and past of a community. Therefore, this emphasis requires that
we extend Heng's framework in a way that allows us to explore two
different things: firstly, how Singaporean women's adaptations are
constrained by the nationalist paradigm of reformed/ traditional woman
because of the security of belonging this affirms; secondly, how they
may be inflected by different communal legacies of responding to and
appropriating new knowledges as well as altering the familiar.

[7]   I show below that one way to explore how these self-mediations
occur in literary representations of everyday lives is to unravel the
various levels at which the stories re-represent and "process"
information (Mohanty, 201) about Singapore women's embodiment of
dominant values and commitments. In these popular literary pieces norms
of feminine self become aesthetic products that constitute a locus of
women's desire to gain advantage by conforming to social standards, and
are marketed as such. But as symbolic re-creations of everyday selves,
these also permit women--the writers themselves and their reading
publics--to reflect on and rework imposed identities. As Charles Taylor
points out, a society's symbolic expressions lie between the levels of
"explicit doctrine" and "embodied understanding" or the habitus; they
bring together "images as yet unformulated in doctrine"(168). In other
words, symbolic understanding is somewhat fluid. It re-presents and
experiments with embodied forms of being and knowing, exceeding the
doctrines/ formalized meanings that exert control on a particular
cultural domain. In Singapore, whose daily life is strongly regulated by
doctrines of Asian nationhood and capitalist progress, popular
literature is one site in which women cultivate a "bifurcated
consciousness"(Harding, 185). They begin to think in oppositional ways
about the identities they embody and the roles they play in national
history. These women's narratives are made up of conflicting strands
that capture the multiple acquiescent and reflective voices in which the
writers respond to modern and traditional femininities. They show how
women situated in positions similar to their own desire and adhere to
them, and become embroiled in contradictory and distorted forms of
reality. Through the partially reflexive practice of storytelling,
writers also unevenly cultivate an understanding of why these
distortions occur and how they may be rectified by drawing on
non-conflictual practices of cultural exchange. In short, these
narratives present inquires into how women struggle to claim cognitive
agency over their embodied values and commitments. They interpret in a
minimally systematic way what it takes to change the oppressive aspects
of dominant selves.

[8]   These critical reflections on embodied femininities cumulatively
produce a divergent history of Singapore life. This centers women who
attempt not to synchronize their lives with prevailing nationalist
agendas, but to transform existing social and symbolic conditions in a
way that enables women's participation in communal interpretations of
ideals and goals. Speaking to the common interest of decolonization, the
writers persuade compatriots in overt or covert ways to seek in the
interaction of modernity and communal memory not a hierarchical
relationship producing totalized notions of adversarial humans, but
intersectionalities between different cultural times, spaces, and
epistemes of the human (ways of knowing the self in relation to the
family, society, the cosmos, the good). They draw on female cultural
legacies of survival to sketch a Singaporean subject who is conceptually
mobile, who selectively adapts new ideas and tools to change yet
conserve traditions. This subject finds in no social arrangement
unconditional freedom from sexualized hierarchies. But she seeks in all
of them concepts and tools for a new society liberated from gendered
forms of oppression. Before turning to the works, I consider them in
their historical context.

The Times and Spaces of Singapore's Women:
Disjunctions and Intersections

[9]   The creative writings investigate how modern-educated women of
Singapore are able to find their voices in a national history that
surrounds them with contradictory constructions of the self. Since the
establishment of independent Singapore in 1965, patriarchal nationalist
discourse produced by the Chinese-dominated ruling elite has dexterously
controlled the temporal and spatial conditions under which middle-class,
predominantly ethnic Chinese, female citizens belong to the nation and
practice citizenship. It has dictated that women will perform
instrumental functions in the time and space of production; but they
will truly belong only to the reproductive sphere. Moreover, the
latter's temporalities periodically have been manipulated to revive a
stable (gendered and ethnicized) Singapore subjecthood. In the first
phase of national development under the PAP government--People Action
Party led by Cambridge-educated Lee Kuan Yew--there were obvious
commonalties between the values and commitments ascribed to women's
productive and reproductive identities, with undercurrents of
contradiction. In the later, neo-Orientalist phase of ideological
formation, the disjunctions became acute.

[10]   After Singapore's expulsion from Malaysia and the common market
in 1965, the government discursively constructed a nation caught in a
"crisis of survival"; this demanded that every member be "transformed
into a tightly organised and highly disciplined citizenry all pulling in
the same direction of socioeconomic development"(Chua, 18-19). In this
first phase of social engineering, economically privileged women were
made into both efficient workers and modern citizens whose progress
vindicated the nation's rejection of its 'barbaric Oriental' past. They
received English and technological education equally with men, and were
encouraged to selectively modernize family arrangements and
sensibilities. Government propaganda discredited such traditional values
as preference for large and extended families, sons over daughters, and
dependence on children for old age care (Chua, 115). Intending to
enhance women's productivity in the workplace, Lee encouraged
companionate conjugal relationships by urging men to partake in
housework (Tamney, 121). Singaporean people were already living in
nuclear forms of family due to their migrant status (Kuo and Wong, 8).
Now, they were indoctrinated in the bourgeois capitalist idea of the
nuclear family comprising upwardly mobile male and female individuals.
As early as 1961, this ideology of modern Singaporean womanhood had been
institutionalized by the Women's Charter that showed unmistakable
influence of Western feminist concepts about women's progress. It
granted women unprecedented rights of societal participation and
self-definition: enfranchisement, property-ownership, increased
education and employment opportunities, divorce rights, and autonomy
over their sexuality (through the prohibition of polygamous liaisons and
marital rape) (Wong and Kum, 256-271; Hill and Fee, 144-145).

[11]   Throughout this period of modernization and
urbanization--extending from 1965 to the early 80's--the nation's elite
Chinese new women also were reminded that their primary duty lay in
socializing children in what were nativist hybridizations of modern
Western concepts and values. They were to teach children a form of
"individualism" that combined economic competitiveness with a
citizenship "conceived less in terms of rights -- as enshrined in the
liberal-individualist tradition of Western societies--than in terms of
community-defined duties" (Hill and Fee, 11). These duties in turn were
understood in Confucian-patriarchal terms, as these were being redefined
by Singapore's Chinese elite (Chua, 153-162). Women's task of nurturing
dutiful individualists did not clash, in the arguments put forward by
the leadership, with their other responsibility, that of preserving
communitarian values against the "cultural and moral pollution" of the
West (Kuo and Wong, 11). The next ideological phase of nation-building
began around 1980. In this period, there was systematic reaction against
the "excesses" of individualism and consumerism perceived to have been
bred by economic success. In the view of the ruling elite, these trends
foreboded a decline in the state's control over its hypersubjective
citizens (Chua, 26-27; 116-118). The contradictions between Singapore's
modernity and its re-invented traditions were now spotlighted as moral
polarities.

[12]   Alarmed by the decline in marriage and fertility rates of
university graduate women (largely Chinese) in comparison with
less-educated women (largely Malay Muslim, also Indian Hindu) the
government vilified 'hyper-individualist' graduates for failing to
fulfill the familial and patriotic duties of marriage and child-bearing
. As he defended the government's infamous social eugenics
program--which gave tax-incentives to university-educated women to marry
and have babies--Yew grew nostalgic about the past when families
retained control over their daughters' biological destinies by arranging
marriages. He also spoke admiringly of the "virile Chinese patriarchs"
who had retinues of wives, mistresses, and illegitimate children, and
even speculated on the possibility of reviving this virility in Chinese
men through reintroducing polygamy (Heng and Devan, 349). The process of
producing and legitimating nationalist female identities that had begun
with the legal definition of the modern Singapore woman by the Women's
Charter (Heng, 37) now was harnessed to the neo-Orientalist patriarchy
of the evolving capitalist-racist state.

[13]   These ascriptions of conflicting times and spaces to female
identity have been integral to the elaboration of a national hegemony
that upholds gendered and racial stratifications of social labor in the
capitalist state. Yet a "lived" hegemony, even when based on outright
propaganda and intellectual coercion as in Singapore, is always a
"process": "it has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and
modified . . . [and is also] continually resisted, limited, altered,
challenged by pressures not all its own"(Williams, 112). The spread of
modern education and diverse progressive influences has produced many
dissenting voices throughout the periods of Singapore's birth and
development. The PAP government has been rather successful in coopting
or marginalizing such dissenters, notably feminist and Marxist radicals
(Heng, 35-35; Chua, 11-17; Dancz, Parts II and III). Through
legislation, penalties, and restrictive libel laws, it has tried to
curtail freedom of foreign and local presses, of parliamentary
discourse, and of political opposition in general (Gomez, 28-29).
Moreover, these censorship codes enforced by the one-party state have
deeply influenced the everyday attitudes of Singaporean citizens.
Viewing alternative political voices as illegitimate, the majority
engage in acts of "self-censorship and / or the censorship of
others"(Gomez, 3). Nonetheless, this stringent structure of governance
has had to deal with an increasingly independent-thinking electorate. It
has partially yielded to persuasions from below and periodically
attempted to rebuild consensus (Chua, 23-24).

[14]   As is often the case, symbolic expressions, because of their
reflective and processual nature, capture the "hegemonic in its active
and formative but also its transformational processes"(Williams, 113).
There are "counter-traditions" of literature that run against the grain
of the "aesthetical ideology" that pervades the canon of Anglophone
writing in Singapore (Lim, Writing South East/ Asia in English, 119).
The canon itself is produced by English-educated professionals who hold
prestigious jobs in the state and want to avoid intellectual coercion
(Lim, Nationalism and Literature, 18-21). But many texts by
Chinese-Singaporean women who hold such jobs carry the
counter-traditions as well. In some instances, as in Catherine Lim's,
these literary projects are intertwined with political reflections
(discussed below). As a whole, women's counter-traditional literature
presents an arena of hegemonic struggle between doctrinal meanings of
Singaporean femininity and women's practical consciousness--i.e., lived
relations of domination and subordination, and opposition to oppressive
ideas and practices (Williams, 110).

[15]   As the writers depict and reflect on everyday lives, they speak
in conflicted voices about the status of new Chinese women in a world of
shifting times, spaces, and ontologies. Their protagonists attempt to
embody both traditional and modern roles and sensibilities, and find
their lives fragmented by spatial and temporal contradictions:
segmentations of families and communities into advanced-backward and
authentic-inauthentic cultural sectors and the fractures of female
bonds; temporalized hierarchies of upwardly mobile and backward classes
and ethnicities, and of urban and rural peoples which also break down
intra-community and intra-family bonds. Through these symbolic
portrayals of Singaporean lives, however, the writers also struggle to
achieve cognitive agency over women's fragmented selves. They refuse to
treat modern and traditional values and underlying social arrangements
as the moral polarities defined by patriarchal nationalism. Instead,
they draw on women-centered practices and communal legacies of
non-confrontational exchange between different cultural rationalities.

[16]   The pieces look through gendered lenses on the various
intersecting and conflicting epistemic positions their protagonists
learn or expect to embody. They examine the individualist self
participating in a "common action in profane time"(Taylor, 172); the
rational subject claiming rights and reparations in the body politic;
the mobile subject of a market economy; the monogamous nuclear family
woman seeking companionate relationships. They also look into the
implications for women of a collective self and its principle of
communal-over-individual-good; a self attaining fulfillment in sacred
time, a ritual, not purposive, rational subject; a non-individualist
resistant self; and women's practices of self-empowerment in patriarchal
and polygamous communities. What these works attempt is to discriminate
between ways of knowing the self and its community on the basis of the
beneficial or oppressive impacts these produce on contemporary women's
lives. Thus, these writers enter into the "temporal action . . . [or]
progressive, future drive" which Homi Bhabha considers to be a "value"
of modernity ("Race, Time," 201, 204). But they also resist the
homogeneous times of dominant modernities. They contribute to the vision
of a new nation whose progressive past contributes to a gendered
decolonized future. They demonstrate that, from the standpoints of
modern Singapore women's fragmented lives, insights may be garnered
about a trans-temporal agent of national progress. This subject turns
critical eyes on conceptual and material innovations, foreign and
native. She seeks ideas and tools that enhance--rather than compete with
or obliterate--communal histories of survival, self-actualization, and
liberation.

Women Reinterpret Progress

[17]   The poem, "My Country and My People" (1980), is written by Lee
Tzu Pheng, a Ph.D. in English Literature and a faculty member at the
National University of Singapore (Routledge Encyclopedia). Well-known
for its advocacy of nationalism, the poem captures a socially privileged
Chinese woman's perspective on nation-building at the height of
Singapore's first spate of modernization, before the backlash against
the West gained momentum. Overtly, it concurs with the dominant
nationalist agenda of controlled progressivism for Singapore's elite
women. It suggests that modernization and urbanization have emancipated
women like the narrator from oppressions of rural Chinese patriarchy and
have granted them participatory citizenship in the new, egalitarian
nation. Further, the narrator agrees that she must practice citizenship
not only by "driving" into the city with the current of economic
progress, but by nurturing the essentially human sentiment of
neighborliness at the heart of a diverse nation:

Yet careful tending of the human heart
may make a hundred flowers bloom;
and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour,
I claim citizenship in your recognition
of our kind.

Put differently, the educated woman's productive role in the urban
economy must be complemented by her role as reproducer of the spirit of
national culture: she must nurture the transcendent human sentiment of
togetherness in the hearts of racially disparate (also unequally
privileged) citizens.

[18]   Generically, this poem belongs with other celebratory development
narratives produced by elite Singapore women in the first decades
following independence. Noteworthy among these is the first novel by a
Singapore woman, expatriate author and activist Mingfong Ho's Sing to
the Dawn (1975; first published in New York and later in Singapore).
Although set in Thailand, the novel is a Singaporean period-piece in its
choice of theme. It deals with how urban migration and modern education
improve women's lives. The work is a commentary on the agenda of
urbanization that was central in the first phase of Singapore's
development. In this phase, the PAP government was erasing traditional
habitats of ethnic groups--Malay kampungs, Chinese villages--and
exposing selected segments of the population to modern education. The
dominant voice in Mingfong Ho's children's tale is a didactic one,
telling about a potential reformer of rural Asian social oppressions and
evils. This reformer is a village girl who strives to reach the city and
higher modern education in order that she may return to the village and
uplift the backward conditions of her community. Like Lee's poem, the
novel imagines the development of the modern woman in teleological
terms. It suggests that women become legitimate members of the community
and trailblazers of progress only by moving to metropolitan centers of
advancement. However, closer inspection reveals that both authors are
only partially indoctrinated in the ideology of urban progressivism.
Different strands of the narratives capture the other voices in which
the writers persuade audiences. The narratives suggest that patriarchal
modernist notions of progressive self and citizen fill women's lives
with contradiction, and fracture communities. But they also show that
these notions alter when women embody them and try to garner the
benefits they promise: dignity and care for one's self and participatory
membership in a non-hierarchical community.

[19]   Sing to the Dawn opens with the young protagonist, Dawan,
receiving from her village school teacher the unexpected news that she
and not her brother, the top male student of the class, has won the
scholarship to pursue higher education in the City School. Because of
the social and economic opportunities that come to her with this award,
Dawan is singled out for spearheading the changes her Marxist school
teacher has envisioned for the villagers. She is expected to bring back
to the villagers not only modern knowledge and technological tools ("how
to raise new crops and use better fertilizers," 17) but new ways of
analyzing and demystifying the socioeconomic institutions that
perpetuate inequities in the village. Notable among the institutions she
must challenge are the land ownership and revenue systems which
routinely cause lands and labors of the poor to be seized by feudal
landlords who have now accumulated capital. In the words of the
schoolteacher, if the scholarship-winner wants to be useful to her own
people, she must acquire from progressive intellectuals of the City
school a new critical perspective, the ability "to think, to perceive
what is wrong with the society, to analyze and understand the rules
which create these injustices . . . "(32).

[20]   Although she is educated in the intellectual tradition of
dialectical analysis by her school teacher, Dawan is depicted as being
unable to move forward in the path of revolutionary social change until
her grandmother steps into the enterprise of sending her to the city.
The school teacher is one of a new breed of urban Asian men influenced
by radical strands of modern European thought. He has traveled to the
village to organize at the grassroots against rural inequities. His
class-centered analysis is, however, limited by an elite male
perspective that fails to take into account the specificities of how
gender biases intersect with class, and what village women must combat
in order to become agents of liberation. The novel both complements and
contrasts the teachers bird's eye view of villagers' oppressions with
the knowledges of village women. It depicts the oppositional wisdom of a
multiply-marginalized villager, an illiterate and aged woman. Through
her portrayal of Dawan's aged grandmother, the modern author
symbolically revivifies progressive legacies of women's conceptual
mobility and adaptation. She attempts to draw these legacies out of a
collective/ personal memory overrun by the notion that progress
constitutes a teleological movement away from the rural past toward a
modern metropolitan future. Since the character of Grandma forms a
symbolic bridge between the progressive pasts and the future of women,
it also counteracts the dichotomy of static rural tradition and dynamic
urban modernity presented by the novel's didactic narrative.

[21]   Grandma "ha[s] a way of sensing things"(38). She is the first one
at home to pry out of Dawan the facts that the girl has won a
scholarship but that her brother and bosom companion, Kwai, sorely
begrudges his defeat by her. Grandma then inspires women to mobilize
against the patriarchal figures--the brother, the father, the monk in
the local Buddhist temple--who obstruct Dawan's progress. She urges
Dawan's mother to break her habit of ventriloquizing her husband's
sexist biases and take independent charge of preparing for her
daughter's journey to the city. She also breathes into the girl herself
the empowering insight that women's courage to stand up to patriarchal
bullies like Dawan's father wells up from deep within the wombs that
produce these "big fierce [men]"(132). In these and other actions,
Grandma clearly represents the modern-educated expatriate author's
effort to recall grassroots traditions of women's activism,
self-definition, and participatory group formation.

[22]   The basis of Grandma's activism on behalf of her grand-daughter
is a non-individualist and relational notion of feminine self. She
indirectly advises Dawan that to win over her father she must temper her
courage with the recognition that his ferocity stems in part from the
"burdens . . . [and] worries" the impoverished peasant has borne (133).
Grandma's principle of compassionate opposition counteracts the
Orientalist stereotype, also present in the novel, that unenlightened
Asian men tend to be despotic and ought to be rejected by women seeking
progress. Instead, the principle is shown to enable rural women's
bonding with men who also suffer diverse forms of oppression, such as
poverty and classist exploitation. Following Grandma's lead, Dawan wins
over to her cause not only her brother and companion, Kwai, but the
overbearing father. Later in the novel, Dawan's father is shown to be
strongly supporting his daughter's emancipatory vision "to do great
things for [them] all . . . the village, and the country, even the
world"(137). Practicing this non-individualist philosophy of
collectivizing the community against various kinds and levels of
oppression, Dawan finally brings about a re-grouping of villagers across
gender lines. On the eve of her departure, men and women alike gather on
her doorstep; they symbolically converge on the goals of acknowledging
the dignity of the female individual and looking forward to her
visionary leadership of society.

[23]   Still, the novel does not present a utopian vision of a community
homogenized on women's causes, nor an unqualified affirmation of the
collectivist ethos of compassionate opposition. It shows that women who
try to self-actualize and claim equal membership in making communal
history must continually strategize in old and newly-acquired ways
against dominant communitarian agendas that attempt to erase or coopt
their individualities. For example, there is no indication that Dawan
succeeds in quelling the ferocity of all patriarchs who, like her
father, react against economic and social oppressions by clinging to the
last bastion of their privilege, possessive authority over family and
community women. Posing an odd contrast to the communal assembly at the
novel's close is an earlier scene. This depicts Dawan's schoolmate,
Vichai, brutally attacking his own rebellious sister, Bao, for her
support of Dawan's aspiration for a life independent of patriarchal
control. To celebrate the rare opportunity Dawan has earned of "flying
to a bigger world" free of impositions by brothers and husbands, Bao
permits Dawan to free one of the few caged birds she herself is vending.
When Vichai learns of this, he attacks Bao on the charge that her whim
will cause financial hardship for their family of impoverished pavement
vendors as Dawan is unable to pay for the bird. But his plea of
disciplining Bao in the cause of the collective good of the family turns
out to be a cover for reactionary masculinism. As Bao is quick to note,
Vichai grows angry because women like herself and Dawan assert their
individual self-worth. This threatens his control over the one thing he
owns, the birds he 'caught' and the women these symbolize. This episode
implies not only that the approach of compassionate opposition will not
work in all cases, but that its underlying principle of placing the
collective over an individual's good needs to be rethought in regard to
women's well-being. The criteria for the collective good may well be
determined by dominant men like Vichai who want to stifle germinal
efforts of self-definition by women like Bao.

[24]   If malevolent patriarchs like Vichai, whose viciousness is
exacerbated by social inequalities in the present, stand outside the
influence of Dawan's vision, so does their temporal opposite in the
novel's map of patriarchy, the Buddhist monk who keeps the gate of the
community's spiritual past. Through her feminist depictions of
malevolent and benevolent men, Mingfong Ho scrupulously avoids
romanticizing the supposedly resistive knowledges of underprivileged or
unmodernized people. Earlier in the narrative we see this monk's
customary "gentleness" turn to authoritarian recalcitrance when Dawan
tries to marshal to her cause his paternal authority over villagers. He
reminds Dawan that her spiritual self will attain fulfillment and
Nirvana only if she strives to rise "beyond" profane time, when
suffering is inevitable, into sacred; it is pointless learning how to
achieve material improvements in lives and times that must pass when all
that is really valuable to know is not out there but in his "tiny
temple"(94). To an extent, the monk stands for the nativist who wants to
impose on the woman a static spiritual identity that signifies the
timeless inner core of the community. But the scene resists a monolithic
reading. Mingfong Ho presents not simply a pedagogic situation that the
subordinated disrupts, but a polemical one. She pits a static against a
dynamic vision of time, and ends the scene in a breakdown of
communication that unsettles both parties. Dawan is embittered that she
fails to communicate with her spiritual father, and the monk slightly
saddened that such a "good-hearted" follower should rebel against his
concerned guidance. This mutual sense of failed communication is
conveyed through a poignant metaphorical image: "for a brief moment a
glint of sunlight on his smoothly shaven skull seemed to catch and
reflect the shiny tears from the young girl's face"(99). The scene
underscores the intellectual struggles women face as they cultivate a
purposeful way of understanding their roles in historical time--seeing
themselves as transformers of oppressive social and cultural
formations--and realize that their moral rationality has become
incommensurable with the ritual reasoning that is presented to them as
the core of their heritage of faith. It also sets the stage for a
response. This response once again comes from Grandma. She implicitly
argues that when women embody faith they rework the dichotomous male
understanding of religious morality that separates the sacred/ ascetic
realm from the profane/ worldly one. The implication is that the woman
adapts spiritual sensibilities and rituals of faith to the dynamic
ethical purposes of empowering herself against manipulation and
reconstructing her community.

[25]   In characterizing the growth of progressive spiritual awareness
in women, Grandma invokes a central Buddhist symbol of spiritual
permanence, the lotus. But she presents the lotus in temporal and
spatial movement. She suggests that women must be lotuses that
"endlessly . . . unfold" across the inside and outside, the village and
city and, by implication, cultural memories and modernities. This means
that women self-actualize and grow resistant to gendered oppressions
only when they cease to be afraid of newnesses, of what lie "outside"
the circles of familiar time and space (cultural and religious customs,
homes and temples) in which they are placed. Women ought to remain
conceptually mobile because no singular cultural space or time affords
freedom from patriarchal institutions. In important ways, Grandma is a
didactic portrayal that depicts the combination of knowledges
progressive village women carry in them but must also acquire. Her words
imply that custom-bound women such as herself should draw upon the
"future drive"(Bhabha, "Race, Time," 201) that inheres in many women's
histories of survival and empowerment. This is the drive to select from
and adapt newly-acquired ideas and tools to empowering legacies from the
past. The larger implication is that only when women refrain from a
supremacist affirmation of one communal tradition and its culture of
struggle are they able to avoid the risk of compromising their
emancipatory visions. When they do not, they very well may be complying
with family and community traditions manipulated by malevolent and
benevolent powers.

[26]   In the novel's feminist schemata, visionary Grandmas from the
past see the full potential of their legacy realized through the
unprecedented opportunities modern offspring get for thinking
cross-culturally about revolutionary change. The first of these is the
scholarship that comes to the village girl and indicates the
democratization of economic resources in a modern nation. It also shows,
however, that capitalist distribution systems limit the democratic
process by maintaining urban centers and rural peripheries of economic
privilege. As Koh Tai Ann points out, only one scholarship reaches the
village, and causes rifts in the family and the community (69). What the
single scholarship does afford Dawan is access to innovative
intellectual resources for challenging the capitalist hierarchy that
intersects with and rigidifies existing feudal patriarchal inequalities.
The essential complement to Dawan's lessons from the past is her
educational travel to an urban locus through which global cultures flow,
and carry both hierarchy-forming and liberation epistemologies
cultivated in other sites of struggle. These include Marxism and,
implicitly, Western feminism which clearly informs this novel. Equally
important, however, is the symbolic return of the new woman, Dawan, to
rural Asia to rethink and re-contextualize her hybrid modern and
traditional knowledges.

[27]   Sing to the Dawn presents a symbolic assessment of the temporal
and spatial conflicts rural-tradition-bound women negotiate as they
attempt to embody the ideology of urban progress in rapidly modernizing
Asian contexts such as Singapore. It endorses the unprecedented
intellectual and economic opportunities for resisting old and new social
hierarchies that urban growth and ancillary global flows bring to women.
But it transforms the very notion of 'progress' from a teleological to a
cumulative temporal-spatial process--an on-going cross-fertilizing and
cross-critique of familiar and new theories and practices of gendered
liberation. By contrast, "My Country and My People," the poem I briefly
discussed above, overtly repeats nationalist ideology. The elite Chinese
author's ability to critique her dominant identity seems severely
restricted, not only by the race and class privileges this identity
gives her in Singapore but also because of her location within a
repressive regime that censors dissent. In this respect, her location is
in contrast to the expatriate Mingfong Ho's geographical and political
positioning. Lee Tzu Pheng appears to concede to hegemonization also by
writing about nationalism in the poetic form. Poetry, unlike the novel,
constitutes the canon of Singapore literature. Nonetheless Lee speaks,
as Ann Brewster rightly notes, in an "ambivalent" voice (836). She
covertly re-tells Singapore's past and present to selectively concur
with and differ from her poem's dominant narrative. What she aims is to
find her voice and place her body in the history of national-urban
progress.

[28]   The work reveals that its author is deeply invested in her
people's struggle for decolonization. She indicates that her own
life-story is inextricable from her people's. Neither her people nor she
has had the "comfort of [their] preferences" because conflictual
processes of domination, subordination, and reaction--colonization,
nationalism, modernization, reactionary traditionalism-- have impinged
upon the lives and times of all Singapore people. While she stakes her
loyalty to her people, however, she also asserts right at the outset
that her kind of patriotism is at odds with "fanciful" constructions of
pasts and futures.

My country and my people
are neither here nor there, nor
in the comfort of my preferences,
If I could even choose.
At any rate, to fancy is to cheat;
and, worse than being alien or
subversive without cause,
is being a patriot of the will.

It is soon evident that she is re-telling history through re-defining
the terms of her affiliation with her countrypeople. Being the "daughter
of a better age," a Singaporean woman learning the lessons of modernity
and progress, she was trained in English books. But this also was the
day of militant anti-colonial nationalism, when "those foreign devils/
whose books [she] was being taught to read" were being cut down
everywhere. Thus, although she entered the new Lion City (Singapore)
with the "privilege" of a modern education, she was "sent . . . back
fast to [her] shy forbearing family." She succumbed to the contradiction
patriarchal nationalism bred and returned to village traditions in her
'authentic' Chinese home. There, she faced a rigidified patriarchy:

The city remained a distant way,
but I had no land to till;
only a duck that would not lay,
and a runt of a papaya tree,
which also turned out to be male.

If she does reaffirm the ideology of a new nation that arises from
decolonization, then, the narrator also reflects on this ideology and
why it must be reworked. She begins to understand that her person and
body are contradictorily used as symbolic labor in the patriarchal
discursive economy. On the basis of this partial knowledge of
manipulation, she sets about reinterpreting her role in the nation.

[29]   The poet reclaims the privileges of her education and class
status and "drives," in real and metaphorical terms, on urban highways
of opportunity. But she seems to suggest that the city too does not
offer her a supportive community, one that is free of sexual oppression:
"They built milli-mini flats/ for a multi-mini society,/ the chiselled
profile in the sky/ took on a lofty attitude . . ." The implication is
that the lofty phallic profiles of modern urban institutions give not
much more room than the reinvented traditional home to her progressive,
gendered individuality. It seems that the symbolic phallus is ubiquitous
in all the cultural times and locations that surround her. In the course
of the personal/ communal historical narrative she presents, however,
the narrator still searches across her past and her present, her urban
and rural experiences to find ideas and tools that will enable her
participatory agency in determining her nation's future.

[30]   The last stanza, which claims citizenship by asking from
neighbors "recognition of her kind"(quoted above), is multi-level in
meaning. In the obvious sense, it reproduces the dominant ideology of
multiracialism by making visible and overt the different "kinds" of
racial cultural groups dwelling in Singapore. Propounded by the People
Action Party, this ideology tailors the principle of racial pluralism
that had thrived in British Singapore, under entrepot trading, to the
interests of the nation-state (Chua, 101-108). If we set Lee's claim of
citizenship against the historical narrative that precedes it, we also
note that the reproduction of multiracial nationalism veils a feminist
voice that criticizes the exclusions this communitarian nationalist
framework enforces. The poem presents an argument about how the kind of
citizen the narrator is can achieve recognition and participation in the
nation. What she demands is that the nation be reconfigured in a way so
that she is known not only as a Chinese citizen with her own customs,
but as a gendered Chinese citizen. She must be un-circumscribed and
un-threatened by masculinist "runts" of frozen traditions, and other
such phallocratic "lofty" forms of sexual and psychic domination.
Although this vision is gendered, it refrains from a binaristic feminist
stance that interprets women's progress into citizenship as also the
rejection of (Orientalized) traditions of despotic patriarchal
communities. The vision includes all those like-minded countrywomen and
men who want to join. The narrator reaffirms in the last lines

My people, and my country,
are you, and you my home.

[31]   In the stanza previous to the last, the narrator invoked the
feelings of racial and cultural tolerance that had once existed in
Singapore. As she put it : "I grew up in China's mighty shadow,/ with my
gentle brown-skinned neighbours . . ." But she also implied that
Singaporeans had progressed beyond the discrete composition of the
pluralistic colonial society in which different ethnic groups had
peacefully co-existed "because crossing over racial lines was near
impossible"(Chua 102); post-colonial Singaporeans strive for a feeling
of community among racial groups. In the last stanza, the narrator calls
for revivifying the pre-existing organic spirit of tolerance in this new
multiracial community-as-nation. But also implicit here is her doubt
about the ambivalent attitudes of her "fence-sitting neighbours." She
attempts to speak to the feelings of racial and cultural alienation that
underlie this ambivalence, and thereby to dispel the tensions riddling
Singapore's reinvented multiracialism. Moreover, for the feminist
nationalist narrator, speaking to the common interests of communal
progress and racial harmony is not enough. She substantially
reinterprets the legacy of tolerance and its significance in modern
Singapore by introducing in it her idea of
feminist-democracy-as-country-and-home.

[32]   Although this elite Chinese woman's depiction of a feminist
citizen is more restricted in its vision of social justice than Mingfong
Ho's class-sensitive reflections on revolutionary feminist change, the
two writers come together in taking an important first step in the cause
of feminist nationalism. Both Lee Tzu Pheng and Mingfong Ho depict how
women reconstruct themselves as active agents of history by becoming at
least partially aware of and resistant toward their oppressive dominant
identities, and how they try to build communities that support their
trans-temporal vision of the future. In the overarching ethical
objective of caring for oppressed female selves through resisting
binaristic identitarian commitments, they are joined by a different
category of female author, the commercial fiction-writer, Catherine Lim.

Between Masculine Ghosts Past and Present:
'Tradition' in Feminine Imagination

[33]   Like Lee Tzu Pheng, Catherine Lim holds a Ph.D. degree in
Linguistics. She has taught in schools and served as a high official in
Singapore's Curriculum Development Institute. She is best known,
however, for her mass-produced novels and short stories. These address
another strand of nationalist doctrine about Chinese Singaporean women.
They consider what is involved in women's attempts to reproduce a frozen
set of traditions while they also participate in the production of
progressivist capital. Lim is a highly successful writer who thrives,
like other commercial producers of culture, on instrumentalizing and
packaging for entertainment popular desires and anxieties (Jameson,
130). The fiction she produced through the '80's overtly responds to the
growth of sexist neo-Orientalism in Singapore. The works assuage
prevailing cultural anxieties about the social and sexual autonomy
college-educated Chinese women were commanding, and the decline this was
causing in the fecundity of their elite ethnic bodies. They pit the
decadent materialism and threatened desexualization of educated and
upwardly mobile Chinese women against the social and sexual
'reliability' of rural females and women of bygone days, who kept the
homes and bred the progeny of virile patriarchs. But nested within Lim's
skillful "management" and repression (Jameson, 141) of male nationalist
schizophrenia are elements of another narrative about modern-educated
women's critical engagement with the temporality of native traditions.

[34]   In recent years, Lim has spoken out against the lack of "freedom
of expression in political debate, in the arts and the media" in
Singapore, and how this is symptomatic of the "emotional estrangement
between the ruler and the ruled"(Latif). Her literary works are related
to the growth of these political views. In effect, they explore how
modern-educated women can work across the "emotional" divide and speak
freely for and to the Asian traditions the rulers attempt to revive and
uphold. Her fiction suggests that for women preserving heritages and
practicing the traditional self does not comprise memorized routines of
'timeless' values and commitments. Tradition-bound women constantly
revivify as well as redefine habitual ways of relating the female self
and body to its family and community. The objective still is a
mainstream Singaporean one, of preserving--not revolutionizing--family
and community structures in a context where both men and women cope with
rapid material and conceptual changes. Her first novel, Serpent's Tooth
(1982) is illuminating in this respect because its protagonist, Angela,
cultivates a dynamic understanding of traditional identity beneath her
fragmented modern-traditional self. I discuss this work and connect it
with some short stories Lim also wrote around this period (late 1970's
to 1990's).

[35]   On the dominant level, the novel constructs a neat
temporal-spatial binary of moral and decadent Chinese femininities.
Angela, a consumerist new woman who is the wife of a
businessman-aspiring-to-be-bureaucrat and an entrepreneur in her own
right, is openly blamed for destroying the timeless moral harmony
reigning over rural Chinese female spaces, emblematized by her aged
mother-in-law. Living in an exclusive private residence and driving
around in an imported Toyota Corolla, Angela performs memorized routines
of filial piety and kin-keeping, but utterly fails to connect with her
rural and Chinese-custom-bound relatives. The narrative clearly blames
her for causing fragmentation in the family. She is shown to be
identifying Old Mother with a valueless, past way of life filled with
numerous irrationalities and superstitions. She denies the old woman the
right to participate in raising the children and determining the
family's future, her argument being that any association her children
have with their grandmother's erroneous thoughts will retard the
children's education and upward mobility. For betraying her venerable
heritage, Angela also is fittingly reprimanded in course of the dominant
narrative. Ancestral spirits haunt her dreams--of her dead father-in-law
who will not recognize her dutiful rituals of respect (29), and of the
rural patriarchal home that turns into a graveyard (2-3).

[36]   In this respect, the novel merely repeats a stock theme that
appears in best-selling short stories by Lim. One of her early
successes, "The Mother-in-Law's Curse" (later reprinted under the title,
"Or Else the Lightening of God") depicts how the Westernized Margaret is
cursed for her arrogance by her mother-in-law. Later, she is haunted, in
her dreams and in waking hours, by both filial remorse and fears about
the supernatural consequences of the curse. Driven to the brink of
losing both her sanity and the child she bears, Margaret finally
succumbs to the authority of her mother-in-law and her magical beliefs.
Another short story, "The Journey," narrates how a wealthy, professional
Chinese man who learns that he is terminally ill chooses to leave the
elegant abode of his materialistic and individualist wife to return, in
search of physical and emotional solace, to elderly female relatives in
the village. It is clear from these narratives that Lim markets her
books by capitalizing on a particular nativist-patriarchal desire that
pervades the rapidly changing context of modern Singapore, the desire to
reappropriate woman as a cultural sign into the transcendent roles of
keeper of a reified traditional Chinese home and breeder of a (male)
progeny. Moreover, this centripetal pull of traditions, as defined by
patriarchal nationalism, is even stronger in the prevailing ideology of
female sexuality. Modernized women are shown to be decadent and
symbolically desexualized. In the bitingly ironic short story, "The
Awakening," Lim narrates how Peony pitifully fails in all her anxious
efforts (which include investing in French negligees) to rekindle her
aging Chinese husband's sexual desires because she is being soundly
defeated at this game by the voluptuous Filipino maid. The story
provides an ironic outlet for the ruling elite's anxiety that female
fecundity resides only on the ethnic-sexual peripheries of Singapore, in
the racially tainted bodies of lowly Malays and Filipinos. But it also
implicitly exhorts elite Chinese women to reclaim their sexual energies
and so regain their rightful positions in the racialized hierarchy of
female sexualities in Singapore.

[37]   Serpent's Tooth, like "The Awakening," reproduces the
center-periphery model of female sexualities. But other strands of the
narrative introduce a significant alteration in the reproduction,
capturing the author's bifurcated perspective on Chinese female
sexuality. Angela's husband is lured away by their rural Malay maid,
Mooi Lan; but Angela herself and her consumerist individualism are not
blamed for this loss. The novel suggests that her husband's promiscuity
is inherited from age-old customs of polygamous liaisons and concubinage
that pervade Chinese patriarchy, and were rampant in Singapore until the
institution of the Women's Charter (Hill and Fee, 144). This important
point is made through the depiction of one of Angela's nightmares in
which ghosts from the past come to haunt her, as if preying on the
modern woman's independent existence. In this central episode of the
novel, Angela is visited by the vision of the ancestral bed of her
parents-in-law. On this bed, her father-in-law's body is twice replaced,
first by a profligate grand-uncle's who is raping a Malay Muslim maid,
and then, by her own husband's who is "locked in pleasure" with her
maid, Mooi Lan (107). In this instance, Angela is by no means a
conventional nationalist who gazes with Orientalist eyes on the sexual
barbarities--the wild masculinities and exploited
femininities--pervading her Chinese past. She suffers the same form of
sexual domination, and moreover, must cope with it on her own, without
the female support groups that existed in rural Chinese spaces. This
lack of a support group stems, on the one hand, from the nuclear
framework Angela has sought to impose on her family life by casting
'backward' and uneducated relatives onto its periphery. On the other
hand, it arises from Angela's partial disagreement with Chinese women's
traditional tactics of resisting male promiscuity. These tactics are
invoked by Old Mother.

[38]   The only instance in which Old Mother openly bonds with Angela is
when she offers supportive counsel about dealing with her own son's,
Angela's husband's, profligacy. Old Mother recognizes, before the
monogamy-oriented Angela admits so to herself, that Mooi Lan is a
"snake" who must be disposed of (140-141). Through Angela's dream, the
narrative symbolically suggests that Angela herself values this
ancestral legacy of resistant wisdom symbolized in Old Mother's counsel;
for she sees Old Mother as a supportive figure in that central nightmare
about old and new profligate patriarchs. Still, Angela cannot fully
endorse the form of resistance Old Mother represents. In her dream,
Angela is discomfited to see that the old woman silently comes in to
clear away the stained sheets after Grand-Uncle's rape of the servant
girl. Old Mother's dream behavior suggests that what underlies her
covert attempts to bond with Angela in organizing resistance against the
man's irresponsibility is acquiescence to the patriarchal structure that
institutionalizes male promiscuity, and blind faith in this structure's
stability. This faith stems from women's habitual lack of the
opportunity to exert choice. The new generation professional woman,
however, does have the right opportunities for economic and, at least
partial, social independence. Concomitantly, she has cultivated an
independent sense of sexual dignity. Therefore, Angela is uncomfortable
with Old Mother's acquiescence to a social structure that
institutionalizes the sexual degradation of women. Because Old Mother's
form of resistance fails to engage this structure it is, in Angela's
view, limited at best. Angela symbolically takes a step beyond Old
Mother's partially progressive female legacy of collective survival and
suffering. She claims control over her own experience of sexual
exploitation by selling the ancestral bed immediately after she gets
this nightmare. Catherine Lim's depiction of Angela's partial
disagreement with the resistive traditions Old Mother carries poses a
contrast to Mingfong Ho's celebratory revivification of progressive
female Chinese legacy. Lim exposes the strategic ways that women learn
to be trans-temporally mobile to improve their own and the community's
conditions. She shows that they evaluate and selectively discard
oppressive traditions, they draw on and also add to enabling legacies of
women's resistance whenever they get the opportunity to exert that choice.

[39]   The symbolism of the ancestral bed in Catherine Lim's fiction is
critical to understanding Angela's response to Old Mother's legacy of
resistance. The bed is a recurrent and ambivalent sign in many stories
by Lim. Quite often, it is identified with a dying breed of Chinese
matriarchs, specifically, with their fecund bodies that demand social
authority because of the male progeny these have produced. The new
generation of modern-educated Chinese women violate this authority by
commodifying the beds as exotic relics of the past, and thus underscore
their own materialistic decadence as well as the possibility of decline
in their procreative energies. However, on close inspection, stories
about the bed ("A Bed: A life," "Monster") also suggest that the
ancestral bed is a dynamic, not frozen, symbol of how Chinese female
sexuality survives and is collectively nurtured by generations of women.
In "A Bed: A Life," Chan Ah Keow's four-poster "absorb[s] the blood of
her birth, her reaching womanhood, her being broken into"(The Best of
Catherine Lim, 137). On it, she is suckled; she joins her sisters in
making body pads out of rice paper when they start to menstruate, and
storing these beneath the four-poster for "communal use"; she is raped
by a profligate Chinese man; and, on her wedding night, she is
camouflaged as a virgin by a resourceful grandmother (who supplies her
with pig's blood for this purpose). Defying the aversion her modern
offspring show for the bed that carries these "terrible stories of sweat
and pain [and] . . . dark superstitions from the past," Chan Ah Keow
clings to the memories of collective nurturance it evokes. She strives
to revivify the dignity these memories give to her body. She dies in
contentment only after she is brought back from the immaculate modern
hospital to this bed which reeks with "sweat, urine, saliva, vomit"(139,
133, 142).

[40]   Angela's dream of the ancestral bed in Serpent's Tooth does give
symbolic value to the tradition of communal nurturance of female
sexuality by including Old Mother as a supportive figure. But the novel
also suggests that women like Angela who cultivate a sense of individual
sexual and social worth restore themselves to dignity by attempting to
change histories of degradation and domination, not by merely learning
to survive within the seemingly stable social structures these histories
reproduce. Tactics of survival within oppressive structures do not
exhaust these women's claims to resistance and agency. Modern-educated
Singapore women who seek to maintain traditional family and communal
ties are portrayed to be adapting the epistemic positions acquired from
new intellectual influences to inherited notions of social stability and
the collective good. Angela's assertion of individual self-worth takes a
non-sovereign form. She acts according to Old Mother's guidelines,
without explicitly acknowledging this, in trying to resolve the problems
in her family life. She gets rid of the Malay maid and refuses to blame
her husband for his promiscuity. Moreover, she stands by her husband
when he is frustrated in his professional ambitions, and even takes some
of the blame for this on herself. However, she is depicted, on a
meta-narratival level, as being critically aware of and politicized
against patriarchal sexual and social oppressions.

[41]   The narrative of her life is en-framed by a commentary in
Angela's own voice, which perhaps captures the author's own bifurcated
response to the story of an upwardly-mobile Chinese new woman she
markets. In this voice Angela declares that her family is in a "mess"
which she alone can "clean"(2). She also says that she cannot afford to
"remember," live in fear of, the paternal ghosts who accusingly haunt
her dreams (3). The implication is that she must forge ahead to
re-stabilize herself and her family on her own terms. The large question
posed by the novel seems to me to be exactly this, how the stability of
Chinese family life can be preserved by women whose ways of knowing
themselves in the present and thinking of the collective future have
altered. The answer appears to be that women must critically redefine
the criteria of the stable family. They must simultaneously evaluate and
select from inherited and new ideas about women's survival and
self-empowerment in patriarchal family contexts.

Feminist Agency and Cross-Border Dialogue: An Afterword

[42]   Above, I consider the productions of three writers who are
unequally reflexive toward power structures in their feminist visions of
social change. If Mingfong Ho's and Lee Tzu Pheng's come together in the
quest for different forms and degrees of change in cultural, social, and
economic structures, Catherine Lim's vision resists fundamental
structural change. All want to preserve the overarching form of the
heterosexual, ethnically and economically dominant Chinese family of
Singapore. But they also underscore how modern women recast this form
from within. My objectives in juxtaposing these works are two. Firstly,
I have shown the extents of the progressive visions, and the factors
that set limits on these. As I have illustrated, Singapore women's
emancipatory visions not only are constrained by the social and economic
privileges that impose psychological blindness on subjects. In some
instances they are restrained by choice. The subjects attempt to
conserve communal heritages, and to partially align themselves with
'countrypeople' who also struggle for this conservation against the
manipulations of communal memory that accompany cultural colonization
(during and after political colonies). Secondly, I have tried to
underscore where the writers share common ground. They garner from the
everyday lives of modern Singapore women a trans-temporal future drive.
This constitutes the specific form of feminist challenge modern
Chinese-Singaporean women thinkers pose to the gendered temporality of
anti-colonial ethnic nationalism.

[43]   As a whole, these literary works underscore the point I made at
the outset, that when modern Singapore women speak for communal
liberation and progress, they substantially redefine the constitutive
terms of the ideals. In this light, it is useful to re-consider the
question with which I began the discussion and think through its
adequacy for this and similar explorations of feminist histories. It
seems to me that these women's works have demonstrated what is
misleading about the question itself, and how it ought to be rethought.
I began by asking about the extent to which a woman can claim agency
without discarding her commitments to her national cultural community.
To frame the question in this way really is to look at the problematic
of feminist agency and national culture from an either/or perspective.
Driving the binaristic perspective is skepticism about a woman's ability
to think and act for self-empowerment so long as she abides by the roles
and ideals dictated by male-dominant national culture. If we are to
arrive at a notion of agency that accounts for the practical and
conceptual struggles women undergo to recast such ideals and rethink
their communal roles, we must revise the investigative query. We must
ask : To what extent is a nationalist woman able to claim the agency to
rethink what her commitment to the community means, and accordingly
redefine the terms of her participation in communal history ? This
revised question enables a fruitful investigation of the various
community-centered feminist claims that arise in contexts of
decolonization. It permits us to consider in what ways women intervene
in the dominant national episteme and which factors constrain or
otherwise limit these re-visions.

[44]   In closing, I stress what the significance is for cross-border
feminist debates of recognizing how different forms of feminist agency
arise out of dominant nationalist subject positions. This recognition
can produce more fruitful exchanges, across historical divides, on the
common struggle for social justice if we take note of both its
implications. On the one hand, it reinforces the point many postcolonial
feminist thinkers make, that it is highly problematic to search for "a
transparent or transcendent feminism . . . a space outside . . .
patriarchal formations"(Grewal, 11). Feminist consciousness arises at
different intersections of sexual, racial, imperial, and class
formations, and always struggles against interpellation by dominant
discourses. Progressive selves are circumscribed by different privileges
or their lack--which incites desire--and different loyalties. It is
critical to the enhancement of cross-cultural feminist solidarity that
we do not overlook the factors that circumscribe agency, or seek an
essential legacy of women's liberation. For if we do so, we impose
centers and peripheries on women's histories, tending to separate those
who are always on the path of emancipation from others supposedly
victimized by despotic patriarchal regimes.

[45]   A recognition of some forms feminist agency takes in
anti-colonial cultures, on the other hand, also reinforces why the
postcolonial model of interpellation-and-response itself is only
partially adequate for understanding different feminist struggles and
achievements. To discern these differences, and share concepts and tools
between women's histories, we must be attentive to what motivates women
in their advocacy for emancipation and how these motivations change with
the context of domination-and-struggle. We must first acknowledge that
an at least partial moral self-consciousness motivates political
struggles, enabling subjects to selectively "break and reform ties to
ideology"(Sandoval, 15) as they set objectives for their advocacy. We
also must distinguish between the different assumptions, ideals, and
aspirations that drive moral consciousness in diverse contexts of
struggle. This means that we must be alert to where and when a woman's
aspirations for personal emancipation and improvement are mediated by
her responsibility toward her community's on racial and cultural
freedom, and to the ways that this sense of responsibility inflects her
own liberation thought. This is not to assume that a loyal woman's
objectives will be tailored to patriarchal visions of liberation, and
constitute a predominantly "contributive history"(Jayawardena 261). It
is to explore, as I have sought to in this study of Singaporean women's
voices, the uneven ways in which women re-determine the objectives of
their contribution to their community's ideas about liberation and
progress.

[46]   My hope is that this study of struggles for epistemic
determination in Singaporean women's literature paves the way to further
cross-border dialogues on feminist emancipatory visions. The way we, as
feminist thinkers and researchers, can guard against imposing
theoretical models of feminist agency, or its lack, on women's voices is
by collaboratively examining how progressive subjects re-orient specific
constellations of oppressive thought and practice, and where and why
they meet their limits. What are called for, then, are
conceptualizations of feminist agency that both focus on specific
contexts and also initiate broader comparisons between contextual
histories. These comparativist dialogues will reveal the specificities
of feminist agency in different contexts. Moreover, they should enable
mutual critiques of the factors that constrain feminist emancipatory
thought in different contexts, or drive women to restrain their efforts
to reform dominant ideology. It seems to me that a shared critique such
as this of diverse women's struggles for epistemic agency will
substantially advance the cross-border pursuit of feminist justice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am grateful to Robyn Wiegman, Ketu Katrak, and
Katherine King for thoroughly reading and commenting on an earlier draft
of this essay. A version of this work was presented at the session
"Feminism in Time" held at the annual convention of the Modern Language
Association (December 2000).

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ESHA NIYOGI DE teaches Women's Studies and English at University of
California, Los Angeles. She has published articles in the fields of
Singaporean, Indian, and British literature and film. She is the
co-editor of Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of
South and Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, 2002). She is at work
on two books, including one that focuses on Singapore.

Copyright <../download.html> ©2002 Ann Kibbey. All Rights Reserved
Worldwide.

 

Copyright <../download.html> ©2002 Ann Kibbey.
 

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