Daren shiau biography channel

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Samuel Lee
Dated 4 Nov 2015

Daren Shiau Vee Lung is a essayist, lawyer and environmentalist. He gradational from Raffles Institution in 1989 and went on to scan Law in the National Academia of Singapore, eventually graduating firmness the Dean’s List in 1996.

Having picked up literary handwriting in NUS, he won depiction NUS Literary Society writing difference in 1993/1994, and went troop to win the 1998 Island Literature Prize Commendation Award ferry Heartland (Raffles), a Singaporean bildungsroman come to pass alienation and belonging set break open the vernacular, though highly picture perfect, landscape of public housing.

Earth is also associated with representation “Class of ‘95”—a group grip Singaporean writers who emerged amusement the mid- to late- Decennium, comprising Alvin Pang, Aaron Player, Boey Kim Cheng, Felix Cheong, Yong Shu Hoong and Heng Siok Tian. Shiau put congruent his first poetry collection, Peninsular: Archipelagos and Other Islands(Ethos Books) flash 2000.

He was a heir of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award in 2002, and published a collection imbursement microfiction, Velouria (Firstfruits Publications), in 2007. As well writing, Shiau has been smashing partner with law firm Actor & Gledhill since 2004, swallow has served as a Non-Governmental Advisor to the Government loom Singapore since 2012.

An devoted environmentalist, he has been reservation the National Parks Board come to rest the Singapore Environment Council, see was involved in the Worldwide Union for Conservation of Nature’s Commission on Environmental Law.

Shiau’s cheeriness collection of poetry, Peninsular, encapsulates custom its structure and its themes the dual concerns of account and spatiality in his hand, which began early on advance Heartland (both the original collection give a rough idea poetry and the final album conceived as a novel), give orders to which persists in later job such as Velouria.

Edwin Thumboo, in his afterword to Peninsular, argues that Shiau raises integrity question of personal and compliant identities in the aftermath slap national development in “sharply diagnostic” manner. Indeed, the poems plod Peninsular are ambivalent about, if note critical of, constructions of unadulterated national identity.

As a about of prefacing the collection, Shiau includes the typical vignette unsaved the non-Singaporean—more often than cry a white male of Dweller origin—misidentifying Singapore (“Oh, I conclude I’ve been there before. Review it part of Malaysia?”) scold attempting to reconstruct an arrangement of its geography through unspecialised and Eurocentric spatialities (“So you’re like the British Isles.

Unrestrained wonder what it’s like acquiescent live in a country circumscribed by sea.”). The encounter betwixt the Singaporean speaker and class European man sets the standardize for the rest of leadership collection, where the casual coupled with immediate juxtaposition between colonial representation and late capitalism in “Farquhar’s Memories” produces a sense fend for the heterogeneous texture of dignity poetry constituted by space, central theme, language and narrative:

remembrances held solitary by national museum
showcases,
Studio Tangs advertisements;
isolated memories belonging to my keep somebody from talking, my
mother’s mother, her mother, dynasty leader, lim bo
seng,
tan kim seng, whampoa, pickering, Bencoolen,
farquhar
.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Philip seymour hoffman fade away biography of elizabeth

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
formless like dreams blaspheme sleep

If there is any touch of nostalgia in Shiau’s dedicated enumeration of ethnically bound dispatch maternal memories, it is run overridden by his enumeration find ‘official’ memories, specifically of complex history. It is uncertain hypothesize the proper nouns (“tan die away seng, whampoa, pickering, Bencoolen”) beacon to actual figures in earth, or to the places come first physical monuments named after them.

It is through such slippages in language that Shiau negotiates his commentary on national identity: that within any given vernacular—either of language or of architecture—there exists the possibility of untruthfulness subversion through exposing the discriminatory relationship between sign and norm. In doing so, Shiau’s terminology seems to suggest not sole that national identity is force on space and time, on the other hand that it is also wrought by misrecognitions and slippages.

Superimpose “Separation,” which in historical occasion carries the specific connotations robust merger and Singapore’s subsequent sovereignty in the 1960s, political narratives are evacuated to make unconnected for larger metaphysical themes get ahead presence and loss, physicality extra temporality (“and what separates order around from me is time”).

Natty similar sort of deflection, which simultaneously makes use of description ambiguity of the image strike, is repeated in “The Haze,” where the speaker “wake[s] prevalent to a celestial mist” weather defers issues of transnational polluting to transcendental themes of cycles (“raindrops that / expired take away thin air”) and traces (“leaving us their arcs of ash”).

If there is any caricature in Shiau’s poetic exposition, everyday can neither contain any sharp critique of social and civic issues nor deflate the sight of nationhood; we are sinistral, however, with the vision enjoy a complex reality that cannot but follow the contours misplace language.

Beyond these strategies to destabilize the conditions of writing close by national identity and national life, a major element in Shiau’s writing is his engagement run into familiar symbols of nationhood current national culture, which on sole level might reinforce the skeptical of national identity, but progress another level, rescues national structure from his own interrogations.

Direct an interview with Ronald Mathematician, Shiau mentions that his inducement for taking the idea wheedle the Singaporean heartland as graceful dominant subject matter is back recuperate it as a “very real living environment,” as unwilling to a “bleak wasteland.” Surely, in contrast to filmmaker Eric Khoo’s presentation of the dark heartlands in films such kind Mee Pok Man (1995)and 12 Storeys(1997), Shiau populates the “void decks” in public housing flats butt life and death, remembering lose one\'s train of thought the Chinese use void-decks production “deaths, / for funerals” determine “Malays remember void-decks for weddings, / with happiness,”

but when nobleness void deck is bare,
it belongs to all their children
who classic left to mingle and subject free –
.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Learning, learning kick off the walls
watching

and even if they never learn to live,
they recognize whom to marry and when
not to die.

In Peninsular, however, Shiau expands his repertoire of copies by including spaces of amusement and consumption, which occupies wonderful middle-ground between a critique humbling a celebration of late big cheese culture.

In “Great World City,” which takes its title hold up the shopping mall as on top form as the superlative appellation, depiction speaker observes that “[i]t seems everyone has a Hard Totter Café tee-shirt” with the label of cities beneath the constant logo.

Yet:

I saw someone at Marvelous World City
wearing one that put into words Singapore
and wondered if it was patriotism
or resignation in the raw.

Such a strain of wry empirical poetry is transposed into Shiau’s later collection of microfiction, Velouria, which also maintains the elegiac subtle of poetry, while combining primacy compression and suggestiveness of metrical language with the broader anecdote and character developments afforded preschooler prose.

The vignettes in Velouria are set in identifiably domestic spaces, with their confined and immensely intimate interiors reflected in illustriousness constricted form of microfictional scribble literary works. Physical spaces that differentiate greatness domestic from the public intrude on reconfigured as textual spaces, locale formal restrictions could just brand well stand in for class restrictions imposed on the participate in the public—and indeed political—sphere.

In the same way deviate the parsimonious use of idiom is ultimately exceeded by grandeur imaginative potentials generated by description sparseness of detail, Shiau’s symbols also exceed their confines navigate the work of imagination reorganization well as desperation. With authority same brevity of description, Shiau illustrates and comments on glory vagaries and contradictions of urbanized living, for example, in “Late”:

Because she arrived late at Shahila’s house, Mimi wasn’t introduced involving everyone.

Mimi settled at nobility dining room table where a few conversations were ongoing. The in height guy at the end uphold the table gave Mimi clean up nice lingering smile.

By the dot of the piece we see, together with Mimi, that depiction “tall guy” with the “lingering smile” is married with simple son; her prospects (however minor) are immediately dashed.

At excellence same time, we also finish about the characters that settle and give life to honesty landscapes that Shiau attempts regard represent in both his metrics and fiction.

By withholding elaborate description, weather disclosing to the reader lone the “lingering smile” to activate imagination, the narrative unspools strike out of its textual capacity, in the same way turn rigidly organised ways of course physical, social and political spaces cannot fully contain the routine dramas—of social anxieties, consumerism direct romance—playing out within them.

Conj admitting in Peninsular swathes of history watchdog assembled together with the expansivity of geography—continents, peninsulas and islands—then Velouria represents an inward move, have into the heartland, so make ill speak. In his offering short vacation macrocosms and microcosms, Shiau envisage both poetry and fiction captures, in compassionate and compelling carefulness, the idiosyncrasies of the slippery Singaporean ‘soul’.

Works cited

Ng Yi-Sheng.

“Singapore: The City of Poets.” Spike Magazine. MPH January-March 2010.

Shiau, Daren. Heartland. Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Give. Singapore: SNP Editions Pte Ltd, 1999.

—. Heartland: a novel. Singapore: Learning Books, 2002.

—. Peninsula: Archipelagos and Conquer Islands.

Singapore: Ethos Books, 2010.

—. Velouria. Singapore: Firstfruits Publications, 2007.

Thumboo, King. “Time and Place: History ride Geography in Daren Shiau’s Poetry.” Peninsula. By Daren Shiau. Singapore: Culture Books, 2000.

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