Written by Ada Cheong
Dated 18 Dec 2025

The Lion City where the Merlion spits pee. The land of milk and honey. The eye of the tiger, and the City of Dreams. In the words of Singapore’s migrant poets, the city is transformed into a space that is at once wondrous and unsettling. Their verses often veer into the strange, speculative and sensual, drawing on an irrealist aesthetic to describe their lives in Singapore. Interestingly, dreaming recurs as both mode and motif across this polyphonic body of work, forming a poetics through which the realities of migration and labour are (re)imagined.

In this essay, writer, researcher and advocate Ada Cheong traces this dreaming across the emergence of “migrant poetry” in 2004, its rise in 2014–2017, its peak in 2018–2021, and seeming decline in the last few years. In doing so, she explores two key questions: What is “migrant” poetry? And what does migrant poetry do? Through the study of their literary aesthetics, Ada argues that migrant poets perform a collective dreamwork. From articulating the precarity of the migrant dream, to creating spaces of empathy and activism, they use the act of writing to dream a better future into being.

/ TRACING THE DREAMING

/ ABOUT THE WRITER

Ada Cheong is a Singaporean writer, researcher, and advocate whose work is largely fuelled by midlife crisis and chronic burnout.

She completed her PhD in literature with the University of Exeter in 2024, and has previously taught undergraduate modules on critical theory in Exeter, as well as on environment and culture at NTU. Beyond the ivory tower, her foray into creative nonfiction began with the Manuscript Bootcamp in 2024. Driven by the inequalities of global warming, she continues to read and write about a cluster of topics that include: food systems, contemporary speculative fiction, and the culture and politics of the Capitalocene.

She is also a communications specialist in the nonprofit sector and now handles communications for TWC2, a Singaporean NGO that advocates for low-wage migrant workers in Singapore.

/ ABOUT THE ARTWORKS

Anchoring each section of this essay are scans and pictures of artworks made for Here & Elsewhere, an exhibition of art running from 18-25 January 2026 at the Visual Arts Centre, Dhoby Ghaut, created in community by migrant workers and Singapore residents over the course of a year. Through workshops where participants created side by side, the exhibition brings together different walks of life in Singapore, with works that weave language and image. These pieces reflect on belonging, the lives built in this country, and the memories carried from far away.