Stephanie Chan (b. 1987)
SELECTED POEMS
Back Again
Five holes in his T-shirt,
the haggard karang guni guy
pushes his bike on the leftmost side
between the double yellow lines,
as taxis slither past him.I admit I missed your diesel smell.
waking up to hear the mee pok auntie yell
as rush hour traffic on your highway swells
to the rhythms of reversing lorries.Above, the rain trees roll their eyes.
They know I can’t help but romanticise
everything I see and feel and hear:
it was just yesterday I just returned to you.I admit I liked that stranglehold
outside Changi Airport cold,
how your sticky arms never seem to let go,
as if you've always known
how I just really want to cuddle.I want to lie in bed and breathe
you in, hope you won't mind
my faded skin
from all those months I spent
snowed in, all those months spent
trying to blend in: you know I was
only compensating, living so far away.Will you take me back from
what I've become, taste of English
strangers still on my tongue,
from nights you could only imagine,
smell of American Spirit tobacco
still stuck to all my clothes.
(Believe me when I tell you
I will never start to smoke.)I want to lie naked in your field
of vision marked STATE LAND,
exposed to the ants and pigeons
and policemen who will quickly
pull me away while you sit and watch
and say why do you have to be so weird?
I told you this would happen.And I'll say it's a direct action
-slash performance art experiment
I saw in Berlin.I want to climb all your rambutan trees,
take grassroots polls from citizen monkeys
about the recent traffic jams along the BKE
and how it's affecting their work-life balance.
The monkeys will pat my head and laugh at me. They know my excitement is just temporary, /
that I'm still high on your humidity
and your sweet belacan perfume.They know that in a week or so,
your stranglehold will start to dig
into my throat and the sunshine
will start to sting: you'll tell me
I've changed, that my accent's
gotten strange, and I will remember
why I left.
But for now,
when your East Coast coconut palm
does that thing with its fingers
on the back of the setting sun,
my wires get crossed
and all memory gets lost,
and all I can do is watch
as their shapes entwine
and pull me all the way back in
Merlion Poem
(with apologies to Amanda Chong, Alfian Sa’at and Edwin Thumboo)
You came out of the sea,
skin dappled scales of sunlight;
riding crests, surfing waves, thrashing
through the waters of Development and Progress,
Droplets of saltwater
cascading off
your shining muscular torso,
you shook your magnificent head
from side to side
like a dog after a bath
but in slow motion
because you are too dignified
to do it otherwise.Oh Merlion,
Now you perch, resplendent,
on a curved tail.
Head held so high
Presiding over the river
that brought you to this land.Before you crawled out of it
and realised you couldn’t breathe outside of water.Gills snapped shut, you lost your life
at the mouth of the Singapore River.And people covered you in concrete
The way we cover everything in concrete
in this country.And made you a monument
to inter-species relationships.Oh Merlion,
how you sacrificed yourself for us,
throwing yourself at the feet
of our great nation.Oh Merlion I’ve never felt like this
about any animal before.But you are so much more than animal
Oh Merlion sometimes
you make me want to touch your scales
with my fingers, and tell you, its ok.
Everyone loves you now.Oh Merlion, sometimes
you make me want to do a call and response.When I say mer, you say LION!
When I say lion, you say, MER!Oh Merlion, sometimes I wish you had paws.
Then you could hug people!
Then you could hold me as I have always dreamed
Of holding you in my miniscule arms
that cannot even encircle your whole upper body.If you had paws you would probably hold…
A kris!I’m not entirely sure what a kris is
But it sounds relevant to this poem.Actually it sounds a bit dangerous.
But that’s ok Merlion
I like danger.
You can hold it to my throat.
While I stroke your glorious mane
and whisper into your ear, its ok Merlion.
You are big and strong and beautiful.
Everyone loves you.Then I will unsheath my own kris
and plunge it into you
while you cry out in
a unique and exotic roar
that sounds somewhere between
a lion’s mating call
and a dolphin’s click.I want to ride you Merlion.
The way your Lion Father rode your Fish Mother.I want to ride you Merlion
The way no one has ridden you before. Or ever.I will ride you wildly.
Through the oceans of progress.I want to ride you Merlion.
The way Simba would ride Flipper.
The way Mufasa would ride Nemo.
The way Free Willy would ride Simba’s mother
whose name nobody can remember.But I will not, Merlion.
Because it would be very painful for me.
Because you are covered in concrete.
Like everything else in this country.
Umbrella
My grandmother used to warn me to never bring an open umbrella
into the house. She said I would bring evil spirits inside.
Said ghosts found shelter in the shadows under open umbrellas,
And they would follow us into our homes if they had half a chance.I used to wonder where these ghosts went when umbrellas were closed.
Did this mean every umbrella had its very own ghosts? Did ghosts share
umbrellas? Did ghosts come out in the rain, looking for umbrellas to haunt?I read somewhere that every year fifty thousand umbrellas are lost on the MRT.
By which I mean fifty thousand umbrellas get found by MRT staff in carriages,
on platforms, on benches, in toilets. I know I’m probably
responsible for at least five of them this year. Because after the rain, its easyto forget what you no longer need. The way our brains lose their hold
on old memories to make space for new ones. Something deep inside
decides for us what’s worth remembering and what’s not. Names
and dates and what we had for breakfast on the 3rd of Septemberdisappearing as easily as that $4 umbrella you bought at 7-11
when you got stranded in that thunderstorm. And I wonder
if every forgotten umbrella has a ghost of its own stuck inside,
waiting in that great MRT lost item repository for the daythey will be free to haunt a new house. Umbrellas were never
meant to be permanent, more like mobile bus stops to bring us
safely one more solid shelter to the next: keeping us safe from
sunburn, from colds, from pneumonia.But isn’t every structure here temporary in some way?
only around for as long as someone decides necessary,
until they think up a better use of where we lay our heads
until they can exchange the land for more money,
until the memories are older than we have space for.Then disappeared. Then we say “But I could have sworn
---it was just there! Just around that corner,
across the road….I swear that wasn’t there last Friday
But it was there when I was here last year, last month,
last week. Yesterday.”They say it is easy to forget things you no longer have any use for.
How buildings get torn down without so much as an online petition to save them.
How markets get lost without so much as an angry whisper.If a hundred-year-old tree gets cut down in the middle of Bishan
without anyone writing into the Straits Times Forum page about it,
does it make a sound?Where do we go when our stories have been washed away?
Who will warn our grandchildren of the ghosts in open umbrellas?So hold on to your umbrella, your home, your stories
while you still can, before you become just another ghost
searching for shelter. Because once our flesh turns to dust
we are no more than the memories we etch in people’s minds,
no more than the sum of the myths we once told one another.
When the World Ends You Will be Eating Hokkien Mee
When the last Panda dies in a zoo that he was sent to as a cub as a last-ditch-attempt-at-peace-type goodwill gift from China, you will be counting how many pieces of sotong the stallholder gave you.
When the oceans start overflowing and start swallowing up small coastal cities, the death toll
will not even reach the 6PM news on the hawker centre TV screens.When all the fish have gone extinct, and all the chickens died of some flesh-eating version of bird flu that also managed to wipe out three developing countries in two months, it will be ok
because there will still be enough prawns left in the sea.
And you don’t need chicken to make Hokkien Mee anyway.When the tidal waves start flooding large coastal cities like Sydney, LA, and Vancouver
there will still not be enough lard in your Hokkien Mee.When the earth starts to crack open and swallow up Jakarta and Tokyo, you might be intrigued
by the noodles on your plate trembling ever-so-slightly the tremors.When buildings in Malaysia start to collapse from the tremors, tell yourself
that they were all poorly built anyway.When a malaria epidemic hits Southeast Asia,
remember to swallow your government-sponsored vaccine after your meal
and thank God you live in a functional country.When the threat of nuclear war is imminent
but probably won’t make much of a difference at this point in history,
keep believing that Hokkien Mee noodles grow out of the ground on a farm somewhere in Kranji.When the ocean starts to encroach a little bit on the reclaimed land in Changi, Jurong Island
and the CBD, just remember that you were never promised that Singapore would be ‘flood free’.When the first child dies in a flooded neighbourhood on the ECP,
be glad you live on the 20th storey.When the first families are lost to a tsunami in Pasir Ris, you will be eating Hokkien Mee.
When Resorts World disappears underwater, you will be eating Hokkien Mee.
And it will be damn good Hokkien mee.
So good, you will want another.
But you will never get another because the stall owner will be dead.
And his wife will be dead.
And his son, the only other person with the recipe in his head will can no longer remember it
ever since he left to open a gourmet dessert bar which only serves people who can say the words ‘post-apocalyptic’ with a straight face.So go on, enjoy that plate of Hokkien Mee.
It will be the last plate of Hokkien Mee you will ever taste,
that will ever be tasted in the world, and be glad, be bloody glad
that you are, because when that tidal wave rears up to engulf this island
and there is screaming everywhere and gnashing of teeth
and you finally look up and see that wall of water about to swallow up
Old Air Port road hawker centre
the taste of prawn stock, lard and MSG will be the only things left to hold on to.
