Wang Gungwu (b. 1930)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Jonathan Chan
Dated 11 June 2021
“Using a bit of Malay, Cantonese, Hokkien in our own brand of English, which we called Engmalchin, was legitimate, but that was not itself going to create a Malayan literature.”
(Wang, Home Is Where We Are)
The poetic career of Wang Gungwu was short-lived. His earliest poetic experiments were recordings of his impressions of China expressed in Chinese and as an undergraduate at the then University of Malaya (MU), Wang wrote poems in English for the student magazines The Cauldron and its successor The New Cauldron. Under the encouragement of his senior Beda Lim, Wang’s efforts culminated in a short collection of 12 poems he published in 1950. It was entitled Pulse.
By Wang’s own admission, his project was defined primarily by the impetus to craft a literature that would suit the aspirations of a nation that had yet to come into being. That English was chosen as its base was a decision made partly out of convenience and partly out of haste. Having been an English literature major at National Central University in Nanjing prior to his transfer to MU, Wang was concerned with whether he could “find [his] own voice in that language” (Wang, Home is Where We Are). Alongside his contemporaries at MU, the crafting of a common Malayan culture where language and its realisation in literature played crucial roles was urgent. As a New Cauldron article notes:
The people of Malaya are a mixed crowd, but they possess most of the requisites for nationhood. Time must be given for a common language to be evolved. This will come about through an increased contact between the different communities. A Malayan language will arise out of the contributions these communities will make to the linguistic melting pot. The emerging language will then have to wait for a literary genius who will give it a voice and a soul, a service which Dante performed for the Italian language.
(“The Way to Nationhood”).
This vision of a hybrid national identity, represented by the syncretic elements of Engmalchin embodied in Wang’s poems, would come to stand at odds with the divergence of Malaysian and Singaporean models of multiracialism – the former holding to the primacy of the bumiputras, the latter enforcing a bureaucratised separation of racial identities. That Wang’s vision did not bear out in the national imaginary of either country can perhaps be attributed to the idealism of MU’s Anglophone social elite, as well as the bitter linguistic battles being waged more broadly in Southeast Asia at the time. Yet, Pulse stands in its own right as a milestone in English-language poetry in Singapore and Malaysia.
At the time of publication in 1950, Pulse earned Wang a feature in the Singapore Free Press, in which journalist Tan Tock Saik declared, “the poetry of this teenager stands high above the rest in reflection and poetic expression” (Tan, “A book of poems comes from a Malayan’s pen”). In reading Wang’s poems now, it is vital to remember that he was only 19 at the time. While his poems bear the marks of a rich attempt to synthesise different literary traditions and linguistic interactions, they also bear out the inchoate attempts of a young man attempting to fashion a literary voice for himself.
Born in Indonesia to parents from Jiangsu, China in 1930, Wang was raised in Ipoh, Malaya. His father, an inspector and supervisor of Chinese-medium schools in Ipoh, instilled in him a love not only of classical Chinese literature, but also of English literature as it was the subject in which he received his training. In his memoir Home Is Not Here, Wang recalls memorising classical Chinese poetry to complement the English-medium education he was receiving. This was all part of his parents’ aspirations for him to contribute to a new, modern China. Yet, while still believing that China was his “real home”, Wang also recalls being:
drawn to the images of England in my books at school, especially those that dovetailed with those in English writings, notably the schoolboys’ magazines that my father encouraged me to read and the stories from English history and literature that were introduced to us in my school.
(Wang, Home Is Not Here)
A temporary resolution to Wang’s feelings of cultural displacement was found when his father bought him an atlas for his tenth birthday. This led him to note down geographical features of different countries and eventually, “feel a pleasurable calm […] think[ing] of Shanghai and London, Horatio Nelson and Yue Fei, whoever and wherever. All places and people had become knowable” (Wang, Home Is Not Here).
Returning to China, highly conscious of his identity as a huaqiao, or Overseas Chinese, Wang initially enrolled as an English literature major at the National Central University in Nanjing in 1947. However, he returned to Malaya in 1949 after the university was shuttered amidst the instability galvanised by the Chinese Civil War. His subsequent naturalisation as a Malayan citizen intensified an existing sense of itinerance – the sense of alienness that accompanied him as a foreigner in Malaya, as a returning national to China, and as a new citizen who could not claim to be “post-colonial” having never previously identified as “colonial”.
Drawing on the love of English literature inculcated by his father, his prior university education in China, and his effective trilingualism in English, Chinese, and Malay, Wang’s poems in Pulse were a noteworthy contribution to the literary scene at the time. As Philip Holden notes:
If some of the phrasing at times seems awkward, and the references obscure, we should remember that Pulse is one of the first efforts to produce a distinctively Malayan voice in English-language poetry. As such, the poems collected in the volume attempts to wrest English-language poetry from “the implicit body of assumptions to which [it] was attached, its aesthetic and social values, the formal and historically limited constraints of genre” and put it to use in a new context (Ashcroft et. al. 10-11).
(Holden, “Introduction to Pulse.”)
This sense of a new language, fit for the contours, landscapes, and urban settings of 20th-century Malaya, displays a keen awareness of the country’s realities: the daily interaction of unique linguistic and cultural traditions, the inadequacies of imported verse, the new impetus to carve out a national identity that could include those of all ethnic backgrounds. This was especially so for Wang in his attempts to find a place in a burgeoning nation as a citizen of Chinese descent.
Wang's poems show the creation of a diasporic consciousness, one that constructs a composite image of what it means to be Chinese from the “many mirrors” available in a non-Chinese environment (Wang, “Among Non-Chinese”). This is evident in his poems “Plus One” and “Moon Thoughts”. The former, a rough translation of 初一, or the first day of the Lunar New Year, depicts a Chinese family celebrating the occasion in Malaya. The burgeoning awareness of an ethnic estrangement is foregrounded in the poem’s opening:
Beneath a foreign sky
In this alien night,
Ancient rites survive
To tell of yearly life.
An ancient powder is set alight.
Here, Wang draws on the sense of alienation experienced by the Chinese in Malaya while appealing to the atavistic transmission perpetuated in rituals. With the Chinese often seen as an itinerant population, especially given the economic opportunities that drew many to Malaya in various capacities, Wang’s rhythmic, almost incantatory lines, heightened by the insistent assonance of each concluding word (“sky”, “night”, “survive”), demonstrate the mutuality of this sentiment. Malaya itself is still alien to its Chinese inhabitants. The cultural materials available to the speaker are evident in an attempt to articulate the casual friction of disparate national iconography:
Ah those feminine fingers
Orient paper red, King George’s head!
It’s everyone’s birthday,
So warble your kung-heis gay.
The internal rhyming of “red” and “head” yokes the two images together, providing a sense of the immediacy with which the ornamentation of a red packet would give way to a paper note with the British monarch’s face printed on it. The conspicuous inclusion of “kung-heis” attests to Wang’s attempt to organically weave transliterated Cantonese into his poetry. Amidst the “silks, brocades, and bangles”, the speaker nevertheless draws attention to the evening’s “moonlessness”, a noticeable absence on an auspicious evening supposedly represented by a full moon, and the salient presence of “an alien sky”, one unfamiliar to those who gaze upon it (Pulse).
If it is the materiality of cultural interweaving that Wang depicts in “Plus One”, it is in “Moon Thoughts” that he attempts to synthesise influences from distinct literary traditions. The title itself is taken from Li Bai’s 静夜思 or “Quiet Night Thoughts”, a Tang dynasty poem often taught to be memorised in Chinese. Wang lends a painterly eye to the moonlit scene:
The Truly Great adorn these green arcades,
Marble images, idols, now but shadows,
Spectre-like in the moonlit glades
Have-beens; the night returns, but their lives
Come no more.
Think no more, home appears nearer;
The moon, impure as ever, becomes clearer.
The integration of the “moonlight glades” and “Marble images” foregrounds what Anne Brewster observes to be the integration of symbols from a “European classical, pastoral tradition” (Brewster, Towards a Semiotic of Post-Colonial Discourse, 12). While there are traces of Elizabethan and Romantic poetry in Wang’s phrasing, with recourse to the ekphrastic eye of John Keats in envisioning ‘Marble images’, the strongest debt that Wang owes is to the classical Chinese tradition. Beyond the careful rendering of the “drooping leaves of rubber trees”, one reminiscent of the impulses of Chinese landscape painting, the poem’s association of the moon with a yearning for home bears a particular echo with Li Bai’s original. As Li Bai’s poem concludes:
I lift my head and look at the brilliant moon:
I lower my head and think of my hometown(Li Bai, “Quiet Night Thoughts”, Translated by Philip Holden, 2002)
Wang intuits this semblance of transhistorical communality with Li Bai under the experience of the moonlight. In doing so, he accords the speaker of ‘Moon Thoughts’ a sense of continuity with “ancient heroes born” and “martyrs and lovers” amidst the backdrop of “rubber trees” (Pulse). The spectral presence of ancient figures that accompany the speaker is dashed as “home appears nearer” (Pulse). Fit to Shakespearean form, the poem ends on a couplet, alluding to a diminishing sense of the moon’s “impur[ity]” and a burgeoning sense of affinity with Malaya itself. (Pulse).
While these poems lend themselves to plausibly being read with recourse to a diasporic consciousness, Wang’s other poems demonstrate an investment in a kind of social-realist depiction of Malaya. It is here where Wang bends English and transforms it most recognisably into Engmalchin, a more reliable descriptor of his environs than the staid language of received English verse. This is captured most effectively in “Three Faces of Night” and “Ahmad”, recovering a sense not only of the jostling between Chinese, Malay, and Indian cultural influences, but the perennial inscription of a British presence. “Three Faces of Night” moves from a dancehall, to a roadside stall, to an indeterminate domestic space. At the dancehall, Wang renders the sight of a woman in a qipao as such:
Saxon cut and Mongol shape
Dravidian red
Flows as the bandsters ape.
The qipao’s collar and fastening are erroneously referred to as “Mongol”, while its cut follows that of a tight-fitting Western dress and its bright colour is inflected with a South Indian influence. The energy of the hall is buttressed by “the bass dum dum”, the “swish swish feet”, and the “swinging beat”, reflections of the importation of jazz and swing, themselves deriving from an African-American music tradition (Pulse). The poem’s shift to “the next world” brings in a mix of languages:
The crowds wait their share of the steaming fun
At the kuey teow stalls of the kerosene glare
And in the shadowed, rubbish lined malls,
The whisperings have just begun.By the drains, sandalled squats
Lick their durian seeds;
Near the lanes the night-soil workers
Wipe their stinking beads;
And urchins at the car park do their good deeds.
The herbal cool-tea colours the bowls;
Mango skins attract the flies.
“Fun” and “kuey teow”, as transliterations of different varieties of rice noodles, represent attempts to preserve dialect expressions from Cantonese and Hokkien. This is so even as “steaming fun” doubles as a somewhat clumsy pun in line with the energy of the poem. This is set in contrast to “cool-tea”, an inelegant translation of the Chinese 凉茶 or liang cha. As with the term “night-soil”, a historical euphemism for collected human excreta, “cool-tea” bears a resemblance to Anglo-Saxon kennings, compound expressions of metaphorical meaning. Such formulations highlight a simultaneous normalisation of Chinese dialects in daily parlance, but also a sense of linguistic estrangement.
The vividness of the shift from dancehall to food stall is demarcated by olfactory and visual images – the evocative, mingling smells of “durian[s]”, “night-soil”, and “their stinking beads”, the flash of “the kerosene glare”, and the colour of the “herbal cool-tea” (Pulse). Through the normalisation of dialects and the presentation of the workers of the night bereft of moral impugnment, Wang eschews an orientalist gaze as he attempts to bring the hawker stall into the fold of the English language. The final sphere, “the world between”, presents cursory references to an “alarm bell”, “vases”, and “school” (Pulse). The rapid flitting between these three areas indicates the sort of whiplash that arises from their contrasts, as the speaker concludes:
We rush around
To see the others,
But the mirror is a prism blue.Thus we live in triple spheres:
In laughter, in stillness, and in tears.
The sense of a splintered and refracted self is engendered not only in the movement between vastly contrasting social spaces, but in the friction and coexistence of different cultural pressures and influences in 1940s Malaya.
While Hokkien and Cantonese feature in the aforementioned poems, “Ahmad” centers a Malay subject while also interweaving Malay with English. Holden notes that the poem uses “Malay phrases and a pared-down diction in contrast to the overly-allusive vocabulary of many of the other poems in Pulse”, in effect achieving the collection’s most successful “representation of the local” (Holden, “Interrogating Diaspora”). With brevity, the speaker recalls the story of “Ahmad”, a Malay man who grows steadily comfortable under the British regime, quashing any ambitions in higher education as represented cheekily by the portmanteau “Camford” (Pulse). As the poem unfolds:
His wife with child again.
Three times had he fasted,
And puasa was coming round once more.
One hundred to start with — a good scheme;
Quarters too,
With a room for his two little girls.
Kampong Batu was dirty!Thoughts of Camford fading,
Contentment creeping in.
Allah has been kind;
Orang puteh has been kind.
Only yesterday his brother said,
“Can get lagi satu wife lah!”
With Ahmad imbued with an everyman quality, Wang eyes the imperceptible process of experiencing an increasingly comfortable Malayan life. References to Muslim practices such as “puasa”, referring to religious fasting during the season of Ramadan, are set against British policies such as “One hundred to start with”, an ostensible reference to financial support, as well as “Quarters too”, accommodation for a growing family. Where the poem begins with Ahmad “never lik[ing] his masters” as a “clerk”, the acknowledgment that “Orang puteh has been kind” reveals no anti-colonial scorn (Pulse). There is an almost illicit conjoining of the colonial and the divine in those two sentences, the larger unseen forces that shape a life of contentment. As Brandon Liew observes:
If we look closer at the polyglot effect of the third last line ‘Can get lagi satu wife lah!’, we see that it resembles the informality and syncretism of Bahasa Pasar (Market Language) – Can get (appropriated English) lagi satu (Malay for ‘one more/another’) wife (English) – lah (Hokkien particle). The entire sentence kept together is an old Malayan idiom, meaning ‘Life is going so well, you can get another wife’.
(Liew, “Engmalchin”.)
This organic interweaving of distinct linguistic elements is achieved with greater effectiveness relative to Wang’s other poems in Pulse, though as Philip Holden notes, it is one of a series of experiments rather than the terminus of Wang’s developmental process (Holden, “Interrogating Diaspora”).
Further to Wang’s impulse to render Malayan life with acuity, he also draws attention to the encroachment of urbanisation and industrialisation in daily life, a rural-urban tension that continues to play out across contemporary Southeast Asia. In “Municipal Prose-Poem”, itself conscious of its hybridised formal qualities, the speaker is a visitor from a village to the city. He notes:
I walk out from the fields where the green grass grows and try the metal roads. I find that they always lead somewhere, though it may be in opposite directions.
The road-people seem very sure that they know where they are going; but most of them have their backs to each other, and they all know that the wrong way is behind them and the less wrong before.
Ah I must tell the field-people about the snakes here. They are short, and fat, and purr inside, but they go faster on the roads. (I’m sure they die younger.) Are there any rabbits in those hedges? Or frogs?
I like smell of the drains and the river. It reminds me of little Porky.
One can detect the trace of a well-intentioned misrepresentation, an attempt to inhabit the psyche of an individual who might not otherwise articulate such thoughts in the English language. As the poem plays out, proceeding in a somewhat meandering fashion, one gets the sense of a clumsy translation. There is a hint of the naïve sincerity of an archetypal countryperson, supported by innocuous observations of roads that go “in opposite directions” and “road-people” who “know where they are going”. The officiousness of the speaker’s language almost replicates that of a municipal report, albeit reversed from countryside to city. The noticing of distinct varieties of natural life, snakes that are “short” and “fat”, and familiar smells, like “little Porky”, present a rendering of assumptions that derive from a rurally oriented life. The poem’s reference to “darling Ah Mooi” and “Kelings next fence” are themselves indicative of ethnic difference and neighbourliness, even if the latter term is no longer in ordinary parlance (Pulse).
Under the acceleration of urban development in Malaya, the widening gulf between an urban centre and rural periphery became more and more evident. While this is hinted at in “Municipal Prose-Poem”, it is central to “Pulse”. Just as “Three Faces of a Night” moves through a variety of social spaces, so too does “Pulse” illustrate the transformative social effects of urbanisation. The poem’s opening stanzas are evocative:
The ways are old.
Faces steeped once fell
Near deepened tracks
Now thickened grease films
On convex tar,
Mirrors the cyclic wheels of a factory car.No cock crows the dawn,
But metal cold whines the morning born,
Choking in the carburetor.
A late slut yawns away her cares,
The early hawker yokes his wares;
And numbered planks accumulate
As splatterings cease from telewires —
Life again, life of flowless mires.Seen through the market railings:
Trouser-wearing women
Worm among saris, sarongs colourfully checked;
Baju biru full of tailings,
And sams unhooked at the neck;
Here and there are tailored New Looks
Brushing the basket-arms of cooks.
O listen to the haggling drone of female rooks.
While the poem begins with the geological transformation of the Malayan landscape, with the fall of “Faces steeped” and the laying of roads with “convex tar”, it moves toward the ways in which an industrial and cultural modernity comes into view. Electrification and technologisation are evident from the presence of “the carburetor” and “telewires”, with the noise generated replacing that of a crowing rooster. “Trouser-wearing women” patronise the market next to those wearing “saris, sarongs colourfully checked; / Baju biru full of tailings”, a contrast of “tailored New Looks”. The sartorial influences of the West present a visual contrast to Malay clothing. Wang’s insistent rhyme scheme in “Looks”, “cooks”, and “rooks” almost enacts a forced intertwining of these jostling elements.
The “pulse” of change persists in the manifestation of new hobbies, such as couples who “go tasting the wind” or “snuggle in conditioned air” (Pulse). The former is a literal translation into English from the Hokkien phrase “jiat hong”, meaning to eat the wind or go for a ride, again creating the sensation of a linguistic estrangement. The latter, in some ways, foreshadows the ubiquitous adoption of air-conditioners across Singapore and Malaysia.
Amidst this rapid pace of change, Wang reveals an affinity for the positions of such Romantic poets as William Wordsworth. As the poem concludes:
Life there is here, but machine-life
Left in an unvarying pattern.
The essence is lost.
The change — the soul.
This notion of the intangible, corrosive effects of the mechanisation of daily life is consonant with the Romantics’ injunction to luxuriate in nature and hold to the original, untarnished innocence of the soul. The disorienting effects of these transformations, particularly with regard to their behavioural and spiritual changes, are causes taken up by subsequent generations of Singaporean poets, notably in Arthur Yap’s “there is no future in nostalgia” (1977). As Holden notes:
a diasporic consciousness makes Wang's poetry curiously predictive of Singapore today, in which economic progress through the nation's astonishing development has brought no fulfillment but rather exhortations to further sacrifice, and in which transfiguration seems increasingly less possible in an ever more socially atomized nation state.
(Holden, “Interrogating Diaspora”.)
Wang’s poetry, in many respects, thus pre-empts many thematic and linguistic concerns that would later be later examined by Singaporean writers in English.
Even if the notion of an independent Singapore made little sense to Wang and his contemporaries in 1950, the country’s adoption of English as an official language and its predominant medium of communication would establish it as the linguistic anchorage to which all other languages would be drawn. Engmalchin as a poetic idiom proved premature without the cultural or political independence of Malaya. While Wang’s aspirations toward a linguistic melting pot, the “New Cauldron” of Engmalchin, would find themselves dashed with the separation of Malaysia and Singapore, its legacy would morph and survive as Singlish. Shawn Hoo addresses this as such:
If Engmalchin’s dream was to cultivate in poetry a national consciousness, to hold disparate languages together, and to reflect a local reality, then many will consider Singlish as its worthy and undisputed successor
(Hoo, “Singlish Modernisms”.)
The idealism and nationalistic fervour that shaped Pulse, while inconclusive at the time, would eventually find its literary descendants. Wang expressed admiration for the works of Ee Tiang Hong and Edwin Thumboo and would later say in 2008 that “our Singapore poets could write in English as their mother tongue and could stand with most others in the Anglophone world” (Wang, Home is Where We Are). As he remarks, “I further saw how new generations of poets were finding the voice that we had hoped for” (Wang, Home is Where We Are).
It remains that Pulse, while uneven, remains a profound progenitor of Singapore’s literary forms, experiments, and concerns. Wang’s attempts to draw on distinct literary traditions, daily occurrences, and multilingual and multicultural interactions present a portrait of the rapid transformations within a Malaya at the cusp of independence. Wang’s poems were later anthologised in 30 Poems (1958) and his poems and short stories under the pseudonym ‘Awang Kedua’ in Bunga Emas (1964). Historical distance reveals the posterity of Wang’s experiments; his linguistic and national concerns find parallels in an assured, contemporary Singaporean verse in English. This may well reflect the hope for the future he demonstrated at the end of his poem “To Tigerland”:
Don’t you see?
The rainbow brings the sun.
The lane-trees are green and the jungles don’t carry a gun.
There music slows the flying birds;
There the Hajis sermon their herds.
Bibliography
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Holden, Philip. “Interrogating Diaspora: Wang Gungwu’s Pulse.” ARIEL Issue 33 (2002). Web. 7 Feb 2021.
—. “Introduction to “Learning Me Your Language”.” s/pores. 10 January 2008. Web. 7 Feb 2021.
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Li Bai. “Quiet Night Thoughts”. Translated by Philip Holden, 2002.
Liew, Brandon. “Engmalchin and the Plural Imaginings of Malaysia; or, the ‘Arty-Crafty Dodgers of Reality.’” Exclamat!on: An Interdisciplinary Journal Issue 2 (2018). Web. 7 Feb 2021.
Tan Tock Saik. ‘A book of poems comes from a Malayan’s pen.’ Singapore Free Press. 13 May 1951.
Wang Gungwu. “Among Non-Chinese.” Daedalus Issue 120.2 (Spring 1991).
—. Home is Not Here. Singapore: NUS Press, 2018.
—. Pulse. Beda Lim at the University of Malaya, 1950.
Wang Gungwu with Margaret Wang. Home is Where We Are. Singapore: NUS Press, 2020.
“The Way to Nationhood.” New Cauldron. Hilary Term, 1949-1950.
