vickychong posted: " This Mickey is a friend from my writing circle so I might be biased in my review of this book although I will try to be objective - I really like the stories in the book and I envy how cleverly he takes local news reports and fictionalised them into r"
Mickey is a friend from my writing circle so I might be biased in my review of this book although I will try to be objective - I really like the stories in the book and I envy how cleverly he takes local news reports and fictionalised them into realistic narratives. Many of the protagonists are migrants and the stories carry a sense of pathos in them, which indirectly casts a negative light to Singaporeans. When a story which has a local protagonist in them, the Singaporean is in a derogatory role, more likely to be weak (like the scholar in Moral Clarity in Small Numbers) or, a conman, or worst, a paedophile teaching in a tuition centre in the chapter Hunger. Strangely, I didn't take offence reading these. Perhaps Singaporeans have a sense of humour, after all, this book was given an NAC grant despite all the negativity about Singaporeans.
There are twelve stories in this collection and the stories are mostly less than three-thousand-word long, which made them easy to read. I like how the stories are interconnected in a subtle way which the author has cleverly highlighted in the footnote on the link. For example: a couple in Merlion's Magic watches a badminton competition on television, where one of the players in the game is the protagonist in another chapter, Home Game.
Right in the first chapter The Apex, readers are made to sympathize with a PRC crane operator when his expertise was ignored by the local supervisor, which resulted in a fatal accident.
In Adrift, a neutralised Rohingya in the police coast guard finds two Rohingya refugees on the beach in Singapore and was torn between helping them to stay or chasing them off.
In Right History, an American history academic is given the sack for not conforming to the political history as seen by the authority.
The author has successfully crafted stories where the protagonists are caught in a moral/emotional conflict. The last story, Home Game, Mei Ling, a badminton player bought in from PRC to play for Singapore, was asked by the coach to deliberately lose the game to her ex-compatriot for a chance to return to the Motherland to play for the national team.
If you like local short stories, do pick up this book. (And also my short story collection Racket and Other Stories.)
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