Here are some interview excerpts taken from a blog and websites. Having mentioned a lot about her novels, the interview excerpts serve to reveal more about Lim's personal life and her perception about Singapore writing.
-Interview by Ng Yi Sheng, taken from Writing the City, an online community.-
NYS: How did you start writing yourself?
SCL: I stumbled into writing. I’ve spoken about it in a number of interviews. I was invigilating an exam in Catholic Junior College, and you know those three-hour literature exams: everybody writing, and the afternoon is hot. And I started doodling, and the words turned into sentences, and the sentences turned into paragraphs, and before you knew it, I caught myself writing.
So I walked again, and I wrote some more. I walked again, and I wrote some more as I invigilated. And it grew into quite a few paragraphs. And I thought that I was writing a children’s story, just centered on this convent. Then I thought that I was writing a story for teenagers, because my first story was actually for teenagers.
NYS: Wow. How did you decide to do that?
SCL: I think, it was during the SARS crisis, and I found myself at almost ten o’clock, still working in the Ministry of Education. The first two victims had just died of this strange disease, and there was so much anxiety and fear, and I think my soul suddenly said, “Would I like to die holding a report on the teachers’ state of grammar in my hand, or would I like to die with an unfinished manuscript?”
So I resigned. And I remember my Deputy Director asking me whether I was resigning to seek another job. And I said no, and she asked me, “What are you going to do then?” I said, “Maybe I will end up serving fries and chips in McDonald’s.” (Laughs) Because it was unplanned, totally unplanned. But since then I think I’ve been blessed. It has been an amazing journey ever since I left Buona Vista.
NYS: What do you think of Singapore as a whole today?
SCL: When I came here, Singapore struck me at that time as being grey, brown, flat and dirty. That was in the 1960s. And now, at my age, at 62, I see Singapore as a brash, sassy young woman, you know, in high heels, ready to take her place. Sometimes she’s a woman, sometimes it morphs into a brash, arrogant young man, just saying, “I’m number one, I want to be number one.” And that’s the part I hate.
NYS: That’s really weird, that Singapore has aged from being old into youth.
SCL: In a way, in a way, you know. Because I think we have reinvented ourselves as a city: it’s like parts of the city are like a prettified middle-aged woman with a botoxed face.
- Interview by Melissa De Villiers, taken from a blog.-
MDV: What was it like starting out as a writer in a very conservative cultural environment?
It wasn't easy. But I have to take my hat off to writers like Lee Tzu Pheng and Edwin Thumboo, poets who were publishing in English at a time when it was even more difficult: one, because of the political climate; two, because back then people in Singapore were so focused on the economy, on getting ahead, on filling the rice bowl. You were faced with attitude like: "So what's all this airy-fairy, arty-farty stuff like writing, eh? You've no business to write!" I was told to my face: "Sorry, Suchen, we don't read Singapore writers. We'd rather read Jane Austen and George Eliot." Proudly it would be declared to you, the Singaporean writer, that the reading public was only interested in the classics or Nobel prizewinners.
MDV: And that's changing?
Yes, because we have a confidence now that wasn't there before. There used to be what people called a "cultural cringe" - a lack of confidence in all things Singaporean, coming mainly from people who had been educated in English. That's when I started to consider myself very fortunate to have had uneducated, dialect-speaking grandparents, both great sources of stories, and of cultural confidence too.
MDV: So you were always conscious that your outlook as a writer was somehow different from the norm?
I was always conscious, starting out, that I was different, at least from Singapore writers here who are Chinese. I do not write like people in China. I am very clear about that. And so you will see me describing myself as of Chinese ethnicity, but situated in South-east Asia.
MDV: Is there a specifically South-east Asian approach to writing fiction?
I think there is a tradition in the West - I might be wrong - that if you are an artist or writer with talent, you can get away with almost any kind of destructive behaviour. As long as you have the talent to write and are considered good, or brilliant, or splendid in some way. Here in South-east Asia that's always balanced with a kind of responsibility to community and to family. I wouldn't call it self-censorship, as such, but we are always thinking about harmony, knowing that life is actually chaos. Life is chaos.
So I see myself as coming from a tradition that tries to use writing, like the Taoists, to create balance and harmony. If the subject is not balance and harmony, if the work needs to be about chaos, then at least it should lead to some understanding of that chaos. I mean, you know there is good and evil, yes? Yin and yang. So let's deal with it, as honestly as we can, without destroying somebody in order to achieve artistic success.
- Toh Hsien Min