Ponti and the Power of the Archive

When you’re a writer, you’re writing all the time. Memory and memorialisation is its own form of fiction making.

 

When I think about my time in ACJC I remember the bleachers flooded in sunlight, the giant track we were forced to run around when it was too bright and too hot, the grayish-blue tiled floors in the concourse, the chicken rice stall, the freezing auditorium where we had our International History lectures, and the art room. I was fondest of that space most of all. There was something safe and sequestered about it, tucked at the end of a corridor. Even the lighting felt dimmer and more somnolent in there. I worked with acrylic paints for my A Level art project. The sound of brush-strokes on board soothed me. I wished I could spend all day in there. Sometimes a tube would explode all over my shirt and I’d paint the stain over in white. Over a decade later, these descriptions have taken on the patina of nostalgia, fuzzed over with the sweetness of distance. They lack the hard-edged clarity of present experience.

 

But what’s wrong with that? I feel like I spent too much time (and still lapse back into) fretting over what subject matters or perspectives are worth writing about, worth inflicting upon readers. If I could give my JC self any writing advice, it would be: write as much as you can, without judgment. It doesn’t matter if you think you have no ideas, or you censure yourself that your ideas are too small, or silly, or weird. Ignore that critical voice as best as it can. It wants to quash your imagination and silence you. All writing is practice. All material is valuable. Even if it doesn’t amount to a finished piece, you’re still a better writer for having tried.

 

The novels I had to study for my A Levels formed a powerful part of my emotional and aesthetic archive. Titles like The Things They Carried and Othello, even The Return of the Native with its endless descriptions of the heath and the tempestuous but tiresome romantic complications of Eustacia Vye. These compulsory texts broadened my reading range and drew attention to the sorts of stories I enjoyed reading for pleasure. Every book I’ve ever loved goes into the intellectual and intuitive archive from which I draw my capacities for empathy and imagining stories of my own. Movies, music, art, late-night conversations, bus stop chatter, WhatsApp arguments, good dinners, bad jokes: all these things go into the archive too.

 

I started writing my novel Ponti when an image came to me of a woman climbing out of a banyan tree. She wasn’t scary looking. Instead she looked sad, and a little stunned by life. She resembled a mishmash of Channel 8 actresses from the nineties. Her beautiful face was caked in make-up. I started thinking of a woman who acts as a Pontianak, in a low-budget horror movie. From my archive I drew out my fascination with filmmaking and performance: how even without a camera, people act differently across particular contexts. How we have public and private selves, for example, or how even the voice and tone you’d use with your parents is wildly different from the voice you’d use with some boy or girl you deeply, desperately like.

 

I thought of other things from my archive that might suit the story that was slowly and messily forming: the idea of a novel with many set pieces in a Singaporean convent school, the cattiness and claustrophobia of it: how I hadn’t read many (if any!) novels where the characters go to K-Box or have dramatic altercations in the bus stop by Tangs Plaza. But I wanted Ponti to be rooted in more than just recognisable localities, for it to be more than just literary tourism for the sake of novelty. Above all, I think it’s a story about connection and disappointment, how we have these big dreams and huge feelings but we don’t always get precisely what we want out of life. I also wanted it to be a funny book, centred upon a failed horror movie actress called Amisa Tan who is a terrible mother to her daughter, Szu. Szu and her only friend Circe say barbed, precocious things to each other, but I wanted their relationship to ring true. Ponti is and isn’t a love story. It is a mixture of things from my archive: trashy horror movies, Jay Chou, spirit mediums, Britney Spears, soya bean milk, Star Wars, movie theatres, pretentious French films, Jansport backpacks, and the particular experience of growing up in Singapore in the 2000s.

 

Now that the novel is finished and out in the world, I’ve had to release these things from the annals of my aesthetic preoccupations. Ponti is out of my hands and I’m working on something new. I’ve got my eyes open and I’m reading all the time. Life itself provides a wellspring of ideas and possible plotlines. Our job as writers is to catch them and try to put them down on paper, and constantly replenish our literary and emotional archives.