Between Stations BY Kim Cheng Boey (Giramondo Publishing, 2009) From the publisher: “Between Stations is a collection of personal essays exploring notions of home and belonging, and where they may lie for a migrant writer, shuttling between the stations of the old and adopted country, the past and present, the memory and the imagination. The essays attempt to recover a vanished Singapore and reconcile with the lost landscapes of a childhood and the ghost of a distant father, as they follow the narrator through a year of international wandering, en route to relocation in the new world of Australia.”

In his 1946 memoir, A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin writes “past and present become each other’s faces; I am back where I began” — an expressive phrase that could also describe Between Stations, a candid inquiry of topics that includes translocation, a bibliophile’s wanderings (from the discovery of Keats to sojourns in the British Council Library), and the quest for home, as well as the painful allure of memory. The collection begins after Boey has left his native Singapore and embarked upon a year-long journey before settling in Australia. Like Kazin’s Brownsville, the cities he encounters comprise a sensory catalogue of street scenes and boyhood recollections. Travel inspires him to reconsider his family’s ruptures, as though the meaning of home could only be truly appreciated “…in transit, between places, or in the wilderness, a no-place which is different from a placeless place” (“Homeless at Taba,” p. 225). Whether he volunteers in India, recites Cavafy in Egypt, or walks through bazaars, alleys, and crowded neighborhoods, memories of Singapore are frequently kindled. One moment Boey may be surveying a skyline at dusk. The next moment he’s launched to an earlier time. Sites which no longer exist accrue a nearly talismanic power. About photographs, he remarks: “… mnemonic tokens, they record the spots of time, providing irrefutable testament to what has been […] offering a key to the past, memorialising vanished selves, times and places, their images like relics, pieces of the cross we have pocketed…” — “Passing Snapshots,” p. 120 These twenty essays similarly capture formative moments with a bittersweet sense of ancestry’s pull on the present. The act of “memorialising” is most evident when he portrays his father — an absent, mercurial yet charismatic figure who is burdened by alcoholism and debt — as well as their walks through Singapore’s streets. In “Rambling on My Mind” he recalls “I am in step with my father. I am walking in his shoes … am in him, as he walks” (p. 43), an instant that could easily serve as a double exposure, allowing the reader to picture the child, who is walking in his father’s shadow, overlaid with an image of the adult who has “inhabited” his father to better understand him from a writer’s perspective. “Change Alley” also employs the walk as a narrative strategy. It is exemplary for its exploration of a child’s wonder, an adult’s hindsight, a son’s desire for “ritual,” and a father’s unreliability. Their relationship is further complicated by the knowledge that these outings are momentary convergences.

Boey reveals the primary struggle in the titular essay:

Eugene W. Smith^[1] describes a similar challenge: “To portray a city is beyond ending: to begin such an effort is in itself a grave conceit. For though the portrayal may achieve its own measure of truth, it still will be no more than a rumor of the city — no more meaningful, no more permanent.” The Singapore that existed between the sixties and seventies remains as elusive as the often mythologized father/son relationship. Boey gracefully acknowledges the problem of trying to reconstruct the city he once knew and of turning a remote figure into one that is more sympathetic. He doesn’t apply a soft focus lens to the noisy flats of his childhood (one of which served as the site for a neighbor’s suicide), nor does he dwell on the reasons behind his family’s dissolution. For all the darkness, an appreciable restraint permeates these writings. The lengthy wait between his father’s visits proves far more rending than depicting regret would have been. In the midst of this pensive state, a love of music and literature takes root.

You start to experience reality as imagined, memory as something that writes you, gives you a second chance, and you seek a possible dwelling place between memory and imagination,
fact and fiction.

In “Guantanamera” a Cuban song serves as an accompanying chorus for life in Tanglin Halt. From the song’s initial appearance to its subsequent shifts in popularity, critical events occur, including a child’s first time witnessing death and Singapore’s introduction of the National Service. “Burning White Christmas” draws from popular culture to illuminate a facet of longing. Bing Crosby’s debonair manners and the reassurance that his singing evokes contrasts with the context in which they are seen and heard. Ten-year old Boey encounters the mid-century film, White Christmas, amidst news reports of 1975 Saigon. Both essays demonstrate the author’s ease with presenting seemingly nostalgic moments while allowing a greater turmoil to gather below the surface.

“The Smell of Memory” details “moments of correspondence” that occur when they are least expected, and how they make one “… feel a strange sense of arrival, as home and abroad, the past and the present slide into one place” (p. 173). The power of smell to bring back memories is akin to the power of music, which can also “conjure up … the whole emotional geography of an era” (“Guantanamera,” p. 228). Small linkages like these occur throughout, revealing a talent for building themes and variations. The essays lead into and echo each other with as much intricacy as any of the places Boey visits.

“Remembering Du Fu” and “My Alexandria” record trips to the cities of two esteemed poets, Du Fu and Cavafy. Boey observes how commercialization has stripped Xian, China of its former character, much as it has in Singapore. Malls replace street vendors. Shoppers move at a frenzied pace, “as if to make up for years of Maoist deprivation” (p. 94). Beijing and Canto pop, rap, and techno-rock dominate the airwaves. A plaster figure of Du Fu may have been broken by “the local red guard contingent … in their unstoppable zeal to demolish the old” (p. 111). In Cavafy’s house-turned-museum, he discovers “All the furniture was sold after his death” while “a period-piece brass bed and a pair of oriental slippers … have been procured for Cavafy fans” (p. 198).

Cultural erasures, the byproducts of communism, the pursuit of modernity and the prevalence of artifice may comprise familiar (though no less potent) laments, but Boey never pines for an idealized past. He seems to subtly call for a world with greater personal involvement, a respect for history and continuity, as well as the occasional pleasure that stems from valuing the artistic over the prefabricated, the handmade over the homogeneous. These ideas speak to the differences between the treasured bookshops in “Dust and Silverfish Memories” and their present-day equivalents, or between his grandmother’s cooking in “Hungry Ghost” and meals that are simply fuel for the traveler. The gift of Between Stations is that it becomes more than an elegiac reflection or literary travelogue; it raises deeper questions about the nature of loss and change, and transcends the vulnerability of personal memories.