Noon at Five O'Clock: The Short Stories of Arthur Yap

Preface

xv p r e f a c e this book includes all of Arthur Yap’s published short stories. Three of these eight stories were included in Robert Yeo’s Singapore Short Stories (1978) and reprinted several times subsequently, most recently by Pearson Longman in 2002. The remaining five stories, originally appearing in less well-known anthologies and journals, had been by the time of Yap’s death in 2006 to a large extent forgotten.1 In 2009, I went in search of Yap’s early poems in the National Institute of Education’s journal collection. In the process, I first encountered his three early short stories written as an undergraduate (or perhaps as a St Andrews’ schoolboy)—“Noon at Five O’Clock”, “A 5-Year Plan” and “A Silly Little Story”—and published in the early 1960s in Focus, the magazine of the literary society of the University of Singapore. These finely crafted, clever, seemingly plotless stories, of whose existence I had been hitherto unaware (no Yap scholar had even mentioned them), were a revelation to me. Introduced to Jenny Yap in May 2009, I suggested that Arthur Yap’s seemingly overlooked, and certainly critically neglected, short stories should be collected in one volume. I thought it might complement the already commissioned collected poems then being edited by Irving Goh. Miss Yap generously agreed to such a short story collection and Paul Kratoska of NUS Press expressed interest in publishing it. But I had by then only traced six stories. Thankfully, two more were quickly traced through a careful search of the NIE Library’s impressive, if underutilised, collection of local literature. These were “Soo Meng”, Yap’s contribution to Edwin Thumboo’s anthology The Flowering Tree (1970), and “A Beginning and a Middle Without an Ending”, published much later in SKOOB Books’ anthology S.E. Asia Writes Back! (1993). Only later did I discover that “A Beginning” had been first published over a decade earlier in the Malaysian journal Tenggara. In this collection, the subtly reworked 1993 version has been reprinted with significant textual variants recorded in the 1 Such amnesia may explain Robert Yeo’s inclusion of the later story “A Beginning and a Middle Without an Ending” in his recent anthology One—The Anthology (Marshall Cavendish, 2012), while Rajeev Patke, another re-discoverer and enthusiast of Yap’s early short stories, includes “Noon at Five O’Clock” in his coedited Southeast Asian Writing in English: A Thematic Anthology (National Library Board, 2012). xvi notes. In the rest of the stories I have taken the decision to retain the texts as they respectively appeared on their first appearance in print. While in places it might appear that either Yap or the printer has made a grammatical error, it is well to recall this early Singaporean writer’s mischievous delight in satirically deploying mimicry of middle-class Singaporean malapropisms made while aspiring to (supposedly) good English. I leave it to the reader to decide whether the stories’ “ungrammatical” instances reveal error or informed naughtiness. I include one other prose piece by Arthur Yap, originally appearing in publications now difficult to locate. Yap’s chapter on the local short story from his 1970 pamphlet A brief critical survey of prose writings in Singapore and Malaysia is a short but uniquely perceptive essay that deserves to be reprinted. The volume concludes with a brief and inevitably incomplete— but I hope informative—chronology of Yap’s life including details of Yap’s work as artist, poet and prose writer. This is set against a backdrop of significant political and social events that happened in Singapore during his lifetime. I also include a list of articles on, and mentions of, Arthur Yap in the press and elsewhere (1965–2009). As I say, both chronology and list of publications are almost definitely incomplete. I would be extremely grateful for any corrections, additions and suggestions. Please do email me at whitehead65_99@yahoo.co.uk should you have any such. In editing the creative work of a skilled linguist in a country that has often privileged language over literature, I have (some might think perversely) brought a contextual rather than a solely textual approach to editing and annotating Yap’s stories. Regardless of the high pressure per square inch we encounter in Arthur Yap’s very short stories, it is strikingly clear that these stories could have been conceived and written nowhere other than the uniquely strained space that was Singapore city between 1960 and...