Foreign Bodies
Tan, Hwee Hwee
MISSION IN SINGAPORE James J. Uebbing It was not very long ago that serious novelists who traded on religious themes seemed compelled to put themselves through contortions of denial worthy...
...Flannery O'Connor may have been more straightforward in her aims, but even she felt it necessary to smuggle her goods across the border rather than declare them outright...
...But Eugene does not believe in Christ, and Loong worships no one beyond himself...
...They are incredible...
...And Andy is a convert of sorts himself, having come to sudden and dramatic belief after suffering an apocalyptic vision worthy of Saint Teresa (complete with angel, chalice, and lance) just down the lane from his parents' suburban split-level...
...Mei, a young lawyer in Singapore, receives a telephone call late at night from her English boyfriend, Andy...
...He has been arrested for operating a gambling ring out of his apartment and needs Mei's help...
...They were such a familiar part of the culture that they had lost the power to startle...
...To a large degree this is a novel of ideas rather than events, almost allegorical in its representations, and the ideas themselves are largely eschatological...
...Her childhood friend Eugene (who was Andy's university classmate in England) argues that Andy was set up by Loong Tay, a diplomat's son who sublet the apartment to Andy and was heavily involved in Singapore's gambling underworld...
...End of story...
...The outline of the story is simple enough...
...The theological reticence of earlier generations of Christian novelists arose largely out of a sense that the Gospel narratives had been, in literary terms, exhausted...
...But I don't...
...Thereafter unable to defend Andy in court, Mei must leave him to face his trial alone...
...They are strange...
...All appearances to the contrary, this is not a story of crime and punishment...
...She takes on the case and quickly comes to two conclusions: first, that Andy is telling the truth when he pleads his innocence and, second, that she has almost no chance of getting him acquitted under Singapore's draconian judicial system...
...The good suffer," she admits to Andy, "while the bad go on to lead happy lives...
...1 know you think vengeance is God's prerogative," Eugene tells Mei...
...For Tan has offered us a narrative of loss and redemption that unfolds itself among characters who explicitly identify their actual sufferings with Christ's passion on the cross...
...The entire work depends upon such an identification, insofar as the power and coherence of Tan's narrative depend upon a literal reading of the Gospels and their promise of immortality and peace...
...Well, Mei is the Christian in this scene, so we've only to wait for her reply...
...They may be old, but they are not old hat...
...There is no hard evidence against Loong, but at a crucial moment in the story the real culprit swears Mei to secrecy and reveals himself to her...
...Tan's characters are (like Tan herself) barely out of college, and they argue about life with a kind of undergraduate terror that their time will run out before they have figured out why they are here...
...I believe that we only have one shot in life, one shot at justice, and if we want to do something, we have to do it now...
...It is impossible to say whether Foreign Bodies, the striking debut of Singaporan novelist Hwee Hwee Tan, represents any significant shift in this attitude—but it is at the very least a contradiction of it...
...Mei is a Christian, baptized in her teens partly out of love (for her Christian Uncle Cheong) and partly out of hatred (for her abusive Buddhist father...
...It will be interesting to see how Tan's work is received...
...Commonweal 40 April 9,1999...
...Graham Greene famously refused even to be called a Catholic novelist...
...It is a strikingly sectarian approach — especially as it seems to be directed at an audience that barely knows who Christ is...
...For a lawyer, she has little faith in human justice...
...And they can pierce you like a lance if you ever pick them up...
...But to someone of Tan's generation, the Gospels are more likely to stand as myths, along the lines of the Aeneid or the Fisher King...
...And they are the norm...
...What is the Christian response to such sentiments...
...when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures...
...When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do," she declared in a 1957 lecture at the University of Notre Dame, "you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it...
...MISSION IN SINGAPORE James J. Uebbing It was not very long ago that serious novelists who traded on religious themes seemed compelled to put themselves through contortions of denial worthy of Saint Peter himself when questioned on the relation between faith and art...
...James J. Uebbing is the editor of Robert Lax's Love Had a Compass: Journals & Poetry (Grove Press...
...It sets them apart from their elders (who show no signs of either awareness or curiosity about the subject) and lends a freshness to their perception that is equally arresting and immature (as in Andy's description of the sun as "God's free tanning machine...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
