Wind and Water

Singapore-born writer Ang Chin Geok's Wind and Water is the story of the Ong Family in Singapore's Chinese community. Told by three generations of women -- Soo Teen, her daughter Peng An, and her granddaughter Lettie -- the story depicts the seemingly omnipresent power of "fengshui" in affecting and even regulating the lives of generations of Chinese individuals, even after their relocation to other countries far away from the Chinese Mainland.

Soo Teen's parents left Southern China in search of their fortunes in Southeast Asia. She resents the traditional patriarchal values preserved in her family, as her parents favor their adopted son much more than her and her sisters. However, she holds the firm belief that her family's fortunes -- as well as her own life -- are blighted by the power of "fengshui", instead of any decision that any individual in her family could have or have not made.

Soo Teen and her daughter, Peng An, live through the Japanese occupation to witness Singapore's birth as an independent nation. As she grows up, Peng An receives education from Western-style schools in modern day Singapore and learns not to be easily affected by the "cultural categories" imposed on her, such as gender, race and socio-economic class. But she, too, finds it difficult to struggle away from the influence of "fengshui", even after marrying an Australian man and relocating to Queensland, Australia.

Peng An's daughter, Lettie, is a Singaporean Chinese born and raised in Australia. She considers her mother's belief in "fengshui" as "unhelpful Chinese fatalism". Having grown up in Northern Queensland, where "you were a white Australian or you were nothing", Lettie is sensitive to all types of cultural assumptions commonly used to distinguish "them" from "us". Yet she has learned to cherish and fight for her personal freedom and her rights as an individual -- and therefore rejecting the considerable impacts of traditional Chinese myths and folk religions on the personal lives of earlier generations of Chinese women like her mother and grandmother.

Wind and Water inevitably employs various Chinese myths, folk religions and superstitions, as well as other traditional Chinese cultural practices, as a selling point. Ang Chin Geok, as the book's author, repeatedly emphasizes the significance of these cultural practices to her Chinese characters, therefore rendering them somehow stereotypical and predicable. However, the strength of Wind and Water as a book lies in the fact that it presents the history of Singapore, from its occupation by the Japanese to its struggles to gain political, cultural and ideological independence as a nation, from a Singaporean point of view. The book's language is also beautiful, the voices of its characters (Peng An in particular) clearly attractive, and its structure solid.

Ang Chin Geok's Wind and Water was published by Random House Australia in 1997.

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Copyright: Christine Sun, Taiwan.com.au Portal, 2005. All rights are reserved.