An Un-Literary Biography

A reading biography can make an aspiring Literature teacher feel like somewhat of a fraud, as though it represented one’s entire credentials for the profession. For the truth is that I never enjoyed a “proper” literary education, or at least any too recognisably canonical one.

As a child, my reading diet was bound to my peers’ popcorn favourites: Enid Blyton’s short stories, Roald Dahl’s children’s tales, R.L. Stine’s “Choose Your Own Nightmare” Goosebumps books, K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs (mostly ghost-written, I would later learn), Tamora Pierce’s series of warrior women, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse series (which I don’t remember), and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books (which I never finished). I rarely strayed into unknown territory, preferring to savour old favourites over and over again. The best you could say about my reading habits then was that I had Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy confiscated during reading period in Primary 3 because I had nestled it within the pages of some Mandarin children’s literary magazine. (I neglect to mention that it was Chinese reading period. I never saw my copy of The Horse and His Boy again.)

My first brush with the “properly” literary came through—what else?—Literature classes in secondary school. Animal Farm, “Flowers for Algernon”, The Merchant of Venice, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Macbeth, Frankenstein: I read these only as much as I needed to score well in Lit essays, but perversely, I mastered the basics of close reading well enough that I began to deplore context and prior knowledge. I never felt the need to read an author’s other works to gain perspective on what she was doing differently in a given novel, for example. To make matters worse, my JC Lit teachers took enough pains to bore me over their first three months that I dropped Lit when it came time to nail down our A Level subject combinations. It would thus take me a long time to shed the context-dismissing imprint left on me by the secondary school Lit syllabus.

Instead, I came to literary enjoyment through a circuitous route through other media. I came to adore the movies after chancing upon Robert McKee’s screenwriting guide Story in Kinokuniya during the December holidays before JC. I learnt to appreciate theatre when I went to university in Chicago, and discovered many affordable and challenging dramatic options throughout the city. I encountered public sculptures like Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (affectionately dubbed The Bean) that actually drew people to interact with them, find pleasure in them, and discuss them. I took university courses on media aesthetics, film history, western music history, comics autobiographies, romantic genres, emerging genres and new museum art. I helped to run the oldest student-run repertory cinema in the United States, which screens over 240 different films every year, many on actual film projectors. I befriended slam poets and circus performers. Through these experiences, I came to value artistic endeavours as live acts of world-building, as the work of people who try to circulate imaginative stimuli to others in a way that might mean something to them, and nudge them in new directions (much like the work of teachers!).

This perspective re-oriented my understanding of Literature. No longer did literary texts stand bereft of audience and context as “pure” aesthetic objects in my mind. I started to see what Pearl S. Buck was trying to achieve when she circulated the Chinese peasant's pragmatic thought processes to the English-speaking world in The Good Earth. I saw the liberal and charitable pieties that Shaw was trying so eloquently to convince his audiences to shed in Major Barbara. I see the dignity that Stella Kon was trying to bestow, the heartbreak that Jean Tay aimed to channel, the anger that Alfian Sa'at sought to unleash. It is these pragmatic investments—pragmatic because people are human, and care about things—that make me care about Literature and what it can and will continue to achieve.