Amanda Chong (b. 1989)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Tan Jing Min and Eden Low
Dated 6 Feb 2025
In crackling boats, seeds arrived, wind-blown,
You summoned their colours to the palm
of your hand, folded them snugly into loam,
watched saplings swaddled in green,
as they sunk roots, spawned shade,
and embraced the land that embraced them.
At the age of 16, Amanda Chong emerged onto Singapore’s literary scene by winning a National Arts Council competition, with a prompt inviting young writers to write about Singapore’s past. Her winning poem, “Lionheart”, is a celebration of the nation’s narrative of “third world to first”, a triumphant celebration of progress and modernity. It is ripe with language that conjures a primordial epic (“Rising runes of your oceanic origins”, “In the jungle, amid rasping branches”), which Chong seamlessly weaves into the otherworldly grandiosity of modern Singapore – its “trees rise as skyscrapers”, “ribbed vaults of buildings”. “Lionheart” is Chong’s response to a sequence of Singaporean poets’ meditations on the Merlion, a national icon designed for the Singapore Tourism Board to market Singapore to the world. Given the grand tone of “Lionheart”, one might have anticipated that Chong would follow in the footsteps of poets like Edwin Thumboo, whose poetry would serve as a point of reference for national mythmaking through literature.
However, Chong’s subsequent poetry contains surprises. The poem “Notes from a Colonialist, 2065”, found in Professions (2016), Chong’s first and only poetry collection, is a cheeky response to “Lionheart”. The “Island” found in the poem is “a godless ark held / aloft by three cenotaphs”, “prostrating before / the Bay, flogged by chastising currents.” Most pointed is the section that follows:
Everywhere, signs of a Country screaming
against its own obituary—We are a Nation
of implausible origin. A Nation built onSURVIVAL. A People with RESILIENCE
coursing through iron veins. The dead
clench merlion amulets in fists, lips
pruning around emptied oxygen tanks.
“Lionheart” and “Notes from a Colonialist, 2065” represent the poet at two points of her self-understanding as a writer and citizen. Instead of cleaving to linear narratives of patriotism, Chong teases out longstanding myths underlying the Singapore success story. In “Notes from a Colonialist, 2065”, she observes Singapore as “A whole city, / metal and glass, prostrating before / the Bay” while highlighting its “arteries clogged with consumerism”. She describes the “signs of a Country screaming / against its own obituary”. The richness and precision of Chong’s poetry highlight the performance of national pride, while prodding at the superficiality that seems to unite the nation.
Chong neither shies away from emotional vulnerability nor moral ambiguity in Professions. In “No. 436”, the speaker is the nameless hangman, preparing the noose (“the coarse braid, a necklace”) for a veiled prisoner. He is the last person the prisoner will interact with, and so he takes care to be gentle, giving dignity to the prisoner’s humanity, while quietly carrying out his role of executioner ordained by the system. The juxtaposition between the first and last stanza of the poem illustrates this in striking fashion:
On the morning of his death,
I unclasp his shackles.
I let him walk in front of me.[…]
I pull the lever, with the practiced reverence
of a soldier hoisting a flag to mast.
I do not stop, until I feel him above me—
hooded and pendulous.
Given Chong’s illustrious academic and professional report card, Professions is an apt title for her first poetry publication. Its dual meaning suggests what is to follow: on one hand, alluding to various vocations such as “The Playwright”, “The Astronomer”, “The Writer”, “The Lawyer”—a catalogue of metaphors to understand broken relationships, or perhaps an imagistic encyclopedia of past lovers. On the other hand, it suggests that the collection offers her most intimate declarations. In this way, Chong traverses the tightrope between the particular and universal with ease, creating intimacy with the reader without overexposing the poet. The reader, in turn, is comforted by the distant familiarity of the heartaches Chong’s poems describe: the dread of a relationship that “should have / been long dead between [them]” in “Revival”, “tiptoeing / around the corpse, holding / breaths in equal measure”, or the mortifying vulnerability at the end of a relationship with “desperate slurrings / of need – don’t leave” in “All Our Clocks”.
There is a chronological logic to the sequence of the poems. “Visit to the Yakult Factory, 1995”, conjures an image of a field trip familiar to generations of schoolchildren past. “Our names both began with “A”, so we had / to hold hands”—the innocence of the first poem melts into the rawness of fresh heartbreak in “Endings”: “At the very start of us, I foresaw / every possible ending.” Professions narrates a bildungsroman of a poet entering womanhood through the unforgiving highway of heartbreak.
While most of her poems in the collection wrestle with romantic anguish, later poems seem to grow out of romantic love entirely (“She’s past her days of being called xiao mei”, in “Office Lady”), and accord more attention to other loves and relationships: the love of friendship (“Monsoon Girls”), a mother (“Yearbook”), and a grandmother (“Timbuktu”). In “Rubicon”, a poem Chong added to the second edition of Professions, Chong surrenders to love and all of its possibilities and forms: “There are certain rivers we must allow / to take us.” She asks questions many are likely to have sought answers to: “The yes, and yet. And yes.” The bildungsroman she writes about belongs to her many readers.
The strength of Chong’s poetry is in her images, which are accessible and evocative. She takes the familiar and renders it sublime—in drinking Yakult in “Visit to the Yakult Factory, 1995”, she “imagine[s] / our intestines lighting up with neon gardens”. She characterises lovers as scroll-shaped kuih kapit (“brittle, from the strength of embrace”) in “Love Letters” and the experience of loss as “shuck[ing] open the clockwork innards of [her] days” in “Mornings After”. Not all of her poems are so driven by narrative. Professions is also dotted by moments of pure luminosity. “Charles/MGH” is a ubiquitous snapshot of a commuter train, rendered spellbinding by a burst of light and colour: from “underground / bound in a monotony of faces and averted / gazes”, to “thrust into the throes / of a Boston summer”. The sunlight “pirouettes”, the sky “surprises / with a reckless blue”, and the trees are a “feathered green”. “Bukit Brown” is an homage to the reclaimed burial site of so many Singaporean forefathers, “thousands of well-plotted lives undone / by swift exits”. In this poem, “[c]loud-churned stars dive deeper in / to sky”, and the darkness of the night “offer[s] no clairvoyance” for the nation’s constant redevelopment.
The poems which adhere to the collection’s central organising motif dive into the depths of the metaphor with indulgence, dancing just at the edges of cliche. “The Playwright” is punctuated by actor’s notes: “Each pause, italicised, labelled, “dramatic””, “we argued, / “passive-aggressively””. The speaker in the poem “tire[s] of him / twisting [her] words for his scenes. / I left him lost in his soliloquies.” Chong’s poems are capacious enough for the universal experience of heartbreak, while making each image achingly distinctive to her.
In “The Explorer”, the speaker is “an empty harbour”, her “memory […] an amulet”, her “name […] a prayer”. She has been left behind by her intrepid lover, whom, having conquered love, prefers to remain “scurvied, sea-legged”, “[e]yes fixed on golden trances of an unpronounceable civilization”, in search of something greater.
“The Cubist”, fittingly, plays with irregular form, as the speaker “splintered / into conquered fragments”, “Elbows and knees / creased fans of origami”. Her lover “fixed on parts: / the arch of my foot, / the bow of my lip”, while the speaker’s body is “a jagged hall of mirrors”. Similarly, Chong deploys form in “The Illusionist”; the trapezoid poem reinforces its opening lines that “It all went downhill the day you sawed me / in two.” While its aesthetic value is undeniable, the precision of Chong’s imagery enables her to deliver her message with devastating simplicity: “Love / was no / good reason / to collude in / cheap magic, cheaper / violence”.
In the middle of Professions, “Museum of Aborted Romance” appears to stand in for the collection, speaking with anthemic clarity. The poem conjures a laboratory or a pathological archive, memorialising the end of a relationship, stocked with “A fridge of hearts with stumps for wings / frozen in a state of readying”, “projections of / tenderness in his gaze, frisson from her / accidental graze of flesh”, “sheaves of overanalyses”, and a box,
locked, tools of romance’s abortion: reason’s
trump card, insidious tripwires into friendship,
catatonia from a broken heart, cold showers
the morning after, vulnerability’s proud ramparts.
“What did I ever say to you that hadn’t yet been said in the history of love?” As it turns out, quite a bit. Professions is a celebration and a lamentation of it. Chong’s careful and passionate handling of the topic precipitates both tender and titanic depictions of missed and waning connections: in “The Way Only Recent Strangers Do”, not-yet-lovers are “months ahead from unbuttoning [their] nervousness”, “histories twined taut for the uncoiling”. Though the conclusion to their story has already been written, the poem relishes the heady hopefulness of a budding romance. Meanwhile, “Domestic Premonition” is a portrait of a love gone stale: an old couple’s “walls tilt inward weighed by the mirage / of smiling wedding portraits”, while the “carpet reeks / of mildew and optimism”.
So many of Chong’s poems relive the tragedy of envisaging the end of love before it has arrived. In “All Our Clocks”, the speaker laments:
Our mistake was believing
this time was our turn,
that time was ours to turn.
The reality of their relationship is fast becoming “time’s rubble”. In “Post-Apocalyptic Love”, Chong vivifies the emotional landscape of a chaotic relationship, with “the sky bucking under / the weight of primordial metals”, “[e]verything is splintering, even / wind whips into fragments”, “water swills”, and “you guide me: up, up, we frailly ascend our tilting tower of tables, chairs, shelves, bed frames.”
These poems are also an elegy for the emptiness a lover leaves behind. In “Bloodsucker”, the speaker is tormented by an infestation of pests that breaks apart her marriage. “It was Wednesday when the welts first bloomed. / A neat row across your chest.” She dismantles her relationship; “tapped door frames, furniture legs for echoes / of cavernous colonies”, “stripped you / naked at the door”, and eventually “our marital bed – tipped out twenty years / of conjugal bliss to the rag and bone man”. For the speakers of Chong’s poems, a lover’s absence “fumed through our flat, scouring all our rooms”, “[winds] this body / into a coiled spring, thumbing the days for / ward like abacus beads”, “sharpen[s] my longing / for you into a dart”. Chong deftly plumbs the human heart and returns, having charted its depth and breadth, with numerous ways to capture how it can shatter. Each feels as fresh and important as the last and offers a mirror to a reader introspecting over the demise of their own relationships.
While Professions is about love, it is not sentimental. Chong deliberately centers the female voice, and her post-mortems of failed romances are just as much about power and control as they are about relationships. The feminist adage ‘the personal is political’ rings true in Chong’s poetry. Like a velvet-sheathed sword, each poem critiques iniquitous gender dynamics in heterosexual relationships: the invisible burden of emotional labour often shouldered by women, fetishisation. and objectification. Her speakers are “a virgin, a crone, a crazed wife”, a distant land to be discovered and colonised, an illusionist’s assistant sawed into half as a magic trick, an artist’s muse, a star to be charted and named, the fertile soil in which a botanist plants his flowers, a writer’s main character, a lawyer’s adversary, an “intractable riddle skirting / logic’s steady glide”—the countless forms that female subservience can take.
The clarity and approachability of her poetry also lends itself to commissioned work. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Straits Times commissioned “Lamentations”, offering vignettes of tenderness and quiet resilience displayed during that difficult time. The images are quotidian, but here Chong’s mastery of sound, rhythm, and pacing come to the fore: “a woman … cradling a bag of rice because all you need for porridge is water. A security guard … dreams / of his daughter across the closed border”; “I finally hear something / shaped like praise. [...] Each morning, the dark side of our planet / curves towards a certain sun. I call this grace.”
In more recent years, Chong has moved toward playwriting. In 2021, Chong worked with songwriter Julian Wong to write the children’s musical The Feelings Farm. It maps a landscape of emotions as landmarks on a farm, such as “Jungle of Joy”, “Field of Fear”, “Longkang of Loneliness”, and “Swamp of Sadness”, with characters like Ants of Anger. Although intended for children, the musical journeys with audiences of all ages as they identify their emotions, process them, and share them with others. In an era of abundant emotional avoidance, Chong reminds us to turn inward, for “feelings bloom and grow. Pay attention to their whispers, they might show you where to go…” In 2022, Chong applied her background as a former sex crimes prosecutor to her debut play #womensupportingwomen, which used the prism of workplace sexual harassment to criticise ‘lean in’ feminism and empty corporate platitudes of women’s empowerment. And in 2023, Chong smashed expectations with the one-woman full-length comedic play Psychobitch. The play chronicles type-A broadcast journalist Anya Samuel’s defense of the four times she cried in public over the course of her relationship with her partner. The play deftly traces the course of their relationship and encapsulates various struggles women go through. Even the misogynistic trope in the play’s provocative title hints at double standards imposed on women. Mirroring the critique of gender dynamics and power in her poems, Chong’s unflinching and unrelenting spotlight on gendered power imbalance is not a show of weakness or defeat, but a reclamation of women’s strength and a tender understanding of the desire to be fully known and fully loved.
Amanda Chong’s contribution to the Singapore literary scene has unarguably been consolidated, but what it will ultimately look like—how wide it will span, and how long—remains in flux. What is for certain is that she will continue producing challenging, beautiful work, whether through poetry or plays or other mediums. The poetry lovers amongst us await her return to our favourite form, wondering how it might change after traversing such breadth.
Works cited
Amanda Chong, 2024, http://www.amandachong.com/.
Chong, Amanda. “30 Days Of Art With NAC: Lamentations by Amanda Chong”. The Straits Times, 7 July 2020, https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/lamentations-by-amanda-chong.
Wang, Shawne. “Deconstructing Psychobitch with Amanda Chong”. WILD RICE Singapore, 31 July 2023, https://www.wildrice.com.sg/deconstructing-psychobitch-with-amanda-chong//
"#WomenSupportingWomen: An Interview with Amanda Chong”. Women Unbounded, 11 April 2022, https://www.womenunbounded.com/post/womensupportingwomen-an-interview-with-amanda-chong.
