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Articles by Sim Jiaying
A National Day baby reviews “National Day Charade”
Go up to any Singaporean and sing them two words from any National Day song. Go on, I dare you. “Stand up ____” “This is ____” “Count on ____” “One people, ____” Well, not every song, I suppose—but those from Singapore’s equivalent of the “Disney Renaissance”, that golden decade of patriotic earworms from the 1980s to the 1990s. Our Pavlovian instincts are strong with these ones, and writer-director Thomas Lim knows it.
The death of the critic, or why it’s really hard to write a bad review in Singapore today
One of the foundational things you learn when improvising and devising scenes in the theatre is the invitation “yes, and”. You learn that there are an infinite number of ways to say yes. Yes, and? Yes, and— Yes, and... It’s a shorthand for what improvisers call “accepting offers” that propel a scene forward, even if these ideas and interjections come from left field. It’s also a term that’s easily misunderstood.
Mother knows best: grief, memory and trauma at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival
“Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?”– from Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) by Cathy Caruth “The Prophet said, ‘Stay with [your mother], for Paradise is beneath her feet.’” – Sunan al-Nasa’i 3104 My mother is still haunted by my grandmother’s death 15 years ago, which was a difficult one. I once asked her how often she dreams of her own mother.
‘La Luna’: Malayan dreaming
First appearing in an 1836 map, where it was mangled as “Brass Bassa Road”, Bras Basah Road is still misspelt from the Malay beras (“harvested rice, with the husk removed”), while basah means “wet” or “soaked”. The riverbanks of Sungei Bras Basah were where wet rice from trading boats was spread out to dry; it’s now the paved-over Stamford Canal, parallel to Stamford Road. This was a rather risky place for unattended beras: the high tide once flooded over, resoaking them.
Wild Rice’s ‘Hotel’: how do we host our histories?
Something happens when you travel to a place for the third time. The first time may be about making the foreign familiar, about setting up the infrastructure of your stay. You need bureaucratic legibility—whether that’s your visa, your bank accounts, your commuter routes. Everything takes you by surprise; everything takes you a little longer.
Splice’s guide to your media future
A former garment workers’ dormitory on a quiet Chiang Mai backstreet is an unlikely place to witness South-east Asia’s media rebirth. Last November, I was there to meet Sonny Swe, the co-founder of Frontier Myanmar, a news and business magazine whose strident independence since 2015 has won it the adoration of fans and the ire of the junta.
#77: Tan Cheng Bock’s return, and Sim Jiaying on Anthony Chen and the road movie
Dear reader, Every week the excitement about our next general election (GE) grows. Last Friday, when the Jom team was in Siem Reap, I received a message about a walkabout by the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) around the West Coast Market the following day. Amid preparations for our Angkor Photo Festival presentation, I didn’t think too much of it.
Where do these roads lead? Anthony Chen’s “The Breaking Ice”
Exterior, winter. Workers are carving blocks of ice from a frozen river, then stacking them onto a conveyor belt where they are transferred onto the back of a truck. The camera pans gently to a broad vista, where a bright blue tour bus is traversing a snow-blanketed bridge. Off screen, we hear a female tour guide informing her red-capped passengers that they will be returning to their hotel shortly, and thanking them for their company. The camera shifts to Nana (Zhou Dongyu).
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