world: singapore | From the Heart of Europe

Singapore is a city-state on an island off the southern end of the Malay peninsula. Famously established by Stamford Raffles as a British port in 1819, it was actually under British rule for less than a century, from 1867 to 1963, with also several years of Japanese occupation during the second world war. For less than two years after the end of British rule, Singapore was one of the states in the federation of Malaysia, but declared independence on its own from 1965.

The People’s Action Party has been in power since before independence, regularly winning huge majorities in the legislature. Unlike most single-party states, Singapore has a strong market economy and a reputation for very low levels of corruption. Singapore has one of the highest PPP-adjusted GDP per capital numbers of any country in the world, certainly the highest in Asia (other competitors include Luxembourg and Liechtenstein).

Its official languages are English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. I don’t have a lot of personal knowledge of it. It’s a constant reference point for my grandmother during the years she lived in Penang (1927-1931), which would have been just after Singapore eclipsed Penang as the most populous Chinese city outside China. I have been friendly with the contemporary sf writer Neon Yang since our Livejournal days.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Singapore.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Crazy Rich Asians	Kevin Kwan	559,748	7,372	91,168
Rich People Problems	Kevin Kwan	187,952	2,788	34,489
King Rat	James Clavell	45,455	3,196	2,100
Last Tang Standing	Lauren Ho	18,080	281	4,553
How We Disappeared	Jing-Jing Lee	12,315	326	2,670
Sister Snake	Amanda Lee Koe	5,329	147	2,279
Soy Sauce for Beginners	Kirstin Chen	8,034	198	1,066
The Original Daughter	Jemimah Wei	7,333	163	1,128

As with Denmark last week, people are generally pretty clear about which books are and aren’t set in Singapore. The clear winners are the first and third books in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, about a young American woman’s culture shock encountering her boyfriend’s family (her in-laws in later books). The second book of the three, China Rich Girlfriend, is set in China as you might guess from the title. The writer, Kevin Kwan, was born in Singapore but has lived in the USA since he was 11.

King Rat was James Clavell’s first novel and is based on his experiences in a Japanese prison camp in Singapore during the second world war.

Last Tang Standing is a romance novel about the last unmarried woman in a large Singapore family. The author, Lauren Ho, has lived in Singapore for many years but describes herself as originally from Malaysia.

How We Disappeared is a novel about the Japanese occupation (and its penances two generations later). Jing-Jing Lee is the top woman writer from Singapore on this list. (The other three books below are also by Singaporean women.)

Sister Snake is about two women born as snakes in ancient China who live in today’s Singapore.

Soy Sauce for Beginners is about a Singaporean woman who moves home from America to run the family soy sauce business.

The Original Daughter is again about two sisters making their way in contemporary Singaporean society, though I don’t think either of them is secretly a snake.

Including the StoryGraph numbers made a bigger change than usual, bringing on the bottom three and losing Snake Agent, by Liz Williams, and two books by men, The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell and the autobiographical From Third World to First by the country’s long time leader, Lee Kuan Yew.

I disqualified only three books for being insufficiently set in Singapore: China Rich Girlfriend as noted above, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal, which is set in London, and my friend Neon Yang’s fantasy novella The Black Tides of Heaven.

Coming next: Lebanon, Liberia, the Central African Republic and the State of Palestine.

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The best known books set in each country: Singapore