Historyproj… SG1990… Tamils…India…nonamerican… multipolar world… sidenote on english… gumroad readers… 3rd culture kids… cultural crossroads…anime…
but what is the oomph? what is the point? why did I choose babel for this? do i want to be dramatic and be like, how to save/heal the world?
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A thing i’ve been wanting to do for a very long time now– and have attempted, in bits and pieces– is something I’ve internally named “the history project” – which makes sense to me but of course doesn’t make any sense to anybody else. basically i’ve been meaning to piece together my own personal history of the world. part of this is pure compulsion. i remember itching to do it when I was working on my second book– I’d be trying to research things about introspection and keep wanting to procrastinate by reading random bits of history instead. the difficult thing, once i’ve made it my actual priority, is how sprawling history is. but there IS a “finite” amount of it! so where do I start? I have a page on my Roam titled [[people]] where I slowly fill out a list of historical figures that I’ve found interesting, ranging from Hammurabi and Herodotus to Hume and Hokusai. It’s interesting trivia, but I’m not just looking to collect random trivia. I’d like to have a rich tapestry of knowledge of the history of the world. I’ve come to believe that the best way to do that would be to extend it outwards from myself as the starting point– not because I think I’m personally important, but because I know myself better than anything or anybody else. So as a starting point of sorts, I thought I’d spend a substack post just sketching out what I know, or believe I know. I’ll try to fact check things as I go.
I was born in Singapore in 1990 to a Tamil family.1 Already here I sometimes get tripped up trying to explain Tamils or Singapore to people who aren’t familiar. Singapore is a small island-city nation-state in Southeast Asia. The Tamils are an ethnolinguistic group mostly from the south of India. My grandfather and father migrated to Singapore from Kattukudiyiruppu, a fairly small village near Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu. My mum’s family has been in Singapore longer– I believe her dad was born in Singapore too– but his dad or granddad presumably migrated from somewhere in Tamil Nadu as well.
Indians are not a monolith. There are 1.4 billion Indians. They speak many different languages. Within the Singaporean context, my wife and I are both considered “Singaporean Indians”. But her family is Punjabi and mine is Tamil, and those two communities are literally originated in the two opposite ends of India.
Let’s pretend that I’ve already written the sprawling essays about Singapore and India and Tamils that I’ve been stewing on for years. A question I keep bumping up against in my writing is, who am I writing for, exactly? When I started out, all of my friends were Singaporean, and so most of my writing assumed a Singaporean context– unless I was writing for an Internet audience, in which case I tended to write assuming that they were probably American. I don’t really like this, to be honest, even though I have enjoyed so much American pop culture, music, movies, and have greatly enjoyed my visits to California and New York. I think even Americans might benefit from hearing from perspectives that aren’t American-centric. I’ve sometimes fantasized about starteing a subreddit called “unamerican” or “nonamerican”, so that the rest of the world could have a place to discuss things without centering americanness. but you see the problem: defining something in terms of what it is not, still centers the thing. I’ve often yearned for a more multipolar world, and I think we’re headed there, for better and for worse. I hope to contribute my little part in hopefully helping make that transition… smoother?
What do I even mean by a multipolar world? That feels like a very geopolitics-coded statement, the kind of thing that academics and Model UN folks talk about. And sure, there’s that. But what I think about is something a lot more… mundane? I just want more culture and more variety from all over. And I know this isn’t a particularly novel desire, I’m thinking now of like Michael Jackson’s music video that has all the dancers from everywhere. But I think it’s worth affirming and restating. I love that movies like Parasite and RRR are of global interest. Mongolian metal bands.
I have a side-curiosity about the role of languages in all this. I’ve often had a longing and admiration for south american cultures, which I know is probably me looking at them from a distance through rose-tinted glasses. I just love that they still seem to appreciate rock music and poetry and literature in the way that I grew up loving them– earnestly, directly. One of my favorite books of all time is The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders, and I suspect that his work isn’t as famous it ought to be because he’s Danish. How much excellent material is overlooked this way? I shudder to think about it.
If I wanted to get a sense of my audience, one way I could approach it is by looking at my book sales. I’ve sold over 3000 copies of my books in the US, for which I am very grateful. I’ve sold almost 200 in my home country of Singapore. But I’ve also sold 68 in Spain, 47 in Sweden, 47 in Brazil, 45 in Mexico, 24 in South Africa, 23 in the Philippines, 14 in Nigeria, 14 in Taiwan. I have readers in Kazakhstan, Algeria, Cyprus, Panama, Uganda, Jordan, Fiji, Morocco, Guam, Lithuania, Estonia, Egypt, Peru. Almost half of my books are sold in the US, and the rest of my readers are from everywhere else. And I ask myself: what if I spent at least half my time and energy writing for the readers from everywhere else? I find the idea compelling.
But I don’t want to position myself as anti-American. You see the challenge? In fact I have several drafts in the works that are basically “about” America one way or another. To state the obvious, I do think America is an important thread in the tapestry of our world. I’d just like to focus on other threads if I can.
What I really want to be doing is to take my particular perspective, from my particular place in the world, and articulate it best as I can and share it as generously as I can with the world. You could say that I’m arrogant and egotistical enough to believe that it’s worth sharing. But really I believe that everybody’s perspective is worth sharing. There are eight billion people on earth. Many of them still don’t have the luxury and privilege of getting to tell their stories. I’ve said elsewhere that as a creative I often feel a kind of survivor’s guilt. Why me? How come I get to be someone who speaks, when so many others don’t? Can I try to weave those silent people’s perspectives into my work? It’s tricky stuff. I never want to speak on behalf of anybody else. But I can listen to them and share what I’ve learned.
I do have a soft spot for the “third culture kids” of the world. One such person I sometimes point to is Bozoma St John, who was born in Ghana, raised in Connecticut, an outsider everywhere. I don’t quite know if that fits my description. I think if I’m honest I consider myself a child of media, a child of the internet, a child of McLuhan’s Global Village. David Foster Wallace said that he’d tell the taxi driver to go to the library, and step on it. David Foster Wallace is no longer with us. We have one less person to speak for the libraries.
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I have a draft of a post about growing up at cultural crossroads. I have some tweets about them too. I talk about what I used to watch on TV growing up. I’d watch local Singaporean productions– which included a TV show literally titled “Growing Up”– it’s really good, and I got one of my first boyhood crushes on one of the characters. I also watched Tamil movies– Kollywood. It’s funny all the -ollywood names given to Indian cinema. The largest industry, Hindi, is called Bollywood, because “hollywood of Bombay”. RRR is a Tollywood movie, because it’s in Telugu.
When writing this up, I googled around and found a funny reddit comment on /r/kollywood asking why so many people call all indian cinema bollywood, and someone wrote “The same for every westerners called vellaikaran (white man), eastern asian people as china karan, every North State people as Hindi karan”. There’s something kinda amusingly universal about how easy it is to gloss over distinctions that we don’t notice and aren’t particularly relevant to us. To Americans I might say, imagine if people assumed that liberals and conservatives are all the same. And- y’know, while that might seem silly, from certain other parts of the world, there’s a truth to it, because there are things that Americans have in common with each other that they don’t realize until, say, they happen to be somewhere very foreign.
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small-time lesser weeb: I also watched a bunch of anime growing up. I slightly hesitate to bring this up– I’ve jokingly defined myself as a “lesser weeb”. I watched a bunch of anime on AXN on TV. Samurai X was my favorite. I also watched Fushigi Yuugi (Curious Play), Flame of Recca (Recca no Honou), Ayashi no Ceres, Vandread… I never actually watched Neon Genesis Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop. Now and Then, Here and There. Ranma 1/2. Cooking Master Boy, Grand Master Musashi, Rave, El-Hazard, Gatekeepers, Gensomaden Saiyuki… I bring all of this up I suppose because I’m insecure about my weeb credentials. I know there are people who watch way more anime than I do, and know much more about Japanese culture than I do. I don’t claim to be an expert on it, or on anything. I’m just a curious guy who’s seen some stuff and has thought about some stuff, and my real skills are things like being willing and able to talk out loud about stuff. I invite people to join in the process, and I’m always delighted when someone knows something I don’t, and preferably aren’t mean-spirited about it. But honestly, I still learn from the meanies even as they upset me.
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I feel like I oughta throw in some stuff somewhere about how the UK used to be more influential in Singaporean culture, but that influence has been mostly waning. You can tell in the names of stuff. Empress Place… we used to use phrases like “Queen’s English”. These days Singaporean kids are growing up with tiktok and youtube, which each have their own interestingly unique accents
want to throw in the benevolent disney marshall plan quote somewhere. Big Bang Theory popular in China. Friends and How I Met Your Mother popular in India.
sitcoms like seinfeld, friends, HIMYM are all based in new york, and so the people who watch them all develop a familiarity with new york even if they don’t quite consciously realize it
I’ve been thinking more lately about the first wave of english films that swept the world – Gone with the wind, sound of music, good the bad the ugly. loads of asian women are named Vivian because Gone With The Wind was popular in China. Clint Eastwood. Marilyn Monroe, tinseltown, Audrey Hepburn… https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2014-02/12/content_17278999_10.htm
I loved watching MTV when it first was available to me in Singapore… what do I remember about it? Avril Lavigne, who’s Canadian. Creed’s My Sacrifice. MTV “VJs”
first mcdonalds, first starbucks
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so previously i talked about wanting to articulate a personal history of the world, and i would work backwards from myself. one way is to approach it via geography and politics, ethnicity, language, nations and so on. but there are other things i care about. books, movies, music, computers, technology, video games. lately i’ve been curious to understand things like the history of CDs, how they came to be, how they became popular, and how they’ve become basically irrelevant
and what about the floppy disk? what about the history of the internet? i’d have to start with my personal experiences and then trace them back. the big CD for me is OK Computer, 1997. As for video games, I really enjoyed reading Masters of Doom, and a fun anecdote i recall is– the game Doom got its name from a scene in a Scorsese movie (The Color of Money), and Scorsese was influenced by Akira Kurosawa, so in an indirect little way, you can kinda say Akira Kurosawa influenced Doom
Jimi Hendrix and the electric guitar, I think is an important story
I love an anecdote from a biography of David Bowie– In 1953, rationing ended and TV started to pick up. Bowie’s dad, like thousands of others, bought a new set so the family could watch the coronation of the glamorous young Queen Elizabeth II. Bowie was 6 at the time. She passed away in 2022 after a tremendous 70 year reign, being a remarkable constant in a world going through so much change. I’m sure somebody’s written a tremendous blogpost or article about it. “when she was born, telegram was common, when she died, Telegram is an app”
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I had an idea in my mind for a substack post a few hours ago that i was pretty excited about, then i got pretty tired just dealing with life, finally got my baby son to sleep and now it’s 1030pm– which is actually pretty early for me, but tiredness can be a complex thing. particularly i feel too tired to write the ‘proper’ thing that i had in mind, but I have a suspicion that if I sorta freestyle ‘casually’ around it, some form of it will manifest itself. if true, the result will be a bit more rambly than ‘ideal’, but it would actually exist, rather than be perfect in its nonexistence.
having a baby is the best thing in the world blah blah and it’s also been disruptive to all my habits and behavior patterns. which can be both good and bad, depending. a thing that i’ve finally started to get around to doing, which i’ve been meaning to do for years– when it’s time to help him take a nap, I try to make it a point to put on my headphones and listen to a good album that I’ve never actually listened to before. So far recently I’ve listened to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Keys of Life, Blondie’s Parallel Lines…
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when i was a kid,
children’s cartoons, soundtracks were so good, batman, xmen, power rangers,
wwe, shawn michaels, undertaker
football?
video games
mtv
axn, anime, samurai x. flame of recca, slam dunk. but the main thing was really samurai x.
nickelodeon, all that. dan schneider. danny timberelli gta.
cartoon network
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- I was born in Singapore in the year 1990. The preceding sentence tells you something not just about where I’m from, but who I’m talking to: a non-Singaporean audience. If I were addressing a local audience of my fellow Singaporeans, it wouldn’t really be necessary to mention that I’m local-born. I could convey that through other context clues. It would be obvious from my accent if I were speaking. And if I were writing, I could pretty quickly establish shared 90s Singapore context by talking about, oh, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, or local tv shows like Phua Chu Kang, Under One Roof and Growing Up.
- I find it interesting to contemplate how my concept of my audience has changed over the years. It’s kind of messy. I always straddled multiple domains. My earliest website..