Poured Over: Rachel Heng on The Great Reclamation

“As a kid, you don’t know any of that. You’re just like, wow, this sounds magical, like, how could this be the sea? How could this be land? How can that just happen? And I think that speaks to a particular quality of life in Singapore, and growing up in Singapore, and all of the changes that you see happening before your eyes…”

Rachel Heng’s new novel, The Great Reclamation, is an epic story of love and power and family (with a magical twist) set in mid-century Singapore. She joins us on the show to talk about the legacy of colonialis, rewriting (with an assist from post-it notes and index cards), Elizabeth McCracken and the Michener Center, the histories that get told (and the ones that don’t), Crazy Rich Asians, and much more with host Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favoirte podcast app.

Featured Books (Episode)
The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
Suicide Club: A Novel About Living by Rachel Heng
The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Full transcript

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Rachel Heng…You might have seen a story in The New Yorker (I think it was Spring of ’21), Before the Valley. So you definitely know her name. There’s also a debut novel called The Suicide Club, which is a little different from The Great Reclamation. But The Great Reclamation…there’s so much I love about this book, there’s the characters I love, the setting I love, there’s a slightly weird set-up, that’s a little fun that we’re going to get to. It involves some disappearing islands, which I can hear some of you now saying, what disappearing islands? But it’s also the history of a place and a culture and a people. And it is so gorgeous, this book. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. It’s really nice to meet you finally.

Rachel Heng: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s so great to be here.

MM: So here’s a question. You grew up in Singapore. But you’ve been studying in the States and you were at Columbia, you also did your MFA at the Michener Center in Austin, which you have some pretty great colleagues from. A lot of writers I love have come out of that program. And The Great Reclamation is really, really different from The Suicide Club, which was dystopian, it was New York, it was a play on wellness culture. If you haven’t read it, folks, you should go out and read it. But The Great Reclamation is one of these epic stories. But it’s an epic story of a place that not every American knows: Singapore. So can we talk a little bit about where this book came from?

RH: Yeah, yeah. And thank you for mentioning Suicide Club as well. I think it’s interesting when I did my very first interview, for my first novel, even though this dystopian novel set in New York, and so on, it was with the Singapore newspaper, and the journalist said, she’s like, Oh, well, I read this. And, it’s set in New York, and it’s in the future, but it feels very much like you are writing about Singapore. Like it’s a society in which success is very narrowly defined. And they are the sorts of controls over certain things. And so I think, even though it does seem like a very different book, going back into history, and writing about land reclamation in Singapore, in a way, it does feel like a sort of organic continuation of my writing. And as you know, in my short stories, I frequently am writing about present day and historical Singapore as well. And so for this book, I guess what inspired it was, well, land reclamation itself really. I grew up in Singapore. In primary school, I remember, which is kind of like elementary school here. I remember being in the classroom and a teacher saying, you know, where we’re sitting right now used to be the sea. And that just totally stuck in my mind. And every single kid learns about land reclamation at some point. It’s part of this concern or narrative that, you know, the country is very small, there’s tiny, it’s literally you can cross the island in like, an hour, an hour’s drive. So land reclamation has been a big initiative to increase just the size of the island. And I think it’s grown in size by about 25%. Since the 60s, you know, as a kid, you don’t know any of that. You’re just like, wow, this sounds like magical, like, How could this be the sea? How could this be land? How can that just happen? And I think that speaks to a particular quality of, of life in Singapore, and growing up in Singapore, and all of the changes that you see happening before your eyes, and like you say, you know, maybe many Americans aren’t that familiar with Singaporean history or Singapore at all. But most people would have seen Crazy Rich Asians. And you would have seen, you know, the skyline right after like being really beautiful, you know, with the boat on the top. And even that skyline is something that came up in the last 40-50 years or so. Even in my lifetime, growing up in Singapore, I would drive past places that used to be either you know, trees, or the sea or flat, and then you’d come back a couple of years later, and there would be huge buildings there. So that that those hotels in the crazy rich Asian skyline is built on land. And so I think growing up with all of that happening around you, and constantly having the ground shifting, and like buildings going up and coming down and roads changing, it raises questions about, I guess, memory, and the stories and, and how, you know, how you hold on to the past? And what does it mean when everything is changing so much so quickly? And I think that’s the feeling out of which this book came.

MM: Yeah. And as a reader, I got a real sense of sort of this thrust of change. It’s so fast, and it’s so intense, and some people buy into the change and some people super do not buy into the change. And obviously that’s where the dramatic conflict comes. And a big part of the narrative engine for this novel comes from that conflict. And you know, when you talk about land reclamation too, I mean, Boston’s Back Bay, reclaimed land. you know, Battery Park City, in Manhattan, reclaimed land, like, you know, Singapore, isn’t the place where this is happening. And you know, how much do we give up people in exchange for sort of future promises, right? Like I’m using air quotes because I, you don’t really control the future, it comes no matter what. And it was wild to me the way you handle time in this novel, and when we open up and it’s just like, oh, wait, okay, where am I, in time and space, and we meet this kid, Ah Boon, who—essentially we follow him to adulthood. Was he the first character who showed up for you? Because he’s a very special kid, when we first meet him.

RH: Um, yes, he was the first character. It actually came out of a short story I wrote. While I was always working on the research for this novel, and I had started a draft that was written in a totally like straight historical vein with no speculative bent or magic at all. Right, and it wasn’t working. So I threw it out. And then I wrote a short story that actually is now a chapter in the middle of the book, it’s when the government first come to the village. And that was a story, character. So he was there sitting, you know, on the steps of his house and seeing these people come in into the swamp and like measuring the ground, legs into the earth. So he showed up right from the very beginning, I would say. And then after writing that story, I wanted to know more about him as a character and kind of to go back into the past. So then I wrote backwards 20 years. And that’s why the book spans the 20 years before that. And then the few years after.

MM: We go essentially, from sort of late 30s, early 40s, into the early 60s, let’s say 65?

RH: I think we go up to ‘61.

MM: I can totally see why you would want to take that period and build a novel around it. But can we talk about this fisherman’s family for a second? Because obviously, they are not among the wealthy, they are not among those who are having an easier time of things. And in fact, you know, they’re hiding this secret from a community where everyone does, they share everything, you know, you can’t sort of keep secrets in this tiny community. How much research did you have to do into the Campo?

RH: A lot of research, I guess, is the is the quick answer. I probably spent about a year doing research, like just reading, going into archives before I even started writing. And then as I was writing, I would continue researching, whenever I needed to know about like a specific aspect of life, or like a particular historical period of events. But honestly, the research was really enjoyable, because I think I wouldn’t have decided to write this book if I wasn’t interested in this time period. So for me, it was just really, really fascinating to dive into the archives and look up oral history interviews of people living through this change, the interviews of people who lived along the coast, when the land reclamation was happening, and seeing the coast move out, seeing the buildings go up, you know, and talking about like, oh, all the dust that’s coming and all the crabs that are disappearing, and all these little details that I wouldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t had access to the archival material. Yeah, I really loved doing the research, and then reading kind of about geography and history, but also politics and you know, all the different events that were happening at the time, not just in Singapore, but also in the wider region and in the world. Because this was part of a global wave of colonialism right across the British Empire. Yeah, it was like a year plus of pure research, and then lots of follow up research.

MM: What surprised you the most from your research?

RH: Oh, gosh, so many things. I think one of the things that I read about that maybe didn’t surprise me, but was so unlikely or like, so surreal was the conveyor belt. I write about the conveyor belt in the book, that was a real thing, the conveyor belt that they built in order to move the fill material. So they had dug out this hill, that was some from the coast, and they cut down the hill, and they dug a reservoir. So today, that reservoir exists today, I’ve been there many times, and then they build a belt to shift the dirt from that spot all the way to the coasts. And I don’t know exactly why I couldn’t find out exactly why in my book, I say well, it was cheaper to do it that way than to you know, hire truck drivers. But you see photos of it and it’s it looks just like something out of a movie. You know, it looks made out like it doesn’t look like it could have existed but it did.

MM: Wait, so is that how you got to this idea of islands that appear and disappear with the cycles of the moon?

RH: I think that was more that that is pure fiction. And you know, based in part on folklore, and just like coastal vagaries, I wanted the book to feel like a shift in reality, I guess from like one kind of reality or one type of narrative about the world too, and I think the early section of the book where there are these disappearing islands is a time when things were less known or pinned down or named, right, and then when, after the war, and we shifted to this independence, nation-building mode, then it’s much more about sort of concrete things or this technocratic model of living where we know everything, we name everything, everything is categorized. We have these efficient plans in place to build this modern nation. And so I think the islands sort of stand in contrast to that future that we eventually get to because the islands are slippery, ungraspable. That they’re not always there. They can’t be, you know, pinned down

MM: Well, they can’t be pinned down. And they also just can’t be contained. You can’t just say, I claim this in the name of X, Y, or Z, which is obviously a lot of what has happened throughout the history of Asia. I mean, I’m part Taiwanese, I mean, if you want to talk about a complicated country history, and there are so many people who have opinions about Taiwan, who really should possibly not share those opinions, because they’re not well thought out. But you’re just kind of like, okay.

RH: Actually, one of the books that really inspired me that I just remember is by a Taiwanese author, Wu Ming-Yi, The Man with the Compound Eyes and he writes about land, and there is a bit of yeah, that’s, I love that. And he writes about, I guess, similar questions and themes. And yeah, so it’s really cool that you mentioned that.

MM: Well, it’s tricky, too. Because if you think about it, Taiwan went from being a Portuguese colony, which, okay, do a Japanese colony and you know, then, of course, we have, you know, Chiang Kai Shek and his folks roll in, and it’s just kind of like, but yet at the same time, it’s really becoming its own place. And however people feel about the directions it’s going or what its neighbors might think about the directions and whatnot. It’s just to see this country emerge from a colonial legacy…And somehow the Brits, I don’t really understand how maybe they were distracted by Hong Kong and Singapore and Malaysia, I don’t really know. But Taiwan never hit their radar. So, you know, there was a whole different direction that kind of happened for that country, but it’s just one of those places like Singapore, that’s so wildly unique. I think that’s the best way to describe it. I mean, Singapore, it’s a polyglot, like you have multiple languages. So I mean, you have all of these different ways that you can pull story in. And yet, you’ve created this amazing family, and this amazing community, I love Ah Boonand his story arc. I’m going to sit here quietly, and not ruin anything for anyone. It’s fabulous. It’s fabulous. It’s inevitable. It’s everything you would hope for in a novel with this kind of sweep. But how do you take all of that research and all of the things that you know about the place that you grew up in, and turn it into a story that really moves with characters that I am so deeply invested in?

RH: I guess, like all fiction, it starts with character, you know, it’s like, Yes, I’m interested in all of these big historical, political, geographical questions, but ultimately, I am Singaporean. I grew up in Singapore, and these are real, you know, real people that I know, I see. Like Ah Boon feels, to me, like a particular character of a generation, you know, my grandparents’ generation, the kind of person that I know very well, and that I, you know, I encounter every day (not in my current life, but when I was growing up, and whenever I got home). It was very important to filter all of those big questions, big themes through the very human, very intimate perspective of these characters and their relationships. And all the characters feel incredibly close to me and dear to me. They all feel like people I know or could know, and maybe all parts of myself really, when as like all fiction, fictional creations are of their writers. Yeah, I think always filtering it down to Ah Boon and his relationships. And it was helpful also–or deliberate– that he was a child when we met him, having that childlike lens, and the naivete and the fact that he didn’t understand these changes, he didn’t understand what was going, you know, happening to his country and the place around him, we kind of learn what the reader learns at the same time as Ah Boon is learning. So having that filter allowed us allowed me to really narrow in on like him, his family, his community.

MM: There’s a lot of love in this family. And there’s a lot of making do with what you have kind of thing. But Ah Boon and his uncle ultimately have very different views of the world. And I knew it was coming and I’m not spoiling anything yet, readers will, they will understand. It will be clear, but at the same time to see that and to not lose sight of the fact that these characters do love each other and they just they’re kind of bewildered by each other. I think it’s what I’m trying to say that. You know, here they are in this family and they just can’t figure it out. They can’t find the middle ground. It feels very au courant. It feels very of the moment no matter where you live, but also, they’re men and they just don’t have the language. They don’t have the language.

RH: Totally. They’re men of a particular place and time and culture as well. And I guess, like you say, it happens everywhere, ways in which like the individuals, individual relationships are like shaped by, you know, politics and class and all these things. I was just thinking about my mother’s own family. So my grant they disagreed on at the time, you could say, you could go either to Chinese school or English school, and you see me the story, they go to a Chinese speaking school, but they were different languages. And they meant very different things, right, because English schools were run essentially, by, you know, not necessarily the British, but like, often Catholic nuns, but it would be access into different kinds of life. And Chinese schools were associated with communism and China and all these other things. So even within my own family, my grandparents disagreed on where to send their kids and they finally came up with the solution, like they would alternate. So one kid would go to Chinese one, the next one will go to English. So it’s just like, even within the same family, you have all the different experiences and ideologies that are completely formative, right. And so I think that’s something I wanted to bring into the book. And so you see there is there are those tensions that are those conflicts, as you bring up, across generations, but also even within the generations themselves. Because you know, as it is, in real life, we don’t all agree, just because we all grew up at the same time, even if we’re from the same place or the same family.

MM: Well, I’m thinking about Natalie, and Sook Mai – if they’d ever met. I don’t know what they would talk about you do.

RH: They meet very briefly at the community center.

MM: And it’s kind of an awkward, but they don’t speak. And I mean, like if they sat down over a cup of coffee, I, it would be a very strange conversation, I think. I think they would just end up staring at each other until someone says something about Ah Boon.

RH: Or they would just talk about Ah Boon. I don’t know.

MM: Maybe, maybe. But I do love the idea that they each–and Natalie story’s I really appreciated Natalie story. I felt like she had a couple of surprises that I did not expect. And I always love it when I’m surprised by something in a novel. And certainly I know enough about Singapore. You know, I can locate Singapore on the map. I would love to go to the airport someday. I’ve heard stories about that airport, I would like to see it for myself.

RH: Yeah, yeah.

MM: All of these characters feel really fresh and really interesting. And even Ah Boon’s mother is kind of like, she’s ahead of her time. She’s really ahead of her time. She’s like, No, no, this son, my other son can be a fisherman, this son is going to go to school, which, for a woman in her position, this is kind of outrageous.

RH: Yeah, yeah, again, that came from my grandmother. So my grandmother was, you know, she grew up in an immensely poor family, she never, she was illiterate, she spoke only Hokkien, and then she knew some Mandarin, she was the one fighting for her children to go to English school, because she said, it’s important for them to learn English, because that’s the direction the country is going in. And they’re going to be able to get jobs if they can speak English, and my grandfather was hugely against it. So that’s how they extract the bargain of like, half the family would go to English school and half to Chinese school. So I think they are, you know, these people of that generation, actually, mothers maybe we’re, you know, without love and concern you have for your child, very sensitive to, you know, the ways in which the world is changing, and always aware of survival, and wanting the best for their kids. So I think the mother in the book is like one of those characters.

MM: Well, and also, honestly, I mean, there’s so like, the speed at which all of this change is happening to this community. And you are talking about sort of decades in the history of the book. But I mean, if I were one of these characters, I would be thinking, this is happening so fast, I don’t really know what to make of it. And I don’t have all the parts. But education is the thing that makes you; it means you can deal with change. It means you can figure some things out. And yet, it’s not a perfect solution. And it’s kind of hard to go.

RH: Well, you see the ways in which once Ah Boon goes to school he is in a way estranged from his community. So that kind of sadness in that as well.

MM: Do you have a favorite moment from The Great Reclamation? Do you have something that we can talk about that isn’t a spoiler?

RH: Favorite moment that’s not a spoiler… I think the moment where they try to find the island again, so there’s the disappearing. And they discover them at first and they’re like, oh, my gosh, the islands here, they’re not meant to be honest. And then they go back and they’re like, they’re gone. And nobody believes them. Everybody thinks they’re crazy, right? And then, you know, our Buddha and his father and everyone they go into this like Silent space of like, okay, this strange thing happened to us and we’re just not going to talk about it. And then at some point, I won’t find this. I think I know how to find them and he brings up and back out to sea alone, and then they actually manage to find them. And there is this closeness between Ah Boon and his father when previously, you know, they were always like slightly distant, and they didn’t know how to relate to each other. And it’s the finding of this, these beautiful islands that kind of brings them together as father and son for the first time, and is a moment of like real joy and connection and like discovery for them. So I think I, that’s definitely one of my favorite moments early on the book

MM: I bought into this world so completely, from the first page without a doubt, absolutely. To believe every single word was true. And I really, I wanted to know what was going on with this father and son, and I wanted to know where you were going to take me. And every time I met someone in this book, you know, you take a couple of moments, and there’s Sook Mai, she’s amazing. I mean, we meet some really fantastic people. But talking about the structure, though, how do you balance, you know, the research and the movement of the story? And also just all of the things you want to cover, all of the things you want to do? Yeah, in a novel?

RH: Yeah. I think I knew where it was going to end, so that was helpful. I had that middle of chapter of when, you know, the government first come to the Campo for the first time, and I knew where it was going to end, so I knew what I was writing. And then I had to figure out the beginning. So like, why is Ah Boon, why does he become the person that he becomes, so that he goes on to do the things that he does? I always had a loose structure, in my mind, I initially thought it would be three parts, there’ll be a section, and then there would be the ending section in the independence period, right when the British first leave, and then there would be the past. So 20 years ago, before the war. And then as I wrote, I realized I had to fill out some things, you know, for it to make sense, so then it ended up being five pots, which is what it is now. So there, there is a period, it starts in the 1940s, before the war, and then the war happens. And then there’s the 1950s, well, certainly had this kind of coming of age when they first go to school, outside the village. And then the middle section, where the government first arrived. And then the fourth and fifth section, which I won’t spoil. So once I had that, five part structure, I knew roughly, you know, what would happen in each set section. And that really helped tracking all the different plot lines and all the different characters, because it is also a multi-point of view novel, you have Ah Boon as the main character. Yeah, until like maybe five or six different other characters points of view. And so I guess I had a lot of post it notes, a lot of little note cards. At some point, I had a big I think when I was writing my second draft and editing, I had a big piece of paper, like a butcher block sheet. And I just put all the chapters, or cards and color coded them, for each character’s point of view it was and sometimes it would be like three different characters in one chapter. So I had to put like three different sticky notes. And then I put it all up on this board. And that was my first like, big attempt at revising, and the content on there, figuring out which chapters do we keep, with chapters do we add, which characters are like not helping the narrative or like too confusing or too much digression? At the same time, I wanted it to have that digressive quality because to me, it’s a story of a community, you know, it’s not just a single character coming of age. It’s, it’s this sort of this community in this country. So I wanted it to be polyphonic in a way, if it could be. So like balancing that, having the breadth of perspective, but also to keep it moving forward enough so people aren’t, you know, like, Oh, my God, where’s this going? It’s gonna be a million pages. Yeah, it was a whole process, with many, many rounds of revision, I had amazing input from my wonderful agent and editor. And I did massive, quite a bit of structural revision, even though we had sold the book to Riverhead. So that was, as with all books, maybe some more than others, you know, an ongoing iterative process,

MM: You totally answered my next question, which was how much of writing is rewriting for you? And it sounds like like all of it?

RH: Yeah. Well, I think that’s really important. I, you know, I think it’s easy sometimes when you see a book out in the world and think, Oh, well, that person made it look really easy. Like, those are usually the ones right, because you do hear about people who are absolutely, I have spoken to months, and this is the final version, right? But, you know, maybe they’ve been like thinking about it or like marinate in it for a long time. And that’s also the writing that you don’t see.

MM: That’s absolutely true. I do think everyone needs an editor. Everyone needs an editor. I don’t care who that person is. Everyone needs an editor and I think, you know, it’s helpful to when you’re when you’re trying to keep track, as you said of major storylines and a cast and their emotions, and a lot of feelings in this book. There’s a lot of it, it’s so satisfying. It’s just so all of the feels, as they say, are in this book, but also for you, as you’re doing the rewriting, and you’re doing, you know, sort of the rejiggering and figuring out, you know what needs to go, which is a huge part of the process, too. I mean, how much are you pulling from your formal MFA studies? Or how much of it is just I’m going to trust in the process and see where it goes?

RH: Yeah, well, I guess I have a slightly different perspective on this because I wrote my whole first book before I went to the MFA. And I actually wrote my first book when I was working in London for the Singapore government as part of a scholarship I had taken to go to college. And so I didn’t even know MFAs existed at that point, and when I discovered it, then I was like, Oh, I should go do it, which was after I saw the first book. So I guess I’ve had both experiences, one writing really just on my own with no input. I think the first person, aside from my husband, who read my first book was my agent. I queried her with a very early draft. And then it was my editor. And that was it. I didn’t have any external mentors or other writers. This book was written within the MFA, because I started in my second year at Michener and it was my thesis project. I had a thesis advisor, the amazing Elizabeth McCracken.

MM: Oh, she’s the best.

RH: She’s a genius, a total genius, and I am hugely indebted to her for talking me off the cliff, like many times with this book, because I was just like, I can’t do it, Elizabeth, it’s just too much today, I don’t know how to balance the history and the magic and all this stuff. She would always have really just like wise, stabilizing smart things to give me and she also read it many times I think, two, three times possibly. So having that input was super helpful. Some of the big revisions I did to the character arcs, you know, came out of like my conversations with others. At the same time, by the time I graduated, I think I was still only on like, version three. And this is like maybe version ten. So you know, there was like I did on my own after I graduated, it was different. But it also wasn’t that different from writing. The first book was like, I did have the input and the support more the emotional support and like the, you know, general, like the craft advice, but ultimately, when you’re writing a book, you are sort of on your own, whether in an MFA or not like you’re the you’re sitting, you know, from your Word document you’re having to face down the page.

MM: What did you learn writing Suicide Club that you used in The Great Reclamation?

RH: I think I learned that even when I felt like, I should throw it out, and that it was going nowhere, and that it was terrible, and no one will ever want to read this, and I hate everything—that that feeling is temporary and that it’s a matter of, or maybe it’s not, maybe in the end, you do have to throw it out, but you’ll never find out until you finish writing it. And so I think having done it once, I wouldn’t say it became it became easier because I don’t think What does as many people say, every project has its own new learning, you know, things to learn and challenges. But I did feel like I had the faith to continue, like it was a little easier. And I needed it for this book, because this book was so long, like it was just you know, the first draft was like much longer than this. It was just like 140,000 words or something, you know, with moving pieces and keeping track of stuff and then cutting and adding and cutting and adding. So I think I needed to have that faith that it would work out in the end.

MM: Okay, wait, Suicide Club came out in 2018? Right. And you and I are talking in March of 2023. So wait, how many years did you spend on The Great Reclamation?

RH: I started writing it right as soon as a club came out. So in 2018, and I sold it in 2020. I think the fall of 2020.

MM: So really, the bulk of the work has happened sort of in the last three years, maybe?

RH: I would say it probably from beginning to end, it was maybe four years from the first Final Draft, maybe three and a half to four years.

MM:That feels so fast. And I’m just the reader and it feels so fast.

RH: Yeah.

MM: Because again, I just want to go back to the idea that this is an entire world. And yes, there is this sort of fantastical element of the islands. But that note is so grounded in this world and these people that it’s just kind of like okay, I bought in. I mean I’m completely in and it just it works and then I get so wrapped up in the characters and I know you don’t necessarily, you can’t really have a favorite character when you’re writing this obviously, but I sort of feel like you might, and I’m going to ask anyway. But I sort of feel like Ah Boon gets the most love. Overall. I mean, you’d like your other characters to but he really there’s, there’s a compassion there for him that I think as a reader I really needed to see.

RH: Yeah, I think again, you know, Ah Boon, to me feels like many a Singaporean person that I know, of a of that generation, you know, when you know, who was part of but also also enacted this change. So I think it was important for me to like, to kind of to write them as like, with as much complexity and compassion as possible. And it is my you know, he is the main character, so I guess I ended up spending the most time with him, I do have a soft spot for Sook Mai. I think it’s hard not to because she has such strong beliefs, and so passionate, and it’s such a like, strong, idealistic woman that I just feel like I really identify with her and I loved writing her. And also her path to some sort of, like, reconciliation and healing towards the end as well. I wouldn’t say she’s my favorite character, but definitely a soft spot for her.

MM:

Well, love is hard. Love is hard. (Laughter) So someone described Ah Boon—when I was researching—someone described him as a character “who loves too much.” And I do I think that’s, Sook Mai too. They love too much. I don’t think Ah Boon is the only character who loves too much, but I think it is possible, you know, to want to be part of something so much bigger. You know, it’s going to push you and it’s going to test you and it’s it makes for great reading. Oh, you’re such a great read. Can we talk about some of your literary influences for a second, though? I know Elizabeth McCracken, who we all love. I mean, she—what that woman can do on the page. Yeah, fabulous. But she’s not the only person who’s helped create Rachel Heng, writer. So can we talk about some of the other influences on you?

RH: For sure. Yes. Well, for this book, specifically, I was very influenced by Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.

MM: Yeah. Okay.

RH: Yeah, it makes sense. I feel like every time I tell people that that’s the response.

MM: Because I don’t like to assume that.

RH: What he what he does with time and point of view. I also just love 19th century novels in general but didn’t want to write a 19th century novel. Like, in the end, I feel like he kind of has that, like omniscient perspective of the 19th century that I love very much, but like, in a contemporary way, with the fluid, like, moving in and out of different characters, like getting very close to them. The way time is like so circular in his fiction, really, like with the foreshadowing and the returns and repetition. The way like a single moment can like expand and contract like I just, I yeah, I love that. Yeah, The Known World but also his short fiction, Lost in the City. Like, yeah, lots of short stories, I can go back to them again and again. So that was very much a big influence. I think the writer, a few writers have sort of speculative historical fiction, you know, so I mentioned Wu Ming-Yi early on, The Man with the Compound Eyes. And that’s translated. That’s a really beautiful book about a landslide that happens in Taiwan. And the magical element, and it’s kind of hard to describe, but also combines this like very literal socio-political issue with like something that’s a little more fantastical or metaphorical.

MM: Sometimes you have to step to the side a little bit to be able to talk about the thing you want to talk about, that you can actually talk about, because, yeah, you just can’t, there are guardrails in place, and

RH: Absolutely, and it’s complicated to like, I think that’s the thing that fiction can do, right? But it can be, you can hold all of these like contradictory ideas that you couldn’t necessarily get out in like something that was, you know, I don’t know, an essay or something, or maybe something you can’t write about that you can then like, you know, kind of convey through embodied characters. So I think yeah, he does that wonderfully in The Man with Compound Eyes. And then I really loved Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift. And, you know, goes through I think, like, I don’t want to say wrong, but I think it’s like 100 years or something. It’s many, many years, it’s intergenerational, and it follows like three different families, this huge class of characters, and is historical, but also speculative, and like goes into the future. So I think that like sweep and the range of that and again, history at a slant, right. It’s not just straight on, like, very sort of realist textbook sort of history. So I was very inspired by that, and so many more, I could go on.

MM: I mean, also, when you think about how history is written, right, like, I mean, I was a history major in college, and there were times where you’d be working in primary source or, yeah, but you’re looking at a primary source and you’re like, I’m sorry, what did you just say?I mean, and or, you know, let’s just take American history at the moment like we’re having many conversations about American history.and the way people want to tell stories, right and the way they want to talk about change and the way they talk about, you know, where we sit in relation to our past and our future. Like there are people who, when they’re talking about, you know, where we aren, they forget that we are actually sitting in what’s going to become history.

RH: Yeah. Right.

MM: Also you can read a lot of history. But if you’re not using that information to do something else, yeah, yeah, I want to think about what’s kind of fascinating to me watching people respond to what is simply historical fact with a deep amount of emotion.

RH: Well, also the way in which like sudden histories are told and certain aren’t, right? What is the official narrative? What are the other narratives that you don’t get as much at a time? So yeah, I think that like when saying something is like, historically accurate, what does that mean? Like, who and like, how, and you know, so yeah, I think the beauty of writing historical fiction is to get into all of those questions.

MM: I think we just need to get to the emotional truth of the thing, right? Because I think the emotional truth is how you end up changing someone’s mind, right? Like, how many times have you heard well, you know, I related to this character more than I expected to, or Oh, no, not that person. I know that person personally. So they’re one of the good ones fill in the blank of whatever, the extreme is. It’s just, it’s wild to me. How, if you can make the stakes feel personal. For people, yeah, you wrote a novel set in Singapore. But at the same time, there’s so many moments that I don’t care where you grew up, or what your background is, there are just so many great moments in The Great Reclamation. I mean, it’s a big messy love story. And you know, it’s a family story, I’m going to come back to the islands that disappear with the moon. I mean, that’s just fun. Like, that’s just a fun, weird thing. And yet, it sets up this sort of runway to get into the story. And it’s great. It’s so great.I keep saying great, which is terrible. This book really is, I don’t want to say sublime. Sublime is not the word I’m looking for. And I can’t think of the word I’m looking for, which is what happened, there’s a sublime, okay, well, then you can have sublime, but it’s just the experience of reading The Great Recommendation was so surprising and delightful and heartbreaking. And it was all of the things that I want when I’m reading a novel. And I don’t have to like everyone. I’m not saying I liked every character. I’m not saying I loved every piece of the story.But as a whole, I did not want to put this book down at any point. Now I did actually have to put it down at one point because I had to do some others, like life interfered, and I had to do some stuff. But this is really the kind of book where if you can sit down and read all of it in a single sitting. That’s delightful. I highly recommend it. But at the same time, it’s a really special book. Do you miss this world? Do you miss your characters?

RH: I do. I do. Someone else asked me that recently. And I think the characters don’t feel gone for me. I feel like that’s still there. And often I do find in my fiction, like characters do return, even if not in the exact same form, like bits of them appear elsewhere in other stories, so I don’t feel like I’ve totally left them behind, which is not to say I would write a sequel per se, but they’ll come back in different forms.

MM: Yeah, I know, I said at the top of the show, but Beyond the Valley, your story that ran in The New Yorker, it’s not the same in any way, shape, or form. But I just feel like those characters know these characters.

RH: A little bit a little bit.

MM: What do you want listeners to know about the Singapore that you’re writing about? Since this is a largely American audience in just the context in which Singapore tends to be known, which most recently is probably Crazy Rich Asians. I guess just knowing that that’s, that’s a very, very small, obviously, you know, and obviously, we know this like a very, very tiny segment of Singapore’s population. It’s like doing a movie about like the Kardashians and the world taking that to be like, literally all of America. And so I think hopefully, this book will provide a slightly different perspective and also to know that, you know, this feels like it’s in the distant past, but it’s really not. It’s like from the you know, it goes up to the 60s, like our parents, my parents’ generation, my grandparents lived thru this. So the Crazy Rich Asians Singapore is incredibly new. It’s something you know, just the physical landscape only appeared in the last like 30-40 years. So I think that’s hopefully what they want to know about Singapore specifically, but most importantly, I think, I hope that the characters speak to them and the stories of you know, love and family and what it means to be like a child growing up in any world and trying to figure out like what is important to you what your moral like system of beliefs are, you know, what do you do when you disagree your family I hope that will resonate with people.

MM: Yeah it will, straight up it will, that I know that that I know with absolute certitude, Rachel Heng thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over the great reclamation is out now.

RH: Thank you. Thank you so much.