Even further back, in the late 1950s, former mui sai Janet Lim published her captivity narrative Sold for Silver. Helmeted construction workers, a detail from Lee Boon Wang’s nation-affirming painting ‘Workers in a Shipyard’, dominate the cover of Robert Yeo’s Singapore Short Stories. Significantly further back, in the late 1980s, Filipina domestic maids recounted their experiences which were collected in Loo Bee Geok’s ‘I am a Filipino Maid’.
Alvin Pang channels and privileges migrant worker’s voices in his poem ‘Made of Gold’ (c 2000): One wonders when migrant workers first appear in Singapore writing? We can easily go back to 2013 and Theophilus Kwek’s poems ‘Little India’, and ‘Chinese Workers on the Evening Train’ in his first collection They Speak Only their Mother Tongue, although the latter poem has possibly more to say about uneasy contemporary Singaporean attitudes to migrant workers, and foreigners in general, than migrants themselves. Undelivered, and so lacking the syllables,
That I could share the joke, could suddenlyīe gifted with the Indic tongues. My eyes as he laughed – and waved, seeming to wish In the final section of Daryl Lim’s very recent poem ‘Running by the Kallang’ we encounter a sustained, intimate, yet troublingly distanced portrait of migrant workers in Singapore.Īnd homesick hearts, the newest seekers of hope “this migrant soul enriches this earth”: Encounters with Migrant Bengali Poetry in Singapore
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