Some of us might have been there before. When we were growing up, we could not possibly connect the dots. We were told to focus on doing well in school because acing the exams would be the gateway to a bright future but not everyone is academically inclined. Even if you did manage to get a college degree and even completed a tertiary education, you wonder what now? When you go through the daily grind you may also wonder what is the point of it all.
I was so glad that I chanced upon If We Dream Too Long written by Goh Poh Seng and read it . I might not have enjoyed reading it in my youthful days because it is too close to home. Though the story is set in Singapore during the 1960s when Singapore first achieved its independence, the theme that runs through the fiction is relatable wherever you are .
After finishing school, eighteen-year-old Kwang Meng did not do well enough to secure a scholarship and he cannot afford a university education. He is now employed as a clerk. Shy and sensitive, he finds it difficult to settle in mainstream life and he is unable to identify with his friends’ values.
Kwang Meng takes refuge in day dreaming of exotic faraway places and imagines merging himself with the sea. The story begins with him pretending to be unwell and after obtaining from the company doctor a sick leave certificate, he boards a bus to the beach. Swimming in the sea is among one of the few things that he really likes.
‘He had honestly not been feeling too well since he contracted poverty, loneliness, boredom,sexual frustration and periodic coughs and colds. not to speak of his dreary job.’
Kwang Meng is navigating his young adult life. He hangs out with his former schoolmates, Hock Lai and Portia getting drunk on Tiger beers, Portia has relatives who would sponsor his studies and Hock Lai was once the great orator in school and used to take part in school debates. He would make a good freedom fighter but Singapore has now gained its independence, and those in power are still young plus he has no degree in Law nor Economics. He becomes an insurance salesman and now courting Cecilia Ong who is from a wealthy family.
‘ You should see the house,’ Hock Lai recited.
“You know,’Hock Lai said,’once you’ve seen at real close how the rich live, your whole perspective enlarges. All your life you have been used to one world, and now you know there is another completely different world in existence Once you’ve seen this at close range, your own world crumbles into dust. And you must get into that new world. You don’t know how, but you know you simply must, or else you would go berserk.’
‘ You must pull yourself together, man if you want to make it in this rat race.’ Over one lunch, Hock Lai lectures him.
Kwang Meng is told by his mother that his father feels responsible when Kwang Meng cannot find a good job and if only he could afford his son’s university fees.
“I don’t understand everything, he thought. No one can understand everything. Things just happen, that’s all. So what is there to understand? Things just happen.” –Chapter Twenty-Three, If We Dream Too Long, Goh Poh Seng (New Edition) NUS Press Singapore
“What if nothing happens all life long? He knows them, knows the people to whom nothing ever happened in their lives. Was it fate? Fate, in this day and age?” – Chapter Fifteen If We Dream Too Long, Goh Poh Seng (New Edition) NUS Press Singapore
Boon Teik, a young school teacher who lives next door to Kwang Meng invites him to dine in his home. He sees that Boon Teik and his wife, Mei-I have done up their flat very nicely unlike his home. Boon Teik has a good collection of books and he encourages Kwang Meng to read them. He ends up carting home Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, and Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi. He feels somewhat reassuring with the weight of the books in his hand and when he reads them, he enjoys them. In the beginning Kwang Meng’s life unfolds without clear meaning As the story progresses, we know that Kwang Meng will be OK.It is a coming of age story, it is about balancing your youthful aspirations and dreams against family and societal expectations. Its theme is universal.
In the author’s preface:’I felt that Camus and his fellow European writers had retreated behind the smog of Europe, while I was facing the winds of change in Asia. I had naïvely thought that depersonalization only affected people in the West. Now, I learned that the outsider exists in all societies. It struck me as a worthy subject to explore. I was lured by the notion of commitment and involvement – the opposite of the European outsider : the man of inaction.‘
If We Dream Too Long by Goh Poh Seng was first published in 1972. It has been widely hailed as the first Singapore novel and it has been used as a text in university literature courses in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. It has been translated into Tagalog and Russian.
Incidentally after putting up this post, I read from Read the Classics with Henry Eliot that 2026 marks seventy-five years since Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was first published.
Bookaholic Macchiato 