Interview by Tania De Rozario
Thea Lim and I met in Singapore when we were twelve years old, in a queue to use the public telephone in the school canteen. We ended up classmates in high school and reconnected this summer, only months before her new novel An Ocean of Minutes was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize. In this interview, we chat about how this novel came to be and time, space, and things in between.
There is so much to unpack in An Ocean of Minutes. On one hand, it is all about Time. On the other hand, Time serves as a device that surfaces so many other issues concerning love, human relationships, immigration, power, bureaucracy, nostalgia, and impermanence. What was the driving force behind this novel?
Though it isn’t the most obvious thing about the novel (often what stands out is the love story or the sci-fi), time and its obdurate nature, as well as the fact that to be human is to always be running out of time, were the driving force for me. How do we continue to make friends, fall in love, take in pets, have children, when we know that one day everything will end? And everything is already constantly ending, all around us, all the time – every year, family members die, relationships end, and friends disappear. What are the mental gymnastics we do to suspend this understanding, and how does that labour both help and harm us?
When I came up with the idea of time travel to raise the stakes, I sent my character one way into the future. This was purely a narrative necessity, but once I did that, I was taken aback by how the book turned into an immigration story. Eventually, that made a kind of sense. My own worries about time stem from my experiences with migration, how every departure is like a death. So, it makes sense that my subconscious would funnel a story about time through that experience.
It is interesting to know that the book was influenced by your real life, especially since the whole story has a very “real” feel in general. For example, the struggles faced by the migrant workers felt very true to life. And because of where I am from, I can’t help but read so much of Singapore—its treatment of migrant domestic and construction workers —into so many of the scenes you wrote. What places were you inspired by?
I didn’t set out to write a novel about work and the nature of work in the global economy. The fact that my protagonist, Polly, becomes a bonded labourer—and that labour bonds are the means through which TimeRaiser, her employer, rebuilds the future—was another element that appeared organically as I tried to figure out how to construct the plot. Once that bit was in place, the way I shaped it was heavily influenced by my experiences growing up in Singapore: the shantytowns where construction workers lived by the side of luxury developments, the closet-sized “maid’s room” that is a feature of many typical Singaporean flats, the streets in town being crammed with young women, mostly Filipina, on the one Sunday a month they didn’t have to work.
Yet, now that I live and write in the West, I was also wary of publishing a novel that suggested that inequality lives elsewhere, in parts of the world that aren’t as “enlightened” as ours. I think that what I witnessed in Singapore gave me a heightened interest in the way migrant workers are treated anywhere, especially here in North America: the obscenely unfair treatment of farm workers in Ontario, the neglect and exploitation of female migrant workers in any number of industries from strip clubs to nail salons, and the groups of men clustered in Texas parking lots, waiting for work in the baking heat for hours on end.
You’re right—this is a global problem that is ongoing. I am curious about why you chose to situate this universe in the past, rather than in the future. What did your choice of time period enable in terms of your narrative?
There were two different reasons. First, it was thematically useful: so much of the novel deals with nostalgia and the desire to rescue a lost epoch. Setting it in the past (even an alternate past) was a way to enable readers to “feel” along with the characters—to dwell in the past and in everything that is irretrievable there. So references to old music—Dionne Warwick, Carly Simon, Bobby Womack—were key, as were references to outdated technology.
The other reason is that early drafts of the novel were set about 80 years in the future, and my guinea pig readers commented on the predictive nature of the text—how the story seemed to be trying to offer a window into what could happen if our society continued in its way. This troubled me. In portraying migrant work, my intention was not to say that we might, one day, treat people so badly, but that we do treat people this way and have been doing so for decades. I realized I had to set the novel in the past in order to say: this is already happening; this is who we are now.
For this reason, I’m mildly uncomfortable with the labelling of my novel as “dystopia.” Dystopias are usually associated with prediction (think of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, Black Mirror) or at least amplification. I was neither trying to predict nor amplify; I was trying to present our world as it is, just in slightly different housing, to create enough defamiliarization to enable us to see again.
Well the housing you’ve chosen really works. As does your language on many fronts. In the book, Polly “can’t get the light in the painting to do what it used to”. The scalloped edges of napkins are to her “such an act of beauty that goes mainly unseen”. There is such a sensitive and poetic quality to so many of the lines in this book. Is it difficult handling beautiful language when writing about such harrowing circumstances? Do you ever find yourself having to pull back for fear of “aestheticizing” tragedy or trauma?
I love this question, and I think it’s really tricky. Because what literature can offer is poetic language as a reprieve from the bleakness of real life. While in real life no one cares about your suffering, in stories the same type of suffering is given weight and is adorned in language. An obvious example is A Little Life, which I think tries to really get at the lived experience of trauma by providing a story that runs at the highest pitch for eight-hundred pages. Through beauty, stories can humanize or draw attention to experiences that we are more comfortable ignoring. At the same time, the preponderance of things like sexual violence in contemporary fiction (especially film and TV) should make us worry about the stylization of trauma and torture. We should consider whether this means that the dominant culture is coopting what was initially a positive impulse to shed light.
For me, I’m a bit of a minimalist to begin with, but I was particularly aware of the need to be restrained in this novel—in part because my vantage point character is very restrained, and because it felt inappropriate to be super ornate while describing exploitation. I did want there to be many moments of beauty in the novel, because that’s all Polly has—we can continue being human when others deny our humanity, if we can continue seeing the beauty in daily, mundane life: a cheesy reprint in a waiting room, a cocktail napkin at a scuzzy bar. It’s a way to affirm ourselves as sentient beings. In other ways, I held back in a fashion that sometimes felt risky. Much worse things could have happened to Polly, but it was important to me to only make things as bad as they needed to be for the plot to go where it needed to go. It was a risk because I think readers are used to more horror—more trauma—and some readers might feel that Polly’s experience wasn’t all that bad. But I think it is our responsibility as writers to not give in to the pornography of suffering, even if that might cost us.
I think the association between restraint and risk is very interesting and that “suffering as spectacle” is definitely something that needs to be interrogated as a writerly concern. Speaking of which, it’s been just over a decade since your first book, The Same Woman. What have the years done to your writing style and to your writerly concerns?
While publishing my novella didn’t change my life the way I imagined it might (I think this is an almost universal experience), it did enable me to give myself permission to pursue the writing life: to make writing my centre instead of a side hustle. And when I did that, something else happened: I realized that I wasn’t required to write stories that have a clear moral, that teach us how to be better than we are. Before The Same Woman, I really felt that stories that didn’t have some kind of higher purpose were decadent. After all, how else could I justify being a writer, when I had friends who were social workers, labour activists, and immigration lawyers? When I decided to go all in I was slowly able to realize that stories—with or without a strident moral—have unimpeachable value, that they are, as Leslie Marmon Silko says, “all we have to fight off illness and death.” So since that first book, what has lead my stories is not some righteous fight, but just what the story itself needs. I think this makes me a more effective writer, hopefully. (And surprise, still political anyway!)
Yes, I do find that when we give a story what it needs, the politics attached to that story tend to surface on its own. If nothing surfaces, that too is political. You’ve mentioned before that your own history of long-distance travel required you to relay your life across great distances, and that this got you into the habit of telling stories about your life. Looking at the state of the world today, what do you think is the role of writing in bridging gaps between people and places?
This is a lovely question that I don’t know the answer to! In a way the answer is always the same, because storytelling in any form is an eternal human endeavour—one that will always be inextricably tied to the production of empathy. Except this question makes me think more of the actual act of writing to communicate than the production of creative work. If someone had told me when I was a teen in the 90s that, in twenty years, people would communicate almost primarily via the written word—email, messaging, social media—I would have been thrilled. Yet, I think what most of us have found is that we don’t feel more in synch with the people around us now than we used to; many people say the opposite. The first time I migrated was in 1989; the last time in 2012. While I have often pondered how things like WhatsApp and Facebook have changed migration by mediating distance, nothing takes distance away. I wonder if the belief that distance somehow matters less these days is an illusion—one that causes us despair. I guess I was trying to wink at the hopelessness of our most advanced technology at solving certain ancient problems—like the anguish of being sundered from your family or home—when I wrote this section: “Just as the invention of air travel had made it easy to go, but no easier to leave, the invention of time travel made time easy to pass, but no easier to endure.” (I just quoted myself. Sorry.)
Don’t apologize! I’m going to quote you back to yourself as well: you’ve mentioned before that a lot of readers were thrown by your ending. Without giving too much away, perhaps we can talk about endings as a potential site for disruption?
I wanted to write “true science fiction” —what would it really feel like to time travel? What red tape would be involved? How would the rich be affected? How would the poor be affected? And so my ending had to follow suit: it had to feel real. What is it like to reunite with someone over a span of immense time and distance?
I think what was unintentionally unconventional about this is that the novel is also a love story, and we have certain expectations of how love stories should end. There’s so much exciting innovation in fiction—Pulitzer-Prize-winning novels with whole chapters written in Powerpoint, fiction books that star characters with names suspiciously similar to the author’s and all of their best friends, stories without plots that still demand to be called story. But what I discovered is that within certain genres—especially ones perhaps unfairly associated with normativity, like love stories—we are much less willing to tolerate deviation. Or we see deviation as an error, rather than intentional experimentation.
I think this is exciting! I guess I’ve always kind of envied writers who are very experimental, who push the boundaries of what fiction can do, since I am hopelessly plot-oriented and plot is one thing I can’t give up. Despite this, I too long to be innovative (who doesn’t?). Realizing that there are so many unbroken boundaries within my plotty wheelhouse is a bit like realizing that, sure, space exploration is great, but what’s in the ocean?
Thea Lim’s Giller-shortlisted novel An Ocean of Minutes is out now. Her writing has been published by the Paris Review, the Guardian, Salon, the National Post, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, the Southampton Review, GRIST and others. She has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her novella The Same Woman was released by Invisible Publishing in 2007. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of creative writing at Sheridan College.
Tania De Rozario is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of And The Walls Come Crumbling Down and Tender Delirium (Math Paper Press, 2016 / 2013). Her work has been published in journals including the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner Online Journal, Blue Lyra Review, and Margin – the Asian American Writers Workshop Journal. Her work has been presented in Singapore, New York, London, Goa, Canberra, Hertfordshire, Moscow and Washington DC. Tania is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.