Description
Kim Chen Boey writes a travel memoir which explores the condition of the migrant writer, living between the place of his birth, his adopted country, and the wider world; between the past and the present; between the city he is in, and the cities that live in his memory and imagination. The book maps his trajectory through India, China, Pakistan, to Egypt and Morocco, during the year of his wandering between his native Singapore and his new home in Berowra. His essays offer memorable portraits of his parents and grandparents, friends and teachers, barbers and backpackers, the handicapped and the poor. Boey is a poet and he brings poetic sensibility to make this writing of the most powerful kind.
Genres
Collections
Publication
Artarmon, N.S.W. : Giramondo, 2009
Pages
320
Media reviews
One day, however, this man’s name caught my eye on the spine of a book in the Kino Kuniya bookshop on Orchard Road. I opened it and fell under its spell upon reading the first paragraph. It was a description of a trip to Calcutta, a city that he finds reassuringly unchanged on each return visit,
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whereas Singapore, his home, has changed beyond recognition during his lifetime. His account of finding the constant in his life in a place he doesn’t belong to, and of belonging to a place he has fallen out with, spoke to my own contradictions as an emigrant. Show Less
A sense of urgency grips the eponymous last chapter (“Between Stations”) when the writer tell us that as both emigrant and immigrant, he has become “adept at switching between codes:” “You become Kim Cheng Boey instead of Boey Kim Cheng…Kim Boey is accommodating…while Boey Kim Cheng
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has begun to try to find a way back to the old world…He is still searching for a language to utter himself into being.” Show Less
Awards
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards (Shortlist — Non Fiction — 2009)