The Inventors | 誠品線上

The Inventors

內容簡介

內容簡介 A history of embarrassments in the garden begins a meditation on the nature of memory. Unfolding alongside notes and marginalia, a ghost story becomes a reflection on grief, remembrance, and identity. Failed writing projects coalesce into a contemplation on the limits of our narratives. The haunting essays in The Inventors explore the stories that we tell ourselves—and the ways in which we constantly invent and reinvent our selves.

作者介紹

作者介紹 Daryl LiDaryl Li is a writer of literary fiction and nonfiction based in Singapore. His first book, The Inventors, is a collection of creative nonfiction published by Rosetta Cultures. His work has been longlisted for the Australian Book Review Calibre Essay Prize and Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and been a finalist in the Georgia Review Prose Prize. He has won a Golden Point Award for short fiction. His work can be found in publications including Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, NANG, OF ZOOS, Unwinnable Monthly, and Gastronomica.He can be found on Instagram, Twitter, and Threads at @nonstickpanda.

產品目錄

產品目錄 The Physics of Memory1. Entanglements2. Triptych3. GravitySolaris1. One: Interloper2. Two: The Hall of Echoes3. Three: DispatchesMoths1. Scars2. Ghost Stories3. MetamorphosesCindersAcknowledgements

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內文 : Gravity

Bras Basah Complex, named after the area in which it is located, sits across from the famous Raffles Hotel, which is said to have been home, however briefly, to several notable writers, including Conrad and Burgess, at points in its illustrious history. It is bounded by Bain Street, Cashin Street, Victoria Street, and North Bridge Road—the brothers Gilbert Angus and Robert Bain, the prominent Cashin family, Queen Victoria, and the north of Presentment Bridge (now Elgin Bridge). At the bottom, there is a four-story podium of shops and offices. On the fifth floor, one often finds people exercising, walking their dogs, or gossiping about not-present neighbours. And above that, residential flats split between two HDB apartment blocks, containing the most normal lives in the most normal of environments It is both a shopping centre and a residential estate, public housing right smack in the middle of the city, where real estate is at a premium. There is a shop selling watches here that looks like it must have had been here from the very beginning, and an art gallery that opened this past week. A complex of connected buildings, but also a complex of intersecting paths, of in-between qualities.

Bras Basah is a Malay name—beras basah, misspelled—meaning “wet rice”. It refers to a time where the area was a lagoon where boats carrying rice would come through. With land reclamation and urban development, there is hardly a trace of wet rice here today—and certainly no lagoon. Bras Basah Complex has a Chinese name: 百勝樓 (Baisheng Lou), which literally means Building of a Hundred Victories. It sounds much more dramatic and important in English, and was likely chosen perhaps because of the way it approximates the sound of “Bras Basah” (百勝, Baisheng) while carrying an auspicious implication.
Bras Basah Complex is also colloquially known as “書城” (Shucheng), which means “city of books”. This is a reference to a time when it housed an impressive number of bookstores, which were consolidated from the greater area of 大坡 (Dapo) and 小坡 (Xiaopo). While the complex is not actually all that old—it was built in 1980—it is connected to a much larger history of Singapore’s publishing industry and Chinese diasporic culture. More directly, whether symbolically or materially it embodies entire cultural histories—and personal ones too. It contains ghosts.
Names are curious things. They can become so removed from their point of origin, can be erroneous, can be overwritten, can resist proper rectification. They can imply histories, but also obscure them.

The story goes that when I was very young, my grandfather would bring both me and my sister to Bras Basah. At that age, I was basically a useless biological machine, with no developed sense of purpose. More importantly, I had hardly any reading faculties and certainly nothing in the way of reading preferences. They say that you can positively influence a child’s development during pregnancy with Mozart and reading, so I guess my grandfather believed in similar processes of diffusion. When I was tired from all the walking, I supposedly asked him to carry me. I had already grown considerably by that time, and so my grandfather refused. Reluctantly, I said that I would carry myself.
I have no real recollection of this. I have the haziest impressions of these outings, and even then I wonder if I’ve imagined them. I am sceptical of these memories. I don’t doubt their veracity—that they actually happened—but I wonder if I’ve remembered these incidents myself. Perhaps these images came from my own sense of what would be reasonable based on the stories I had been told. When this thought first occurred to me, I immediately remembered the scene in Blade Runner where Rick Deckard is talking to Rachael, referencing a spider from her supposed childhood, and he says: “Those aren’t your memories; they’re somebody else’s.”
As I grew older and my reading preferences became more defined, there seemed to be little reason for the family to visit Bras Basah. I was more into Times the Bookshop, and then later, Borders and Kinokuniya. Those were the places that carried the books that I liked. Growing up, I spoke primarily English, and any situation where I was forced to speak in Chinese would prove calamitous. I carried this yoke all the way into my teenage years. Bras Basah Complex had, by then, turned into a more commercial space. There were a few bookstores; it had become more notable for the shops that sold musical instruments or art supplies.
I already knew of the 書城 name then, even if I couldn’t see the books. I believed it. I could only have imagined it, filling in the gaps according to the stories that I had been told or simply what the name evoked, but I could see this mythical city of books in my mind’s eye, almost as if I could remember things that I had no right to.

It’s strange to think that given how small the island of Singapore is, and how Bras Basah Complex sits right smack in the middle of the city, that I never quite found my way back to it after those early childhood years. Our paths through spaces, distant and foreign, familiar and convenient, is often so exactly defined that they become more linear narratives than spatial interactions. We have no energy, no need, no motivation—no time. Between time and space, you get one or the other sometimes. Our reality is the result of multiple choices and coincidences, the wide sea of possibilities funnelled into the stream of our experience, thinner than a thread.
Sometimes, I found it easy enough to convince myself that the mythical shopping destination of my imagination still existed. But each time I passed by, the reality of things would prove much more disappointing. It was crusty and old, and I almost never stepped in. I rarely had any strong motivation to, though perhaps I didn’t want to confront the emptiness that awaited me within the space.

Several years after my childhood adventures with my grandfather, I started a job at Bras Basah Complex. The interview took place on a weekday afternoon. I was quite early, but my anxiousness meant that time slipped by me all too quickly. A bag of nerves, I stepped into the building. There was a pronounced uncanniness. There were some features that looked familiar, certain stores, certain structural features, facets of a place that I must have remembered, heard about, imagined, or gleaned subconsciously from media.
Not long after the interview, I learnt that I had secured the position, and would be able to start work very quickly. Feeling as if I hadn’t done very well in the interview, the news came as a surprise, and yet, it also felt like a strange sort of homecoming, like there was underneath it all a slender thread of destiny reeling me towards this place that I had effectively forgotten.
I took some time acclimatising to my new job. Different hours, different commute, new habits. Part of this process was getting to know the space. For such a small building, it concealed many surprises within nooks and crannies—shops hidden from plain view, disused spaces, unusually useful facilities, toilets to avoid. There was none of the mythical City of Books that I had learnt of or perhaps imagined, only details, rigid and practical.

During my university years, I found a book that was a gift from a professor to one of her students in one of the used bookstores. The professor taught at the university I attended. In fact, I had taken one of her classes before, so there was an unusual sense of providence. I turned the page and saw a second note. The recipient of the gift had passed it on to another friend for her birthday. Somewhere further down the line it ended up on those shelves. It always fascinated me that there was a clearly traceable path that the book had taken to arrive in that place at the time, for me to discover it, as though it had been guided by some destiny. I sometimes wonder what happened to that book in the second-hand bookstore. Sometimes I also think that I am much like that book, swept along by rewritings and erasures, barely making so much as a ripple, perceiving destiny in my stories when there’s no such thing as destiny.

There are few bookstores left in this old building. I remember Select Books, run by the indefatigable Lena Lim, and her stories about shoplifters. I remember how the Youth Book Company was trapped in limbo for a considerable length of time after its owner had passed away and none of his children took up the mantle. I would pass by the store from time to time and wonder when its green signboard would light up again. Basheer Graphic Books remains, a favourite haunt in my youth. In a corner of the building, Xinhua Cultural Enterprises houses an immense book collection belonging to Mr Yeo Oi Sang that still intimidates me with its size, breadth, and depth. His collection and his life story mirror the histories hidden beneath the façade of Bras Basah Complex, of the Chinese publishing industry in the region. Now and then you can see him reading the papers outside the store or tending to his plants.
It feels as though I’ve known these stories all my life, but the truth is that I learnt of many of them only when I started working in the building, and somehow was drawn to retelling them. They would come to me in various ways—collaged from fragments of remembrances and anecdotal accounts, information I came across in the course of my work, stories I read in the papers or remember from years and years ago—a patchwork of story parts, truths and half-truths curated from a malady of tedium, leaving only the most exciting portions, extruded into some new reality.

I don’t remember what our plans were that day. I only remember that they had failed in some way—a meal that was disappointing, or a show that we were late for. No, we went to the art museum. I feel sure that we went to the art museum, even if no impressions of our time there remain. You wanted to go to Bras Basah Complex

最佳賣點

最佳賣點 : From laments on urban change and ruminations about the garden to reflections on writing and meditations on grief, Daryl Li’s debut collection of liter