Email Hwee Hwee Tan at hwee_tan@hotmail,com

From "Barnes and Noble Online"

Interview with Hwee Hwee Tan, by David Bowman

Singapore Sling

Imagine Kafka's   THE TRIAL set in Singapore, with chapters alternately narrated by Holden Caulfield, Philip Marlowe, and Perry Mason's  secretary, Della Street. That's the feel of Hwee Hwee Tan's first novel, FOREIGN BODIES. The novel's primary narrator is Mei, a 20-something Singaporean lawyer. We learn that she lives with her mother, who is fond of hosting karaoke parties. ("Trust me, you haven't seen something truly Satanic until you've seen your mother belting out 'Chain Reaction,' complete with Diana Ross hand actions and bum wiggles.") Mei gets a phone call in the middle of the night from her English boyfriend, Andy. He is in jail, falsely accused of masterminding a global gambling syndicate. Now, Philip Marlowe got a midnight call once, and he got out of bed to drive a pal to Mexico. Mei just says, "Goodnight." She'll bail Andy out in the morning.

"Why can't you come now?" he whines.

"It seems to have slipped your notice that it's half-past one in the morning," she answers. "You might be surprised to learn this, but the courts aren't open at this ungodly hour, so I can't apply for bail now anyway. I'll see you in the morning."

Andy tries to make Mei feel guilty. No go. "Don't worry, you won't rot," she tells him. "This is Singapore. Parliament outlawed bacteria in nineteen seventy-eight."

That Mei is one hard-boiled dame. And so is Hwee Hwee Tan herself. I meet her in one of her favorite Chelsea coffee joints in Manhattan. When I praise the Philip Marlowish narrative voices in her novel, she says, "I love Raymond Chandler . And I wanted to write a detective story. But I didn't. I couldn't handle the plotting."

FOREIGN BODIES does work as a first-class detective story. Through the three alternating narratives of Mei, Andy himself, and Eugene -- Mei's Singaporean childhood companion -- we learn that Andy is addicted to gambling on soccer. Apparently the police raided his house and discovered a hidden Filofax containing lists of soccer bets.

The pacing of the prose in FOREIGN BODIES has a breezy Chandlerian feel. Singapore is "like Disney World minus the giant rodents and the fun." But Tan's Singapore is refreshingly anti-noir. "Police stations in Singapore are so clean and bright, so unexpectedly cheerful, it's unnerving," Mei reports. "With pink floor tiles, lime green walls, air-conditioning, and an assortment of dumb potted canes and money plants, the station looks more like a civil service office than a sin bin." Mei even finds a duty officer sitting beneath a framed Snoopy jigsaw puzzle. Andy assures Mei that the Filofax isn't his. Mei then plays detective with Eugene (who introduced Mei to Andy to begin with) and discovers that the house Andy rents is owned by a big-shot gambler named Loong Tay.

Eugene doesn't let on that he knew this Loong fellow when they were kids. "When I first met Loong," Eugene confesses, "I wouldn't have dreamt of stealing anything at all.... But I guess Loong was different; although he was born in Singapore, he'd been an ex-pat kid all his life....When you're an ex-pat kid, you get your kicks from smashing in headlights, lobbing rocks at lamp-post bulbs, and watching porno videos like 'Driving Miss Daisy Crazy' and 'Thunderballs.'" It turns out Loong is guilty of killing one of Eugene's close childhood friends, and now Eugene has a secret Clint Eastwood revenge thing brewing.

Mei and Eugene zip through Singapore, trying to find a way to pin the planted Filofax on Loong. Being a detective-story freak, I assumed that damn Filofax was just a Hitchcockian McGuffin driving the plot along. But Tan constructs an Agatha Christie-style least-likely-suspect surprise around the Filofax, and suddenly FOREIGN BODIES is much more then a breezy tale of amateur gumshoes. A religious back story concerning Mei's experiences with Christian beliefs comes to the forefront. Suddenly Tan has become an Asian Flannery O'Connor:  "A long time go," Mei remembers, "my Uncle Cheong told me about the Fisher King, the guardian of the grail, the maimed monarch who rules over the dry and wasted land. When Andy told me about [a] vision and the wound in his thigh, I thought -- No, it couldn't be. How could Andy be the Fisher King? Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood from Christ's wounds as it dripped from the cross into the cup. How could Andy possibly posses this sacred vessel? Andy was a lager lout who spent most of his life performing reverse communion, turning his own blood into alcohol. How could he possibly be the keeper of the grail? I guess I was wrong. Andy always had the cup, but he spent most of his life denying it."

        But suddenly at the book's conclusion, there is no neat and tidy settling of the crime. The idea of the wrong man in jail merges with the right or wrong (your pick) man crucified on the cross, which merges with the concept of the unpunished parent. The final two paragraphs of the book are an absolutely brilliant Robert Stone-like revelation that you'll want to read several times over.

The strength of the ending may seem alarming when you consider that Hwee Hwee Tan is only 24. She started FOREIGN BODIES four years ago when she was a student at Oxford University. "I'd write huddled up in a sleeping bag because Oxford dorms are so medievally cold," she says. Then she frowns. "But I don't like all this attention on my youth."

"I won't mention it," I lie, and stand to leave. "Plenty of 24-year-olds have first novels published in this country."

Of course, I lied. How can you write about Hwee Hwee Tan without considering her youth? But more remarkable than her age -- more remarkable than the fact FOREIGN BODIES is so good for "just" a first novel -- is that with this book Hwee Hwee Tan "owns" Singapore in the same literary-slash-chronicler way that Raymond Chandler was once master of Los Angeles or that Dawn Powell held dominion over Greenwich Village. As I leave, Tan mentions that her next book will be set in England. Run for cover, Martin Amis!

David Bowman is the author of LET THE DOG DRIVE and BUNNY MODERN.