Emulative Versus Revisionist Occidentalism: Monetary and Other Values in Recent Singaporean Fiction

Towards the end of Rex Shelley’s A River of Roses (1998), the ageing heroines discuss cross-cultural love affairs in 1966. As part of Singapore’s Eurasian community, they have inherited a legacy of intermarriages and, in the turmoil of the war, they have engaged in further dalliances across cultures. Yet, as they critically view the new opportunities and problems that the next generation has to face, they find that their discussion of ethnicity, culture and racial hybridity boils down to one thing: money and, with it, the newly forming class-divide that is premised on capital alone. Monetary accomplishments have led to the submergence of issues of religion and race. This is not to say that money did not play a vital role in earlier fictions of the region. The centrality of commerce had indeed informed fictions of the British Straits Settlements – now Singapore and parts of Malaysia – ever since East India Company employees produced both fiction and non-fictional writing about the region that was emphatically inflected by a mixture of exotic Orientalism and late-eighteenth-century economic theories to generate a pervasive Romantic commercialism. The most intriguing shift in recent representations, however, is a new awareness of the power that money and, by implication, the class-division based on money, holds in the Straits’ past and present fictions. The comparison of crosscultural relationships in A River of Roses demonstrates this growing emphasis on monetary values rather than on cultural or racial hybridity: