Reading Responses
Jeyaretnam, Abraham's Promise, 11-64.
"When she came back from Colombo, after the war ended, she was so quiet.
She never seemed to speak. if she was not reading, then she was staring into
space. When someone else spoke to her she would shut the speaker up before he
had managed a complete sentence, adopting the same firm tone of voice that Victor
had just employed. She was like him in one other way too. She refused to marry.
How Mother fretted and worried! How Father raged! But to both cajolery and anger
Mercy remained impassive, as unmoved as a block of wood. She would sit there,
her eyes locked in front of her, her hands on her knees, and say she would marry
when she was good and ready, not a moment sooner." (56)
From this passage, we can see that there are marked similarities between Mercy
(the narrator’s sister) and Victor (the narrator’s son). Perhaps,
this has to do with the fact that both, in some way, are isolated form their
families.
For Mercy, her isolation stems from her being sent away to Colombo to escape
the ravages of World War II in Singapore. As the narrator mentions, it was at
a time when Mercy was in her young and formative years that she was sent away,
“she had been separated from them for a number of years, important years
for a young girl” (56). Thus, because of this, she has had to learn to
be independent at an early age, to fend for herself, and because of this, her
independence manifests itself obviously in the form of her isolation from her
family.
As for Victor, he grew up as a child in a broken family, living with his mother
and seeing his father only once a week on Sundays. Similar to Mercy, he did
not enjoy the joy and security of being in a united and functional family environment.
As such, he too displays signs of isolation, as can be seen in the fact that
he lives alone in his own apartment. And even though he has asked his father
to live with him, both Victor and the narrator do not seem to share a close
relationship.
Furthermore, both Mercy and Victor do not wish to marry. This could be interpreted
as going against the norm, for they were both of marriageable age, both suitably
qualified in terms of education and family background. Yet they chose to be
loners
What is evident here then is their strive for individualism, their refusal
to submit to any pressure or obligations as a result of their own personal roots
and identity. Or perhaps, it is because they are in a sense rootless—Mercy,
“not happy at being abandoned” (40); and Victor, the ambiguity of
who his father is—that they are thus able to represent the people of the
emerging new nation of Singapore. For there is no one real root of Singapore’s
culture. Instead, it is more a myriad of individuals pulled together and a constant
evolving of identity.
--Chew Chien Way
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