In your story “A Very Safe Place,” a boy and his father, in Singapore, find a man on the beach who has clearly swum to the island in the hope of establishing a better life. Father and son take the man home but have no real plan for how to help him. What inspired the story?

Several years ago, while visiting Singapore, I was on a bicycle ride with a friend on a beautiful, forested island just off the northeastern coast, which is known as Coney Island, or Pulau Serangoon. It’s a place of mangroves, estuaries, beaches, rich with mudskippers, tree-climbing crabs, and marsh birds, among other wildlife. There aren’t many such pockets of nature left in Singapore, which is a small and now heavily urbanized country, and that makes Coney Island feel all the more peaceful, like a respite and a haven of sorts. That day, we stopped at one of the rest areas, where, next to the usual signs prohibiting fishing, camping, fires, and so on, there was a very large signpost with the emblem of the police force. This sign said “See any suspicious activities? Call 999 immediately!” and gave a list of examples of such activities, one of which was “suspicious person swimming at sea.” This phrase and image stuck in my mind for years. Something about the juxtaposition of that sign with the idyllic natural setting was intriguing, and it eventually sparked the idea for “A Very Safe Place.”

The story is told in third person but primarily from the point of view of the boy, Shawn, who is nine years old. Why did you choose that perspective for the story?

In my first draft, the story was told mostly from the point of view of his father, Chee Meng, with segues into minor characters including Chee Meng’s fisherman friends and Shawn’s mother. Shawn’s voice came in only part of the way into the story, and it was a surprise to me. There was something about Shawn’s perspective that made me terribly sad, that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I had also just given birth to my first child and was filled with awe and love and terror, all the enormous and life-changing emotions of new parenthood. I think I was feeling deeply how tender it is for children to shed their innocence, for them to discover harshness, violence, brutality; and, eventually, to discover that their loved ones, their countrymen, are capable of these things. So I rewrote the story to be solely from the boy’s point of view. I think Shawn’s perspective is at once limited and wide open; he understands both less and more than the adults about the place that is his home, and about the kindness and the cruelty that human beings are capable of.

Shawn is a very observant child, who seems to carry on his shoulders a heavy burden of knowledge and responsibility. Do you see him as an unusual kid?

My experience of being a child, and now a parent of young children, has been that kids notice and understand so much more than adults think they do. They have such a raw and powerful sense of justice, not yet blunted by life, and often see things more clearly than we do. Being incredibly sensitive to inconsistencies and hypocrisies, and capable of intuiting and understanding profound things, I think, they can at times see what we adults cannot.

A lot of the drama of the story revolves around Singapore’s strict laws. If the stranger is discovered, he faces imprisonment and caning. So perhaps do those who have harbored him. The government and society argue that these laws are what keep Singaporeans safe, yet they are also what make it a dangerous place for people like the stranger. Does this contradiction make Singapore a particularly rich setting for fiction?

I think every society makes choices about what trade-offs it is willing to make—whose liberties and whose safety are prioritized. Perhaps some Singaporeans have been steeped in these choices for so long that those trade-offs have become invisible or are no longer questioned. That is as true here in the U.S. as it is in Singapore.

Singapore is a particularly rich setting for fiction, I think, because of the many ways in which it is seen as a kind of success story by the rest of the world, and because so many aspects of Singaporean society—safety being just one of them—are held up as something to emulate. I’m not here to say whether the country is or isn’t a success. As a fiction writer, I’m more interested in the human calculus of those decisions and trade-offs, what they mean for the individuals caught up in them.

When we published your story “Before the Valley,” in 2021, you mentioned that you were planning a collection of stories set in modern-day Singapore. I’m guessing that “A Very Safe Place” will be part of that collection. Are you working on others?

I’m mostly working on my third novel now. I do have several other stories, in addition to these two. But the collection is a slow process of woolgathering, as I find I can’t just decide to write a story. I have to wait for something strange or moving or unforgettable to strike me, something I can’t shake, before the story can be written. This takes a long time, and I just have to be patient! ♦