In this issue, the CPDD History Unit caught up with three Singapore writers (Lee Jing-Jing, Ng Yi-Sheng and Rachel Heng) and filmmaker, Tan Pin Pin, to find out more about how they research and reconstruct the past in their works. The article draws on insights from these conversations to explore what it really means to engage with History, and the choices that go into bringing the past alive on the page and on screen.
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The Stories That Almost Disappeared: How Singapore's Creatives are Filling the Gaps in History
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” When Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote these words for his hit musical Hamilton, he captured something that historians have long understood -- that history is never just a record of what happened, but a reflection of the choices made about what is worth remembering and how it should be told. By retelling the founding of America through hip-hop and a racially diverse cast, it deliberately blurred the line between history and historical fiction, between the archive and the imagination. And yet, for many audiences, it became their most vivid encounter with that chapter of history -- more so than any textbook accounts.
The same is true closer to home. In Singapore, the past has always been retold through the arts – from Mediacorp TV drama productions like The Awakening, The Price of Peace to theatre productions like Moonlit City, LKY the musical and Kwa Geok Choo. Outside of school, most people will rarely encounter the past through archives or works of history. They encounter it through stories, which makes the stories that we choose to tell even more consequential. In cases where the past is not even so often shared or discussed among adults, the stories that make it into the school history curriculum (and those that don’t) play an outsized role in shaping how we understand who we are and where we came from. The question of which stories get told, and how, matters enormously.
Deciding which stories to tell
Writers and filmmakers, whether they are working with historical material or capturing the zeitgeist of the times, face the choice on which stories to tell.
That choice can be sparked in many ways: discovering a gap in an otherwise well-documented historical event, being curious about an unexplained detail in a non-fiction account or simply asking “what really happened here?”. For some, the spark comes from something heard or encountered during their formative years which lodges itself and refuses to let go. Rachel Heng traces the seed of The Great Reclamation to a single remark from her primary school days: her teacher telling her that the floor they were sitting on used to be the sea. Those words stayed with her, eventually growing into a novel set against colonialism, the Japanese Occupation and the road to independence. For Lee Jing-Jing, it was watching The Price of Peace, a Singaporean period drama set during the Japanese Occupation that first made her aware of one of the most painful and long-silenced chapters of Singapore’s wartime history – the experiences of comfort women. That encounter moved her to write How We Disappeared.
Not all stories carry that kind of weight. Some have simply fallen outside more conventional frames of what gets considered worth knowing. Ng Yi-Sheng’s Haywire Histories series was born partly from frustration with a version of Singapore history that felt thin and uninspiring: one that began with colonialism and left the deeper past largely unimagined. And then there are stories that are disappearing in real time, before anyone has thought to preserve them. Tan Pin Pin’s film, Singapore GaGa grew from a simple but urgent impulse: to record sounds that nobody seemed to be keeping (i.e. the cheer of a school sports day, the tone of the MRT doors, the voices of dialect newsreaders speaking to communities.) “I never see the Singapore that I lived through (on screens),” she says. The film was her way of holding on.
These different starting points all share something in common: each began with a personal and deeply felt affinity towards a particular story. Whether it was a childhood image that never quite faded, a silence that demanded to be broken, or an everyday sound that was quietly disappearing, each creator felt a responsibility to honour the people and the past at the heart of their story. To do this well, the work had to begin long before the first word was written or the first frame shot.
Into the Archives – Staying True, Making it Live
Once the decision to tell a story has been made, inquiry and research begin. For writers and filmmakers working with historical material, the sources they consult, the archives they visit, and the people they seek out determine whose experiences get represented. As such, the process of understanding the context of the period they are representing is heavily interwoven into the creative process.
For some stories, the silences in the record sometimes speak louder. Lee Jing-Jing drew on more than two hundred sources for How We Disappeared (Singapore and international war archives, testimonies from former comfort women of multiple nationalities, oral interviews with Singaporean war survivors, and documentaries featuring Filipina and Indonesian survivors). However, what struck her was that testimonies of girls and women being taken away were often given by someone else – a neighbour, a friend of the family. The taboo surrounding the issue had created a gap in the historical record. Navigating that gap with care and responsibility shaped every creative decision Lee made. Where the historical record could not tell her what these women went through, she had to imagine it – but always in a way that remained faithful to the reality of their lived experiences. The responsibility even extended to deliberately leaving out some historically accurate details because including them would have risked sensationalising what these women experienced rather than honouring it. Accuracy, for her, was never just a matter of factual fidelity: it was fidelity to the reality of what these women lived through. Historical imagination had to do the work of witness where testimony could not exist, albeit carefully.
Rachel Heng’s research process began from a different kind of gap: not silence, but distance. For her, history felt remote and unfamiliar in the beginning. “My knowledge of Singapor[e] history when I started was fuzzy at best,” she admits. To bridge the gap, she began with broad histories before working her way towards the granular details that fiction requires to feel alive. The National Archives of Singapore proved invaluable: oral history interviews with residents affected by early land reclamation projects, photographs of the first HDB flats rising over flat, empty land, etc. These specific details are what she describes as “pure gold for a fiction writer” and that research was not just about getting the facts right, but about fleshing out the texture of a world that no longer exists.
For historical non-fiction, these silences are not necessarily always obstacles to telling a story, but often the very reason the story needs to be told in the first place – as Ng Yi-Sheng found when researching pre-colonial Singapore, where the record was so sparse that almost everything required imaginative reconstruction. Javanese sources offered more than he had expected, and Dutch sources yielded useful fragments, though the deeper challenge was that so little had been written down. Rather than treating this as a limitation, he argues that even an imperfect picture of pre-colonial life is better than no picture at all. The tension between what seems true and what is known to be true is not a problem to be resolved; it is a productive space that makes readers more curious. "When writing history," he says, "you don't think about what people didn't have; you think about what they did."
The same dynamic plays out for documentary filmmaking, where the material is real, but the gaps are no less present. Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City began as a project about Singapore’s spaces but shifted when she found herself at an archaeological dig at Fort Siloso, far more interested in the people doing the digging than in the site itself. Thereafter, Invisible City became a documentary about people documenting Singapore (i.e. photographers, journalists, etc.) Tan Pin Pin described the construction of this documentary as “slow and painstaking” – like picking up one piece of mosaic and searching for the next. She had put together the film based on what she chanced upon, and many of these individuals have documented parts of Singapore history that were rarely featured in Singapore’s mainstream historical narrative. For instance, one of the individuals, Mr Han Shan Yuan had fearfully kept a set of photographs from the 1954 May 13th movement showing a picture of students getting beaten up by the police. In the documentary Invisible City, Mr. Han discusses his fear of being called in for questioning if he showed the photos given that it contradicted the official narrative, which is why he kept them hidden for many years. Tan Pin Pin’s film later was screened at The Arts House in 2007, where these footages were shared with the Singapore public. In the film, this man’s hesitation to share the pictures was itself part of the story — a reminder that what gets left out of the historical record is always a decision someone made, and that representing history honestly sometimes means confronting the fear that surrounds certain topics or narratives.
History as Interpretation
Underlying all these creative choices is a deeper argument about what history is. For Lee Jing-Jing, “history is told as a narrative, and it can be turned this way or that to suit the teller.” History is not a fixed record waiting to be consulted. It is a practice that is shaped by the questions we ask, the sources we seek out, the gaps we choose to fill, and the stories that we decide are worth telling. Every act of historical engagement is an act of interpretation, and the interpretations we encounter further shape how we understand the world we live in. This is something Rachel Heng also mentions – she is not interested in historical fiction as a vehicle for imparting facts. Rather, she sees it as an imaginative space that allows her to capture “the ineffable”, the emotion and meaning of what came to pass. Historical fiction is about the present as much as it is about the past: it is a way of giving voice to what readers already feel but cannot quite name. “I hope that it captures something they already feel or know,” she says, “that it gives language to the contradictions of our shared losses and remarkable achievements as a country.”
The platforms through which history gets told therefore matter enormously. Ng Yi-Sheng points out that popular culture is often more powerful than formal education in giving people their mental images of the past. After all, the average person’s sense of what life looked like in the Qing Dynasty or the Roman Empire comes from films, television and short-form media, more so than textbooks. Creative engagement with history is not a lesser form of historical understanding, but sometimes becomes the primary one, which is precisely why the stories that get told (and the ones that don’t) carry much weight. To ask “who tells your story” is not merely a question about the past. It is a question about when and how we come to understand and relate to it, as well as about power, privilege and agency. It is also about when that story gets told and how it is told. Every retelling is an interpretation, a set of choices about what to foreground, what to leave out, and how to frame what remains. In Singapore, artists, writers and filmmakers are still actively making those choices, and in doing so, shaping the way people encounter and make sense of their own history.
But the act of telling does not only belong to artists and historians. Each of us carries stories of the past, whether passed down by family, absorbed through the media we consume, or shaped by the silences we have grown up around. The question is not just whose stories get told, but whether we are paying attention to the choices being made in the telling, and whether we are willing to do some of that telling ourselves. After all, History is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we are always making through the stories we choose to tell, the questions we ask, and the voices we listen to. As History educators, how can we help students recognise the choices involved in representing the past, critically engage with different interpretations, and actively shape how history is understood and remembered?
Looking for your next historical fiction read?
In this issue's From Your Perspective, teachers share some of their favourite historical fiction titles and tell us what makes them memorable. Click on the books below to read their reviews and perhaps find your next great read!
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