It is 25 years since Rice Bowl was first published in 1984. Since then, the novel has had three reprints in 1989, 1991 and 2005. Instead of a fourth reprint this year, Marshall Cavendish decided to issue a new edition, and I thought it was a good opportunity for me to look at the novel again.
I must confess that I have not read Rice Bowl since its publication. Neither have I given a public reading of the novel. There were two reasons. The first was the scarcity of public literary readings in those days. The second reason was my secret shame. Parts of the novel read as though it was a poorly edited draft. There were errors in tense and punctuation, and some in sentence structure. Since these were in the printed novel, I felt responsible for them, and over the years, through the writing of other novels, I slowly forgave myself and put it down to my own poor vigilance during the editing process. I take this opportunity to thank my friends and readers for their kind silence. In Singapore, poor editing is one of the pitfalls that novice writers almost always fall into in our eagerness to get published.
Books were typewritten and typeset in the 1980s, and it cost too much to make changes once the book was printed. Besides, a novel with a small print run did not justify the cost. Today, technology has made it relatively cheap to scan a typeset page into the computer and turn it into a Word document for the author to edit, and this was done for the new edition of Rice Bowl.
I have never regarded my published works as sacred texts, or the author in me as an unchangeable entity. The author who wrote Rice Bowl 25 years ago is no longer the author writing today. If this older author is irked by a clumsy sentence or phrase, so will you, the reader. I regard it as a form of courtesy to my readers to iron out such irritations as far as I am able to do so.
I have also edited out, for copyright reasons, certain long quotes from songs and hymns, popular among Singapore’s Catholic students in the university in the sixties. Twenty-five years ago, it was generally thought that as long as the author acknowledged the source it was all right. Today, international copyright agencies might argue otherwise.
I do not think that the editing has affected the substance and themes of the novel. It is still a powerful story of Singapore’s youth who dared to question the values of a nation governed by fear, played out in the intense relationship between Paul Tan, the pragmatic Harvard scholar and police inspector, and Sister Marie, the idealistic novice nun who organised the protest march against the Vietnam War.
Now that I have re-read Rice Bowl, I daresay I am rather proud of that young teacher from Catholic Junior College who wrote this novel secretly on her Olivetti typewriter in a storeroom under the stairs of Yusoff Ishak College in the National University of Singapore when she was supposed to be studying for her English Honours.
Suchen Christine Lim
15 May 2009