Chantelle Ing:

In this video, Chantelle Ing reads from her Honours Thesis in English at Western University. The project is titled Traumatized Bodies: The Visibility and Reaction of Minoritized Bodies in Lydia Kwa’s Pulse.

Traumatized Bodies: The Visibility and Reaction of Minoritized Bodies in Lydia Kwa’s Pulse
(a condensed version)
By Chantelle Ing

Before I begin, I’d like to thank my thesis supervisor, Dr. Thy Phu, who has been encouraging and incredibly helpful throughout my writing process. I’d also like to thank the author, Lydia Kwa, for allowing me the opportunity to interview her about the book, in which she provided me with personal and enlightening insights.

This thesis examines Lydia Kwa’s novel Pulse (2010) and its complex representation of a queer, Singaporean-Chinese woman in Toronto. Bouncing between Canada and Singapore, the story follows the life and interactions of Natalie Chia. Natalie is a queer Singaporean Chinese woman and established acupuncturist who lives in Toronto with her parents. The plot is set into motion after Natalie receives a phone call from her former lover, Faridah, who relays the news that her son, Selim, has died by suicide. Natalie then embarks on a quest to uncover the reasons for Selim’s passing. In doing so, the she reveals her own complex history of queer love, intergenerational ties, and abuse during her life in 1970s Singapore.

Pulse’s narrative speaks to the complexities of how Natalie’s queer and racialized identity affects her lived experiences. The divergent attitudes and social institutions which determine a country’s attitudes towards queer and racialized minorities constructs a detailed framework in which Natalie has a narrowly ascribed space to navigate: an illegally homosexual body in Singapore, and a homogenized “Asian” in Canada. Her multifaceted Southeast Asian identity is dismissed as she exists in the limited space that Canada makes for Asians. My thesis asks: How do intersections of race and sexuality present themselves in Singapore and Canada? Does Natalie experience marginalization differently in different countries? If so, how and why?

The queer body is a main theme consistently explored throughout the narrative as a central figure through its interactions, experiences, and trauma. This speaks to the intersections of race, intergenerational conflict, and how it affects the queer body. Natalie is a racialized and queer body, whose visibility and tangibility is marginalized and traumatized in Singapore and Canada: racially in Canada, and queerly in Singapore (they are not mutually exclusive, but more apparent in different transpacific regions). I consider the ways in which the body might be restored in the aftermath of trauma and violence, and the extent to which experiences of diaspora fragment or complicate this process.

Through Natalie’s engagement with Chinatown’s immigrant community, the narrative highlights how her Singaporean Chinese history is obfuscated. Critic Cheryl Naruse notes that “a sense of melancholy suffuses her narration” (Naruse 191), which is likely attributed, in part, to the obscurity of her Singaporean Chinese identity in Canada. In order to combat the erasure of her nuanced ethnic heritage, we see Natalie working towards integrating herself and her family into other Chinese communities, such as the Hong Kong community. Therefore, she loses her ethnic nuances while relying on “an essentialized version of their ethno-racial distinction in order to find social recognition in Canada, which means that their background is subsumed under the recognisable immigrant communities that facilitate their integration” (O’Brien 187). Thus, we see that in Canada, she is turned into a racialized body categorized under a homogenized definition of “Asian” that “naturalizes the idea that diasporic peoples come from a space of racial homogeneity and arrive at spaces that are becoming increasingly multicultural because of other people ‘like them’ without ever questioning the autochthonous claims of those ‘who were there first’” (Cho 190).

Diaspora also affects Natalie as a queer individual, given “the illegibility and unrepresentability of a non-heteronormative female subject within patriarchal and heterosexual configurations of both nation and diaspora” (Gopinath 16). Singapore’s “Section 377A of the Penal Code criminalizes only sex between two men” (Naruse 250), the heteronormative legislation pushing for the importance of women serving “as reproducers, symbols, transmitters, and participants in patriarchal nationalism” (250). This social pressure appears present regardless of Natalie’s location, because in Toronto, she lives at home with both her parents as a caretaker (as she would have if they had stayed in Singapore). However, Natalie’s identity diverges from the ideal Singaporean female because she is lesbian, forty-eight (past her reproductive “prime”), and a successful acupuncturist, whose “non-western practice such as Chinese acupuncture (in contrast to her father who worked for a pharmaceutical corporation) further serves as an ironic comment on the Singaporean state’s emphasis on technocratic knowledge in a global market” (250). According to Kwa, who is also a clinical psychologist, “TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) has been around far longer than so-called Western medicine which is really a very recent phenomenon. There are so many other ancient medical approaches, such as Ayurvedic medicine, and homeopathy” (Kwa). So, Natalie’s vocation, in addition to her racial and queer identity, presents her as an outsider whose long and rich histories are erased in patriarchal, heteronormative, and racial configurations of society.

Kwa contends that “such simplistic reduction in terms of racial categorization, also attempt to erase assertions of hybridity. Or if not erase, then these systems override hybridity either implicitly or explicitly, and assert notions of ‘purity’. I consider notions of purity, as reflections of neo-Fascist thinking” (Kwa). We see the notions of “purity” from Natalie’s family reflected through Adam (Selim’s father), who like Natalie’s family, chose to identify with his Chinese roots. Selim however, deviates from his father’s choice by prioritizing his Malay name over his Christian one, Gabriel. Selim’s choice initiates a strained family dynamic, in which we see the divide between the Chinese majority and the Malay minority by how Selim’s family addresses him; Selim’s Uncle Osman and his wife, Aunty Sylvia “spoke to their grandson far more than to their granddaughter Christina, Selim’s younger sister. They called him Selim with a certain gleam of approval in their eyes” (31-32). However, Adam did not treat Selim with the same kind of approval, Natalie “witness[ing] the palpable anger coming from Adam, his sour expression every time he heard his in-laws use his son’s Malay name…Adam persisted in calling his son Gabriel, and Selim ignored him” (32). Selim’s minoritized racial configuration in Singapore, similarly to Natalie’s in Canada, is reduced to the state’s generalized idea of “Chinese”. However, Selim’s privileging of his Malay name acts “as an attempt to resist both the state’s desire to dictate his racial identity and mark him as Chinese, and the colonial implications of his Christian English name” (O’Brien 192).

Natalie and Selim’s parallels also speaks to the political climates in Singapore and Canada. Firstly, “[b]y using 9/11 to bridge his understanding of modern Singapore, and Natalie’s understanding as someone who identifies as Singaporean and Canadian, [Selim’s] comments recall the discourses of raciality that continue to have global influence, and resulted in certain forms of ethno-racial distinction being devalued in both locales” (O’Brien 189). Like Singapore, Canada’s post-9/11 legislative changes “have impacted the Arab and South Asian Muslim experience” (Khan iii): “Although the government has insisted such policies to be implemented for the protection of its citizens, according to Dobrowsky (2007) they have proven to increase racist acts in Canada” (7). Thus, we see that Selim and Natalie are able to draw a comparison between Canada and Singapore in terms of racism, due to how both countries felt (and continue to feel) the racist after-effects of a global crisis like 9/11.

Natalie as a young child, develops psychosomatic, physical responses to the abuse she faces at the hands of her father. The sexual trauma Natalie endured as a child is introduced through Selim’s suicide, prompting her to revisit her wounds, “which entails a succumbing to ‘the force of memories’” (qtd. in To 41). When Natalie returns to Singapore to uncover the mystery behind Selim’s death, she comes to learn through his closest friends and family, that he also endured a traumatic history of paternal sexual trauma. Being back in Singapore, the environment triggers old memories, such as her fond times with Faridah but also her father’s abuse. As she continues to recount her adolescence, she elucidates on the revulsion and confusion her father’s sexual abuse elicited. Unable to emotionally process the trauma as a child, her body demonstrates a physical reaction to the trauma as a way of coping with the discomfort and disgust she experiences by her father’s “nauseating nighttime habit” (Kwa 108).

During a trip to Kyoto, Japan in December 2002, Kwa “chanced upon a show of Araki Nobuyoshi’s work called Hana-Jinsei. [She] was very moved by the depictions of dead flowers interspersed with those of women tied in kinbaku shapes” (Kwa). Thus, inspired to do further research into the practice of kinbaku, Kwa explored the “notion that kinbaku bondage is a very complex practice, having stemmed from sacred use of the rope (in the Jomon period), then being degraded through use of rope for torture by the military, then somewhat reclaimed/re-created by people through kinbaku practice” (Kwa). Thus, kinbaku becomes a fundamental part of Natalie’s recovery, where physical sensations and performing bondage work as methods of intimacy and reclaiming her queer body. I contend that Natalie’s difficulty separating pleasure from danger is not a result of miseducation, but is a result of the trauma she’s experienced from her father. Therefore, she has difficulty separating traumatic pain from kinbaku’s consensual, pleasurable pain. So, although being unwilling to be bound herself, she takes great care in binding her partner Michelle. When weaving Michelle into one of her favourite patterns, “The Tortoise”, she “loop[s] the ropes instead of knotting them, so there’s more give to the harness, more room for Michelle to move around” (Kwa 124). The care she takes in ensuring that Michelle is not uncomfortable or hurt while being bound is a complete contrast of when she was forcefully bound by her father and “the ropes ate into [her] skin,” causing her to “wince from the pain”(225). Therefore, the act of binding her partner, helps  “rewrite” Natalie’s memory and challenge her past by redefining the intentions of the nawashi. In doing so, she can “assume some degree of control over her trauma, and, in some ways, to triumph over it with the knowledge that she is not replicating her father’s aggression and brutality” (To 81). After performing kinbaku, she “feel[s] peaceful. Placated” (127). She finds peace in transforming what was once the source of her traumatic pain into art.

Kwa chose the title Pulse “because it resonated with Natalie’s work as an acupuncturist, and also for other meanings – how do we detect the pulse of truth or historical impact?” (Kwa). In searching for Selim’s truth, she discovers her own as she begins to recognize a correlation between her body’s pulse and her emotions. Her work as an acupuncturist helps gives her the background to recognize the moments her body’s pulse physically represents her feelings towards certain memories, interactions, and relationships. Natalie transforms from trying to calm her pulses as something physical, to finding the important connection between physical and emotional pulses as something that exists within the spirit. In doing so, she is able to reconcile with her body in a final act of surrender. Thus, we see that pulses are more than just a bodily function or physical sensation, but they also lie in our memories, truths, and histories.

Chantelle Ing is a fourth-year undergraduate student, doing a dual degree in English Language & Literature, and Arts & Humanities via the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities (SASAH). She is also taking a Minor in Chinese Studies. She is passionate about visibility and representation for POC and queer artists and writers, particularly Southeast Asian diaspora and immigration. Therefore, she has written her Undergraduate Honours Thesis on Pulse by Singaporean-Canadian psychologist and author Lydia Kwa, in order to examine the intersections of diaspora between Singapore and Canada, queerness, and trauma.