C
And the Award Goes to Sally Bong!
Sally Bong is an NPC protagonist. She allows life to happen to her because she has never felt strongly for anything, and yet possesses a strong moral compass that makes her hard to dislike. Her personal entanglements with fellow everyday folk lead her to discover a myriad of social issues that marginalised communities face in Singapore, and she is driven by her commitment to these human relationships--rather than any socio-political alignment--to make life a little easier on everyone.
Sebastian Sim's writing goes down easily. The language is entirely straightforward, with cause and effect explained in every line, and plot points are introduced and resolved within the chapter--sometimes even within the paragraph! Sim effectively uses a mixture of kooky situations, local history, and characters' naïveté to expose hypocrisy within the system, but the whole novel lacked any real tension point and felt more like a laundry list of issues presented in a rushed first draft. It read less like a narrative and more of a collection of short stories: every chapter dealt with a specific marginalised community, and characters did not seem to have any meaningful interiority explored beyond the sentence / paragraph / section they were allocated. What compounded this issue was the unchanging English-language register used to illustrate their multilingual speech (and the language they were speaking was not clearly indicated, which made some plot points confusing). Regardless of whether one spoke English / Malay / Mandarin / Chinese dialects, everyone's speech was peppered with overly English, overly formal, multi-syllabic adjectives and terminology that did not quite give off the unique texture of these languages, spoken in real life.
Sim's style might have been better suited for satires like his preceding Let's Give It Up for Gimme Lao! . Here, his attempts at sincerity sometimes fall flat. Still, And the Award Goes to Sally Bong! is a light and enjoyable read, seeking to dignify the life of the little man in prestige-seeking Singapore, where life (and general humanity) is validated through awards doled out by the ruling party. Sally Bong shows us that there is honour in simply being a good friend to those around us, with or without state-sanctioned recognition.
Sally Bong is an NPC protagonist. She allows life to happen to her because she has never felt strongly for anything, and yet possesses a strong moral compass that makes her hard to dislike. Her personal entanglements with fellow everyday folk lead her to discover a myriad of social issues that marginalised communities face in Singapore, and she is driven by her commitment to these human relationships--rather than any socio-political alignment--to make life a little easier on everyone.
Sebastian Sim's writing goes down easily. The language is entirely straightforward, with cause and effect explained in every line, and plot points are introduced and resolved within the chapter--sometimes even within the paragraph! Sim effectively uses a mixture of kooky situations, local history, and characters' naïveté to expose hypocrisy within the system, but the whole novel lacked any real tension point and felt more like a laundry list of issues presented in a rushed first draft. It read less like a narrative and more of a collection of short stories: every chapter dealt with a specific marginalised community, and characters did not seem to have any meaningful interiority explored beyond the sentence / paragraph / section they were allocated. What compounded this issue was the unchanging English-language register used to illustrate their multilingual speech (and the language they were speaking was not clearly indicated, which made some plot points confusing). Regardless of whether one spoke English / Malay / Mandarin / Chinese dialects, everyone's speech was peppered with overly English, overly formal, multi-syllabic adjectives and terminology that did not quite give off the unique texture of these languages, spoken in real life.
Sim's style might have been better suited for satires like his preceding Let's Give It Up for Gimme Lao! . Here, his attempts at sincerity sometimes fall flat. Still, And the Award Goes to Sally Bong! is a light and enjoyable read, seeking to dignify the life of the little man in prestige-seeking Singapore, where life (and general humanity) is validated through awards doled out by the ruling party. Sally Bong shows us that there is honour in simply being a good friend to those around us, with or without state-sanctioned recognition.