The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead Books)

At first only a small boy is able to find the islands. Ah Boon is on his father’s fishing boat when the first island appears, with its bounty of fish that will bring financial stability without effort. Elusive and mysterious, the island is gone when the next trip to it takes place, reappearing only when Ah Boon is on the boat to search for it. It turns out to be one of several islands, never before seen by the small village of fisherman who profit from this discovery. 

Money from the steady crop of fish sends Ah Boon to school, an unusual step for a child raised in a kampong, one of many villages at the edge of the sea, surrounded by mangrove trees. There he meets Siok Mei, a spirited, smart orphan from the kampong and their friendship is a fiercely loyal one, even when politics drives a wedge between them. Siok Mei becomes a Communist activist while Ah Boon finds an opportunity to join the Gah Men, British-educated Chinese from the city who find an economic goldmine in the mangrove swamps on the coast. First lured by the air-conditioned coolness and the television set in the newly built community center that has been built in the kampong, the villagers begin to understand that another, more comfortable, life exists outside of what they’ve always known. When Ah Boon tells them about the apartments that will soon be built nearby, ones with electricity, plumbing, bathrooms, and refrigerators, slowly they abandon their fishing village for these newfound luxuries and the construction equipment moves in. 

Singapore, the island they live on, needs more land. To get it, the Gah Men remove the mangroves, fill in the swamp, and extend Singapore into the sea. The kampongs disappear, the fishermen who live in high-rise buildings lose their livelihood, and Communism becomes a threat to be eradicated. Ah Boon and Siok Mei are on separate and dangerous pathways but their friendship pulls them together again.

Rachel Heng juxtaposes a mythic way of life against the hard truths of history, taking her characters from 1941 into the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945 and up to Singapore’s independence from Great Britain and its short-lived merger with Malaysia. The Great Reclamation shows how Singapore stamped out kampong culture in the service of its expansion, an act that would lead to the island eventually increasing its land mass by 22%. Since 1965, Singapore has gone from 227 square miles to 277 square miles and plans to reclaim another 38 by 2030, bringing it to over 300. In the process people who have traditionally been rooted to the seacoast are now far from it, suspended in buildings that keep their feet from the earth.

Rachel Heng’s characters are all servants of this history, each of them representing a fragment of Singapore’s past. None of them go much beyond this and the tragedy that engulfs them seems pallid as a result. It’s the kampong that’s given vivid life with descriptions that are bound to make readers mourn its disappearance--and when the enigmatic islands become threatened, this has more resonance than what takes place between Ah Boon and Siok Mei. 

This is a fine introduction to Singapore’s modern history but as a novel it falls short. Rarely does fiction cry out for a timeline but this book definitely does.~Janet Brown