grew up in Singapore. She holds undergraduate
and medical degrees from Boston University and
graduated from the Warren Wilson College M.F.A.
program in creative writing. After the publication
of her first novel, Breaking the Tongue (2004), Loh
was elected fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Con-
ference in Vermont and later at the Radcliffe In-
stitute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Her novel was noted for the 2005 Kiriyama Prize
and picked by the New York Public Library as one
of the year’s “Books to Remember” in 2004.
Breaking the Tongue is a historical novel set in
prewar and wartime Singapore, partly drawing on
Loh’s childhood experience of World War II. Sin-
gapore’s fall to the Japanese in 1942, a cataclysmic
event in the island’s history, forces its inhabitants
to renegotiate their cultural identity: Having orig-
inally come from different parts of Asia to settle
in Singapore, having lived so long under British
colonial rule but now being faced with a Japanese
military rule, the residents of Singapore are torn
among British culture, Japanese culture, and their
own ethnic heritage.
The novel opens with a harrowing torture scene
as Claude Lim, who grew up in an Anglophilic
family of Chinese origin, is interrogated by the
Japanese because of his resented English-educated
background and his friendship with the nurse
Ling-li, who is suspected of being a Communist
spy. That this allegation might only be fiction con-
structed out of jealousy by a female collaborator
working for the Japanese at once underscores the
novel’s interest in understanding how cultural fic-
tion is created; to explore this issue of cross-cul-
tural perception and imagination, Loh uses sexual
intercourse as a metaphorical vehicle. While this
thematic and allegorical structure permeates the
text, it is particularly overt when Claude’s mother
is described, through Claude’s flashbacks, as hav-
ing committed adultery in the past with a series of
white men in order to satisfy her disconcertingly
inculcated desire to please the British colonizer.
During the torturous interrogation, Claude’s
memories of his boyhood as part of the Paranakan
culture (the English-educated Chinese diaspora in
Southeast Asia), his love for Ling-li, his friendship
with the Englishman Jack Winchester, and their
attempts to hide from the Japanese during the oc-
cupation can only be pieced together, or guessed
at, from these disjointed flashbacks. They are jux-
taposed not only with Ling-li’s experience but also
with extracts from a variety of sources, both his-
torical and fictitious. This emphasis on mediation
is additionally articulated by tightly linked im-
ages of different forms of linguistic practices—of
movements of the tongue during mastication and
sexual encounters, the switching from one lan-
guage to another, and ultimately the literal and
the metaphorical breaking of tongues that gives
the novel its title. Thus, as Claude is tortured, his
tongue is repeatedly on the point of being liter-
ally broken or twisted. This is paralleled by his
increasing self-awareness of the growing number
of Chinese-speaking immigrants from China after
the war. Ultimately, the text itself breaks down,
collapsing into a medley of English and Chinese.
Claude’s ethnicity is subsumed by a new under-
standing of homogenizing ethnic categorizations.
No longer Peranakan, he is simply an English-
educated Chinese who learns a new language to
fit in.Bibliography
Ban, Kah Choon and Yap Hong Kuan. Rehearsal for
War: Resistance and the Underground War against
the Japanese and the Kempeitai, 1942–1945. Singa-
pore: Horizon Books, 2002.
Loh, Vyvyanne. Breaking the Tongue. New York and
London: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Suryadinata, Leo. “Peranakan Chinese Identities in
Singapore and Malaysia: A Re-examination.” In
Ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia, edited
by Leo Suryadinata, 69–84. Singapore: Times Aca-
demic Press, 2002.
Wagner, Tamara S. Occidentalism in Novels of Ma-
laysia and Singapore, 1819–2004: Colonial and
Postcolonial Financial Straits and Literary Style.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2005.
———. “Victims of Boutique Multiculturalism: Ma-
laysian Chinese and Peranakan Women Writers
and the Dangers of Self-Exoticisation.” Journal of
Multicultural Discourses. Forthcoming.Tamara S. Wagner174 Loh, Vyvyanne