Bullies exposed

Debut novelist Jolene Tan exposes a darker side of schooling in Singapore in A Certain Exposure, published by Epigram Books this month.

The novel begins with the funeral of a government scholar, who commits suicide after being bullied, and follows the effect of his death on family and friends.

Though names of persons and places are changed, many of the incidents of petty cruelty and student violence in the novel are inspired by real life, says the 31-year-old.

“There was a boy in school, everybody knew the rugby players had taken him into a toilet and p***ed on him. Or this girl who everybody knew had had sex on a pool table, but it never occurred to me to think about what went on behind that knowledge,” says Tan, who studied at Raffles Girls’ Secondary School and Raffles Junior College before reading law at Cambridge and Harvard.

“It never occurred to me to ask, did they want this to happen? Why is it that we all knew about it? Who made this knowledge public and how voluntary was that act?”

Tan is programmes and communications senior manager of gender equality advocacy group, the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware). She is also one of the founders of the No To Rape campaign to repeal part of the Penal Code, which does not consider non-consensual sex within a marriage to be rape.

She has written several non-fiction articles on rights issues for The Straits Times, worked for the Prisons Reform Trust in the United Kingdom and was a freelance editor in Germany.

She returned to Singapore just last year after 12 years away, with her husband, a researcher in developmental biology. They have a two-year-old daughter.

A Certain Exposure is both eye-opening and entertaining. It runs the emotional gamut from pathos to black comedy, as Tan paints a portrait of racism and class barriers which still exist in Singapore.

“I want readers to enjoy reading the book. For me, reading is primarily for pleasure,” says the author, who began her literary career at age six.

“I used to carry these notebooks around with me and write stories about my dolls,” she says, recalling her first effort: Blinky And Rachel Go To The Beach.

The younger of two children and the only girl, Tan has always been an avid reader, enjoying science-fiction and fantasy writers such as Anne McCaffrey and literary authors such as A.S. Byatt.

Her mother taught at a primary school and her father, now retired, worked in an oil company.

In secondary school, Tan and a friend wrote a fan letter to well-known Singapore novelist Catherine Lim, asking for advice on how to get published.

“She handwrote this beautiful, encouraging letter of reply,” she recalls with a smile.

However, in her teens, she says: “There came a point when I felt I had decent writing but no stories.”

While she was doing her master’s in law at Harvard University – her undergraduate degree was from Cambridge – she began to rethink the events and canteen talk of her school days in Singapore.

Incidents such as teasing less “manly” boys or making crude jokes about girls with sexual experience took on a different light.

“Thinking back, I was this incredibly ignorant person. I would say to some person: ‘Isn’t this bad?’ And they would say: ‘Don’t take it so seriously.’ I find it really alarming that there are all these patterns of behaviour that are normalised or seen as innocuous and fun.

“If anybody has felt alone, seeing this kind of normalised brutality that they couldn’t get others to take seriously, I’d like them to feel less alone and know that their feelings are not dysfunctional.”

She began work on A Certain Exposure in 2009, a year before American student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after pictures of him kissing another man were shared on social media by his roommate at Rutgers University.

The tragedy led to wide debate about cyber-bullying and harassment of people who were gay – the latter is considered acceptable in many countries, which can be immensely damaging emotionally and psychologically for the victims.

Tan points out that in such a culture, people have to hide themselves to fit into social norms.

“I’ve a long-standing interest in the question about how much of ourselves we can reveal, how much of ourselves it is safe to reveal. Even though it seems safe to hide ourselves, it’s incredibly dangerous because we might disappear.”

akshitan@sph.com.sg

This article was published on April 13 in The Straits Times.

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