After publishing seven poetry collections, Cyril Wong has written his first book of short stories, Let Me Tell You Something About That Night: Strange Tales. But even though the poet is happy with the result, he admits he hated the new writing process.
'It was a very painful six months. The characters haunted me for too long and I don't like that feeling. When I write something I like to put it down and put it away. With a poem, when it's over, it's over,' says the 32-year-old Singaporean.
The 2006 Singapore Literature Prize Winner's debut collection of short fiction includes stories of a little girl and a talking moon, a lonely elf and a prince, and a butterfly that wants to be a rabbit, but these are not fairy tales for children. The themes of lost love, loneliness and homosexuality are aimed at an adult readership. 'I suffer from depression and I feel those issues need to be discussed. I was very determined to write stories that are dark, but there is also a struggle towards a kind of light in many of them, so it's balanced. But there are no real happy endings,' he says.
Reading Wong's work provides a window into the writer's personal life and angst. Openly gay, Wong has long favoured what he calls 'confessional poetry', talking about his personal experience and difficulties coming out in a traditional Christian Chinese family; his father has not talked to him since he came out 14 years ago, and his mother is in 'self-denial'.
'My family is a psychological mess, but because we're Asians we don't really talk about it,' he says. 'It's all about saving face. I'm the only one spilling everyone's guts through my writing.'
The themes in Wong's writing have developed over the years. In his first two collections of poetry, Squatting Quietly (2000) and The End of His Orbit (2001), the young author mainly dealt with his response to the breakdown of his relationships with family members and the absence of a father figure in his life. But he has grown more philosophical, writing about how the city state has shaped him and expanding beyond issues of sexuality to embrace themes of love, mortality and alienation.
In his last book of poems, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light, published in 2007, Wong imagined what it would be like if he and his partner were both HIV positive, transforming the two of them in his writing into two shape-shifting Hindu deities.