Desiring the Singapore story: affective attachments and national identities in Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo

Abstract

In 2013, Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo/Pa ma bu zai jia became the first Singaporean film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in Singapore during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the film portrays the lives of an ordinary middle-class family and their Filipino maid, Teresa. This article explores the affective ties to the ‘Singapore Story,’ an authoritative narrative of the city-state's nation-building history and progress determining (economic) success. Drawing on Lauren Berlant's notion of ‘cruel optimism,’ I argue that the film's main characters are dangerously attached to the idea of living the Singapore story. I further contend that Teresa's migrant domestic labor, which both sustains and troubles the Singapore story, exposes for audiences issues of loss, absence and dislocation. Employing Kathleen Stewart's notion of ‘ordinary affects,' the characters' everyday interactions and bonds formed through the figure of Teresa manifest her outsider status and the undesired costs of maintaining the Singapore story, such as dysfunctional family relations and other social issues attributed to foreign domestic workers. Using affect theory to examine Singaporean cinema, this paper interrogates what constitutes Singapore's national identity by tracking the modes of affective investment in the Singapore story.

Acknowledgements

This essay was presented at the 2014 New York Conference on Asian Studies in Hempstead, New York. For their invaluable comments on earlier versions of the article, I am grateful to Joy Schaefer, Vicky Hesford, Kadji Amin, E.K. Tan, Robert Harvey and Liz Schmermund. I also thank Lily Wong and the journal editors for their generous advice and the anonymous reviewers for their productive suggestions. All remaining errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All translations are the author's, except otherwise noted.

2. While important, analyzing the film's success at Cannes is beyond the scope of this essay. For discussions of Singaporean cinema at international film festivals, see Khoo (2006) and Chan (2008).

3. Although ‘Indians’ refer to people of South Asian descent, not all of them come from India. ‘Huaren’ is a term differentiating ethnic-Chinese people from Mainland Chinese.

4. Although both terms refer to Mandarin, ‘Huayu’ is used by ethnic Chinese to distinguish from ‘Guoyu’ (national language).

5. While Britain first introduced English, inculcating a ‘neutral’ and ‘common’ language within multiethnic Singapore was considered advantageous to nation-building (Shroud and Wee 2010, 259–260).

6. Malay was authorized as the national language when Singapore was part of the Federation of Malaysia (1963–1965), and symbolically maintained in Singapore after separation (Chua 2009, 241).

7. Affect is considered ‘autonomic’ and the body's preconscious reaction to feelings, whereas emotion is regarded as ‘subjective’ and the social articulation of feelings (Gorton 2007; Massumi 2002). That said, affect studies scholars continue to debate these differences between affect and emotion.

8. Stewart employs Mary Louise Pratt's notion of ‘contact zones’, which characterizes the confrontations and hierarchical relations between distinct cultures (1992, 4).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle H. S. Ho

Michelle H.S. Ho is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory, Stony Brook University. Her research interests include affect theory, (post)colonial studies, transnational feminisms and sexualities and media culture and gender-based subcultures in Southeast and East Asia.