The premise about cake draws me. Who doesn’t like cake? The sugary piece of fluff has probably no nutritional value of any sorts, but dare we imagine a world without cake? Singaporean Yeoh Jo-Ann has come up with an impressive novel that has cake playing a secondary albeit important role in it. Used to soothe, cajole and impress, Yeoh’s clever use of cakes (they’re delightfully tucked in between her prose) sets the theme of love, loss and redemption in one delicious mix of ingredients.
Impractical Uses of Cake marks the debut of the former SPH Magazine’s features editor who grew up “… dreaming of becoming a cat or a rock star.” Working in publishing for eight years, 37-year-old Yeoh gave up her career in publishing for one in digital marketing.
Writing, she confides in an interview with the Straits Times, was a childhood dream that had to be fulfilled when she found herself turning 35 and “… having your life smack you in the face.” She confesses she couldn’t help but feel that she might be halfway through her life, if she were to die at the same age as her father who succumbed to cancer at the age of 60.
That meltdown prompted her to finish the novel she’d been meaning to write. In yet another interview with Her World, she confesses: “It was one of those things I never quite made time for. I’d always dreamt of being a novelist as a child, but what I didn’t know was how life gets in the way. And the thing is we actually have a very finite amount of time.”
Deep questions begat a story that goes deep. In the same interview, Yeoh described her novel as “… a story about having enough and wanting more, but not being able to express that because you’re not able to articulate what you really want or need.” Surrounded by the fluff of sugee cakes and its likes, Impractical Uses of Cake struck all the right taste notes when it won Singapore’s richest literary prize – the Epigram Books Fiction prize – last year.
“It reveals a whole side of Singapore that many people in Singapore may not be aware of, with a dry sense of humour and a deep understanding of human difficulties and the problems faced by Singapore as an urban centre,” reviewed one of the judges, Professor Rajeev S. Patke, director of the Divisions of Humanities, Yale-NUS College.
UNUSUAL LOVE STORY
Sukhin Dhillon is a 35-year-old jogger, literature teacher, Punjabi-Chinese hybrid who’s mostly a surly doormat (with the occasional outbursts when provoked). He’s clearly not satisfied with his lot in life. He teaches because of a need to prove to his doctor-father that he can, and nothing more than that. During the day, he spends his time avoiding his students and colleagues. He isn’t happy. He isn’t unhappy. He simply is. Does it strike a bell for some of us who are in careers that don’t really agree with us, but we stick to it anyhow? Meandering in life, resisting change and just being dissatisfied with our lot. Perhaps there’s a Sukhin residing in all of us – and that’s what makes him strangely likeable.
His parents want him married because they want grandchildren. He visits his parents on the weekends and indulges in a slice or two of his mother’s sugee cake. But there’s only so much he can take from his overbearing parents. Their clumsy attempts at matchmaking get under his skin, yet he has no social life to retreat to.
There’s aren’t any regular fixtures in Sukhin’s life except for a flamboyantly gay colleague Dennis who pursues this rather one-sided friendship doggedly, and one Mrs. Chan, the doting canteen aunty who tries to feed him regularly with lovingly-prepared carb-laden food and an extra-large cup of teh si gao kosong.
Cake resurfaces in the form of an ill-timed birthday surprise that Dennis springs on him, complete with a yuzu coconut cream cake and a cacophony of voices that yell: “Happy Birthday, dear Sukhin, haaaaaaaaaapy….” Sukhin feels like crying, or throwing up. “I’m 35 and this is my life,” he thinks. And then, the next instant: “Oh god, I’m 35 and I’m about to have a mid-life crisis. How cliché. How sad.”
And then things change. A chance meeting in rainy Chinatown with a homeless vagrant turns Sukhin’s unremarkable life around quite suddenly. His ex-girlfriend Jinn whom he’s not heard from for years resurfaces. And she lives in a makeshift cardboard house in an alley – a far cry from her affluent Bukit Timah life in the past. It’s a shock to his system.
But maybe he should bring her some cake. What if she thought cake frivolous now? It strikes him that there’s something incongruous about eating sugee cake and living under a pile of boxes. And yet he does. And thus begins a tentative journey into her new world – of homeless people, soup kitchens and foraging through discarded wilted vegetables at wet markets.
The homeless community aren’t people to be pitied in Yeoh’s story. They’re close-knitted and supportive of each other. Some like Jinn, have homes but choose to live in the streets voluntarily. The question that persists through most of the chapters is simply this: Why would Jinn choose to give up her comfortable and affluent life, her identity and choose to be homeless?
Sukhin is desperate to know but never really finds out until the end. And when he does, we’re left strangely disappointed. There’s no real ‘twist in the story’, no great revelation, no brilliant sub-plot, no real tragedy as we’re led to hope.
Jinn opens Sukhin up to the possibilities of a real adventure outside his unhappy little world. And he does go to great lengths to do things and socialise with people despite being such a self-imposed hermit. But their reunion doesn’t really change him too much. He’s still unhappy with his lot although we never really understand why he finds his life so unfulfilling despite his passion for literature.
It’s not quite a love story, not quite a serious exploration of heavy issues like homelessness and mental illness, not quite comedy and not quite a dramatic tear-jerker. It’s a little bit of everything and sometimes a whole lot of ingredients can render a tale – or cake – disappointing.
It’s a delightful tale nonetheless. Yeoh writes well, and her well drawn-out characters stand out. With all his idiosyncrasies, there’s something inherently likeable about Sukhin. He’s an embodiment of who we are sometimes – dissatisfied, angry and wondering if we are sometimes “… surrounded by incompetent idiots!” Forget the plot; revel in the mostly well-written story. And if that fails, there’s always cake to fall back on!
Impractical Uses of Cake
Author: Yeoh Jo Ann
Publisher: Epigram Books
229 pages
Sold in all major bookstores.