This is something of a review of current events. It is also a review of Amanda Lee Koe's debut novel, Delayed Rays of a Star, Neon Yang's apology threads concerning Isabel Fall, and a meditation on power, complicity, and subalternity. A dear friend I was talking with last night on Discord said this of John Gunther, a deeply flawed journalist who, in the 1930s, took on the admirably comprehensive task of assembling political opinions on every part of the world: his work remains not because he was writing for the future, but because he was writing for the here and now. The art of being present is also a timeless one. I am trying to be present here.

Here is my summary of Delayed Rays of a Star, with spoilers. Swashbuckling pick-me bisexual Marlene Dietrich, a young networking, girlbossing, pre-Nazi Leni Riefenstahl, and the Chinese-American trailblazer Anna May Wong walk into a party. A photograph is taken of them. The photograph prefaces the novel, and history spirals from there. Koe's work flits between times and places, interjected with historical-fictional interludes: a sad little German twink fixes lights for Leni, a young Chinese maid empties piss jugs for an ungracefully aging Dietrich, et cetera et cetera. Walter Benjamin shows up too and dies, which is very sad.

In one chapter made uncomfortably long by its lack of distance, Riefenstahl addresses an imaginary interviewer in 2003, apologising for nothing.

It is on this point that I am drawn to. Delayed Rays of a Star is about many things, and one thing it circles back to a lot is the idea of guilt. The German twink fatefully intercedes when Leni's Romani cast orchestrates an escape, acting against his conscious moral instincts. Wong is castigated by the Chinese press as a race traitor for her Orientalist roles. Dietrich never really learns that she should care about other people. Everyone is deeply damaged by racism and sexism and their intimate entanglements with power. Everyone is deeply damaged by their proximity to power. They are complicit when they do nothing. They are complicit even when they do everything in their power. The Riefenstahl interview section sharpens this to a point. She made films for killers because it was the only way (Koe narrates) she could see how. The hesitant tension in her earlier chapters suggest otherwise. As if to assuage the readers' fears, Koe includes telling paragraphs on Leni's outdated sensibilities and her disdain for Sontag. We are in the right here. See, she disagrees with us! It doesn't distract from the fact that this is a negotiation with guilt, or a negotiation with fame.

Amanda Lee Koe is gathering fame. Winning the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize does that. In that same year, she relocated to the United States. Delayed Rays of a Star seems to be her debut into the big leagues. I am happy for that. Earlier this year, she had a feature out on the incredibly lesbian Mädchen in Uniform on the Criterion Collection website. It is a wonderful review. Midway, she delves into the queerness of the film and the legal history around it. She does not fail to mention that the antigay legislation that sent the film's queer cast members to the camps still exist in similar forms in many parts of the world. She does not fail to mention Singapore. A gesture outwards from Brooklyn, received sparingly here eight minutes too late. Amidst that glowing review that line stood out like a declaration of humility. In a more melancholic piece I might have read it as apology. I am happy she is out there. I do not think she's coming back.

I am a firm believer that every gesture of a writer outwards reflects a corresponding gesture inwards. In that, I do not blame Koe. It is difficult to be queer here, to say the absolute least. In less trying circumstances it can also be very liberating. No surprise that Neon Yang, the other protagonist of this essay, seems to find themself in London a lot, shuttling back and forth between there and their home base of Singapore. Yang is the only other 'big leagues' Singaporean fiction writer that comes to my mind, at least in the terms of my current echo chambers. I wonder how it is like to have 'made it' in this way, to be spoken of in the same breath as N.K. Jemisin or other contemporary spec-fic greats. It certainly doesn't hurt to be faithfully promoted by spec-fic giant Tor Publishing. I want to say Yang's bigger than Koe or any other writer from this city at the moment, in terms of standing on a 'global' stage (keeping in mind the omnipresent certain western-centric bias of the 'global'); in terms of being one of the 'who's who' of active writers pushing the boundaries of speculative lit.

'Making it', for many of us, means drawing close to centres of power. Being close to the publishers who distribute the most. Hobnobbing with the people who tweet the most. Proximity to English, and the media-cultural machine of the North Atlantic: this holds true for academia, for showbiz, for the creative arts. For some of us, this is how we shelter ourselves from harm. I withdraw to the permanently-online SG twittersphere with one foot on this island and another foot permanently elsewhere. Amanda Lee Koe moves in with her girlfriend to their Brooklyn flat, where neither of them have to wait till they're 35 to live. Yang used to tweet triumphantly about current affair after current affair in London, as if they were somehow responsible for the city, living there as a citizen of the globe. Anna May Wong vamped her way through Hollywood in ching-chong English and cheongsams. Leni made Bergfilms for the Third Reich. We are all throwing our hopes elsewhere because the alternative--of oblivion here and now--is unthinkable.

What does it mean, then, when the machines we draw close to are also capable of great hurt? The centres of power amplify what the powerful find most comfortable. This is the essence of what sells. Never mind the decade or their stated goals of progress and inclusion. This is mathematically expressed as the power law. A quantity that grows proportional to its size produces skewed inequalities. Sometimes these inequalities hurt other people. I think a lot of Delayed Rays is trying to deal with that. There are no apologies, only justifications. Everyone from Anna Wong to the fictional German twink is trying to do the right thing, and again and again everyone fails. The regime of power takes the words out of their mouths. They do what they think is right, speak what they think is right, surrounded by people who think they are right, exponentiated thus by the status quo. The things that are normal and good for the many agglutinate around the voices in power like a thick crust. Are the speakers guilty, then?

The Vox article on Helicopter Story dropped at about the same time as I finished Delayed Rays. I do not think that a coincidence. Yang appears in the article, justifying their paranoid stance on the story. What came to my mind, instead, was their muted non-apology earlier this April, which seemed to put all the blame on the prickliness of the story and the negligence of the editors. The words, which seemed plucked from the playbooks of the great publishing-house machines, deeply stung me. When I began this essay, another non-apology surfaced, this time laden with tried-and-tested meanderings: I-am-sorry-this-happened-to-you, I-am-sorry-if-I've-hurt-you. Words decanted from the regulating valves of voices in power. I wonder how easy it was to write these words, and, simultaneously, how difficult it must have seemed to the writer. One is expected to write a certain way when one occupies a position of responsibility. Sometimes this is demanded by one's publicists. But on the Wild West of Twitter, it is quite likely that all fetters in our writing are our own.

I think there is something in the brain that gets to you when your voice starts to become very loud, and that that something is very, very dangerous. And every outward gesture belies an equal gesture inwards.

In Delayed Rays, Anna May Wong grapples with being a woman in two worlds: ostracised by her Chinese contemporaries and haplessly exoticised by the American machinery of fame she so desires to occupy. There are roles she must play to ensure her survival, hideously racist ones, but paying ones nonetheless. Raised in Los Angeles she is unable to speak a word of Chinese, and must have the comments of the press translated to her via a hotel receptionist. In her proximity to power she becomes mute to the people she is supposed to empower. Taking the novel as a whole, I want to believe that Koe's writing betrays a deep anxiety about the positionality she's come to occupy. When one writes for a certain audience, one takes on certain mutenesses. Unlike the works of many other Singaporean writers with international publishing deals, Delayed Rays does not mention Singapore at all. On Koe's Wikipedia, she is described as a Singaporean-American. I do not think that this is an unjustified thing.

I am not alone with my sentiments on Yang among queer Singaporean Twitter. I think we are all very disappointed in non-apologies. We, however, are also very tired. We would like to leave this place, but it is growingly clear that our fight is here, on our own two feet, with our own language, with our own words. We have to be aware of where we're standing and make room for others to stand with us. For there is, as I have come to believe, no shelter that can remain standing for long without denying light to someone else. For us who have no other choice, I wonder what kind of adequate apology can be issued from underneath all that guilt. I wonder how it might feel to attenuate one's signal around power. How liberating that must be, to finally cut through the anxiety, to speak cleanly and calmly, without any muteness at all!