Books, Actually

Picking up a shipment of Moving House at the Tiong Bahru store in July 2020…

Every independent bookstore brings something special to its literary community; none more so – at least to our little expanding universe of Anglophone writers and readers – than BooksActually. I remember my first, magical encounter with the store, then located on Ann Siang Hill, a stone’s throw from its sister outfit Polymath & Crust on Club St. Halfway through a walk around Chinatown, our class of 14- and 15-year-olds were led into its air-conditioned calm, where Alvin Pang (who taught us creative writing) began reciting Arthur Yap’s great and understated poem ‘old house at ann siang hill’.

It was an introduction not only to what local literature could look and sound like, but also to what a locally-rooted literary life could be. In the intervening years, even after the shift to Yong Siak St, this was where the awkward and book-loving among us could wander alone among the shelves, or meet to hear others read poems in accents like our own. Supplying everything from emergency birthday purchases to ideal first dates (how better to see if your crush might be the one?), BooksActually was, in many ways, where we grew up. Along the way, the movement it started – and its imprint, Math Paper Press – fostered a whole generation who still call the place home.

This past weekend, BooksActually turned fifteen – which means it’s now as old as I was when I first walked through the doors. I owe a great deal to Kenny, as well as to the store which, although it’s moved online (with a base in Jalan Besar), will hardly lose its place in the heart’s geography. And what a special place it is.

Here’s a poem to mark the move. Happy fifteenth!

Jalan Besar
for BooksActually
 

See how it swells from the brown surface:
the land curving above the world’s own curve, 

something to stand on, a turbulent plot
leading nowhere but this heart of swampy ground.  

An inheritance. For less than a hundred  
and twenty rupees the marsh changed hands,   

was burnt to brick, was drenched and planted over,
named Lavender to mask its loamy stench 

then named again, a scorch of distant fires,
every inch of road a confrontation.  

Allenby, Jellicoe, Kitchener, Foch –
streets stamped sturdily into being so  

a New World could be founded from the ash,
the best opera in Malaya opening  

to the tap of the taxi-girls’ feet. Years
later they saw their young gather here again  

to mourn and dance, shin-deep in rain rising
from beneath grass to claim its lawful turf,  

lift the lowered shutters and make their way.
Who walks it now? One day, perhaps, we’ll find  

we were reading it wrong, not as a name
or station, but in a voice river-clear  

and charged with history’s silt: no small step.
To stride wide upon the earth, and leave a mark.