Rachel Heng
OSGF
Q&A With Rachel Heng
Tell us a little about yourself - whatever you think is important to know!
That’s a strangely difficult question to answer. I was born and raised in Singapore, and I live in Austin, Texas today with my husband and two cats. I came to writing relatively late (maybe relatively early, depending on where you’re standing!) in life—I wrote my first short story in my mid-twenties, and haven’t looked back since.
How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice? How have they changed your relationship with the natural world?
It’s definitely slowed things down. I’ve been mostly working on my second novel during the past year, and I’d thought having more concentrated time at home would mean I’d finish it more quickly, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Progress has been slow and winding, but on the plus side, I hope I’ve deepened some of the ideas and characters in the book in a way that I might not have, without the enforced solitude. As for my relationship with the natural world, living in Austin we’re very fortunate to have outdoor space and sunny weather most of the year, so I spent lots of time on the porch, and walking the trails and greenbelts we have around the city. Coming from tropical Singapore, I’ve always thought of Texas as a somewhat dry, arid place, but I’ve been surprised how lush parts of it can be, how similar the vegetation sometimes is to that I grew up with.
Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?
I’m very inspired by large, invisible systems, the natural world being one of them. My first novel dealt with the intersection of capitalism with healthcare and the commodification of human life, while my second book is about urban development, ecological loss and communal memory in post-Independence Singapore. On the surface those feel like vastly different subjects but I think what connects them is their interest in the large systems and global movements that shape the lives of individuals. Much of my work is quite research-heavy—I love reading books about history or geography, talking to social scientists, digging into archives and oral histories.
Tell us about “The Remembers”, the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog. What inspired you to write this piece, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
This story was commissioned by the wonderful McSweeney’s Quarterly, as part of their special climate fiction issue in response to the UN’s 2018 climate change report. They paired us up with experts from the National Resource Defense Council to imagine stories set 40 years in the future, in locations all around the world. I worked with the flooding expert Robert Moore to come up with my story ‘The Rememberers’, in which a future Singapore grapples with the implications of life behind a seawall and attempts ever more outlandish solutions to save the country from rising sea levels. In the story, we follow a daughter trying to stall the progress of her mother’s dementia. It’s a story about climate change, but to me it’s also a story about collective and individual memory, and how we value that, how far we’re willing to go to preserve that, what memory can do in the face of what seems like crushing, impending defeat.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on revising my second novel, The Great Reclamation, which will be published by Riverhead Books in 2022. I’m also working on new short stories, and hope to work on a story collection one day!
What are you reading right now?
Grace Paley’s The Collected Stories and Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being.
What is your favorite plant?
The banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis). We have lots of old, sweepingly beautiful ones in Singapore.
Learn more about Rachel and her work here.
Images courtesy of Rachel Heng.