The Story Paper (Xiaoshuo bao) – a tabloid newspaper financed by the United States Information Service (USIS) – began publication in 1955 to propagate anti-communist sentiment amongst Chinese readers in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Modelled on American dime novels and middlebrow pulp fiction, The Story Paper featured tales of social outlaws, detective and spy stories, and interracial romances involving overseas Chinese characters in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. This chapter scrutinizes A Singapore Story, written by Liu Yichang – a modernist writer of experimental fiction in Hong Kong literature who was closely associated with The Story Paper. It brings into focus the interplay between Cold War transnationalism and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, with Hong Kong serving as a key centre for print media and publishing for the region as a whole. It argues that the author’s experimental text and its “Nanyang” flavour and fictional modernism questioned Chineseness and complicated US anti-communist propaganda through its interweaving of romance and Cold War politics.

Singapore, Rock City. On any given day in the basement of Peninsula Plaza, a shopping mall in central Singapore, Singaporeans of different ethnicities and ages can be found imagining and living a way of life through music. Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life in Singapore. The heart and soul of this community is English Language rock-and-roll music pioneered in Singapore by several members of the legendary 1960s “beats and blues” band, The Straydogs, who continue to engage this community in a sonic way of life. Grounded in sound studies, Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour’s ideas of the social—continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, “associations of heterogeneous elements” of human and non-human “mediators and intermediaries”—to portray a community entangled in the confounding relations between vernacular and national heritage projects. Music shops, music gear, music genres, sound, urban space, neighborhoods, State presence, performance venues, practice spaces, regional travel, local, national, regional, and sonic histories afford expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning, in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this deep sound is fiercely cosmopolitan, yet entirely Singaporean.

Goh Ching Lee, the former Festival Director of the Singapore Arts Festival, writes about the evolving contexts of festival development in Singapore and her efforts in balancing artistic impulses and pragmatic expectations. Her work placed exacting demands and justifications on many fronts. This essay reveals her approaches behind a decade of programming the Singapore Arts Festival.