“Love, Nude” - A Short Story by Elaine Chiew from her Debut Collection, The Heartsick Diaspora- 2020

• “A perfect book for a lockdown” - Olivia 

“Love, Nude” - A Short Story by Elaine Chiew from her Debut Collection, The Heartsick Diaspora- 2020

Olivia is very right, The Heartsick Diaspora is perfect literary company for those of us under lockdown.  There are 14 absorbing stories in the collection, read one a day and you will be done with two weeks of lockdown.

Teck Hin is an aspiring Singapore based artist.  To the chagrin of his  mother he dropped out of law school to study art.  (There are lots of references to artists and artistic movements in Singapore in “Love, Nude”.  Googling them all, looking at examples of paintings added a lot to my enjoyment of the story. If you are not familiar with post World War Two Singaporean art I highly recommend you do this.  Below is a small sample of the work of this period.

Besides Teck Hin, there is a second paramount character, Yee Lan. Yee Lan is 16, the daughter of a very close family friend.  The year is 1961.  Politically Singapore is sort of finding its direction as an independent entity.  Yee Lan has a serious crush on Teck Hin, he wants to do a nude painting of her but is not sure how to approach her.  To complicate matters, her mother sees him as the perfect future son-in-law.  She is almost a second mother to him and he worries about her reaction if she learns he painted her daughter nude.  It might obligate him to marry her. He becomes Yee’s art tutor and thus has a legitimate reason for being alone with her in her room.

There are strong erotic undertones in the story.  Marvelous descriptions are given of his work as an art student, in various styles.  

I don’t want to reveal how this works out for Teck and Yee.  The closing third of the story are just a joy to read. The account of the nude body of 16 year old Yee brings to mind the tradition of nude paintings of young women and the often sexually charged relationships involved.

There is one more story for which I still have the pleasure of reading coming in The Heartsick Diaspora.  I think I will save it for May.

Elaine is a writer and a visual arts researcher, and editor of Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around the World (New Internationalist, 2015).

Twice winner of the Bridport Short Story Competition, she has published numerous stories in anthologies in the UK, US and Singapore.

Originally from Malaysia, Chiew graduated from Stanford Law School and worked as a corporate securities lawyer in New York and Hong Kong before studying for an MA in Asian Art History at Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore, a degree conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London.

Elaine lives in Singapore and her book, The Heartsick Diaspora, and other stories, was published by Myriad in 2020 as well  by Penquin Books.