In The Great Reclamation, Rachel Heng traces the birth of modern Singapore through the story of Ah Boon, a gentle village boy whose unique abilities change the course of history for his family, his community, and his country.

Speaking with PEN America’s Program Director, Literary Awards, Donica Bettanin, Rachel takes us beyond the Singapore of Crazy Rich Asians and behind the scenes of an epic, irresistible historical novel that transports the reader in every sense. (Amazon, Bookshop)


1. The beating heart of The Great Reclamation is Ah Boon, a village boy driven to seek the best for his community—with sometimes unexpected consequences. Can you share a bit about imagining your way into Ah Boon’s life and concerns?
I knew I wanted to write about the enormous changes–physical, political, cultural–that Singapore went through in the pre-Independence years. The image of Singapore that Americans may be most familiar with is the one in movies like Crazy Rich Asians, a sparkling, modern city, full of skyscrapers and enormous highways, very urbanized. This modern, urbanized Singapore was the one that I grew up in. But the Singapore that I would hear my mother, my aunts and older relatives talking about, was very different. She grew up in a wooden shophouse that didn’t have running water. They had a tarp for a ceiling, where it would flood and cockroaches would come in whenever it rained. Other family members lived in more rural areas, thick with rainforest, with outdoor outhouses, no electricity or piped water. It felt like a completely different country they would tell me about, but one that existed not very long ago. In writing this book, I wanted to bring that Singapore to life, to explore what it must have been like for that Singapore to be your home and then see it transformed before your eyes in the span of less than a lifetime. 

Ah Boon, as a character, first appeared to me in a short story as a young man trying to figure out what to do with his life, who gets caught up in the beginning of the new government’s ambitious land reclamation project, one of the early initiatives to transform the island’s landscape. In the novel, we open with him as a seven-year-old and follow him for the next twenty years. His coming-of-age parallels the coming-of-age of the young nation itself, with all its moral complexity and fraught choices about who he wants to be. 

2. The novel tells the story of the birth of modern Singapore alongside the captivating tale of Ah Boon. What role did research play in writing the book, and how did you balance being historically faithful with the story you were creating?
I spent about a year just doing research before starting to write. Aside from reading scholarly books and memoirs, I spent a lot of time in Singapore’s national archives, listening to oral history interviews, looking at government documents, newspaper clippings and photographs. I absolutely loved doing the research, and aside from the history of the time period, also got to dive into topics as wide ranging as mangrove swamp systems, urban planning, Chinese school systems and more. I also had the opportunity to talk with generous scholars of environmental history, sociology and geography who shared their expertise and even read portions of my novel.

That said, once I turned to the writing, I had to let go of the hard facts; to try to evoke what life would have felt like, rather than explaining what it was. Toni Morrison says of writing Beloved: “What I needed was imagination to shore up the facts, the data, and not be overwhelmed by them. Imagination that personalized information, made it intimate, but didn’t offer itself as a substitute.” This was an approach I tried to emulate. To have the facts and data at hand but ultimately trust my imagination to build the story. It is an iterative process, of course–writing, then researching, then writing again, then fact-checking, and so on. Ultimately, though, I think historical fiction is never a ‘faithful’, one-to-one re-enactment of history. That is not the work of fiction, the work of fiction is to evoke emotion, to pose a certain set of questions and contradictions, to create a system of meaning through the building of a world the reader can inhabit.


“In writing this book, I wanted to bring that Singapore to life, to explore what it must have been like for that Singapore to be your home and then see it transformed before your eyes in the span of less than a lifetime.


3. What was one of the most surprising things you learned in writing your book?
I get asked that question a lot, and honestly none of it was surprising. Fascinating, strange, unbelievable, yes, but surprising, no. I think so much of Singapore’s history and reality seems fantastical–and much has been written on this–that nothing really has the capacity to surprise. One of the most memorable things I learned was that a miles-long conveyor belt was built to transport the earth dug out from a hill inland all the way to the coast. It’s almost surreal to imagine, and very startling, so that conveyor belt appears in my novel.

4. You also teach writing; is there a teacher or a lesson you recall as essential to your own education as a writer?
I had the immense good fortune of studying with Elizabeth McCracken in graduate school. I’d often go to her office to talk about something I was working on, asking if she thought it would work if I wrote it one way or another, to which she would only ever shrug her shoulders cheerfully and say: “It might!” Her point being, you would only know if you actually wrote it. It was a very valuable lesson for me. I think early on, especially if you are a particular type of person who likes to control things, you want to use your intellect, your executive planning skills, to chart the course a story will take. And you’re very afraid of waste and what you perceive as failure. Wasting time, wasting words, wasting effort, the disappointment that comes with it. That there was no such thing as waste was a very important thing for me to learn. That your intellect does not know what is best for a story or what it can possibly be, and it will kill it, make it smaller and less interesting, if you do not reign in that controlling impulse. It was a lesson not only in writing but also in life.

5. What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever received on writing?
Thankfully, I do not remember. I’m sure I’ve been giving lots of unfortunate advice but I have a habit of tuning out what doesn’t make sense of me.


“That there was no such thing as waste was a very important thing for me to learn. That your intellect does not know what is best for a story or what it can possibly be, and it will kill it, make it smaller and less interesting, if you do not reign in that controlling impulse. It was a lesson not only in writing but also in life.”


6. What role does community play in your writing process? Do you have a writing group, or trusted readers who you rely on for feedback?

I started writing very much in isolation, I was in my late twenties, working a corporate job I didn’t like, and I had never taken a writing workshop. I didn’t know what MFAs were at that point. It was my husband who had encouraged me to write fiction from the very beginning, so naturally, he was my first and only reader. He’s an engineer by profession, but I like to say he has the soul of a poet, as well as a very strong intuition for story. So for many years he was the only reader giving me regular feedback on my work. I went to my MFA program after selling my first novel, because I craved more community and mentorship, and ended up at the Michener Center. MFA experiences are wide-ranging but I am very grateful that I had a wonderful one, with a tight knit and supportive cohort across genres. I made close friends there, brilliant writers with whom I continue to swap work today. And I have a fantastic agent, Julie Barer, who has the knack of being able to ask just one or two incisive questions that crack open a story, as well as a wonderful editor at Riverhead, Sarah McGrath, whose perspective really deepened and shaped The Great Reclamation into what it is today. My husband still reads my first drafts though, the work that feels too rough to share with others. He knows me so well that I find he’s able to intuit whether something is true to my intention, as well as where it stands in the context of all my work and my broader vision, and that’s a very helpful perspective to have.

7. Have you ever had to navigate censorship—or self-censorship—in your writing?
I grew up in Singapore, where censorship is woven into the fabric of civil society. Even if my own writing has never been directly censored, living within a culture of censorship certainly affects how one conceives of one’s work, what one can or cannot say. But I believe that fiction and art more generally has a unique power here. A good friend of mine, a Chinese poet, is fond of quoting Borges: “Censorship is the mother of metaphor.” I believe that, and I believe certain stories will always find a way to be told.

8. Your previous novel, Suicide Club was translated into 10 languages. Have you ever attempted translation yourself?
For the research of The Great Reclamation, I did have to do some rudimentary translation of oral history interviews in Mandarin, but I have not ever worked on translating a literary text. I wouldn’t rule it out! I am very inspired by Singaporean writer Jeremy Tiang, who not only writes his own brilliant novels but is a prolific translator of Chinese fiction. I feel that my Mandarin isn’t strong enough, though I grew up studying it for over a decade in Singapore, but maybe one day I will work on it enough to attempt translating.


“Coming-of-age stories are fascinating to me. They aren’t just about the individual figuring out who they are and what choices they make, but about the society that molds them, that lays out certain paths and possibilities and throws up other obstacles.”


9. Ah Boon’s story is deeply linked with that of his classmate, Siok Mei. While the shifting tides of history send the two characters in different directions, their bond remains. Do you believe in fate?
Fate in the sense of mysterious forces, patterns, inclinations that play themselves out in spite of individual attempts to control one’s destiny–yes, I believe in that. And I think those forces come both from within and without the self. In Ah Boon and Siok Mei’s case, so much of their journeys were already set in motion by factors outside of their control from the very beginning. What their families and communities believed, who they lost, where and when they found abiding love and comfort. Then there are the political factors; the war they go through, the struggle against colonialism, the infighting amongst the local government factions they get involved with. There is a certain inevitability to that. That is not to say individuals have no agency; they absolutely do, and that’s why coming-of-age stories are fascinating to me. They aren’t just about the individual figuring out who they are and what choices they make, but about the society that molds them, that lays out certain paths and possibilities and throws up other obstacles.

10. Why do you think people need stories? What do you hope readers take away from this story?
I think we can’t help but tell stories. It’s what makes us human, it’s how we make sense of the world and all its good and bad alike. As for my book, I hope that it brings to life an old Singapore, one that existed not very long ago, that is now so close to being entirely gone; that it gives life to the people who saw their home change so drastically before their eyes, who felt the ground shift beneath their feet. And that readers might think about what we are erasing today; what is falling by the wayside in the name of some greater good, some necessary exigency. 


Rachel Heng is the author of the novels The Great Reclamation (Riverhead, 2023)—named an April 2023 Indie Next Pick and a Most Anticipated Book by TIME Magazine, Washington Post, Oprah Daily and others—and Suicide Club (Henry Holt / Sceptre, 2018), which was a national bestseller in Singapore and has been translated into 10 languages.

Rachel’s short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Best New Singaporean Short Stories and elsewhere, longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and listed among Best American Short Stories’ Distinguished Stories. Her non-fiction has been listed among Best American Essays’ Notable Essays and has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire and elsewhere. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the National Arts Council of Singapore.

Born and raised in Singapore, Rachel received her BA in Comparative Literature & Society from Columbia University and her MFA in Fiction and Playwriting from UT Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University.