Catskull author Myle Yan Tay writes to process reactions to microaggressions
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Author Myle Yan Tay, who is behind catskull, also debuted his play Brown Boys Don't Tell Jokes in 2023.
PHOTO: JOEL LIM
SINGAPORE – For many people, the circuit breaker in 2020 was a time of enforced rest and relaxation.
Myle Yan Tay, however, was consumed by restless energy.
The 28-year-old hammered at his keyboard, 500 words a day, until he held in his hands the first draft of his debut novel after 2½ months.
And what a burst of a novel catskull is,
Ram, an 18-year-old student about to take his A levels, is concerned with anything but his studies.
A mission to save his friend from her abusive father gives him a taste of vigilante justice, an outlet for his anger that he would visit, again and again.
There are corpses in this neo-noir thriller: of a cat, of a domestic helper, and of a teenage boy.
Gleaming Singapore is transformed into Gotham City, and though there may not be a Joker to terrorise its inhabitants, people are nevertheless ground down by the city’s daily, hidden violence.
Ram’s bat – his weapon of choice – is also Tay’s, as he shatters illusions of clean-cut Singapore and pummels open the cracks of a deeply unequal society.
“They are not necessarily things that happened to me, but they do relate to the frustration I felt growing up,” Tay says in an interview over Zoom.
“I was looking at the world around me, feeling this injustice, but then also not really being sure what to do with that.
“There are about seven or eight cases within catskull that are extrapolated from real cases, from the news. There were these young men deliberately targeting migrant workers so they could practise their martial arts skills in 2013, and that story really set it off.”
He says an instance of domestic worker abuse in the book is a composite drawn from several cases, with some details redacted. “If I put what happened to these women in the book, people would read and be like, ‘There’s no way that could happen. There’s no way that such cruelty exists.’”
In March, Tay had debuted his play Brown Boys Don’t Tell Jokes,
In some ways, catskull is a continuation and an extension of that theme.
But in place of witticisms, there is now a barely controlled rage, which has a lot to do with how Ram’s Chinese schoolmates dismiss him. Ram is Indian, while Tay is half-Ceylonese and half-Chinese.
He says: “A big part of both catskull and Brown Boys is that, in those moments when things were being said, I had this angry response, but I didn’t really know what to do with it.
“Everyone else would be having a good time with these jokes, but I didn’t feel right about what you’ve said to me, about my friend. I didn’t have the vocabulary to tackle that.”
Ram, 10 years younger than Tay in the book, definitely does not have the vocabulary.
“That ends up really sinking into him. He thinks, ‘Everyone else seems to be doing fine. Why am I the only person who seems to be collapsing under the weight of this future that’s about to be upon me?’”
Tay says he is still learning and processing some “messed-up” things that have happened or were said to him as he was growing up, especially in national service.
Writing fiction and plays is a way for him to reconcile these in a way that he cannot really do by facing them head-on.
In school, he was constantly asked “What are you?”, as if being Singaporean was not enough. An all-boys school made matters worse.
“Just the kind of chaos and the level of bullying that was going on,” he says. “It’s important to learn and deal with these things.”
But after talking in some depth about the minority experience, Tay hastens to add that catskull, as he envisions it, is about race only in a small way.
A much larger part of the book is about the educational system that Ram and his classmates have to go through.
The students in Ram’s school are split into lecture theatres according to those who are “eligible for Oxbridge, those who are probably going to go local, and those who are not going to go anywhere”.
The way the system segregates students forces them to look at and assess one another in ways that make it natural for some to believe they are worth more than others.
Tay believes the creation of this hierarchical world view is closely linked to abuse.
He says: “To be 17 or 18, and having this experience where it is okay to think, ‘You are less than me, I am more than you, and so I am going to push you down further because that’s going to make me feel better.’ People are free agents, but they are also influenced by the environment and the things they are taught, and they are internalising what the teachers say.”
Tay’s favourite superhero is Daredevil because the Marvel hero is powered by Catholic guilt, a guilt more specific than Batman’s.
In creating anti-hero Ram, he has tried to manifest this same specificity.
It was what led to him writing a greater role for Ram’s Uncle Arun, a kind of inversion of the effect the death of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben had on Spider-Man.
He is now working on a more experimental novel about a fictional nation called the Motherland, in which the son of a former dictator is assembling a fake national archive.
The novel catskull already has lists, articles, text messages and blog posts, but this as-yet-untitled sophomore effort will also contain screenplays, audio recordings, interrogation reports and even a recipe.
“I’m really fascinated by prose and the ways we can bring different forms to it,” Tay says.
For him, the process of writing is a vulnerable one that requires maximum support from friends. He is not a private writer and is quite willing to send on very rough first drafts to his friends, with one caveat: They should give him only good feedback.
“In the generative stage, which I think is a really critical stage, it’s about getting positive reinforcement. I already know the things I don’t like about it, but I need to get to the things that you like so that I’m excited to return to it, to keep going,” he says.
“That was in part how I was sending it to my friends. Catskull is made up of eight parts, and I was very concerned about making sure each ends with something that the reader is going to be like, ‘Oh my goodness, I got to know what happens next.’
“I wanted to write something that people didn’t feel like they could put down.”
Catskull ($24), published by Ethos Books, is available at major bookstores.
