Today, my first novel is being published. It’s the culmination of seven years of work and, uh, a large number of years of dreaming of writing a novel. Publication day for a debut novel can be a little overwhelming, I’m told—you’ve got all those TV news producers begging you for interviews. (They haven’t called me yet, but I assume they will soon.) Overall, though, pub day ought to be a time of joy, if slightly nervous joy: A thing you made, and care deeply about, is finally making its way into the world!
But for me, and for a lot of other authors this winter, publication day is feeling a little bittersweet. That’s because we’re being published by HarperCollins.
Driving home one day in the early ’90s, Conan O’Brien found himself in a familiar situation: alone in his car, laughing. He had spotted a billboard that he’d never seen before. He doesn’t remember the exact details of it, but one word stuck out: “It just said, ‘monorail.’ I don’t even know why.”
This giant advertisement was completely inexplicable, yet O’Brien also saw it as a perfect joke on itself. “Monorails were always funny to me because they’re a phony promise of the future,” he says. “It really is just a trolley, right?”
Here’s something that happens every time I go to Singapore. The first morning I wake up in my grandmother’s flat, I take a short and sweaty walk to my neighborhood kopitiam and buy myself the same breakfast: two orders of roti pratha with goat curry and an iced Milo.
Milo is, as Patricia Kelly Yeo puts it, “Southeast Asian Nesquik — if Nesquik tasted good.” It is a chocolate malt powder sold in bottle-green plastic cans, usually emblazoned with a photograph of an athlete kicking a soccer ball. In Singaporean and Malaysian supermarkets, there is of course Milo for sale in powder form, but on the shelves there is also Milo whole grain cereal, Milo snack bars, canned Milo, boxed Milo, and bottled dairy-free Milo. The simplest and most common form of the powder, however, is mixed into water or milk and served as a hot or cold beverage.
“The past was elsewhere,” Hemon writes, “the present was always this — the masses of refugees moving around the city looking for food and a place, for some way not to die.” That’s been the plight of untold millions for generations. The real miracle of “The World and All That It Holds” is that despite holding so much, we come to know the fragile joys of this one melancholy man so well that he feels written into our own past.