By TAN SAI SIONG
THINK Singapore bestseller, and thoughts will turn inevitably to Catherine Lim or a volume of True Singapore Ghost Stories.
So, it was something of an eye-opener to discover that taking pride of place in the Times' bestseller list for non-fiction every week in September was a history book - A Picture History Of Singapore. It topped the list in the first week and held on to second place for the remaining weeks.
Amy Chua's book has benefited from
the current interest in history.Brought out by Federal Publications and written by Amy Chua, 42, a freelance editorial consultant and language teacher, the book has sold close to 50,000 copies since it was first published in May 1992.
In Singapore, homegrown fiction books which sell 3,000 copies are considered bestsellers. For non-fiction books which are not also text books, sales can be even more modest.
Yet in its first year, Picture History managed to sell 3,000 copies. Sales continued at a steady pace till 1996 when they leaped to 10,500 copies and then to a phenomenal 25,000 copies so far this year.
A third and updated edition was brought out in August to include some of the landmark changes in Singapore since Picture History first appeared. A CD-ROM, based on the book, was launched at Singapore's annual book fair in June.
It is easy to see the reason for the book's success. It is riding on the crest of the wave of a government-sponsored attempt to revive interest in Singapore's history.
It was in September last year that the Prime Minister announced a National Education committee would be set up to steer efforts at educating students on the subject.
The move was prompted partly by an Education Ministry survey of 2,500 students which showed that they knew little of the events surrounding Singapore's independence.
"Not knowing the circumstances of Singapore's birth is a serious gap in knowledge," he said. "But, this ignorance is not the fault of our pupils or teachers. It is the result of political circumstances."
To plug that gap, a comprehensive plan to infuse NE teaching into the education system was launched in May this year.
The huge leap in Picture History's sales in the last two years mirrors this change in official thinking. Yet, it is not just a case of it being the right product at the right time. The truth is there might have been no Picture History if not for the persistence of Federal's general manager, Mr Mew Yew Hwa, in keeping alive a project that had its genesis 18 years ago.
Mr Mew, who graduated in 1972 with an MA in history from the former Singapore University, had assigned Ms Chua, who was then an editor with Federal, to write a textbook on the history of modern Singapore for use by Secondary I students in the schools.
But before the manuscript could see light of print, the history syllabus was changed. That was the era when Dr Goh Keng Swee as Minister for Education revamped the education system thoroughly.
More than a decade went by but Mr Mew's ambition to publish a book teaching young Singaporeans about their past continued to burn with a gem-like flame.
And so in 1990, he revived the project. Ms Chua, meanwhile, had gone into freelance work, after a series of career moves in the book industry. She was assigned the task again.
Mr Mew said in an interview this week that he thought the history element in social studies being taught in schools was insufficient and there was room for a history book to complement the lessons.
He said the success of Picture History demonstrated that his reading of the situation was correct.
As for Ms Chua, the obstacles to overcome this time round were to write in a way that made history accessible to children in upper primary and lower secondary school.
She said: "It's hard to write history for children as they find it hard to understand and identify with distant events because they are unreal to them.
"There are also lots of terminologies that have to be rephrased in a language that they can understand easily. Some events are rather complex and have to be presented as simply as possible."
Her experience as an editor of defunct children's magazines like Yippee! and Funland stood her in good stead. So did her interweaving of a historical perspective into the events recounted by using a "then" and "now" technique to show how Singapore has developed since its founding.
For Ms Chua, the project is more than an assignment, for even though she is an English Honours graduate, she had grown up in the historic Boat Quay vicinity from which a deep sense of the past appears to have rubbed off on her.
That sense was also cultivated from young when her parents and grandmother filled her head with stories of the customs, traditions and hardships in China. There were tales too of hardships encountered by her mother and her grandparents when they arrived in Singapore and during the Japanese Occupation.
Picture History provided her with an apt vehicle to share what she has learnt from oral accounts and from learned tomes she had consulted.
Her book is not only suitable for young impressionable children. As an adult, I have also found it a breezy read that takes me through the essential elements of Singapore's history, provided one does not plan to be another Dr Ong Chit Chung. And while it cannot hold a candle to Churchill's History Of The English-speaking Peoples, it is clearly not meant to do that. What it does admirably is to whet the appetite of those who want to know more.
To accommodate that, Federal should include a bibliography in its next print order. Then, parents without a clue about Singapore's history may get to know their past better by dipping into their children's copy of Picture History.
First published in The Straits Times, Oct 3, 1997
Next: Let's try a lighter hand at learning history
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