Kim Cheng Boey's Between Stations: ‘The Architecture of Memory’

Abstract

Kim Cheng Boey's Between Stations (2009) presents as a series of essays tracing Boey's travels from Singapore, the place of his birth, through India, China, Egypt and Morocco, to his new ‘home’ in Australia. The essays build in intensity so that, read collectively, they become a layered memoir of loss and mourning. Boey's travels are less to do with discovered new geographical sites than they are to do with the craft of writing and the exploration of the places and spaces of childhood memory. Boey's restless need to travel is inextricably connected to his vocation as writer. He uses the act of travel to provide a metatextual commentary on the acts of writing and reading. Like travel, writing and reading involve border crossings, the discovery of new horizons and acts of translation, particularly translation of the self. Boey is attracted to Salman Rushdie's belief that readers and writers who are ‘borne across the world’ are ‘translated men’ (Imaginary Homelands), and to Seamus Heaney's claim that writing necessarily involves a state of displacement or exile. This article investigates how a displaced, wandering, immigrant Boey travels forward through space and backwards through time to explore the architecture of his childhood memories and produce a hauntingly powerful life narrative of loss and desire.