FROM KAMPONG STORYTELLER TO AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

By Hazirah Nurfitrah Binte Mohamed Hanifar

Diploma in Creative Writing for TV and New Media

Singapore Polytechnic

Josephine Chia with her award-winning book Kampong Spirit: Gotong Royong. Her childhood in Potong Pasir inspired her to become a storyteller. (Photo credit: Hazirah Nurfitrah Binte Mohamed Hanifar)

You could say that Josephine Chia ‘picked up’ the love for reading in a rather unusual way. 

The Peranakan author, who is now 67, grew up in Singapore’s Kampong Potong Pasir, where an English family lived in a house up the hill. Sometimes, that family would throw out books and comics that Josephine would pick up and read.

Stories from Potong Pasir

A collection of short stories of her childhood forms the basis of one of her best-known works, Kampong Spirit: Gotong Royong/Life in Potong Pasir 1955 to 1965. The book was awarded the biennial Singapore Literature Prize for English Creative Non-Fiction in 2014. The recognition is fitting because Josephine credits many aspects of her kampong upbringing for shaping her to become a storyteller and a writer.

From reading Enid Blyton books thrown out by the English family up the hill, to telling stories to her neighbours in the evenings to entertain them, to falling in love with the English language after nearly missing out on an education, there are many ways that Kampong Potong Pasir inspired Josephine to be the prolific writer she is today.

Josephine wants to pay it forward by writing stories that will inspire the next generation and by mentoring young authors.

Inspiring the Next Generation

Josephine recalls doing a reading of her 2017 book Goodbye My Kampong at a library. Afterwards, two teenagers approached her to get their book signed and thanked her for writing it for them. According to Josephine, this is the joy she gets from her writing that it “contributes to the young”.  She says that satisfaction doesn’t come from just her many accolades and her motivation is certainly not money.

“It [writing] doesn’t make much money, you know? If one book sells for $19.90, I don’t even make one dollar,” she says.

Josephine was in fact once a corporate high-flyer who worked for many years in Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations before she decided to pursue her passion.

On her way back to Singapore from the UK, where she had lived since 1985, Josephine pondered on an age-old question: what was she going to say on her deathbed when people asked her what she had done in her life? Would she say she was a PR marketing manager?

“No, I don't think so. I think I want to say I'm a writer,” she says.