Popular crossings: Lin Chen and his bifurcated editorial practice in 1950s Singapore and Malaya

Abstract

This article reframes the Singapore Chinese dramatist Lin Chen’s cultural practice by explicating discrepant modes of popular cultural production and circulation in 1950s Singapore and Malaya through commercial printing. Today, Lin Chen (1919–2004) is remembered primarily as the pioneering playwright-director who shaped Singapore’s Mandarin theatre scene after the second World War. Alongside his amateur theatrical engagements, he served vocationally as an editor at the World Book Company (Shijie Shuju), one of the five major localised Chinese-language publishing houses. It is now revealed that Lin helmed both Linglong (Smart) and Wenyu Shenghuo (Culture and Amusement), two leisure magazines published contemporaneously around the mid-1950s. Whereas Smart carried salacious content, Culture and Amusement promoted “healthy arts and entertainment,” focusing on collective performing art forms. The two publications’ conflicting stances on nurturing readers’ interests placed them on opposing sides of the anti-yellow culture campaign in Singapore, which criticised the widespread societal access to prurient material. Examining the two periodicals in tandem as well as the content within Smart, this article outlines how Lin negotiated fluid ideas about the landscape of mass market publishing that spans the nature of the content, his non-state positionality as a cultural actor, the journals’ audience constituencies, and the contents’ varying degrees of contemporary resonance with the decolonising ethos in Singapore and Malaya. The inter-journal and intra-journal analyses reveal the intransparency of Chinese culture labelled as “yellow” and how the idea of the “popular”—represented through overlapping vernacular senses in Chinese—index an internally dissonant landscape of grassroots culture.