Chien Swee-Teng (1941-1987) was born in Singapore, the tropical island where he was to live and work all his life. Brought up in a rented partitioned room above a five-foot-way shophouse in Boon Tat Street, he received his secondary school education at Chinese High School, and was the only one in a family of nine children to go to university. Graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Literature from Nanyang University with profound interest in literature and art in general, he taught in Deping Secondary School. In the 1970s, he left his post as a Chinese language teacher and became a taxi driver because of his absolute refusal to speak or write in English, not even for administrative purposes. However, this career of roaming the road ended early due to his phobia of driving after the trauma of witnessing a fatal traffic accident. He spent later part of his life as a night watch for various office and industrial buildings located in Shenton Way and Tuas areas. Consequently, the ample free time he had alone without disturbance became the most prolific period for this eclectic yet anti-internationalist writer.
He started writing at an early age, but his first book Listening to the Restive South was only published in 1968, at the age of 27. His rather dark sense of humour and a rigorously intellectual style in works such as Bak Teng (Diced Meat, 1979) did not make him a popular author, although ‘Blades of the Sun’ (1985), a 30 episode television series based on his wuxia genre novel of the same title, shown on SBC (Singapore Broadcasting Corporation) Channel 8, did make an impression on young viewers – especially boys and girls from 12 to 15, then. In 2006, his posthumous publication Critique of a Spectacular Life (1989), a two-volume collection of poems, essays and aphorisms written in Hokkien dialect, was translated into English by Recto Books.
Biography courtesy of www.rectobooks.com/stchien
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