Hunter Ng

Hunter Ng

PhD Candidate @ Baruch College

As Coarse As Emporium

As Coarse As Emporium book cover

As Coarse As Emporium is a Singaporean noir thriller about memory, childhood, and the hidden life of an old neighborhood shopping mall.

Summary

Set in a Singapore shopping mall known only as The Emporium, the novel follows ten-year-old Bee as he grows up among shopkeepers, tenants, and rumors that blur the line between ordinary life and danger. From a mysterious shop selling illegal Game Boy cartridges to the disappearance of a Four-Faced Buddha statue, Bee is drawn into the secrets of the building and the people who inhabit it.

Together with Helen, his adoptive mother who works in a salon to make ends meet, Bee learns to navigate a world that is comic, unsettling, and unmistakably Singaporean. As the incidents around The Emporium become harder to ignore, both mother and child must decide how far they are willing to go to survive inside a place that feels at once like home and a trap.

Author’s Note

I wrote this novel during the Covid-19 pandemic, shortly before beginning my life overseas. At the time, I found myself thinking often about Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre, the old mall where I had spent much of my childhood. I remembered running up and down the escalators, playing with the children of other tenants, and absorbing the small dramas, rumors, and routines that made the building feel like a world of its own.

Although the novel is fictionalized, many of its incidents are drawn from real memories and stories associated with old shopping centers in Singapore. I chose the form of a noir thriller because it allowed me to preserve those memories in a vivid and accessible way, while still capturing the strangeness, humor, and danger that can exist inside familiar places. My hope is that the book helps carry forward a record of a vanishing part of Singapore’s neighborhood mall culture.

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