Under the Sun

Under the Sun (2010) is a collection of flash fiction stories by O Thiam Chin. The book includes more than 50 short narratives, united by their unflinching look at the realities of human suffering, mistakes, and the greater meaning of relationships. Overarching themes of love and grief are told from a wide variety of narrators, including young women, gay men, children, and stories told through a mythological lens.

Under the Sun is a diverse collection of stories, united by their focus on the meaning of life, the pains and triumphs of love, and the often confusing and convoluted nature of existence. Each story, though only a few pages long, speaks to a larger and more vast narrative that lies beneath; the wide array of narrators, locations, and concerns in the collection has the effect of making the book read like a guide book for life on Earth, according to some reviewers.

Many of the stories in Chin's collection deal with grief, and the challenges of overcoming suffering. In “Garoupa,” two siblings are having their regular family dinner together over a plate of fish when they suddenly realize that the fish they are eating likely ingested their dead grandfather's remains. Recalling the beauty of their grandfather's sea burial and the pain of losing him, and despite their initial disgust, the siblings eat the fish in its entirety, “right down to the bone,” in order to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit.



In another piece, “Dying,” a man tells his dying friend a story his grandfather once told him. The man recalls his grandfather stealing a dead baby crow from its mother’s nest, forcing the mother to forget the death of her baby. He explains that rather than being cruel, his grandfather recognized that the mother crow had given up her own well-being and livelihood to protect the corpse and that by taking the dead baby bird, his grandfather was saving the mother crow's life.

Other stories deal with sexuality, as in “Desire,” where an unnamed narrator of indeterminate gender has a long internal monologue about their judgment of their own desire for adventurous sexual exploits. Despite this monologue, the story ends with the narrator ringing the doorbell of their next lover. In another story, “Boy,” the protagonist mourns their gay lover, who is unable to express feelings of love.

Still other stories have a magical bent, as in “Shadow,” in which the protagonist goes to see a spiritualist for career advice. The story ends with deeply menacing, almost life-like shadows approaching the narrator. In “Lamp,” a character's ex-wife escapes from a genie's lamp and refuses to return to her rightful home. And in “Deliverance,” the spirit of a demonic little girl possesses the older man protagonist.



The collection comes together in an exploration of life at its strangest and most mundane, to create a reflection of human emotion and experience that spans continents, races, genders, and sexualities.

O Thiam Chin is the author of five collections of short stories and two novels, Fox Fire Girl and Now That It's Over. Born and raised in Singapore, he frequently attends literary festivals in Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, and the United States. His book Love, Or Something Like Love was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction. He was the recipient of the NAC Young Artist Award in 2012. An honorary fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program, he has been long-listed three times for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.