A stranger arrives by sea, washing up on a beach, and entering the lives of a family of three, when the father, Chee Meng, rescues him. The man appears to have swum to Singapore in the hope of improving the lot of his own family. But Singapore does not support such hopes. Illegal migration, Chee Meng’s nine-year-old son, Shawn, soon learns, is punishable by imprisonment and by caning. Shawn is both stimulated and burdened by this knowledge. As the stranger moves into Shawn’s bedroom, displacing him to his parents’ floor, and then begins a quest that only Shawn knows about, one that endangers Shawn’s parents and the stranger himself, Shawn keeps a wary, uneasy eye on him. In this dissection of the concepts of safety and danger in Singapore, Heng poses the question of what and whose liberties can justifiably be sacrificed in order to keep people “safe.” “As a fiction writer,” she says, in the accompanying Q. & A., “I’m more interested in the human calculus of those decisions and trade-offs, what they mean for the individuals caught up in them.”
— Deborah Treisman, fiction editor | 
