AWA Book Review: The Colour of Twilight by Yeng Pway Ngon, translated by Jeremy Tiang (2025)

By Mandakini Arora

Yeng Pway Ngon (1947–2021) was a star in the Singapore literary firmament. A Chinese- language writer prolific across genres, he won multiple national awards and honors, including Literary Pioneer at the 2017 Singapore Writers Festival. Originally published in Chinese in 2019, The Colour of Twilight was his last novel. City Book Room — an independent publisher and a bijou of a bookstore selling mainly Chinese and some English titles — has published the English translation. 

Narrated in the first-person present tense, the story is pervaded by a general malaise. Ming Wai, a widower in his sixties, is an award-winning Chinese-language writer who earns a living from writing a newspaper column. In his youth, one “dull, dead-end” bookstore job led to another — the store carried not “a single decent book, only stationery, bestsellers, and assessment books.” Lacking a tertiary education, Chinese-educated, with limited English, he decided that “No matter what I did, I was never going to find a job I liked.” 

But, having discovered a love of reading and writing, he decides to write full time, not asking “whether a small country had enough readers to sustain someone writing in Chinese.” While the answer is negative, fortunately his friend Yan Ru sets up a Chinese-language publishing house, a “ridiculous, impractical decision” costing him his marriage.

Ming Wai’s first love, Meng Fong, broke his heart when he was doing National Service, leaving him for Sai Fung. He married a woman whom he met through a shared love of books. She died from cancer. As a widower, Ming Wai encounters Sai Fung, a shadow of his younger, cocky self, who declares Ming Wai lucky, for Meng Fong turned out to be a terrible wife. Meng Fong, who Ming Wai later meets, tells a different story.

The book bespeaks a modern, globalized Singapore in which English is at a premium. Ming Wai cuts a poignant figure. “On this island, the Chinese language that I write in is fading away and being marginalized .... My readers have dwindled ... and my thinking has gradually fallen out of step with young people’s.” The novel is bleak, and not just because of Ming Wai’s choice of an unglamorous profession and his wife’s early death from cancer. A decrepit Sai Fung’s bluster gives way to brittle bravado. Tragedy befalls Yi Fan, who is part of Ming Wai’s small social world. Ming Wai’s brother contends with family grief. A favorite bookstore, which sold Ming Wai’s books, closes. And, in a tragic finale, he hears shocking news. Perhaps, as he says, “Reality is depressing.” 

Somber as the novel is, I was happy to read SingLit (Singapore Literature), skillfully translated by Jeremy Tiang who has translated Yeng’s works to popularize these among non-Chinese readers in Singapore. “For all their brilliance,” he writes, “they are not widely read ... or as big a part of the literary conversation as they deserve to be.”

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Mandakini Arora co-chairs the Writers’ Group of the American Women’s Association, Singapore, and reviews Asian books for the online AWA Magazine. As travelling_bookmark, she shares book news on Instagram. A collector and writer of women’s stories, she has a PhD in History from Duke University where she was a James B. Duke Fellow, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths’ College-LASALLE College of the Arts. She welcomes comments on the books she reviews at mandakinni@gmail.com