Damien Sin (1965–2011)
BIOGRAPHY
Better known as a writer of horror short stories and noir, Damien Sin (1965–2011) published a single volume of poems titled Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans (1998). Containing sixty poems, it includes four earlier poems interwoven through the fiction collection Tall Tales and Short Stories (1995). Both collections were published by Angsana Books, a local press better known for genre writing, and non-fiction from media personalities. Not one to be limited by genre or high culture, Sin was a prolific writer and published books 1 to 4 of Classic Singapore Horror Stories between 1992 and 2003. He was much admired and extensively supported by Alex Chacko, his publisher at Angsana Books (Lim, “The Man Behind the Books”), and was also part of Russell Lee’s team of ghost writers for the True Singapore Ghost Stories series (Wong, “TV extra tells his story”; Khoo).
Sin’s poetry should be rightfully assessed in terms of his larger oeuvre, which also includes songs written as the frontman of the band Fairweather Friends. In the early 1980s, he was also a member of Transformer, a New Wave band, whose lead singer was Chris Ho. Exhibiting a penchant for rhyming lines, the ballad form, and a startling mix of subjects ranging from the devil, sex, chasing the dragon, Nero, to Eunos Crescent, many of the characters in these poems as well as Sin’s prose works draw from Singapore’s fringe culture in the eighties and early nineties. Parallels can be drawn with the tough street personas of Royston Tan’s films and the plangent themes of romantic love gained and lost in Zircon Lounge’s Regal Vigour (1983). Often, the first-person speakers of Sin’s poems in Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans (1998) exude a sharp satirical tone that echoes Chris Ho’s writing in the zine Hosay (Lim “X’ho Still Marks the Spot”). Sin’s work is not usually read as part of Singapore’s poetic tradition, perhaps due to his lack of association with other Singapore poets and his popularity as a horror genre writer. Despite his exclusion from the canon, Sin was a larger-than-life figure who was invited to read at Velvet Underground — part of a series of poetry readings organised by Tower Books that brought musicians and writers together (“Poetry Reading at Velvet Underground”).
Sin was also the screenwriter behind Mee Pok Man (1995), the landmark local film which launched director Eric Khoo’s career. Credited to Sin under his given name, Foong Yu Lei, the script was based on the story “One Cold Kiss” from Sin’s second volume of Classic Singapore Horror Stories (1994). In 1995, Sin was hired as a scriptwriter for less than a year by the Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS) when the English drama unit was conceptualising the popular drama series Growing Up. He left TCS after writing one episode that was never produced (Ng).
Born Foong Yu Lei to a businessman and a homemaker, he later chose Damien Sin as his pen name, an allusion to The Omen (1976) (Khoo). Sin was raised in an affluent family and attended Catholic High School, before dropping out at fifteen due to drug-related issues. Despite later attending St. Aldate’s Secretarial College in Oxford, he failed his A-Levels and returned to Singapore, where he was arrested during a police sweep and remanded at the Drug Rehabilitation Centre (DRC). He served a total of three years between 1989 and 1994 (Khan, “Damien Sin writes on horror as he knows it; “He was a Far East Plaza Kid). During this time, Sin read many of the classics in the DRC library, which would become the main influences for the style and content of his writing such as Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Ernest Hemingway. In a newspaper article on his current reads, Sin describes James Joyce’s Ulysses as “slow moving.” In what is perhaps a disguised longing for a more conventional literary education, he also lists Dante Alighieri's Inferno, Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) as among his favourite books (“Who's Reading What”). Throughout his life, Sin struggled first with marijuana, then heroin addiction. He died in 2011 of a suspected overdose.
Despite what some would consider the depravity of his chosen subject matter, which includes, at various points, necrophilia and incest, Sin’s life and writing is compelling for his immense social range. The neighbourhoods mentioned or evoked in Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans include the upscale Bayshore Park and the heartland of Bedok Reservoir up to Ang Mo Kio, detouring through the environs of Katong and Geylang Serai. Frequently autobiographical, Sin alludes to himself in somewhat campy and faux-tragic terms as “putting in the ‘Sin’ in Singapore”, while declaring “God is not the Author of Sin” (“The Author of Sin” 88). Nevertheless, the gravitas of a deep spiritual struggle is strongly present in Sin’s work, through themes of redemption, as well as the sanctity and defilement of the body, which suggest the continuing influence of a Catholic childhood. Sin embraced the tradition of the artist as a larger-than-life figure, while disdaining the elitist associations of the literary world. Throughout his life, he espoused a working-class ethos, proudly depicted in the anthem-like poem “Working Class Nero” and in numerous short story plotlines where the competitive small-mindedness of the bourgeoisie is punished with tragedy and grisly deaths.
Reviews of Sin’s work in the press were mostly, if accurately, unfavourable, describing his work as unsubtle “wham-bam horror” and “an uneasy literary equivalent between a slasher movie…and a flirty television episode (Chua, “Gross Out”). However, his debut fiction work, Classic Singapore Horror Stories Book 1, proved immensely popular, selling close to 20 000 in its first year (Lee “Just being myself”). After winning a Turkey award for this same book, given out as an annual worst-of-the-worst list in The Business Times, Sin promptly retorted with a letter, proclaiming to the judges that “your rage is that of Caliban seeing its face in the mirror.” Noting that his work has been popularly voted for in BigO magazine, he declares, somewhat hysterically: “my art is for the proletariat, the working class” (Sin, “One man's art, another man's turkey”). By turns charming, sharp-tongued, infuriating and irresistibly good-humoured, Sin was never without a girlfriend (Khoo). He craved company as much as he craved an audience, and once declared “I am a human installation art piece” (Khoo). Above all, Sin very much wanted to be known as a writer, if not exactly a poet. His writing certainly points to a deep desire to be something more than a misplaced faith in literature. The last word belongs to him:
So I ask Russell Lee, I ask Salman Rushdie.
But neither of them, has got back to me.
People don’t return your calls from around here.
In the hallowed hollow halls
– of Literature.
References
“He was a Far East Plaza Kid.” The Straits Times. 7 July 1996.
“Poetry reading at Velvet Underground.” The Straits Times. 18 July 1996.
“Who's Reading What.” The Straits Times. 3 October 1992.
Chua, Livia. “Gross out.” The Straits Times. 15 August 1992.
Khan, Yasmin. “Damien Sin writes on horror as he knows it.” Timeszone Central. 3 September 1992.
Khoo, Eric. Personal Communication. 19 May 2023.
Lee, Dinah. “Just being myself.” The Straits Times. 5 November 1992.
Lim, Cheng Tju. “X’ho Still Marks the Spot.” Mynah Magazine, Issue 2, 2018.
Lim, Richard. “The Man Behind the Books.” The Straits Times. 31 August 2013.
Ng, Say Yong. Email Communication. 6 June 2023.
Sin, Damien. “One man's art, another man's turkey.” The Business Times. 9 January 1993.
---. Saints Sinners and Singaporeans: A Collection of Poems. Angsana Books 1998.
Wong, Tessa. “TV Extra Tells His Story.” The Straits Times. 15 April 2002.
Author Photo © estate of Damien Sin. Author Biography © Ann Ang. All rights reserved.
