Love, death and debt restructuring

• Main Author: Gresham, Jonathan Paul
• Other Authors: Boey Kim Cheng
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2019
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::Singapore
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/136561
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

My work consists of two parts – the first 24,000 words from the start of a novel I’ve written, Love Death and Debt Restructuring (“Love, Death etc”), and an exegesis detailing the focus of my writing and research. The novel draws on my first-hand experiences as an adopted, Eurasian growing up in Australia and England, and as a financial adviser on the restructuring of Thai Petrochemical Industries Pcl from 1999 to 2003. Stories make meaning by demonstrating causality, sequence and agency in respect of selected events resulting in change (Burroway 271-275). Adoption narratives in particular show that stories are a creative means that adoptees use to negotiate the unknowable aspects of their past. My novel explores this in a narrative of adoptee experience in an Australian and Southeast Asian setting. Through my fiction and exegesis, I explore how identity formation, transcultural and transnational issues interact in an adoption context to demonstrate how “the search for an unavailable origin compels imaginative work that itself constitutes identity” (Homans 2013, 114). Specifically, at the start of the novel I show the protagonist, Paul Moore, leaving from Australia and discovering new forms of kinship and belonging in Thailand. With this emphasis I wish to show in my work that the journey of self-discovery is not found explicitly in a return to, or recovery of the past but in creating new connections and affiliations in the present.