Wen-yi Lee likes writing about girls with bite, feral nature, and ghosts. She is the author of historical fantasy When They Burned the Butterfly and YA horror The Dark We Know, and has also published speculative fiction and essays in venues like Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Reactor, and various anthologies. A University College London alum, she is currently based at home in Singapore. “Red, Scuttle When the Ships Come Down” is her second appearance in Uncanny, a powerful and unsettling tale of prison laborers, firestone, and blood-red crabs.
Uncanny Magazine: “Red, Scuttle When the Ships Come Down” is a story of oppression and revolution set in a dark and richly developed world. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story?
Wen-yi Lee: My grandmother was born on Christmas Island, before Singapore sold it to Australia. She died before I was born, but I grew up hearing third-hand tales from my mother about the annual red crab migration on the island and always wanted to write something set there. So I started with the crabs, and the image of streams of crabs overlapping with streams of blood and veins of stones.
But the story really came together when I combined it with Christmas Island’s origin as a British mining colony using indentured Chinese labour, as well as the 1963 prison island riots on Singapore’s Pulau Senang, which killed a British superintendent and his assistants. They’re completely separate events, but they sang in harmony to me—the mining colony gave me the story’s starting point, and the riot gave me the ending.
Uncanny Magazine: What was the easiest part of writing this story? What was the most challenging thing?
Wen-yi Lee: The easiest part was the crabs. These days I find myself more drawn to fluid and surreal elements rather than hard magic systems; it’s very effective in sketching unease and primality, when that’s the undercurrent I’m going for. (Magical realism as a genre is so rooted in colonial or political disruption—in South America but also other places—and the landscape itself feeling mutable and precarious and strange.) That’s the smarter answer, but I did also just find it incredibly fun writing about people bleeding crabs without having to do any explanation whatsoever.
The most challenging part was probably knitting everything together and balancing the sense of scale. You generally shouldn’t write big casts in a short story, it balloons the word count so quickly, but the premise made it necessary. I don’t know why I keep writing big ensemble pieces (my upcoming novel is about various gangs) when I hate having to keep track of that many people and make sure the whole group has weight and relevance in the story. The men, like the crabs, are a mass. Usually I’m quite a character-focused writer, but in this story the narrator could have been practically any one of the 200 men. So it was making him feel individual and real while keeping the story moving on that larger level.
Uncanny Magazine: “Red, Scuttle When the Ships Come Down” is full of details that make it feel grounded in time and place. What research did you do for this story? Did you find anything that surprised you?
Wen-yi Lee: The story doesn’t explicitly specify its location or era. I wanted the context to be recognizably British colonialism and late nineteenth/early twentieth-century migrations, but at the same time, I was really leaning into it just being a slightly surreal piece. I sketched the world with fairly familiar aesthetic cornerstones. The reading I did was looking into the mining histories of Christmas Island and the development of the riot on the prison island, and figuring out where to combine the two.
When I workshopped this story at Clarion West, there was some discussion about whether it was realistic for a labour force of a couple hundred to only be managed by like five guards. But yeah, that was actually what the numbers were like on that prison island riot! The British headman didn’t think they were any danger at all (and then they killed him).
Uncanny Magazine: You write both novels and short stories—what’s your favorite thing about writing at each length?
Wen-yi Lee: This is such a good question! I love how much more experimental and distilled a short story lets me be. I think good short stories don’t leave you needing more but at the same time let you see how it could be a much larger work, because of the way they layer and gesture at a larger world around the core story. And to add on to the last question about research—having written both the historical short story and the novel, what I love about short stories is that I can fuel them so much more on vibes. I had to do so much research for the novel that I’m tired; I’m not doing another historical book for a little bit!
I tend to think of my short stories as an experiment and my novels as a thesis. My short stories are where I get to explore the imaginings that don’t feel substantial enough for a book. You can get a lot weirder in a short story without it getting tiring, and you can cut away all the fat and focus on the beating throughline. A short story is like mining out a precious vein for me, something compact and distilled but no less powerful.
On the other hand, a novel is like carving a whole tableau, or something. Lots of layers and segments and needing to track both the big picture and the small details. The challenge is fun and I enjoy how much depth and breadth I get to have with a book. There have been times where I’ve written a short story only to realise I actually have more to say about the same themes or emotions it touches on, whereas ideally with a book I’ve expunged my entire introduction-argument-counterargument-conclusion by the time I’m done.
Ultimately both are super rewarding for me and different ideas merit different formats. Also, sometimes after doing my head in with 100,000-word manuscripts it’s nice to remember I can also do something in 5,000!
Uncanny Magazine: I loved the vivid and unsettling imagery in this story: fire and burnt flesh, blood and skittering crabs. What are some of your horror and dark fantasy inspirations, literary or otherwise?
Wen-yi Lee: I always love voices that trend female and visceral and unsettling or strange: Carmen Maria Machado, Bora Chung, Han Kang, Mariana Enríquez, etc. Tamsyn Muir and Seanan McGuire aren’t quite dark fantasy I think but certainly strange. I also really love what Zoe Hana Mikuta is doing in the YA horror fantasy space.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Wen-yi Lee: My adult fantasy debut When They Burned the Butterfly, about a girl gang in ’70s postcolonial Singapore’s Chinese secret societies, is coming out October 21 from Tor! Although I didn’t write this story together with the book, I love that my historical Singapore-inspired pieces have ended up coming out so close together.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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