“The orange blooms glowed in the green room like a lamp.”
At 4:30 am, a lonely boy creeps into the room of a lonely man. He does this every morning from December 15 to December 20, six days from his childhood he will never forget, six days during which he felt furthest from loneliness, sharing those quiet hours with a stranger from Korea.
Yeo Wei Wei’s “4:30” is a short story based on an award-winning film of the same name by local filmmaker Royston Tan. The film (and Yeo’s response) traces the relationship between Xiao Wu, a reserved eleven-year-old boy who lives alone in a public apartment, and Jung, an alcoholic Korean man who has come to Singapore with the intention of ending his life. Taking the film as its point of departure, Yeo’s “4:30” remains faithful to the original plot while shuffling the narrative sequence to form a story in ten parts. She cleverly layers details and motifs that not only surprise us when they make a reappearance, but that also offer us more poetic ways of looking at and listening to the film.
Where pictures fail, words step in. What I appreciated most of all from Yeo’s imaginative transcreation is the insight it offers into Xiao Wu’s perspective—his backstory and his life after, his inner thoughts and his perception of reality. In the film, Xiao Wu is a boy of few words; in fact, his (and Jung’s) silence is often superimposed upon by a melancholy guitar theme. Yeo teases words out of the silence and those melancholy notes. How else can we imagine Xiao Wu’s room as a forest of fragile trees? And how else can the orange blooms glow—so magically—like a lamp?
