Goodbye on the Seas: Rising Waters, Submerging Lives

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3818

Keywords:

sea level rise, submerged cities, climate change, dystopian imaginary, hybrid memoir, speculative fiction, pandemic, Malaysia, Borneo

Abstract

This hybrid memoir begins and ends with a sea journey. Combining real-life story and dystopian tropical imaginary, the author takes us to the Straits of Malacca off the coast of Peninsular Malaysia, to futures of submerged cities in 2050, and on a final journey into the South China Sea off the coast of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. This is a story of climate change and rising seas entwining vignettes of pandemic lockdown, of a father’s dying, and the author’s future life submerged. It questions human survival in a world of demise, shaped by pandemic and surrounded by waters slowly but inexorably rising.

Author Biography

Christina Yin, Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak

Dr Christina Yin is a former news anchor, journalist, columnist and media executive at an international conservation organisation. Currently, Christina is a writer and senior lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak Campus. Her PhD on “Creative Nonfiction: True Stories of People involved in Fifty years of Orang-utan conservation in Sarawak” was the first in Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. Christina’s fiction and nonfiction writings have appeared in Anak Sastra, eTropic, New Writing and TEXT, among others.

Downloads

Published

2021-09-10

How to Cite

Yin, C. (2021). Goodbye on the Seas: Rising Waters, Submerging Lives. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 251–263. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3818

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 2 (2021): Special Issue: Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis

Section

Speculative Fiction

License

Copyright (c) 2021 CC-BY

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who submit articles to this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material that has influenced the research or writing has been properly cited and credited both in the text and in the Reference List (Bibliography). Contributors are responsible for gaining copyright clearance on figures, photographs or lengthy quotes used in their manuscript that have been published elsewhere.

2. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, or publish it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of the work's initial publication in this journal.

4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access or The Open Access Citation Advantage). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (i.e., a copy of a work which has been published in eTropic, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the eTropic publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.

5. Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.