A boy named Ah Boon in a 1940s Singaporean kampong discovers he can sense the location of islands that appear and vanish from the sea, invisible to other fishermen, and these islands yield abundant catches. His gift binds him to a vanishing coastal way of life even as that life is literally dissolved by postwar land reclamation.
Filling in the sea to create new land does not simply add territory; it destroys the fishing grounds, shoreline, and daily practices that constituted an entire community's identity. Progress framed as creation of land is simultaneously an act of obliteration for those whose lives were tethered to the water.
Viewing a nation's modernization through the people absorbed, relocated, or made redundant by it reveals the human cost hidden inside official narratives of development. The same reclamation celebrated as nation-building appears, from the kampong, as coercion, loss, and the quiet dismantling of community loyalties.