sentences: "She interviews Ivan Polunin, an English doctor who moved to Singapore in 1948 and was a university lecturer and part-time documentarian for the BBC up to the 1970s, by which time he had produced hundred of hours of film footage capturing, among other things, the lives of fisherman working on kelongs and the Cantonese-speaking heartlands of old Singapore.Tan's interview with the elderly Polunin takes place shortly after he underwent brain surgery, a trauma that has caused him to lose, by his own admission, much 'brainpower'".