Modern and progressive literary realism in the Sinosphere famously had an ambivalent relationship with popular forms. This was the case whether in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Singapore. This talk takes a 1951 story Xinjiapo de Wudingxia (Under the Roofs of Singapore) by the iconic Singapore realist writer Miao Xiu as an entry point to revisit this well-covered literary polemic. It proposes that taking the language question seriously will produce new understandings of Sinosphere’s uneven and changeable landscape undergoing reconfiguration by the Cold War and the intersecting process of decolonization. This talk shows that at a time when literature in print increasingly becomes dissociated with the popular, a vigorous understanding of literary form and literary history still has much to offer in contemporary discussions of the politics of popular culture