Novelist Jemimah Wei is telling a different story of Singapore

South China Morning Post

5 days ago

Jemimah Wei remembers being struck recently by a simple encounter on the American book tour for her debut novel, The Original Daughter. A reader, having enjoyed Rachel Heng's The Great Reclamation (2023), told her he was eager to dive into another story set in Singapore. For Wei, it was a sign: fiction from the city state was gaining traction, and people wanted more.
'It's just great news for me to hear that someone read one Singapore story and is now interested in other stories from Singapore,' says Wei via Zoom from New York during a break from promoting her book. 'I dream of a world where there is, like, an immense plurality of stories from Asia. It shouldn't be a case where somebody from a specific background can only write one type of story.
'It's amazing that there are more and more writers who are coming forward and more and more writers who see other writers do it and think, 'I could also do it.''
Debut novel, The Original Daughter, by Jemimah Wei. Photo: Handout
For 32-year-old Wei, her own watershed moment came in 2015, during a 10-week creative-writing course in Singapore, when she met Malaysian author
Tash Aw (The Harmony Silk Factory, 2005). 'I was like, OK, he's Malaysian and he's a writer. Why can't someone from Singapore be a writer?' she says. 'So I went out and tried to do it.'
Published this April by Doubleday Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday and a division of Penguin Random House, The Original Daughter explores the complexities of identity, belonging and familial bonds through the lives of two sisters. At its heart are Genevieve Yang and Arin – half-sisters but, in reality, cousins – bound by a shared history yet divided by secrets. Together, they navigate the shifting dynamics of their relationship across time and distance.
One of the novel's central ideas emerged from Wei's fascination with the concept of a 'return sibling' – in this case, Arin, a cousin from the secret family of a grandfather who is unceremoniously dumped on the Yang family after the old man's death.
'It was extremely common in the generation right before my own, where you would have people give away family members or take people in,' says Wei. 'People don't talk about that very much. All those silences were things that I really took note of when I was growing up. The premise of this novel about a girl being given away into a family is something that I was always very interested in.