The creation of highly
competitive working-class life in Singapore is interesting and convincing (Review
by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Jemimah Wei’s debut novel, The Original Daughter, is a complex tale of messy family dynamics,
sibling rivalry, affection turning to resentment and, above all, perceived
betrayal.
The story opens in 2015, in Singapore, where the Yang family live. Downtrodden Gen is caring for her dying mother who wants her to contact her estranged sister Arin who is living a glamorous and successful life abroad and to ask her to come back and say goodbye. But Gen cannot bring herself to do that.
We then go back to 1996 when eight-year-old Gen is living with her taxi-driver father, librarian mother and difficult grandmother in the same small flat as in the novel’s opening chapter, and is an only child. Until the sudden arrival of a “sister” who is not actually a sister but a family member through complicated and difficult relationships. A year younger than Gen, she has come from Malaysia and has been uprooted from the only family she has ever known, but is inevitably a disruption to the lives of the Yangs.
So Gen takes her under her wing and, as they negotiate childhood and adolescence, they become close. But rifts begin to develop – Gen is protective of “her” family and sees some of Arin’s actions as manipulative, and, while Gen was initially the driven one, the high achiever, that begins to change. Singapore is a relentlessly competitive society, one where coming second is never good enough. So, as things start to unravel once the girls reach adulthood, Gen moves to New Zealand.
However, it is not an entirely successful move, and when things go badly, Arin comes to help. And that is where their estrangement really takes hold and what seems to be a permanent rift between the two develops.
While Wei has drawn a lifelike picture of how close relationships can fall apart, and deals sensitively with the difficulties that can arise in families, towards the latter part of the book, before Gen does return to Singapore, the reader cannot help feeling that she makes too much of an issue of it all. The Original Daughter is a long novel, and towards the end, I was beginning to feel that it could have been written a little more tightly without losing any of its impact.
Nonetheless, the writing is descriptive and evocative. The creation of highly competitive working-class life in Singapore is interesting and convincing. Gen, the first-person narrator of the novel, is a mostly sympathetic character, even as we regret some of the choices she makes. It is an impressive debut. - Margaret von Klemperer
The Original Daughter is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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