Jemimah Wei’s mesmerizing, emotionally engaging first novel, The Original Daughter, which is set in Singapore in the years between 1995 and 2015, arrives this week after a journey of more than a decade. She was born and raised in Singapore, where she launched a blog in 2007, worked in advertising and was a social media influencer. She started the novel in 2014. Five years later she came to the US as an MFA graduate student at Columbia. “When I touched down in the States in 2019, I knew nobody,” she told me.
I was in my late twenties and really making a hard pivot, and so I had to build new friendships from scratch. I’ll be honest, for most of my first semester at the MFA, I felt like I was on Candid Camera. I totally didn’t get the American “How are you?” and I still think people shouldn’t ask questions they don’t want answers to. It took a while for me to find my rhythm and people, and then just as I was getting a little more acclimatized, the pandemic hit and I had to go home.
The pandemic “totally and utterly felled me,” she added. “But I did start writing flash fiction, and slowly started having an online community of writers that way, and then the next time I got back to the States in 2021, I returned almost with a vengeance. I was pretty intense about working on my book, but also hung out hard with the rest of the world that was also emerging from lockdown, and made very good friends in New York that way.”
Through graduate school, fellowships at Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers Conference, Hemingway House, and Writers in Paradise, among others, she built a solid and supportive literary community. She recently wrapped up a Stegner fellowship at Stanford. I was very lucky to have such a wonderful cohort at the Stegner, we’re very close. The pain for me is, being international and coming to the States, I’m not rooted to a city the way born and raised Americans are, and so I do feel like I’m always saying
goodbye to people I love. We stay in touch through a variety of group chats, phone calls, etcetera, the way friends regularly do. But the way it differs from regular friendships, I guess, is that we’re also able to confirm each other’s artistic reality, share information and experiences so publishing doesn’t feel as isolating, and commiserate and celebrate together.
This year, in addition to launching The Original Daughter (beginning in New York tonight in conversation with Roxane Gay and including three bookstores in the Bay Area, with the Singapore leg starting in June), she is mentoring emerging fiction writers with the Singapore Book Council. “I think it’s extremely hard to visualize a writing life or reality without examples or resources (see above re: not that many of us), and am invested in having those conversations back home wherever possible. The Original Daughter is an incredibly specific Singaporean story, not the Singaporean story. I do dream of a world rich with plurality and am excited to facilitate that however I can.”
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Jane Ciabattari: What was the seed for your first novel, The Original Daughter?
It meant a lot to me to write a very specific version of the Singapore I know into print and literature, which is its own type of immortality.Jemimah Wei: There’s no one seed, unfortunately, which happens when you work on a novel for close to a decade. But here’s one way I entered the novel: In 2014, I was writing the story of a woman who’d left her country only to find that there’s Narnia nowhere. She’s meandering down a dusty main street in the middle of the workday after walking out of the office. And then when crisis happens, to her own horror, she takes relief in the direction it provides.
JC: How did you settle on the title?
JW: Gosh, the title took a long time. It started out being called ‘Smaller Crimes,”’ which gives you an idea of where my mind was at. Then I changed it to “Fault Lines,” but I took so long to write it that the lovely and talented Emily Itami published a novel with that name in 2021. So for the longest time it was on my to-do list to find a new title, in my head that marked the transition from private draft to something I was committing to as a real book that I would send out to the world someday. I sat down after finishing my first draft, in the summer of 2021, and came up with a list of words that related to the book, and then put The Original Daughter together that way.
JC: How does The Original Daughter draw from your own growing up years in Singapore?
JW: I very deliberately wrote in a lot of things from my environs, things I didn’t think we’d see in mainstream narratives. Being a Singaporean writer, I’m constantly aware that there aren’t that many of us, and that the story of five million people is an incredibly specific, varied one that is easily flattened into consumable narrative. So it meant a lot to me to write a very specific version of the Singapore I know into print and literature, which is its own type of immortality. I put in the fauna of my childhood, the routines and games, the atmosphere of gossip and intimacy that’s so endemic to public housing, families, and community. But then I thought, why stop there? It’s fiction. I can do whatever I want.
So I wrote in the names of my friends’ parents family businesses, I dropped Easter eggs in there for my loved ones—affectionate nicknames, favorite haunts—I named one of the schools after my husband, the cinema chain after my filmmaker friend, etcetera etcetera. I know there is often that fear that autobiography will be read into your work, especially if you share the character’s circumstances of being millennial, female, and Singaporean, or [insert whatever your specific vectors of identity are], but that fear wasn’t big enough to counter my desire to build a personal literary canon that involved all these things, too, the Singapore I know and love personally, not just generally. I know that historically women don’t get reprinted as often, and we thus fade into obscurity; I’ll be sad when that happens after my death and this fingerprint of my community and heart disappears. Please buy the book so we stay in print, thank you!
JC: Do you have a sister? Other siblings? How many? Did this guide you in writing this novel?
JW: Two younger sisters. It’s kind of hilarious to me now because when people ask me how my sisters will react to my extremely fictional novel I just tell them I’m going to lock both sisters in a room and get them to duke it out for the title of OG.
We’re very close, not just emotionally, but physically: it’s our love language to always be lying on each other, heaped in a pile, or gnawing on the other’s shoulder as a joke, or yapping so much we go from yapping at the dinner table to yapping at the bathroom door while the other showers. I think I worked a lot of that physical intimacy into the novel, which is something an early reader pointed out to me—that the characters in the book are always touching, always in contact, that they’re very embodied. It’s something I miss, that squishiness of intimate family life, now that I’m based between Singapore and the United States. We still send each other video bubbles and voice notes on telegram but it’s not quite the same.
JC: Arin, Genevieve Yang’s younger sister, arrives in Singapore in 1996, when Gen is eight, “dropped into our lives fully formed, at age seven.” Gen’s grandmother explains that her husband who had been politically “disappeared” and presumed dead when her father was a child, had actually been alive and well in Malyasia with another family. He’s just died, and his secret family can no longer afford to raise his gaggle of grandchildren, so her family is taking in the youngest. What was the origin of this origin story?
JW: One thing that stayed constant through various iterations and drafts of this novel is the idea of a sibling given or returned. It’s actually incredibly common in a slightly older generation to have children given away or raised in an extended relative’s family, often due to patriarchal ideas or financial concerns. As mentioned earlier, I’m a yapper, and as a yapper you really notice when you come up against big silences in your life, one of which was an awareness from a young age that there were these huge silences around exchanges in my extended family and in the lives of people I knew. I used to fill in the silences with imagination, which was probably my first foray into fiction writing as a kid.
JC: You create a set of intimate scenes in which Gen’s mother sends her an invitation to meet together at 2 a.m. at McDonald’s to have a private talk, away from her dad. The first is before Arin arrives. They create a game around eating French fries, which becomes a reference point throughout the book. At another point, Gen is punished for her actions, with her grandmother and father upset at her. Arin bears witness, but does not act. I’m curious about your sense of scene building, how you develop the family dynamic unfolding through the point of view of an eight-year-old who is smart and observant but also too young to fully understand adult context.
JW: For that entire section you’re referring to, A Beginning, I knew that I would need to establish the family dynamics immediately and viscerally so the rest of the book could bloom. For each of those scenes you referenced, I wrote several versions of them, and then combined and edited them according to what character choices, technical maneuvers, and scenic structures I thought would be the most emotionally effective. The book moved from third to first person that way, it found its retrospective ledge that way, as well.
I also created intense family lore, a huge compendium of dates, personal events, local and historical events, how those historical events affected personal events, I added and deleted characters, and then I branched out to creating diaries tracking the psychological development of each character over the course of their lives, highlighting the years in the middle where the book’s events take place. Then I edited those diaries and tightened their psychology, and marked where Genevieve, our narrator, would be mentally in relation to what the other characters were going through, so that I could filter the scene through story action and retroactive processing from the narrative ledge from which the book is told. I often joke that I probably wrote half a million words before I ever queried my agent, but it’s probably more like a million words.
JC: Negotiating space is complicated in families, especially among siblings who are close in age. Even more so with this “dropped in” sister and this working-class family. How did you think about time and space when writing scenes when Arin and Gen are in grade school and are getting to know each other and negotiating for space literally as well as for attention from the adults in the family? And how did you create an emotional connection between the two of them so strong that they draw up and sign a “contract of sisterhood?”
JW: I took the idea of a fictional ticking clock very seriously—and looked for physical manifestations of ways I could make condense and tighten the frame for which the story was happening in. As an artist, I’m very interested in the concept of suffocation, and what that does to an individual’s formation of the self; I think living under an ultracapitalist modern society whose organizing principle is profit and efficiency can be fundamentally dehumanizing, and we find ways to cope, one of which is resistance through love. Love, which has, if you think about it, a precious inefficiency at its very root that’s necessary to its formation.
So I pressurized the frictions that come with loving a person by narratively shrinking the space they had to share, giving the characters no pressure valve materially, but also emotionally, since they are arrested by the guilt of wanting space from or competing with the other despite their close bond. One of the ways I did this was having the girls become almost codependent in their desire to establish themselves as individuals with agency early on in the book, which is what directly leads to the contract of sisterhood you mentioned—at that point they’ve just confronted their lack of agency in the face of external circumstance and adult decisions, which I think is a kind of death of childhood. And it feels as if they have only each other against the world moving forward, which is a codependent doubling that leads to all kinds of trouble down the line.
JC: The teen years are difficult for Gen and Arin as they negotiate the school system. Gen aces the O levels and has her pick of junior colleges. But by the time she takes A levels, she fails, and her confidence wanes. Arin learns from her older sister’s mistakes, and excels by the time she takes the A levels. She also is a standout at acting. Sibling rivalry is natural at this stage. Is it exacerbated by the “original” daughter’s sense of being displaced by an outsider? And yet Gen is protective and helpful. Did you see her ambivalence as an element in driving your plot?
JW: I think we swing wildly between the person we are and the person we want to be. And I don’t see that aspirational other self as a false self, but just one of many realities we could be inhabiting if we made just a single one of our micro-decisions differently at any one time. We contain multitudes, and all that. At the same time, in Singapore, and in many capitalist societies, I think, there’s this sense that your range of options and possibilities calcifies and narrows as you grow, the breadth of what life can be closing in around you with every misstep and failure. So every little decision is torn between pragmatic, moral, ethical, and aspirational desires, and it’s about which one you let win in the moment. Gen wants to be a good sister, which conflicts with her selfish desires to be singularly regarded, which conflicts with her simultaneous happiness for Arin’s success and humiliating desire to be happier than she actually is; she’s also aware of the other life she could have had, yet grateful for the emotional expansiveness that the one she has had provided her, and suspicious of the impact Arin and she have had on each other. So on and so forth.
JC: How did you weave your longstanding social media presence—as a blogger (jemmawei.com, launched in 2007), an influencer, and a columnist for years for the No Content magazine—into the activities of these sisters?
JW: I grew up in an era where we were all just flirting with the internet, when you literally couldn’t use the internet if someone was talking on the phone because they used the same wire or something, to all of a sudden having the internet—and social media—be the new and untapped frontier of community and expression, which of course meant opportunities for commercial capitalization. I’ve always been fascinated by the way it’s changed how we negotiate our relationship to our vision of ourselves, and how the commercialization of personality hinges precisely on the seamless presentation of having those two selves be in harmony. But it’s also a kind of instantaneous feedback loop, where you are audience to yourself simultaneous to the world’s consuming your performed persona, and you make micro-adjustments all the time based on internal and external feedback, as if you’re existing with a mirror before you at all times.
Because I’ve had a long career in the media, first working in advertising, then as a presenter and simultaneously an online creator, I’ve had a lot of time to contemplate the distance between a consciousness and her manifestation in the world. I mean this not just in terms of an online or public facing presentation, but also the ways in which we’re always trying to minimize the distance between our words and intention, as writers. A lot of that sensibility watered the grounds from which the sisters developed. Not action wise—that would be severely limiting for the characters—but it helped create events and story movements that would best test out these questions I had about modern identity, ambition, and performance, and push them to the brink.
But in a pragmatic sense, I really tapped that social media presence for research. I’ve been pretty open about my publishing journey, and so when I was tightening up the last 5 percent of the book and trying to factcheck and make sure I’d dotted all my I’s and crossed my T’s, I would just ask on IG stories if people remembered this or that, and let my Singaporean audience crowdsource answers for me. It was pretty great.
JC: You set a long section of the novel in Christchurch, NZ, as Gen, who has been working in an ice cream shop instead of going to college, strikes out on her own. How did you research the scenes set there, including two historic earthquakes in 2010-2011—disasters you include in this section, along with Arin’s visit in the midst of shooting a big part in a film, a visit that becomes the turning point in their relationship?
I don’t see that aspirational other self as a false self, but just one of many realities we could be inhabiting if we made just a single one of our micro-decisions differently.JW: For the longest time, the twin earthquakes were actually the two poles of the story that were grounded in reality, everything else I kind of freewheeled until it was time to revise and factcheck (which is a whole other process for a country as rapidly evolving as Singapore is). I visited Christchurch once in 2014 and was struck by the sense of it being a city out of time (this was a couple of years after the earthquakes). The city was still struggling to try and rebuild, but there were all these rubbled buildings and the question of accountability: whose cost is this to bear, how does geographical calamity psychologically impact resilience and crime, what does it mean to come of age in a city where you literally cannot trust the ground beneath your feet? This was really, really interesting to me because Singapore has no experience with natural disasters despite also being an island, due to our geographical position. I couldn’t get it out of my mind: that immense natural beauty adjacent to the scale of potential disaster.
As I developed the book more, the earthquakes became the two things I really had to date and work around since they actually happened in reality, a limiting parameter which became its own craft challenge for me. I started DM-ing random architecture firms in Christchurch to ask questions about what it was like to be in the business of building in the time of earthquakes, but I wasn’t trained in research so I must have just come across as nosy, I only got a couple of replies. Finally I saved up to do a research trip to Christchurch in early 2018, where I basically roamed the city, took buses all over, and tried talking to whoever was willing to talk about the earthquakes—literal strangers who were just standing around. I went to the quake exhibitions, talked to librarians, baristas, even went to stand outside the Environment Canterbury office so I could catch an office worker coming out for lunch and ask them about bus routes. By that time I knew what the big plot points in that part of the book would be, so I spent a lot of my trip looking for physical locations that could correspond to the character’s actions and circumstances, making those walks in person, trying to retrace the character’s steps then rework them based on new information.
Arin’s visit I had to really work to scale up and down based on what would be pragmatically possible for an actress who was just starting out. For her, I tried on so many different paths for size. There was a season of the book where Gen had moved to Christchurch and Arin had moved to Shanghai to seriously audition for roles, trying break into the massive Chinese drama market, while their mother tries hard to keep close to them from Singapore. I had so many different clocks on my wall and time conversion charts when I was working on that version of the novel. In the end I scrapped it, because working across three time zones really sucked. And then I realized that for Arin, being able to succeed within Singapore would be a real point of pride, a way to try and convince her sister to come home—and the film scene in Singapore was independent enough to be flexible in the way my narrative needed it to be. So I started talking to directors and filmmakers in Singapore about timelines, finances, award seasons, casting calls, things like that, and then found the best path for Arin for this section of the book.
JC: What has your experience been as a member of literary communities in the U.S. (as an MFA graduate student at Columbia, a Stegner fellow at Stanford, others) and Singapore? How do you stay in touch with your literary colleagues? How does this camaraderie sustain your work? And did I see you’re going to be collaborating with the Singapore Book Council to mentor emerging writers and broaden the literary community in 2025?
JW: When I touched down in the States in 2019, I knew nobody. I was in my late twenties and really making a hard pivot, and so I had to build new friendships from scratch. I’ll be honest, for most of my first semester at the MFA, I felt like I was on Candid Camera. I totally didn’t get the American “How Are You,” and I still think people shouldn’t ask questions they don’t want answers to. It took a while for me to find my rhythm and people, and then just as I was getting a little more acclimatized, the pandemic hit and I had to go home.
The pandemic totally and utterly felled me. But I did start writing flash fiction, and slowly started having an online community of writers that way, and then the next time I got back to the States in 2021, I returned almost with a vengeance. I was pretty intense about working on my book, but also hung out hard with the rest of the world that was also emerging from lockdown, and made very good friends in New York that way. And I was very lucky to have such a wonderful cohort at the Stegner, we’re very close. The pain for me is, being international and coming to the States, I’m not rooted to a city the way born and raised Americans are, and so I do feel like I’m always saying goodbye to people I love. We stay in touch through a variety of group chats, phone calls, etcetera, the way friends regularly do. But the way it differs from regular friendships, I guess, is that we’re also able to confirm each other’s artistic reality, share information and experiences so publishing doesn’t feel as isolating, and commiserate and celebrate together.
And yes, I’m mentoring emerging fiction writers with the Singapore Book Council in 2025. I think it’s extremely hard to visualize a writing life or reality without examples or resources (see above re: not that many of us), and am invested in having those conversations back home wherever possible. The Original Daughter is an incredibly specific Singaporean story, not the Singaporean story. I do dream of a world rich with plurality and am excited to facilitate that however I can.
JC: What are you working on now/next?
JW: I made all these plans and did all this research for a next novel, and then when I sat down and started writing it was this whole other book instead. I’m still in the early, friendly stages with that new book and don’t want to scare her off so I won’t get too specific, but I’m hoping it won’t take another eleven years.
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The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei is available from Doubleday, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
