The Politics of Place: A Conversation Between Shze-Hui Tjoa and Farah Ali

What roles do place and memory play in the construction of a narrative? In this conversation, memoirist Shze-Hui Tjoa and novelist Farah Ali talk about how these forces affect the storytelling in their respective books: The Story Game (Tin House, 2024), an interrogation of memory, childhood, and c-PTSD that is part travel memoir while being rooted in Singapore; and The River, The Town (Dzanc, 2023, paperback 2025), a narrative about a family that tries to build a life in different places in Pakistan-a village, a town, a city, a room, an apartment. Together, they speak about how their characters experience the effects of place on their psychology, and the complex ethics of re-imagining those places as diasporic writers so as to capture them on the page.

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Farah Ali: I want to start by talking about fiction and nonfiction. When I was listening to your podcast with David Naimon on Between the Covers, the question of what aspects of your book were one or the other came up. Naimon said, “If someone were to call it a fiction or even fantasy, they would also be partially correct.” And further in the discussion you said, “If I were to try and tell somebody what it feels like to be me, the most authentic thing to do would be to also tell them about the many fantasies I have in my head.” I was struck by that because it felt completely true. Do you feel that as writers diasporic to their countries we owe strict fidelity in depicting the places in our accounts, whether we’re writing a novel or a memoir? Or that there’s an expectation that we do so?

Shze-Hui Tjoa: I mean, I do sometimes feel this externally-imposed pressure to accurately, maybe even journalistically, represent the place I come from—particularly with North American readers who dump The Story Game into the catch-all bucket of “Southeast Asian memoir.” Personally, I really dislike this kind of simplistic categorization based on identity markers, because it makes me feel like an easy-to-digest touristic product instead of a full human being who gets to be weird, multifaceted and complex. So that’s where fantasy comes into it, for me. In my work, I try to make it clear that the reader is getting a hyper-specific view of Singapore through my eyes, and through my personal insecurities, unprocessed feelings, or unconscious beliefs about the place.

Something that struck me when I was reading The River, The Town, is how persistently your text insists upon the realities of the material world. One of my favorite scenes is about how the children in the impoverished Town get assigned a naive new teacher from the much wealthier City, who has them study poems about the virtues of abstaining from food and water—only for her lessons to get interrupted due to a power cut in the classroom. In a similar vein, the City funds the Town’s children to paint a wall mural that depicts a beautiful idyllic landscape with green grass, healthy animals, and a flowing stream—but while painting it, a child almost kills himself to escape from the extreme heat and hunger he’s undergoing each day.

I guess that reading your book made me think about how poverty is not some abstraction that can be willed away with pretty words, thought experiments or pictures, but is an undeniable and felt reality in the body. What role does fidelity play for you, in depicting place? For you, is too much imagination a kind of dangerous distraction from social and material conditions?

FA: Writing requires imagination to be able to bend form, to make sentences on the page align with the voice in the head, to keep the character central. If we start giving too much weight to the issue of fidelity when talking about a place where we no longer live but have spent a substantial amount of our lives in, we then head toward the danger of telling an unimaginative story, of creating work that’s more like fictionalized reportage. The need to imagine is important, and it’s also just as important to keep the character centered in that imagination.

For me, getting as close as possible to tangible things in the story helps me get to see from up close the effects of those things on the characters. A power cut, a child willingly putting himself in danger—those events call for immediate reactions. Maybe I’m impatient about getting to the thing in the story that hurts or confuses or is uncomfortable. Spending too much time in sentences merely talking about what these people are thinking or feeling seems to me like doing guesswork on their behalf. I feel compelled to see as much as possible through their eyes and do the actions they would do. So as I write draft after draft of a story, I sometimes pare it down to a few fixed places: a road, or a set of rooms. It physically contains the people and their actions while magnifying everything they think or do.

I love how, in The Story Game, you made your own rules—the narrative is anchored in one room, and the speaker, made to be her current age, is addressing her sister, made to be her younger self. I remember, when I was reading your book, I got this feeling of immense writing freedom being granted to me. Not only did you decide for yourself what your setting would look like, but you also decided how strict its limits were to be. Do you think imposing these boundaries helped you tell the story? Was it also a way to keep part of you rooted as you explored events, some in the past and some closer to now?

ST: To be honest, the self-imposed boundary of the closed “Room” sections only came at the very end of my writing process, when I had completed all of the book’s individual essays. I think it was because these essays were about different, exciting places that I had traveled to in my twenties: Indonesia, Germany, the UK, the Baltic country where I had volunteered at an eco-hostel, Palestine. But at the end of all that travel writing, I felt like something critical was still missing from the narrative that I had spun about my ability to roam through the world: namely, the fact that no matter how far or exotically I travelled, I always made choices that rendered me physically immobile or inactive, and felt trapped as if I were a small child who had been locked inside a room.

I remember that at this juncture of my writing process—after I’d completed the essays but before I’d invented the Room—I felt a seemingly random urge to do research into the concept of motion sickness. I was obsessed with how it came from the clash between a person’s eyes and body: their eyes experiencing continuous movement through the world, but their body experiencing stillness in the back of the vehicle. In hindsight, I guess I intuited that this contrast mirrored my personal experience of travel: limitless freedom on the one hand, but stillness and entrapment on the other due to the lingering effects of c-PTSD. In the end, I created the closed space of “The Room” to try and include what the essays had left out, and express the whole, more complex truth about my relationship to place.

I love what you said earlier, about how you try to get as close as possible to tangible things when you’re writing. It made me think of this line that I’ve been mulling over recently from Noreen Masud’s memoir, A Flat Place: “Where language fails, where human connection stalls, objects help.” When you were writing about such extreme poverty in The River, The Town, did you feel like there were limits to which you could empathise with or connect imaginatively with your characters? How did you write about them without othering them or slipping into a relational dynamic of pity? I’m also curious how much research you did around actual locations when you were writing this novel—did you base the unnamed town and city on real places in Pakistan, and if you did, how did you get close to them? Did you look at photographs or travel back to reconstruct the scenes—or was it more about working from your imagination?

FA: For a long time I was calling my book Wants and Needs, because that was, to me, always central about the people in the story. Maybe writing about a person’s wants is possible if one is strict with one’s words and says, “Ok, this person hasn’t eaten well in days, what is the first thing they want to do right now?” But, when writing, you’ve got to remember other types of things the person yearns for along with the basics—comfort, love, maybe kind words. So you’ve got to imagine what they’ll do for that as well. Generally, writers are driven by an anxiety around lack, and they create situations built around that anxiety, even if those are not exactly similar to their own. There’s probably a greater danger of pitying the character on the page if the writer feels completely removed from the fictional situation, has seen or experienced none of it. I think in Karachi, in most of that mega-metropolis, there isn’t too big a distance between different ways of living. Everything crowds into everything else: people, their homes, and their places of work. There are degrees to which the population suffers through common problems such as an inconstant supply of water. Not all the degrees are relatable, but there are enough overlaps that, for a person who is overly tuned in to her surroundings and always wondering what people are feeling, it doesn’t make it too difficult to imagine the reaction of a human to certain kinds of trouble.

I’m also stern with the way I write. I like spareness in prose, and maybe here that translated into not looking at the characters with pity. In The Story Game, a memoir, your narrating older self did not look upon her younger or earlier self with a lens tinged with pity. The factual treatment of the events made them that much sharper to experience as a reader.

The act of forgetting and remembering plays a role in both your memoir and my novel. There are large parts of childhood that you do not remember, at first. Did that have a hand in the unusual structure of your memoir?

ST: Yes, it did. While writing The Story Game, I made a deliberate artistic choice to retain all the memory gaps that I had about place—and especially about Singapore, where I grew up, but where my memories were also the patchiest due to having been in a state of dissociation during large parts of my childhood. Initially, I felt a little insecure about owning up to this forgetfulness. But then I figured that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be telling my readers the truth about how my experiences of c-PTSD and memory loss affected my life in my twenties. So eventually, I decided to write the memoir like a detective novel to accommodate all these memory gaps, and turn them into pieces of missing information that could meaningfully generate narrative momentum or suspense.

On top of that, I think there’s something about the foregrounded amnesia in my memoir—how it’s actually about the absence of a place, rather than a place itself—that paradoxically makes it a very Singaporean book. Since gaining independence in the 1960s, Singapore has been a progress-oriented city obsessed with “modernization;” it’s a place where buildings, roads, landmarks, and pockets of nature are continuously being destroyed in a relentless and somewhat inhumane (or at least unsentimental) fashion to make way for the new. Even the very dimensions of the ground under our feet have been shaped and reshaped over the decades through national land reclamation projects. So it makes sense that a lot of the literature about Singapore by Singaporean writers has been about these themes of loss, forgetting, and mourning for our communal sense of placelessness amidst the constant tides of change. My writer friends from back home suggest books like Suchen Christine Lim’s The River’s Song, Jeremy Tiang’s State of Emergency, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation, Jing-Jing Lee’s How We Disappeared, Fairoz Ahmad’s Neverness, and Boey Kim Cheng’s Between Stations as part of this canon. I would like to think that my memoir is writing into this shared tradition as well, in its refusal to pretend to remember what it doesn’t about Singapore.

In your novel, forgetfulness has to do with the intergenerational silence that characters uphold around the water and resource scarcity problems that their town is facing. I found it particularly interesting how the only words that characters permit themselves to speak about the dire situation seem to be explicitly hopeful ones—for example, the parents giving their children names like Leaf, Rain, Sea, Cool Breeze, and Cloud that are “meant to evoke a sensation…of thirst being quenched.” Or the religious group that meets by the dwindling river, and sends back verbal reports of miracles to prove that “soon the weather will change, crops will grow, and bellies will be full again.” Can you say more about how forgetting, silence, and language work to create and pass down a sense of place in your novel?

FA: To get by in Karachi, one has to be scrappy. There is the sense that there’s no time to wallow in sentimentality; to do so is a luxury that only the tiniest percentage of the population there can afford. One makes do and gets on. Karachi is a seemingly-endlessly growing city with a lot of issues—power outages, water scarcity, gas shortages. And, chaotically, this is alongside new expressways and underpasses being built; malls being constructed; apartment buildings and office towers going up in roads that once just had quiet houses. So everything in that city seems designed to make one hurry on. Shandana Minhas is a writer from Karachi whose novels carry that same manic energy. The characters in her books Tunnel Vision and Daddy’s Boy don’t gloss over this chaos; they work through it.

It could be that some of what I’ve seen growing up in Karachi seeped into the people in my book. They have a sense of urgency about time and resources; there is so little of both to spare that they are frugal with them. But they have their own set of traits as well. For instance, the kind of silence or choosing not to hold discussions about difficult past and present situations is specific to this particular group of people in The River, The Town. Their relationships aren’t the kind that make room for a lot of conversation. Whatever they feel, they show it through an action.

You, as a character in your memoir, traveled far from home many times, and you were so convincing in the reason you laid out for those pursuits that I, as a reader, was surprised when you, in your conversations with your sister in “Room”, dug deeper and revealed things you hadn’t said to yourself about why you went and why you stayed in places that were harmful to you. You wove a very convincing fiction about yourself, to yourself, and therefore to me. And even after you discover more about yourself, and talk about it in the book, there are things you don’t fully go into. I found it extremely interesting that you, the character in your memoir, and the characters in my novel, created stories about a place for themselves which were necessary for survival at that time. And it’s also correct to say that we, as humans, probably do it unconsciously all the time, complete with no loneliness and lots of good health. Your memoir reaches a point where you are letting yourself think about a good future, even though it isn’t defined. Were you surprised when your writing let you take that direction of thought?

ST: I love how you put this. It’s true: writing this memoir meant letting go of the stories about place that I had constructed in my head to survive, and opening myself up to experiencing these places anew on their own terms—sans stories, sans judgment. That felt and can still feel like a scary move for me, and it did surprise me when I got there; to this day, I still feel vulnerable dropping that psychological shield of narrative where I presume to know everything about a place or its people, simply because I’ve read a lot about them and know all the theory. But writing The Story Game has helped me to feel more comfortable admitting that I can’t possibly know everything—which in turn has made me feel more willing to step into new or even old places again like a child, with a fresh gaze and only my bodily senses and perceptions to rely on. It’s helped me to feel more authentically curious about other people, and willing to be proven wrong again and again in my assumptions about them. So I think that’s where the feeling of openness to a good future comes from in my work: since I can’t possibly predict what the world beyond my head will be like, I feel the need to go out there and meet it for myself. Writing, for me, means exploring unexpected connections with other places and communities, even if they might seem unintelligible to me at first. I feel a very strong and real desire to persist in stepping beyond my own preconceptions, so that I can encounter the other and maybe even get to know them better, eventually.

In your novel, I found it profoundly affecting that no matter how much the characters tried to uproot themselves from the Town and its many crises, in a sense, they were never able to truly cut ties with it. For example, I’m thinking of the character Raheela, who is divorced by her Town-husband and marries a City government man—only to end up going back to her old house to sleep again, and even stealing items like meat and soap from her new husband’s house to rebuild a pseudo-domestic life with her ex-husband. And then there is her son Baadal, whose insistence on living an aspirational City life that he cannot afford eventually leads him towards pain and addiction. At one point he is even told by his mother, “You do not live here anymore. You are just a visitor.” And it feels like this sense of disconnection from his original Town environment contributes towards the many tribulations he suffers.

What is your philosophy as a novelist, when it comes to this question of whether a person—or a character—can ever meaningfully leave the environment they came from? How important is it to you that this sense of a first or original place persists within your characters’ bodies and psyches? I also wonder if you could say more about how this feeling of place-based rootedness is interlinked with human suffering and tragedy, in your work—or is it?

FA: I don’t think a person can ever completely separate from where they’ve come from, or from a particular set of experiences, especially when they’ve taken place during childhood. The effects can come out in strange, unexpected ways when they’ve become an adult. I really liked how you put it, about the original place persisting in psyches and bodies, because that’s what leads a person to making some unexplainable choices. And “choices” is misleading as a word because there are a lot of parameters around certain paths available to one. When a character opts to carry out a certain decision, they’re being influenced by anxieties from the past and about the future. Even wanting to do well is a form of anxiety, I wouldn’t call it a purely happy choice. But I also don’t believe that a character is entirely at the mercy of where they’re from and of what’s happened to them. That would mean I’m not writing a story but simply a foregone conclusion. So, as in life, the people in the novel are playing out some effects of what they’ve endured, but also making some conscious decisions to do things differently, using the knowledge base they have. And that is one of the things that really struck me about The Story Game, that in the memoir’s narrator, I saw my characters, and myself. A story about place and leaving it, then coming back to it mentally and physically. I saw, in that effort to redefine it, what people try to do—take back some control of the narrative.