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metafiktion's review
2.0
Kwa’s project here is ambitious, with four (or 3.5, rather) narrators taking us between two places and times: in present day, a Chinese-Canadian psychologist (the main narrator) deals with the death of her father and a major break-up, while her Singapore-based mother (the 0.5, as she appears the least) comes to terms with the new shape of her family; in early 20th century Singapore, two Chinese migrants who enter the sex trade via different paths find solace in each other and opium. There’s a tenuous link between the two narratives — modern-day Wu Lan decides to research the colonial-era sex trade in Singapore on a whim, and some quote about ancestors & descendants is thrown in a couple of times — but otherwise they stand pretty much on their own.
The pace of the novel is pretty slow. Most of the “action” happens in Wu Lan’s head, and while there’s more going on in Chat Mui/Ah Choi’s lives, their internal narratives do all tend a bit too much towards the navel-gazey and melodramatic for my tastes. I’m aware that my experience of this book is coloured by being a Singaporean-in-Singapore reading the work of someone who left the country a long time ago, so what others would possibly take as novel explorations of identity (perhaps unfairly) comes across as unnecessary self-exotification to me. (That being said, Mahmee’s “Singlish” is unforgivably bad and her character is such a two-dimensional caricature of the conservative, small-minded older generation I genuinely believe the book would’ve been better off cutting her parts out entirely.) But still, it’s not every day that we get imagined queer histories in Singapore, so I appreciate Kwa’s foray into this even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of its execution.
The pace of the novel is pretty slow. Most of the “action” happens in Wu Lan’s head, and while there’s more going on in Chat Mui/Ah Choi’s lives, their internal narratives do all tend a bit too much towards the navel-gazey and melodramatic for my tastes. I’m aware that my experience of this book is coloured by being a Singaporean-in-Singapore reading the work of someone who left the country a long time ago, so what others would possibly take as novel explorations of identity (perhaps unfairly) comes across as unnecessary self-exotification to me. (That being said, Mahmee’s “Singlish” is unforgivably bad and her character is such a two-dimensional caricature of the conservative, small-minded older generation I genuinely believe the book would’ve been better off cutting her parts out entirely.) But still, it’s not every day that we get imagined queer histories in Singapore, so I appreciate Kwa’s foray into this even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of its execution.
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