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Jemimah Wei, "The Original Daughter" (Doubleday/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025)
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Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Hi folks, this is Christian Ryan, hosts of Soundscapes NYC, a podcast about the sounds of the 70s that have shaped New York City.
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Soundscapes NYC has been named a finalist for the best indie podcast at the 2025 Signal Award.
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A
The judges recognized our episode Shining a Spotlight on the Forgotten Women of Disco. From Regine Silverberg, who opened the first modern discotheque, to Sharon White, the trailblazing DJ who broke the gender barriers at the Paradise Garage.
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You can learn more about the Signal Awards and how to vote for your favorites and@vote.signalaward.com and thanks for listening to Soundscapes right here on the New Books Network.
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. Genevieve Yang, the protagonist of Jemima Way's debut novel, the Original Daughter, works a dead end job in Singapore, living in the shadow of her adopted younger sister, Erin, a rising movie star. Genevieve's dying mother asks her to call Erin. Genevieve refuses Jemima's novel, then teases out the history of Jen and Aaron's sibling relationship from their first meeting in the late 90s, through their shared experience in school, to the final grievance that splits them apart. I'm joined today by Naomi Shue. Elegant Naomi, would you like to tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself?
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B
Yeah.
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D
Thanks for having me on, Nick. I'm really excited to guest host with you today. I'm a writer as well in New York. I'm a journalist, and I also had a novel come out as well this year called Inko Season. I read Jemima's book in May when it came out, and I loved it, and I'm very excited to talk to her about it.
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C
Jemima is a National Book foundation five under 35 honoree, a William Van Dyke Short Story Prize winner, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. D' Alba Fellow at Columbia University. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore's National Arts Council, Sywanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Writers in paradise, her writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, among others. So, Jemima, thanks so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book. You know, maybe we'll start with the obvious first question. You know, what's the story behind the original Daughter? What pushed you to write this novel?
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B
Well, Nicholas, and first up, thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and I'm very excited to talk about the book. So, you know, because I worked on this book for so long, the Original Daughter took 9 years to write, a first draft off that I was pretty happy with, and two more years to revise. So now that that's done, I always have a good time talking about it because I'm no longer struggling through it. But I feel like the story behind the novel is pretty common to debuts, which is that there wasn't a definite stepping off point for the novel so much as a lot of writing that ended up eventually coalescing around what the book finally became. So I feel like I don't have a definite stepping off point for the novel so much as a lot of writing that eventually ended up coalescing around what the book finally became. So I actually started writing the first words, I think, in 2014. I always think about it that way. And it was about a girl who had left her country only to find out that there is no Narnia anywhere. But simultaneously that I had actually also been working on the story of a sibling given away in return. So at some point, because they were both occupying so much of my creative energies, these two stories became the same novel. And it took the subsequent nine years to figure out the best shape for which the story could tick.
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C
So, you know, tell us about, about the Singapore of the late 90s and early 2000s is when kind of most of the novel is set. You know, I think Singapore likes to portray itself as kind of very glamorous, very glitzy, you know, the Marina Bay sands, Coldplay music videos, crazy rich Asians, that sort of stuff. But what's the version of Singapore that you wanted to show kind of in your novel?
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B
So the original daughter in the novel takes place between 1996 to 2015. So this is a period of rapid modernization as seen in largely through the lens of an economically squeezed family living in a one bedroom flat in government housing, which is where most Singaporeans actually live in. So this is a completely different angle or lens of Singapore and it's specific to the circumstances of this one family and the issues they face. For example, they are a fractured family. They have family members who are swapped and given away and taken in, and they are pretty much unable to catch up to the pace of modernization. And many of these issues derive from the economic structures they live within and how these play out differently from generation to generation. And it's not like there wasn't a glitzy or rich or, you know, extravagant aspect of Singapore during this period. There actually was. And we also do see characters who live something adjacent to their life. For example, Genevieve has a classmate, Penelope, who is, you know, her dad is able to make lots of really big things happen just by picking up the phone and making a couple of introductions. So this proximity and adjacency for me was actually what was interesting, the fact that it's not that there are two different realities that are so far away from each other, it's that these two realities, because they play out in a Singapore that is very small. Like Singapore is a city state. It's really like the size of maybe New York City. And because of that, everyone's on top of each other. And so because you're so close to different ways of life, I think that the girls live in one world, but their adjacency to the other has them hunting for ways to bridge that gap. Because they see their lack of agency as economic in nature. And they think that getting economic freedoms, getting other kinds of freedom and agency. So I don't think Jen and Erin, who are my two protagonists, necessarily see themselves as occupying a terminally different reality from a glitzier class. They have this belief in ameritocratic fluidity that is something that actually pulls them through extremely challenging times. So that is actually what was really interesting for me writing this. I am aware of the narratives of Singapore that exists. So this wasn't meant to replace that. It was just meant to expand the universe that I see a little bit more. And to say that, hey, there are more than one, you know, like every single story, there is more than one story. And this is just another layer to Singapore. And my hope is that as time goes on and more and more stories are published, we get more and more layers that create eventually, like an ecosystem of really rich, layered narratives of one specific nation.
- [07:36]
C
Yeah.
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D
You know, I was really struck by how you explored the, you know, ideas of economic class and difference, especially through.
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B
Like a children's perspective. A lot of it.
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D
Like you were saying with Penelope, it's like classmates at school, but kids are often very perceptive about those kind of things.
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B
Could you talk a bit about how.
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D
You kind of explored, like, the theme of class, especially because, like, again, you mentioned Singapore is quite a distinctive system where even though people are in public housing and have these support systems, they could still be like working class and struggling a lot like the main family.
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B
So I definitely feel that in Singapore, because there is a sense of this belief in meritocracy, which I think very quickly over the last decade has been proven to be. People have become disillusioned with that. But growing up, I was definitely very aware of this sense that if you work hard enough, something might change. This country is changing. We have not solidified in the way that countries that have hundreds and hundreds of years of history have solidified. And so there was a sense that things could change very quickly, and for some, people have changed very quickly. And so in the school system, there is a sense that if you do well enough, you can get into certain schools. If you do well enough academically, you can bridge certain class divides. And that's something that the girls really hold on to because it's something that you can control. You can control how hard you work, you can control how hard you memorize certain school syllabi so that you can fake your way into certain grades, for example. And so I was really interested in having them put into this sense of being mixed with people from different backgrounds very early on, because in Singapore, most people go to the public school system. It's seen as a really good world class educational system. I know that's different from many other countries where going to private school is seen as a better thing. But in Singapore, that distinction, I think it's less clear and everybody has to wear a school uniform. Up to a certain age. So in theory, everyone should look about the same and should be able to enact the same kind of reality within the school system. But obviously these differences come out no matter what. And so kind of even the way you carry yourself into a room, the way you approach failure or success in an academic system, is inherited. It's like a certain kind of soft privilege or certain kind of software power that we don't really talk about that much. And so I was really interested in how the girls absorbed this from a young age and try and use that to their advantage. And for me, it made a lot of sense because I was writing a story of them growing up together to have this play out in the school system, at least at the start of the book.
- [10:14]
C
So I'd love to talk more about the characters of Jen and Erin, but before I do, I thought I might ask you to a short reading from your book. Sure.
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B
Okay. So I think I'll read from the start of part one. And so this actually, even though it's part one, it's the second part of the book, because the real part one is the prologue. And this is just to contextualize the way they became sisters, because Genevieve and Aaron were not sisters from birth. Aaron was adopted into the family. So I'll just read from the start of Part 1, Chapter 3. So Part 1A. Beginning 1996, Singapore. Erin didn't appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed at age of seven. And she left like this too, suddenly, decisively. I was eight. One evening in May, right before dinner, my grandmother explained that her husband, who had been politically disappeared and presumed it when my father was a child, had actually been driving this entire time in Kedah, Malaysia, with his other family, right up till last week when he tripped and ripped his thigh open on a rusty nail. The wound blistered and bloomed, refusing to close up. It got infected. The fever burned through his body, shutting down his kidneys and liver, washing acid through his blood. Within two days, he was dead. He had left behind a son, a daughter in law, and a gaggle of grandchildren. But his secret family could no longer afford to raise them all. So we would be taking in the youngest, a girl around my age. After she said this, she looked at my face, switched from Hokkien, which, like most of my generation, I could understand but not speak to Mandarin, which I could understand and speak, but not to her satisfaction and in the manner of one making something absolutely clear. Sid. Sepsis. Blood poisoning. This is why you are not allowed to play in the Long Kang. I knew better than to talk back. There is a kind of person who considers themselves superior for having endured calamity, and my grandmother never let you forget that she had lived through the war as a little girl. Instead, I dipped my head and peeked through my eyelashes at my mother, who had turned very slightly towards my father. Her eyes decreased attentively, but in her mind a million shifting calculations flipped. She blinked once and then again, a quick subsection. My father snapped out a shock. He's alive. My grandmother made an impatient sound. No. He backtracked. Right? Right. How do you know this? Qiang, that's your Ba's other son, wrote to me. Were you aware he had another family? Obviously not. My grandmother drew a piece of folded yellow paper out of her pajama pants, which she wore everywhere, including to the wet market. It was full of angry Mandarin characters. My father held himself very still as he scanned the letter, clean shaven skin drawn tight against his jawline. But I knew he was exerting himself greatly for the show of self restraint. His cheeks blanched the way they always did when confronted with life's indignities, rising gas prices, my grandmother's tyranny. That time he accidentally drank from the cup of chicken fat my mother was saving for rice. I watched the struggle play out on his face, imagine him crushing this new information into a small, compact pill and swallowing it. I watched his Adam's apple quiver and held my breath. It seemed to me that as long as he maintained his composure, whatever threatening reality my grandmother had conjured wouldn't spill out and scour our family. His eyes ran over the paper twice thrice before his lips parted. Even so, my father said, still in that same fantastic, careful tone, he made his choice years ago. I don't see how this affects us. My grandmother put her hand out. He folded the letter in half but didn't move to return it. In Hokkien, the shrinking dialects of her authority, she snapped, I've already agreed. Just like that. Only now did my father's voice peak. I glanced at him, alarmed. He had forgotten to close his mouth after the outburst, and his lower lips hung slightly open, revealing a pale white ring of gnawed skin. It was the first time I had seen the inside of my father's mouth, his defeat so total that to this day the increasingly lonely sound of someone speaking Hokkien is enough to render me pliant. Calmly, my grandmother extended her wrist and plucked the letter from between his fingers. What's past? She said. It's past. Let's eat. I'll stop there.
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C
So thank you for reading from that. You know, and I want to kind of talk about some of the characters in your book. And let's, you know, start with the protagonist, Jen. I mean, as the book goes on, she does kind of become a pretty recognizable archetype, you know, kind of the burned out gifted kid. You know, she. She starts off having very strong academics, she goes to a new school, she really struggles. And then it just. Things seem to kind of continue to go downhill from there. I mean, when you were kind of developing that that character, like what was kind of going through your mind? What kind of inspired you in creating the character of Jen?
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B
Well, it's interesting that you refer to her as gifted because I've never really thought about her that way. I think her gift, if anything, is hard headedness. You know, she has this inherited belief in the strength of her own will com, this desperate desire to enact agency in her own life. And she's someone who really grew up with a sense of her own economic limitations. I think that's very clear from the start of the book. She knew what kind of family she was born into. She knew what struggles they had because they're all literally living in a one bedroom apartment. She, her mom, her dad, and her grandmother. And she just knows economically where they stand. But what is more important to her at that point is that she's very secure in her relationships, due in no small part to her very charismatic and devoted mother. And when a sister gets dropped into her life, she tries her best to recreate that sense of love and ownership and pride in a new relationship. And to me, she is somebody who is very deeply uncomfortable with failure. And I feel like that is both structural and individual. And I'll elaborate on that later, but in all senses of the word, she really, really hates failure. And so instead of being able to accept herself as somebody who is flawed and mystic, making her inability to confront that part of herself causes her to act out in moments of high tension and it leads to a lot of regrettable decisions. So Tumi, you know, like when in conversations around the book, a lot of people have mentioned, you know, that she's really academically gifted, she did really well until she burnt out. But Tumi, she was never that gifted. She just worked really, really hard. And I think that's very common to a generation of Singaporeans. And I say Singaporeans with the caveat that that's because I am Singaporean. I'm sure this behavior is repeated in Cultures all over the world and societies all over the world, but the sense that if you work really hard enough, you can get through anything with like pure pigheadedness. Because you know, you look around yourself and you think to yourself, you may not be the most talented, the most gifted, the most intelligent, but you. And you can't control those things that you're born with, but you can control working harder than anybody else by 200%. So do you make up for anything that you lack? Naturally. And I think that is what she's like. And because of that she doesn't have that sense of flexibility which I think is actually really, really important for survival in modern society, which is the ability to absorb failure and recalibrate and redirect yourself. So because she doesn't have that, she cracks when the pressure becomes too much because she has doubled down so much on this hard headedness that has gotten her through so much of the start of her life.
- [17:33]
C
And of course what tests that is her relationship with her adopted sister Erin and Erin's success, which I guess from Jen's perspective seems somewhat, I mean it seems very easy. I guess as Aaron goes from YouTube star to indie movie darling and good academics and all of that, which is of course another kind of, I guess very recognizable relationship which is the sibling that feels somewhat, somewhat envious of their other siblings success, which I'm sure of course is worsened by the fact that it's an older and a younger sibling as opposed to other way around. So like what did you want to do as you wanted to build out that relationship and how that the positive and negative sides of relationship with Aaron, how does that kind of drive the story forward?
- [18:19]
B
Right. So actually I'll address one of the things you said first, which is the fact that she's younger. To me, Aaron being younger is really the crux of it because there was a sense of, you know, Erin is not just more successful, she is more successful because she is learning from Jen's mistakes. Right. So as a child growing up, if you're the eldest, you look towards your parents, right? But a second child looks towards your parents and you. And so she's learning and that is natural. It's not really something that you can go to a second sibling and be like, don't learn from me. That would be like so insane. But so then that raises the question of ownership, like how much of my life is my own, how much of my achievement is my own and how much of it is like a learning point for somebody and Jen being able to recognize that that is just like a rational and natural part of the chronology of being born in a certain way doesn't make it easier to swallow. And so I describe this book often as gravitating around the question of what love can endure. But really, that is an offshoot of something I've always been really, really interested in, which is what a lot of my larger body of work gravitates around, which is how can we actually live with integrity within a rapidly modernizing world? And Jen and Erin's relationship for me is enacted within this question because I am less interested in writing a book where two people are like, okay, we're not each other's people. We were just born into the same family, or we just happened to be in the same family and we don't have to be best friends. We can just live our own lives. I was more interested in a relationship where they want to be the best people for each other, they want to be intimate with each other, they care deeply about each other, but unfortunately, in reality, they bring out the absolute worst in each other, the most codependent and competitive parts of each other. And the question that arises from that is actually whether this dynamic, I mean, the question that arises from that for me, really, as I was writing, is this dynamic individually created or is it structural in nature because of the society they grew up in, because of everything that's been imposed on them from outside? And a lot of working out, this book was thinking about that question for me as well. So a lot of like writing this book actually is about testing their relationships in different circumstances and existing in the space between the people that they are and the people, the million different versions of the people they hope they can be. And that difference for me is very productive. It's how I moved the novel forward and propelled the characters forward.
- [20:43]
E
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- [22:09]
D
I mean, you obviously spent so much time with, with the girls and with everyone else in the in the book, while you were writing and revising, were there any characters that really surprised you, like did something or something that you didn't plan on them doing that you were kind of surprised by?
- [22:25]
B
So you know, from the very start when I was working on it, I knew what the big events would be. So I knew the general premise, right? Because I had already been thinking about this idea of a family member that was returned or given away and so this idea of what makes chosen family chosen again and again and again and again. And I knew the big moves that would happen, like one character would go away to a different country, something would happen, she would be forced to come back. All these things I did know. The thing that did surprise me was just the execution of how I managed to develop them in ways that I didn't expect. So every single character surprised me. But I would say as I was thinking about your question, maybe the one that broke my heart the most was Erin. Developing Erin's character really for me was, you know, I have a lot of affection for her as I do for all my characters, but for her specifically I really felt like she, because of a deeply dysfunctional relationship towards needing love even at the cost of self abandonment. That was something that constantly surprised me as I was working on this book. But that also made sense because of who she is and the way she was brought into the family and the way she has perceived security within her relationships as really oppositional to the whole older sister Gen, who she really looks up to has engage with our relationships through life. So I don't know. You know, in retrospect, maybe I could say it was surprising, but maybe I could also say it's inevitable. I just feel like when a novel is done we tend to solidify our impressions of how things went. But in reality when you're working on writing a book, it's so much up and down up and down, up and down. And so much uncertainty over trying to develop where each character is going to go. I guess another thing that surprised me was the dad, because, I mean, I keep saying I feel a lot of affection for this character and that character, but the truth is, because all of these characters are my babies, I feel very, very affectionate for all of them. And so with the father's. The way the father's life developed, I guess I had higher or maybe more optimistic hopes for him. And those hopes maybe didn't play out in the way I was hoping. But, you know, I am really interested while in writing characters who fail upwards. So people who are trying their best but kind of always falling short and yet trying their best in, like, slightly better ways each time. And I feel like the father character, for me is a really strong embodiment of that.
- [24:57]
D
Yeah, it's so interesting that you feel that way, because I feel like that's probably how the characters felt as well about him.
- [25:02]
B
Right. Like, he.
- [25:03]
D
He seemed like this person that was like, the good guy that was going to be there. And then, I mean, not to spoil it, but he kind of ends up disappointing them in a way that's quite heartbreaking.
- [25:12]
B
Yeah, I just feel like, you know, at some point. So I think a lot of things that I was thinking about. Okay, so I'll just repeat that sentence. So with most of the characters, you know, there's this underlying theme where they want to be a type of person. They want to be. They want to be the person that they wish they could be. Right. But there is a difference between the performance of self and the self that you actually are. And I think for him, that is something that really pushed him to the brink, which is because of the narratives of how his family, his generation, grew up. He had this narrative of what happened with his dad, what happened with his mom, and then that gets slowly disrupted in adulthood, which is where we kind of assume that that generation, you're set, you've done all the learning you have to do, and, you know, it's time to turn your focus to the younger generation and nurture them in moral character and all kinds of ways. But that's simply not true. I just feel like people don't stop growing. And so for him, because he has suppressed what it means to him this entire time, he really got pushed to the brink and he really cracked. And so I think that entire sequence for me was very, very difficult to write. Not because it was difficult to work out, but because I kind of was trying to avoid Having that in the way it did, but it just felt to me like really the right decision for who this character is. So, you know. So it did go in that direction in the end. Yeah, definitely.
- [26:40]
D
Because you had such close. I mean, it's such a tight knit family and each character feels like just like a very real person, I guess, to like, put it in a very basic way, were you ever kind of tempted away from just Jen's POV to kind of slip into other people's, or did you always know that you wanted to stick with her in terms of the structure?
- [27:00]
B
Well, I actually started this book in third person, so. And when I was in that mood, you know, I had a lot of writing from all the different characters. But as I was developing the novel, I realized that it had to be in first person because Jen makes the. Well, I mean, for lack of a better word, she makes the most insane decisions or the most frustrating decisions. And so when you're in third person, I think the reader is less forgiving of that. But moving it to first person, you create a sense where a reader is in a character's mind, understanding how she processes the process and why she makes the decisions she makes while being able to see around her blind spots in a way that she cannot. So I think what that does is create an empathetic link with the most challenging character. And when I went into that point, when I made the decision to switch from third person to first person and move it from Jen's perspective, it then made sense really to not allow the other perspectives to come in, but to filter everything through the way she is seeing it. Because a big thing about her is how can she really, really, really wants to be intimate with the people around her, but she's not regulated in the way she conducts her relationships. And so because of that, she cannot see people for who they are, even though she loves them so much. And maybe because she loves them so much and that creates a really unhealthy dynamic. But the reader probably can because the reader is able to step outside of this first person and be like, well, you know, that is, you can just. You just want to shake her. You want to be like, that's not, you know, you just like, you know, that is not what's happening here. And so when it was in third person, Gen's, it was a little harder to make Gen's decisions, you know, palatable to a reader. I'm not sure they still are, you know, but I feel like readers generally have felt more connected to her in a way That I don't think they would have in third person. Right.
- [28:46]
C
I mean, I think that's. That's certainly true with me. Whereas, I mean, getting to see Jen's, you know, internal monologue, she's kind of going through all these different things, you know, like, speaking personally, like, at times, I also struggle to see Jen's grievances as real grievances. I mean, even. Even the big grievance, the one that. The one that. That. That splits her and Eren apart, it's a little bit like. Well, I mean, I can understand why. Like, why she'd be upset by that. But also. Anyway, it's so. I mean, when you were thinking of Jen in the book, I mean, how much did you want readers to think of Jen as being in the right or being in the wrong? Or do you want. Did you want that subtlety and complexity in terms of how Jen feels about this relationship?
- [29:30]
B
Well, I didn't ever really care about whether a reader thought about Jen as right or wrong, because I don't think about people that way. Kind of. I just needed a reader to see her as a person, and to do that, I needed to develop her as a person. So it's something I try to do in real life as well. Right. Like, I rarely look at somebody and be like, oh, you're totally wrong or you're totally right. Because putting someone on a pedestal or condemning them are just two different sides of the same kind of dehumanization, even if that isn't the fundamental intent. So it's more interesting to me to try and create a character that's really warty or really has, like, you know, just issues and grievances, because it's really easy to align with a character whose grievances are really easily understood. But the working title of this novel many years ago was Smaller Crimes. And actually, in that phase of the book's conception, I was really, really keen on exploring the small and inarticulable betrayals and crimes that we commit against ourselves and each other. Things that cannot be quantified in any easy or physical way. And so that, to me, was way more interesting, you know, creating a character who you may not agree with her, but you can see why she is the way she is, because that's just kind of being able to respect somebody else's internal logic, even if you totally, totally disagree what they're doing kind of.
- [30:45]
D
Going off of that. You know, one of the big things that propels her forward in the book is she decides to go to New Zealand, which is Kind of a big rupture, obviously geographically, but also for her own character, I think, maybe probably in a good way for herself to get out. But also crazy stuff happens. Could you talk a bit about that kind of act of the book, why you decided to send her away, what that was like?
- [31:10]
B
Totally. Okay. So I think I always knew that the book would take place between Singapore and another place, partially because, number one, Singapore is a city state, right? So we don't have that city, country relationship that many countries have. We. What you see is what you get is like an island that's also a city that's also a state. There is no other kind of within the country. And so I think that creates the mindset that Singapore has that relationship of the city other with places outside of Singapore, that Singapore and then the world, Right? And so everybody I knew, and I don't mean other as in foreign, I mean other as in, is the balance of the contrast to their life there. So everybody I knew growing up, you know, was desperate to get out, but not necessarily in the terms of migration. They were desperate to get out with the caveat that they might come back. And so wanting to find that balance was something that always felt really natural to me. And, you know, number two, I like the idea of a Singaporean abroad, which was my own take on the tradition of a protagonist who just leaves home to discover something. Like, we read so many novels about the American abroad or the European abroad. And I was like, all right, well, I want to make my version which is a Singaporean abroad. And then thirdly, just on a craft level, right. The first half of the book built so much tension and pressure from social and economic circumstances that I really had to balance this out with a valve. And New Zealand was a valve that I could use to ease off the pressure momentarily, even just to let some air into the book. Because at that point, Jen is at a stage in her life where it feels like there is no option. She's really squeezed by life, and she's really in her own head about it. And it just made sense that you would have to find some way to ease that pressure off or to let some air in. And that way, for me, was looking outside of the country. And Singapore, to me, has always been really fascinating in that way, where we have a really powerful passport. We have navigated our political decisions internally in a way that makes it very easy for us to move around the world, regardless of borders. And I was interested in exploring that as well. So all those things may not have been the primary theme of that act, where you see it, but it is very subtly underlaid in her movement there, the way she makes those decisions about which countries I can go to, where will my passport make it easier for me to be hired, what country will the language be the most advantageous to me because Singapore is primarily English speaking country. All of those things factored into her decision and into really being told that those are her fundamental advantages by a wealthier classmate who is like, well, these are the things that we have. Even if you don't realize, even if you disadvantage within your country, these are things that we have that are inherent to being a Singaporean. So when she realizes that, because that way of thinking also has to be told to you, I think it's natural to certain classes of people, but not to others. And so when she realizes that, she's like, all right, you know, where can I go? And then at that point, it was really just a matter of elimination. I was like, oh, right, I need her to go somewhere. I don't want her to go to America because it's too far away. So I went somewhere that's like relatively nearer but still like primarily English speaking. So then I looked at Australia and New Zealand and I started doing research into both these places. And it became a chicken and egg situation where, because I decided on New Zealand, it just seemed to confirm itself as the correct choice at every point of development. Because I was really interested in how New Zealand, the island, feels parallel to the island of Singapore and how they have very different time chromosomes. The sense of time that passes in their countries are really different. And then for me, then I found the perfect geographical event to kind of anchor that period around. So when I found all those things, it just made it really difficult to consider any other alternative. And so Christchurch, New Zealand became the second setting of the book. And when I was doing research on that. So for me, it's always been really important to get on ground research, even for Singapore. So I had to select where I thought the novel was taking place, where I think Jen and Aaron's family live. And then I had to just go to that neighborhood and walk around and talk to people and knock on doors and be like, hi, can I talk about living here? Can I talk about what it was like to grow up? Things like that. And people were generally very friendly. And I had fleshed out that part of the book. And then the part that was the New Zealand arc felt to me comparatively less strong. And so I thought, all right, I was hoping I could just do it through Online research, but I don't think so. So I saved up money and then I did a research trip to New Zealand, I think in 2016 or 17, I can't really remember. And so I went there, and my whole plan was just to go there and vibe it out, you know? So I did a bunch of interviews. So anybody who was willing to talk to me, I would just talk to them. I'll be like, hey, were you here during the earthquakes? Can I talk to you about what it was? Like, what was the bus route like? Where are the young people? Where do you meet somebody else if you want to start dating or making friends? Like, what is it like to live here? And so I think that added a layer of sensory perception to that arc that made it feel a lot more real for me. I plotted out the main events of, like, what would happen in New Zealand. And then I literally mapped it out. I mapped it out while walking around Christchurch. I was like, all right, this is where this is going to happen. This is how long it's going to take to walk to work. This is how long it's going to take to walk home. This is how long it's going to take for the walk to the grocery store and to these different places. And that added a sense of realism to that part as I was crafting it.
- [36:32]
D
Yeah, it's so true what you were saying about the symmetry, because it also felt very symmetrical in a weird way. I guess they even have very similar populations.
- [36:43]
B
It's a lot less dense. But it felt like a good place for her to go. I mean, kind of talk about the.
- [36:48]
C
Research you did for the Christchurch part of the book. I mean, you spent a long time working on this book. I wonder if I talk a little bit about actually, what's your process for writing? How do you put the words on paper, as it were? What's your kind of. What's your process for actually kind of writing a novel?
- [37:11]
B
So this is my first novel, so this process is the only process I have so far. And it was really fumbling in the dark. Right. So basically, I've been writing my whole life, and a lot of that was just, you know, thinking, okay, I enjoy reading, so why not write something? And I was just writing stories, and then at some point, I realized a lot of these stories were gravitating around the same theme. I was trying to work out a sense of what it meant to be a Singaporean in a modern society that was changing very quickly. What does it mean to look for your identity in a time like that. How do you kind of craft your own sense of morals or morality within a world where everything seems at odds with it? So as I was working on those things, those things started coalescing at some point. So then I was like, well, this is really long. All my short stories are like 10 to 12,000 words. So I don't think these are short stories anymore. I think they are like parts of a novel. And I was like, oh, here we go. So then I. That was like, very haphazard. I was writing from all parts of it and trying to figure out how to put it together. So because of that, I had a lot of false starts. I think that's part of why it took so long, which is I knew what the story, I wanted the story to be, but I just didn't know how to find a shape for it. So I was just writing. I would go up to 80,000 words and then be like, I don't think this is working, and then just start all over again. Now that I've done it once, I feel like now that I'm working on my second book, it's a lot more structured for me, which is, you know, a relief, I think. I spent a really long time thinking about what I want. So for the first book, I was just writing and then trying to figure out retroactively while looking at my writing, what am I trying to say? Whereas now what I'm doing is I'm thinking about what I actually am interested in as an artist or what are my concerns that I am reoccupied by on a day by day basis. And how can I play these things out in fiction? How do they coincide with scenarios, situations, characters that I am concerned with and what am I really obsessed with? I think I'm more able now to follow those threads in my mind. Whereas when I was working on the first book, I was just trying to moving forward, looking at my novel sideways, and trying to hope that I would come to a point where it got a sense of acceleration and concrete reality.
- [39:20]
C
Maybe. To close off the interview, just a quick question. The book is so focused on Jen's perspective and possible misperceptions or misunderstandings of what's going on. You know, if. If you were to write, say, a companion book to the original daughter, you know, where you. Where you focus on another character and really focus on their perspectives kind of throughout this whole story. Who would you pick?
- [39:46]
B
I'm actually really glad you asked that question because I did write a companion book to the original daughter as I was working on It. So I wrote a kind of constellation book around it, which constantly around all the other characters in the original daughter. So I thought about it as kind of an extended universe. But a weird thing that happens in finishing a novel is that the world kind of passes out of your system and takes on a different sense of solidity. So it also coalesces a thing outside of me after I finished the book and published it. But in that book, there was a lot of focus around a lot of the other female characters. So, for example, I wrote a lot about Pae Wen, who is a really minor character in the book. She is a character who is a special friend of the father's. And I was really interested in her relationship and why she. How she got to this place in the novel. She is a Manhua translator, which is a kind of, you know, it's a different kind of storytelling art form. And she also has her own sense of, like, what it means to be in a place of utility and labor and service to people that you love in your family. And so that character was really taking out a lot of my brain space, even though she barely makes it into this novel. I also wrote a story about Dana, the doctor at the start of the novel that really helped me get into the head of why she conducts her way, you know, instead of maintaining herself as separate from a family, instead of maintaining a totally professional relationship, the fact that she's so enmeshed, also, like, constantly invested in this family. I had to figure out why. And so I wrote a book about. I wrote not a book. I wrote a story about that as well. So, unfortunately, there wouldn't be a companion book focused on one other character, but I would say just kind of like an extended universe of the original daughter. And part of. You know, you mentioned the fact that OGU is really, like, focused on Genevieve. I think that's really by design, because I am somebody who. I feel like when I'm writing a book, I need to really understand every single thing that happens in a book. And so a big part of why this book took so long to write, because I really had to wrangle one focus point. I was like, I had to sit down with myself at some point and be like, all right, stop writing every single thing that happens in this universe. Because this isn't like a video game where you go in and everywhere you click, there's, like, a new avenue to go down. We really need to get it down to one story. Let's just sit down and think about what this one story is. And I was like, all right, Jen, you're up. You go. And so she became the center of this book that really held it together. And her family. She and her family. But, you know, if left up to me, this would be like a really messy vine that grew in 500 different directions and covered the outside of her building.
- [42:12]
D
Writing out about Taylor Swift all too well. 10 minute version. I'm like, I need the whole cut now.
- [42:19]
B
Well, maybe one day I'll come back to it. I really do feel like I was writing it so intensely, this companion book, so intensely. And then once this book came out, I was like, well, none of my business anymore. This world is none of my business. I'm very happy it's done. Goodbye. And I worked on something else. But maybe one day I'll come back. We'll see. Sorry, Nicholas, were you saying something about video games?
- [42:39]
C
Well, no, I was just going to say someone who plays a lot of video games with, like, a lot of sprawling characters. I appreciate the analogy to kind of having a massive list of characters and quests and all that, but I think this is a great place to end our conversation with Jemima Way, author of the Original Daughter. Jemima, two final questions for you. Where can people find work, not just this book, but all of your work and what's next for you? I believe you kind of mentioned you're working on a second book right now.
- [43:08]
B
So you can find all my work on my website, really? Gemmawe.com, j E M M A W-E I.com or I'm Gemmawe on everything. So all forms of socials. That's my username. And I am working on another book. It is going a little slowly because I'm on tour right now. So I've been doing events for the Original Daughter ever since the book came out pretty regularly. And so being in one narrative mind space makes it a little difficult to move in and out of that space when I'm moving into a different imaginative landscape. But it is something I'm excited about. And, you know, when I started writing the Original Daughter, I thought it was really contemporary, but because I took 11 years to publish it, people are like, oh, you know, why did you decide to write historical fiction? So the way I describe my new book is it's contemporary to me right now, and I really hope it will continue to be contemporary by the time it comes out.
- [44:00]
C
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon, on Twitter ickrigordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asiareviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter at Book Reviews Asia and you can find many more author reviews at the New book network and newbooksnetwork.com Naomi where can people find you?
- [44:18]
D
Oh, also my website, naomyshuelegant.com and my book is called Ginkgo Season. And yeah, this is a great conversation.
- [44:28]
C
We're all favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends, support us interviewing those writing in, around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more news. Who's coming up on show? But before then, Jemima, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [44:44]
B
Thank you so much for having me. This is so fun.