Rice with Salt

Review of Homeless: The Untold Story of a Mother’s Struggle in ‘Crazy Rich’ Singapore by Liyana Dhamirah (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2019)
By Mandy Chi Man Lo

Liyana Dhamirah’s debut memoir, Homeless: The Untold Story of a Mother’s Struggle in 'Crazy Rich' Singapore, introduces its readers to the lives of the underprivileged living in the margins of Singapore. The title of this memoir is a direct reference to the high-grossing film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians (CRA). Liyana’s hardship as a homeless mother in Singapore contrasts sharply against the glamorous, luxurious lifestyles of the affluent Singaporean characters depicted in CRA. Indeed, audiences may not be able to reconcile Liyana’s dire situation in Homeless with the polished version of Singapore that is portrayed in the film. In CRA, Singapore is depicted as a wealthy, glittering city with skyscrapers, where people throw extravagant parties regularly. In contrast, Homeless designates itself as an "untold story" about falling through the cracks.

Liyana’s memoir spans from 1999, when Liyana was a teenage girl, to 2018, when she has become a mother of three. To foreground the theme of homelessness, the memoir begins at a time when Liyana, pregnant with her third child, lived on Sembawang Beach in Singapore. It then flashes back to Liyana’s childhood to provide essential context that helps readers understand what she encountered and why she ended up homeless. By foregrounding Liyana’s experience of homelessness and the difficulties she encountered in seeking help for herself and her family, Homeless exposes the systemic imperfections of Singapore’s social service sector.

At one point, the memoir illustrates the discrepancy between the Singapore government’s statistics on home ownership and Liyana’s own experience of homelessness. It cites a Singapore’s Housing Developing Board (HDB) statistic that "80 per cent of Singaporeans live in subsidized HDB flats (of which 90 per cent own their homes).”[1] While these figures provided by the government suggest that Singapore has a high home-ownership rate, they also draw attention away from those who live in the margins. Liyana’s untold story thus questions the official narrative.

In addition to challenging CRA’s slanted depiction of Singapore and the Singapore government’s official narrative of home ownership, the memoir reveals to its readers just how complex the issue of homelessness truly is. Home, for a lot of people, is associated with a sense of security and predictability. It is a place where one feels oriented and in control. If "[h]ome is the place where, when you have to go there, / [t]hey have to take you in," according to the poem "The Death of the Hired Man” by the American poet Robert Frost, Liyana has lost her home since the age of twelve when her parents got divorced. The stability and security that home is supposed to provide was unavailable to Liyana since her teenage years. Due to financial reasons, Liyana, her mother, grandmother, and three siblings had to move from place to place in order to find an affordable shelter. As the author explains, "[t]he housing choices were plentiful, but [their] budget was not.” One of the accommodations they could afford was "a three-room flat[2] in [their] old neighbourhood of Yishun, which came equipped with an old squatting toilet. Worn down and barely holding up as it was, the flat wasn’t the best possible choice for a family.” Despite being a hard-working, talented child with aspirations, Liyana sacrificed her dream of studying law and opted for practicing Malay dance so that she could assist with household expenses by performing at social events for extra money at a young age.

Rather than providing blunt assertions of her daily stress, the author unfolds her story by using vivid language that helps readers visualize the harshness of her situation. For instance, she emphasizes the bleakness of her family’s plight by tacitly comparing it with wartime experiences:

The lack of food and money, while affecting me at school, was even more detrimental at home. Once, my mother fell sick and ran a high fever for three consecutive days. We had no choice but to live off instant noodles and plain rice without any eggs or vegetables. My grandmother taught me how to eat rice with salt—she told me that it was how people sustained themselves during the Japanese Occupation. There wasn’t a single dollar to purchase anything beyond that.

Liyana takes the readers on a compellingly emotional journey by using imagery that allows readers to envision her stressful and dire circumstances. In these grim instances, Liyana’s calm narration is very effective in moving the readers. Indeed, in Homeless, Liyana’s desperation did not reach its climax until she recognized that her family could no longer afford a house in Singapore and was forced to move to Johor Bahru, Malaysia. However, even the narration of her involuntary departure is matter-of-fact. The unembellished and unpretentious narration reveals Liyana’s endurance in the face of adversity.

Liyana’s resilience is again proven when she recounts her homeless experience on a beach. Camping on a beach in Singapore without a valid permit, Liyana had to stay vigilant for fear of getting into trouble with the National Parks Board officers. Moreover, the frequent, unpredictable rainstorms in Singapore made long-term camping difficult. Nevertheless, Liyana was swift in adapting to her new living conditions. Not only is her depiction of her homeless experience vivid, but also her attitude towards difficulties is impressive. Through showing rather than telling, Liyana’s memoir invites the readers to witness her emotional and psychological growth on a visceral level, even if they have never before experienced homelessness. It enables them to draw their own conclusions about homelessness as a significant yet underreported social issue in Singapore.

Regardless of the variety of challenges that Liyana has had to face since young, she embraced adverse situations with courage. As she proclaimed at an encounter with an unfavorable experience, "adversity [taught her] to rejoice in the smallest victories. [She] began to appreciate the most minute things in life.” Instead of bemoaning her misfortune, she remained hopeful for her future. These hopeful moments intensify the emotional bond between the reader and Liyana. Although readers may not have the exact experience Liyana describes, they have undergone unfavorable incidents and bad times, and thus are able to relate to her plight.

In addition, despite the Singaporean setting and characterization, the memoir is not confined to Singapore in the sense that its major themes of economic marginalization, homelessness, and teenage motherhood resonate with the social issues faced by people in other parts of the world. For example, Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always—an American film that premiered in 2020 and has since received a number of international awards—shares the same concern about teen pregnancy. Hittman’s 17-year-old protagonist Autumn is a talented musician absorbed in her own world. The film unfolds Autumn’s unsettling odyssey when she realizes that she is pregnant. Similar to NRSA, Liyana’s memoir ventures into mature girlhood and brings attention to the sensitive topic of teenage motherhood. Although Liyana’s memoir and Hittman’s fictional film have different foci—Liyana on homelessness and Hittman on reproductive rights—both stories paint unflinching, candid portraits of underprivileged, displaced characters. In the scene where Autumn suspects that she is pregnant, the stormy contemplation she sinks into echoes Liyana’s reaction when she discovered her first unexpected pregnancy at the age of sixteen. When Liyana and Autumn realize that they are pregnant, their instant feelings of fear, helplessness, and cluelessness about how to handle the matter are the same.

In Homeless, Liyana is able to present unadorned reality with bracing clarity, which embeds understated but powerful emotions. Longing to see the end of Liyana’s predicament, readers may feel relieved to learn by the end of the memoir that Liyana managed to achieve financial independence. However, when the memoir recounts the process of how Liyana established her own business and explains her entrepreneurship, the narration becomes slightly tedious. Liyana’s entrepreneurship was certainly a significant milestone in her life, as it was an escape from the plight of homelessness. However, the memoir’s attempt to include most, if not all, significant incidents of Liyana’s nineteen years of life in under 130 pages is unsuccessful. The short length of the memoir limits the room for necessary connections and transitions in the story. Hence, the writing in the later part of the memoir resembles an itemized list and becomes relatively less intriguing.

Moreover, although the memoir alludes in its title to the familiar film CRA to spark interest, it does not expound and explode false assumptions about Singapore’s lavish lifestyle. Indeed, the contrast between the two Singapores depicted by the two works could have been highlighted and enhanced had the memoir included a general understanding of Singapore. To accentuate the complexity of the narrative, the memoir might also have provided a more in-depth portrayal of other people involved in Liyana’s journey toward forging a home for herself, such as the homeless community Liyana encountered on Sembawang Beach; Tinta, Liyana’s best friend in secondary school; and Aunty Zainab, who took Liyana’s family in when they needed a place to stay. A lively elaboration about these people would have enriched the narrative arc by showing how Liyana’s family and friends have affected and shaped her character, hence pulling readers more intimately into her life.

Notwithstanding the above reservations, Liyana’s memoir undoubtedly contributes a distinct perspective to the discourses of poverty and homelessness in Singapore. It is perhaps most difficult for memoir writers to genuinely introspect about themselves so as to present an unembellished yet engaging narrative that can effectively speak to readers. In this respect, Liyana’s courage in recalling painful memories, including destitution, rape, and failed marriage, is tremendously admirable, and her book a strong appeal for empathy and action.


[1] The government’s statistics of home ownership can be found in the HDB annual report 2013/2014 and HDB’s description of the development of Singapore’s housing scheme at https://www20.hdb.gov.sg/fi10/fi10320p.nsf/ar2014/home-ownership.html.

[2] Singaporeans refer to an apartment with two bedrooms and one living room as a three-room flat.


Works Cited
Crazy Rich Asians. Directed by Jon M. Chu, performances by Constance Wu and Henry Golding, SK Global Entertainment, 2018.
Frost, Robert. "The Death of the Hired Man." Poetry Foundation. 1914. Web. 28 March 2021.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Directed by Eliza Hittman, performances by Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder, BBC Films, 2020.


Mandy Chi Man Lo is Assistant Professor of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, City University of Macau. She obtained her Ph.D. at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include cosmopolitanism and globalization theories, transnational studies, cultural studies, identity politics, and Asian Literature in English. She has published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, poetry.sg (an online database of Singapore poetry), and EWCC Review.