Introspective Incineration

By Ashley Marilynne Wong

Review of The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei (New York: Doubleday, 2025)

Cover of The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei.

Image description: Book cover illustration showing the title in white letters against an orange background with many pink crescent moons; one red crescent stands out from the rest.

Blooming with booming quietude and gleaming with silvery precision, Singaporean author Jemimah Wei’s literary debut, The Original Daughter, gently but self-assuredly nudges the reader towards a cheek-by-jowl confrontation with the nihilistic-and-nectarine duality that is human introspection. It tells the story of two non-biological sisters, one of whom is adopted at the age of seven, from a poor Malaysian family into a marginally better-off working-class home in Singapore. In such a manner, the author subverts the ‘rags to riches’ trope all too prevalent in fictional adoption narratives, those featuring working-class children taken in by middle-class families who afford them, pun not intended, lives the adoptees could never have imagined. There is a resolutely and resonantly quiet poise to the way Wei explores the sisters Genevieve and Arin’s relationship, and how their parents wade through the muddy waters of working-class life in search of better futures for the siblings; as well as how the two young women ascend the academic ladders towards their ‘Singaporean dreams’. But it is Genevieve’s first-person narration that strikes the deepest chord in the reader – particularly the way it inevitably functions as the incineration of not just Arin’s perspective and voice, but also Genevieve’s own suppressed sorrows. Indeed, through introspection as incineration, the author cleverly puts her powerful narrative palms to the reader’s eyes, shielding them from that blurriest of lines between self-reflection and its ‘Frankenstein’s monster’: relentless and stifling rumination. The kind that is turned against both oneself and others, scorching and grounding deep desires and inherited traumas to – albeit unquiet and untamed – ashes.

The Original Daughter is in its essence a tragedy – a literary family saga narrated by Genevieve, the older amongst the two sisters, who is also the titular original daughter of the Yang family. It is set between Singapore and New Zealand, spanning the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. Genevieve’s narration of the entire novel, particularly due to her restrained yet self-aware voice, evokes a long, smooth, consistent hush, one that is forceful enough to make the reader lean metaphorically closer and listen, as it were, more actively. Not just to what she has repressed within herself, for that matter, but also to Arin’s perspective, which is deliberately left out of the story. Her response to the news of Arin’s impending arrival to the Yang home serves as an opening or introductory sketch to the artwork that is her coolly perceptive and passionately detached style of contemplation:

In this home, everything was something and also something else. The living room was also my grandmother’s bedroom. The dining table was also my mother’s study. In the one bedroom, my parents and I were stacked. Growing up, I slept each night cocooned between both parents, their hands finding each other over my growing body and latching on so they wouldn’t fall off either side of the bed. Already they had begun fretting over what they’d do when I grew too big for the bed, a point I diligently endeavored to delay for as long as possible by rationing out my meals. Which begged the question: Another child? Where would we put her?

Indeed, the internalised – and compartmentalising – ‘everything is something but also something else’ life motto foreshadows and later forms the essence of the unspoken agreement Genevieve has with herself concerning what to tell and leave out of her family story. It also functions as a selective hearing aid that mutes Arin’s silent scream of vulnerability, a muted agony that is an all-too-natural response to her forced transplantation from Malaysia to Singapore after her and Genevieve’s grandfather’s demise.

To contextualise, though Arin and Genevieve aren’t biological sisters, they did have a loose blood tie in the form of their grandfather, who left behind Genevieve’s father and paternal grandmother in Singapore to relocate to Malaysia without his wife and son’s knowledge. He was presumed dead, until, ironically enough, two weeks after his actual death, which is the point at which Genevieve’s narration begins. In the first part of the novel – after the prologue – she recounts how her grandmother receives a letter from Arin’s father besieging her to adopt his youngest child, a girl about Genevieve’s age. Though it is not the first letter her grandmother has received from Arin’s father, Genevieve’s grandmother misleads her family to believe it is, not out of malice but owing to avoidance, a conflict-resolution style Genevieve’s parents also practise in times of both internal and external disharmonies. And it is the family’s avoidantly attached interactions, or rather non-interactions, that soon imprint themselves in eight-year-old Genevieve’s mind, colouring and clouding her relationship with her adopted sister. And even the world at large.

Genevieve’s unsuccessful attempts at making Arin feel at ease in her new home, for example, lead her to give up and resolve to help her adopted sister go home. On the surface, she seems to be motivated by altruism – especially as viewed through her introspective eyes – but considered in the light of her consistent response to conflicts as the novel progresses, that decision appears much more nuanced. When Arin’s home-going mission is thwarted by the revelations in Genevieve’s grandmother’s stash of letters from her own father, when she learns that her father intended to send her away all along and it was not a mistake as she previously believed, Arin realises that Genevieve’s house is her only home. But Genevieve’s grandmother, incensed by the discovery that Arin and Genevieve have been going through her letters, wants Arin gone and speaks to her cruelly. In the heat of the moment, Genevieve reacts to her grandmother’s meanness in a way she herself cannot comprehend: she flushes her grandfather’s ashes – brought to the old woman by Arin’s father in exchange for his daughter’s permanent new home – down the toilet. This is a protective instinct and an act of solidarity, but I think it is also much more than those things. In the context of Genevieve’s conflict-resolution style, it is possible that she sees her grandfather’s ashes as a deterrent to a harmonious familial environment which she feels obliged to restore, one that now includes Arin in the picture. Upon incinerating her grandfather’s ashes by water, Genevieve’s parents and grandmother’s distress lead her to incinerate her guilt and shame by asking for fire to be set on her flesh, to, again, preserve her family harmony alongside her internal one:

Instead of running to my mother, I turned and retrieved the peanut butter jar, then slowly lifted the feather duster from where it hung by the bathroom door. With my hand wrapped around its severe cane handle, I approached the three of them: him, my grandmother, my mother, locked in a deformed triangle of despair. My grandmother didn’t move, but her eyes followed me, latching on to the freshly washed jar, still shining damply, in my hands.

Because of The Original Daughter’s subtle and quiet narrative style, I am well aware of how easy it is for the reader to project their own interpretations – and perhaps even insecurities – onto the story and its narrator. However, an incident that lends the book its eeriness is worth remarking upon. It takes place when Arin and Genevieve are young adults, with Arin having become a viral game streamer and reviewer on YouTube, and Genevieve the manager of an ice cream parlour. Arin’s popularity has made her the recipient of numerous gifts from different companies eager for her to sample their products. Providing signatures upon receiving those deliveries proves to be challenging for her, as she is either at the recording studio or her university. Genevieve, who similarly has her own work and study commitments, offers the ice cream parlour she manages as the delivery venue so that she can sign the parcels on Arin’s behalf. But when a devastating fallout between the sisters occurs, a fallout that is neither their first nor last, Arin stops redirecting those parcels to Genevieve’s workplace. Genevieve’s response to her own guilt, hurt and confusion is to displace those emotions onto a colleague who comments on the deliveries by snapping at the coworker and treating her coldly for weeks, resulting in her – at least according to Genevieve – ‘unexpected’ resignation. This retaliation, whilst seemingly petty on the surface, has much to reveal about Genevieve’s deep discomfort with conflicts, for it is only the tip of her behavioural iceberg. Later in the novel, it is this same punishing withdrawal – of love, affection and care – that she would resort to when she discovers that, in an attempt to discourage her from going to New Zealand out of concern for her safety, her mother has been secretly corresponding with her employer, imploring the latter to reconsider his decision to hire her daughter. This leads to Genevieve blocking her mother on her contact list when she arrives at New Zealand and muting her calls with Arin each time her adopted sister tries to talk about her mother, effectively cutting Su out of her life for years until her eventual return to Singapore. What complicates matters is that by this point, by the time of Genevieve’s homecoming, a betrayal has broken her and Arin’s soul-sisterhood, grounding it to dust through Genevieve’s deep hurt and struggle to let go, even when Su becomes terminally ill and longs for the sisters to reunite as a dying wish. This, inevitably, leads to multiple levels of both internal and external undoing for Genevieve and her splintered family.

In that light, though The Original Daughter may not blare or scream tragedy through its narrator’s incantatory introspection and its slow pace, it detonates nonetheless as it charts, like a well-programmed time bomb, the implosive fragmentation and disintegration of a family of five, to one of four, three, two … and finally, one. And all this, its tone, atmosphere and plot – all of it deepens the magnitude of the novel’s tragic elements, not despite but because of its lack of drama and fanfare. Indeed, Jemimah Wei’s debut novel is a profound lesson in the beautiful, powerful and, albeit perfectly subtle, psychospiritual properties of restraint.

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Ashley Marilynne Wong graduated with a degree in English with Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Spillwords and Dark Winter Literary Magazine. In 2021, she won the YOUth of Tomorrow writing competition with her poem ‘Six Ways to Expose Your Daughter to Domestic Abuse. As an unapologetic bookaholic, Ashley tends to read for at least three hours daily – occasionally all day.

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