The Time it Takes: author Jemimah Wei on the writing of her dazzling story of ambition and sisterhood, The Original Daughter.
I was recently on a panel in Bangkok talking about my debut novel, and afterwards someone came up to me and asked, very sincerely: “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you take so long to finish this book?”
The Original Daughter
In the year since The Original Daughter came out, variations of this question have been posed many times. Honestly, I get it. The Original Daughter, my first born and debut, took nine years to write and eleven to publish. When I set down her first words on paper in 2014, I had no idea the book was going to take a decade of my life. I recall, in early 2019, being horrified that I was 5 years in with nothing to show for it but 80,000 sprawling words and a loose idea of the book’s events.
I applied to an MFA and moved across continents, telling myself this was my last serious shot at finishing the novel. It took a pandemic, another 3 moves, and another 4 years to finish a full draft. I restarted the novel multiple times, she existed with different titles, in different forms. I came at her with different point of views, tried fitting her into all kinds of narrative structures, and walked away more times than I could count. But novels are hard to abandon, and I’m stubborn. Every new thing I wrote looped me back to her, every theory I had on fiction and character folded itself into the book’s psychology even as I decimated the original story and rebuilt her brick by brick.
Finally, I looked up one day in 2023 and she was done. I couldn’t believe it. Of my original draft in 2014, only one line remained unchanged.
Love is an action word
Love is an action word. It can be committed, like a crime.
With hindsight, of course, things become clearer. Or you cherry-pick memories to fit a standing theory; mine is that the novel’s driving question was always about what love can endure. Certainly I put my characters’ love for each other through the paces, I wanted to investigate the limits of a non-romantic love that existed outside the capitalistic structures of society. How chosen family could keep choosing each other over and over again, what the boundaries are between independence and intimacy.
All of that is true. But perhaps some people can stay single-mindedly focused on one question for a full decade; I can’t. The more honest answer is that at different times, the book has been different things — depending on the year, the season of life I was in, even depending on my mood, this novel has been a treatise on the usefulness of daydreaming; the new frontier of the digital age; the currency of self-image; mental health issues in aging men; our exploitative, consumptive relationship to nature; how we live in a rapidly changing society; how failure makes us act and feel.
Immigration and Identity
I remember being convinced this was a novel about immigration, and being equally convinced that this was a novel about integrity. My shifting questions and focus meant that each time I sat down I was writing a draft that was oriented slightly differently; the result is a novel comprised of many layers built upon each other, inseparable from the book’s original seed of two sisters desperate to hold on to each other even as their individual ambitions and fates drive them further and further apart.
Reading and writing fiction is one of those acts that fundamentally rewires your relationship to time. You could traverse a year in story-time within a paragraph, you could spend five years figuring out the psychology of a single day in a character’s life.
You can simultaneously experience the writing process as an unending eternity and as an acceleration through multiple lifetimes. After aging and de-aging characters, going into their far histories in order to plant ideas that motivate their present-day pettiness, and playing 5D chess with their chronologies, it was a bit of a shock to emerge from the novel to the realization that time, for me, for the world, had moved only in one direction. To the tune of nine years.
While writing, I thought of the novel as firmly contemporary; she was introduced at one of my events as historical fiction. Another shock to me, but in some ways, true.
Singapore
Given how rapidly Singapore develops, how quickly things are tested and culled, The Original Daughter’s fidelity to her relatively recent time period — 1996-2015 — has rendered her a sort of living historical document. Innocuous story elements I hadn’t thought twice about including, like the gossipy void deck aunties that form the novel’s chorus, are quickly disappearing in reality; new housing projects no longer include void decks, the open hangout areas on ground levels of Singaporean apartment buildings.
Once a uniquely Singaporean feature I worked hard to contextualize within the novel for international readers, void decks will now be something the novel translates for new generations of Singaporeans. If I did my job right, they’ll feel as real as anything beyond the page.
And so the novel is a container too, with its own chronological atmosphere. She exists outside the relentless onward stream of time, loyal only to the period she was conceived in. Readers often tell me the novel makes them yearn for their childhood, that reading it feels like reliving a lost age. For me, too. When I look at the novel, I see nine years of wandering, questioning, I see a map of the way time and I have changed. That I can enter my past, hold it in my hands as a separate entity from myself, is something that humbles me. Nine years: the bracket that scoops up the novel’s consciousness. Nine years: the time it takes.
(c) Jemimah Wei
Author photograph (c) Amanda Wong
About The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei:
Singapore, 1996. Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in Bedok, she is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead.
At once collaborators and sisters, Gen and Arin grow up inseparable, navigating the intensity of life in working-class Singapore – where urgent insistence on achievement demands self-immolation in the realms of imagination, work, and play. But as the rapidly modernising, winner-takes-all world threatens to leave one behind as the other’s star rises exponentially, the sisters must weigh their allegiances and bonds, the cost of success and ultimately reckon with who they’ve become. What results is a story that cracks open the fault lines of Singaporean society, our desperate need for acceptance and our yearning to be loved.
Vivid and visceral, The Original Daughter is a breathtaking act of empathy by a new literary star.
Order your copy of The Original Daughter online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
