Jemimah Wei’s debut novel, The Original Daughter (Doubleday, May 2025), aches. It aches with the weight of the unsaid, the scourge of perceived betrayal, and the bitter nut of jealousy. But underlying all of it, it aches with love. When Gen is eight, a seven-year-old girl named Arin comes to live with her family and goes on to become her co-conspirator, rival, friend, but most of all—her sister. As the years pass in fast-changing Singapore, Gen and Arin grow up surrounded by friends who are wealthier and more privileged than they are, parents who are struggling to make ends meet, and an environment that pressures them to achieve success and academic glory at every corner. But even as they struggle, they always have each other. Until they don’t. One day, every tiny cut of envy, doubt, and insecurity that the girls have set aside bursts forth, in a single act of betrayal that sends them reeling apart. A sisterhood split asunder.

Jemimah and I come from the same humid part of the world (Jemimah, Singapore, and me, Malaysia), but we met, as one does, at an author event in New York City. It was a joy to read and feel words from our hot, sticky region. But beyond that, there’s real wonder in Jemimah’s story about sisterhood and Singapore. It captures a world that is imperfect yet undeniably true. Over email, we had an expansive conversation about The Original Daughter, falling asleep as a stress response, and why romantic love does not always have to be the center of a good story.

Vanessa Chan: One of the fascinating things that threads its way through The Original Daughter is the idea of surpassing one’s parents and not having a generational roadmap for how to live. Ma is a librarian and later works at a photocopy shop, a childcare center, and a grocery shop. Pa is a taxicab driver. It is clear from the outset that Gen and Arin will overtake their parents very quickly, but both must find their way in rapidly advancing Singapore without the roadmap their more privileged classmates have. Is this something you have experience with or have observed?

Jemimah Wei: We’re a young country, sixty this year, but the country has already been renovated several times over by progress. You could get whiplash from watching the way the country has changed. It’s fascinating to me, because the change is both reactive and strategic – the country has always kept one eye on how economic transformation relies on national narrative and global perception, and another on how the emotional temperature of its citizens fluctuate in response to these demands.

But on a local level, there is an immense cognitive dissonance to living precariously in one of the richest countries in the world. The skills which were crucial to a country in its developmental stages are often cast adrift in an accelerated world that runs on automation, and for many of these people, adaptability must become the key to moving forward. Learning to cope is a soft psychological skill that we don’t talk about much, but it’s also a skill that’s inherited. You model perspective on approaches you’ve seen, and while Gen is watching her parents, Arin is watching her.

VC: Singapore has been represented in recent media as a place of wealth and excess (see: Crazy Rich Asians). The Original Daughter is set in a Singapore with void deck aunties, hawker stalls, taxicab drivers – the working class that doesn’t ordinarily find itself drawn in literature. Was this the Singapore of your life? And was there a conscious effort to “deglamorize” Singapore?

JW: Singapore is home to immense wealth — the world of Crazy Rich Asians isn’t untrue. It’s just not the only story. The lived reality of many Singaporeans, myself included, isn’t like that, and I was very conscious of how literary narratives that have emerged in the global publishing landscape are often penned by those who could afford to leave. Due to generational wealth, due to riding the wave of opportunities, etc. For me, who lived one way most of my life then had a sudden, abrupt switch of circumstances due to work and scholarships, it can sometimes feel like I’m holding two realities in my brain—one of tradition, one of reinvention—and I’m not willing to let one supersede the other. It’s a fertile junction for me, artistically, and not an uncommon one amongst my peers.

As to your point on the working class, I suppose that’s what the characters are. But it wasn’t as if I deliberately set out to write a social novel, though if you’re true to representing the world of your characters then these things become evident in the telling. Of course, the characters are worried about money, who isn’t, but they’re also thinking of french fries, of charisma, of pettiness. It was important to me to decouple wealth from joy, to show the full dignity of lives that aren’t and shouldn’t be categorized only by their proximity to privilege.

There is an earnest glamor to love, to the delights of being deeply and physically attuned to the life you have, to being able to derive a sense of well-being from intimately sharing silence with a loved one or sucking nectar from a wildflower. I think that can be a point of ambition too, aspiring towards companionability with others and the self, while suffering under the discipline of realism.

VC: The Original Daughter is a novel about love and the ways love fractures. The love between sisters, the love between parents and children, the love of chosen family. Yet one kind of love that’s conspicuously absent is romantic love. Was this a deliberate choice?

JW: Oh, absolutely. Something I was very clear about from the beginning was that my debut would be a love story, but not a romance.

Growing up, books and shows were saturated with romance as the gravitational storytelling force, and although I love a good Taiwanese drama as much as the next person, I was weary of the overall prioritization of the hierarchy of romance in so much of media. For much of your formative years, your key emotional relationships are with other women, with family, with non-romantic partners. I wanted to show that these relationships are not so easily unseated by the appearance of romantic interests, who, in those early years, are often temporary. The immensely intimate love, enmeshment, and heartbreak of platonic relationships can be tsunamic. 

VC: This novel aches. It is not light by any means – and deals with the rage and estrangement of sisters, parents, grandparents, and even death. Was it tough to write? How do you separate the ache on the page from the joy of your life?

JW: My body’s stress response tends to be to simply fall asleep, and it mortifies me to think of the amount of spontaneous napping that happened in the process of writing this book, sometimes in public…

But in response to separating ache and joy, the truth is nothing ails me more than not writing. Writing itself, even when immensely difficult, is the primary, most consistent source of joy and contentment in my life. If I must struggle, I’d rather it be on the page.

VC: Genevieve, the “original” daughter, fears abandonment which causes her to withdraw, essentially forcing her sister Arin away. What draws you to the theme of abandonment? And what do Gen and Arin have to learn about abandonment?

JW: Abandonment wasn’t a primary focus in my writing so much as it was the product of a long wrangle with self-regard. The struggles the girls have with abandonment, envy, and boundaries all spring from efforts to tolerate and develop relationships with their own less savory qualities. Arin, in particular, has a lot to learn about her relationship to self-abandonment in the face of conflict. That’s something I’m drawn to more: how we come to confront ourselves when all narrative is stripped away.

VC: This novel took you nine years to write, coinciding with the earliest parts of the pandemic. How did that influence your writing?

JW: When speaking in retrospect I think we often impose a casual narrative onto our journeys; it’s inevitable for writers to narrativize, but I wonder how helpful it is. As a young writer I was horribly discouraged whenever I heard of writers who seemed to have it all figured out, the map of their influences, the sequential steps of their process. For me it was all very messy and desperate. My head felt tangled up for much of the nine years. I was plagued by the sense that I wasn’t mature enough to handle the vision I had for the book. And I was totally felled by the pandemic, which was, for me, a long tunnel of hopelessness. Maybe I fed some of that hopelessness into the book and made their desperation more convincing, I don’t know. I would like to believe so, if only so I can believe that period was meaningful in any quantifiable way.

VC: Speaking of narrativization, this story grapples with the idea of theft—what parts of our life story do we own, and what parts of ourselves do we owe to and share with others? Do we own our lineage? What about our stories? Our traumas? What do you think about ownership?

JW: I think this is one of those yes, and questions. We’d like to believe the lines between our lives are clean cut, when part of every relationship consists of co-creating a life together. How can we love without giving ourselves totally over to the other? How can we inhabit narrative without letting it cannibalize our sense of self, and vice versa?

VC: Pressure permeates this book, especially the pressure to “succeed” and embrace what one of the characters calls the “season of success.” A lot of this has to do with the markers of success that both Gen and Arin have been told they have to achieve.

JW: Pressure is pretty endemic to Singaporean society. I feel suspicious of movements that purport to disengage from markers of success in hyper-competitive, cosmopolitan capitalist societies. I think that’s just stress undergoing a branding revamp, so now you’re not just expected to succeed, you’re expected to succeed while disguised as being mentally well. The truth is that when you fall off the bandwagon, it can be incredibly hard to climb back up, especially when you witness life accelerating onwards without you.

But the girls aren’t just pressured, they’re also addicted to the pressure in some ways. They love the feeling of achieving, of winning. The myth of meritocracy can isolate your perception of progress in the singular, instead of locating your life as part of larger machinations, in a way that makes the thrill and despair of success so intensely personal.

VC: Gen’s (and Arin’s) relationship with their mother is enduring and illustrates some of the most emotionally resonant parts of the novel. Can you talk about how the relationship between children and parents matter to this book?

JW: Your parents give you the tools to separate yourself from them, it’s a process born of love but one that can be very painful. Specific to this novel I was thinking a lot about the boundaries between independence and intimacy, especially in the formation of a self, and how difficult and worthy a venture it is to develop a love that withstands life’s seas of change. There is a melancholy that accompanies every transition, part of the challenge is to accept it with an expanding view of what love and relationships can be rather than instinctively reject it as a marker of failure.

VC: Gen is a flawed and sometimes frustrating protagonist because she often cannot see what’s in front of her. What is your relationship to “unlikeable” narrators?

JW: I feel terrible affection for unlikeable narrators. It makes it very hard for me to dislike difficult people in real life, especially since I’ve spent a long time in the psychological living room of a frustrating character who’s ultimately trying her best to forge a life she can live with.

VC: This is a novel about withholding. Much is left festering and unsaid. And yet, the reader is never lost because the motivations and psychology of the characters are clear, even when they rarely say what they want or mean. What is the secret to successful interiority?

JW: There’s a revision practice I do, called the “Emotional Synopsis,” where in between drafts I create an emotional map of the entire book, documenting the book’s events with emotional motivations and interior conflicts alongside the facts. It’s adapted from a revision exercise in Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done – his version is to keep the novel’s outline to pure facts, but because of this novel’s nature, it works better for me to have psychological conflict woven in. I go over this emotional synopsis again and again, getting a macro view of the characters’ changing inner lives, revising it and working out the bloats and kinks, before going back to the book with targeted solutions.

I think murkiness on the page can often result from a lack of clarity in the writer’s own vision. It’s crucial to me to fully understand why characters are doing what they’re doing so that I can track the way they process their own actions on the page. That way, the reader can experience their minds working in real story time to understand themselves, even when the characters might find their own intentions opaque.

VC: The Original Daughter passes through a significant expanse of years very seamlessly. How did you orient time? Was it challenging?

JW: Awful. In writing, in life, it often feels like time exists purely to frustrate me. At some point I was creating actual Google Calendars for the characters, to fill in the activities of their daily living in order to get a minute sense of the lives they lived. This responsibility to document time passing in their lives weighed heavily on me, but it was Keri Bertino, actually, who suspected that I was cornered by time and said, and I have to quote verbatim because it was so incredible: I encourage you to release yourself from the obligation to narratively account for all that time. Hearing that was like she’d cut something loose for me. It’s true, why did I have to show the girls laboring over algebra or learning the administrative ropes at a new job? I marked all the places that felt uninteresting to me and axed them, then found a way to incorporate missing story information elsewhere.

VC: We all acknowledge that writing is a lonesome endeavor, but I know that community is important to you, something you strive to build everywhere you go. Why is that?

JW: Writing is a lonesome endeavor, but in the long, undefined yet crucial period before you’ve finished your first book, it can often also feel like Schrodinger’s endeavor—if you stop writing right now, no one knows, no one cares. The book which isn’t, can feel like it never was. That period of time is vital for experimentation, for taking real risks in your work outside of external expectation, but it’s often very difficult to endure. What sustained me through this long season was passionate conversations about books, thinking aloud, together, about craft and writing, being excited and disappointed and hopeful alongside friends who were all serious about their art. Community, which for me is analogous to friendship, reflects back the reality of our artistic endeavors in a way that solidifies its existence.

Growing up in Singapore, which doesn’t have the same access to resources, publishing, and infrastructure, this wasn’t always a given, and writers here have had to work hard to build these relationships with each other and ourselves, to take our dreams seriously in a culture of extreme pragmatism. But part of having no fixed roadmap is a terrifying and challenging freedom to build the life we actually want to live. Once you commit to writing you’re already living outside the societally prescribed models of how a life looks. We don’t have to jump from one narrative to another, to live in the box of struggling artist, isolated writer, social butterfly, to think of writing in the same terms of production as other material goods. We can take and leave what works for us. For me, what that looks like is channeling my Singaporean pragmatism into figuring out what makes my writing life psychologically, economically, and artistically sustainable, and a large part of that is balancing my writing with the relationships that surround it.

VC: Who did you write this book for?

JW: Initially, just for me. But now that I’ve finished it, I hope it finds the people who most need to hear that love can be a life raft for them, too.