Singapore-born author Jemimah Wei opens her resonant debut, The Original Daughter, at "the end," in May 2015 Singapore. Gen, short for Genevieve, is the titular daughter whose mother has received a fatal cancer diagnosis, and has just four to six weeks left to live. "Call your sister... I want to see you and Arin together one last time," Ma implores. Gen knows Arin, now an internationally in-demand actor, would "drop everything and reappear," but even after four years of silence, Gen is desperate to maintain separation. With meticulous detail, Wei unfurls the aching provenance of the family's irreparable fracture.
Eight-year-old Gen was living with her parents and grandmother, when "[Arin] was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven," relinquished from their relatives after the recent demise of a "politically 'disappeared' " grandfather, long presumed dead. He had, in fact, been living in Malaysia for decades with a second, "secret family."
Despite the sisters' closeness--or perhaps because of it--what Gen deems Arin's betrayals begin as teens, including an award-winning school essay publicly exposing family shame, and mining Gen's trauma for the screen as young adults. Excising Arin might be Gen's only option to survive.
Although Gen's relentless, self-admitted "hubris" occasionally threatens to weigh down the narrative, Wei's glorious phrasing and revelatory observations provide buoying antidotes: "simply ripping away the gauze of courtesy"; "our desperate arms locked around each other, both snare and salvation." Pa's simple declaration, "Now we are five," proves to be prescient warning of inevitable upset. From there, Wei reveals a tragic, haunting exercise in the limitations of not-quite unconditional love. --Terry Hong