Singaporean Jemimah Wei, who lives in the Bay Area, 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 with 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: "My independence from her was hard won... if she came home, I wasn't certain I could leave her again." With meticulous detail, Wei unfurls the aching provenance of the family's irreparable fracture.
"Arin didn't appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven." Eight-year-old Gen was living with her parents and grandmother, when a letter resurrected her "politically 'disappeared' " grandfather, long presumed dead. He had, in fact, been living in Malaysia for decades with a second, "secret family." A rusty nail accelerated his recent demise, leaving a "gaggle of grandchildren" without enough resources for this other son and daughter-in-law to raise them all. Perhaps because Arin was "the youngest, and a girl," the family relinquished her to her Singaporean relatives.
Arin's arrival is, predictably, disruptive. Pa is the first pushed out--literally. His place in the family bed, where Gen had always slept "cocooned between both parents," is usurped by Arin. Grandmother dies soon after. Meanwhile, a complex, albeit failed, attempt to return Arin home provides an "illicit thrill of collaboration" that ironically inspires a "Contract of Sisterhood," to be "sisters, forever and ever, till death do us part. Amen." Despite their 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
Shelf Talker: First-time novelist Jemimah Wei poignantly, affectingly observes an extended family that sunders from dysfunction and betrayals in The Original Daughter.