By Crispin Rodrigues

The Original Daughter
Jemimah Wei
Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2025) / 368 pages / SGD 31.15

Jemimah Wei's The Original Daughter was somewhat of an urban legend when I first heard of it. Hot on the heels of Singaporean writers who had been published overseas, like Amanda Lee Koe, Kirstin Chen and Thea Lim, the rights to Jemimah's novel were sold for over $500,000. Then the interviews with The Straits Times, Elle, Harper's Bazaar Singapore. One couldn't help but see the novel promoted in multiple magazines and platforms. It sounds like a dream come true – proof that a Singaporean writer has again broken the glass ceiling into a truly global market.

In terms of presenting the Singaporean socio-economic context, The Original Daughter presents a flipside to media stereotypes of Singapore – the 90s sternness of post-Michael Fay, the opulence of Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians, or even the sliminess of Marvel's Madripoor. Here, Singapore is very much what many politicians allude to when pandering to their middle-class voters: fathers who are taxi drivers and mothers giving tuition and side-hustling while being housewives, with children with ambitions for elite schools. It is this brutal reality that the protagonist Genevieve Yang, or Gen, is born into, and later, where Arin enters. Many of my fellow readers felt divided over this: on the one hand, it presented a reality that was very different from those stereotypical western perceptions of Singapore, and yet, for several Singaporean readers, it presented a cookie-cutter middle class upbringing that felt almost too predictable. To this, I would argue that The Original Daughter attempts to subvert and play to stereotypes at the same time, and how you feel about setting and context really depends on how one is familiar with Singapore's socioeconomic structures, and I will leave the appeal of troubleshooting fiction with reality to the reader's own sentiments of how they would like portrayed on the page.

I am, however, truly fascinated by the premise of Arin's arrival in the Yang family. She is presented first as a silent interloper, forced into a foster family, having to become acquainted with new relations:

I stepped forward.

"Hello," I said. Arin's head whipped around, toward me. I picked up the backpack and offered it to her. When she didn't react, I placed it on the chair. "I'm Genevieve." I thought of the words I'd rehearsed in my head, in preparation for this exact moment. "Your new Jie Jie."

Here, Arin is presented almost mechanically, like an automaton registering her new relationship with Gen the 'Jie Jie'. One almost feels the artificiality of the term framed in the quotation marks, as Gen and the family is forced to reckon with this new daughter in the family. As a result, Arin sets up a wall to his foster family, calling Gen's parents Aunty and Uncle throughout the novel, except for Gen, with whom she even makes a contractual blood oath with as sisters. This sets up the premise of the title in which Gen then views herself as the 'original daughter' while Arin is the secondary sister.

Throughout the novel, the relationship between two sisters is tested as Gen, being the older of the two by a year, becomes the first to encounter various difficulties in growing up. She is exposed to the brutality of Singapore's education system and its overfocus on academic results as she makes seemingly poor academic choices while Arin learns from the mistakes she makes. Likewise, her initial decision to try to audition for a YouTube streaming company becomes Arin's successful opportunity later. Here, the tension between both sisters builds as Gen perceives Arin as the usurper of her success, silently observing her mistakes and stealing her joy:

Childish; did I think we'd remain joined at the hip? Life's acceleration wasn't her fault, but still I felt forsaken. And her absence intruded on me perpetually.

Gen's jealousy towards Arin then becomes a downward spiral to which she views Arin's success as a product of her own failure, which turns Gen into an extremely unreliable narrator despite Arin's best efforts to placate her sister. This is where I find Wei's writing to shine the most, turning Gen into a bitter figure that seems to be her own worst enemy. Despite Arin sharing the spoils of her successful YouTuber career with her sister, Gen rebukes her because of the life she could have possibly led instead of being a glorified PO box for Arin's gifts to accumulate. The sense of animosity that was carried by Arin in the novel's first act transfers over to Gen as she struggles to validate her value in the family as The Original Daughter of the title.

The third act of the novel represents Gen's desire to escape the shadow of Arin. Christchurch gives Gen an opportunity to start anew without the influence of Arin, but at the same time, the tension in her role as unreliable narrator challenges the virtues of the role of sisterhood. Is Gen destroying her own family because of her conceitedness, or is this truly trauma? She is sexually assaulted twice while in Christchurch, and when her sister comes to comfort her while also telling her of her movie that she is starring in, there is a sense of genuine human connection. However, when the film is released containing a scene that simulates sexual assault, Gen assumes that Arin has subconsciously stolen and displayed her own private trauma on the screen. There is a sense of conflict in the reader about Gen's situation. While survivor's trauma is a valid experience, the accusation of Arin as a thief of her situation seems questionable:

When the camera cuts to another close-up of Kimmy's head, fallen to one side, turned to look straight into the camera, I start. Both realities crash into each other, extinguishing the last vestiges of dissonance, of doubt, and for the first time I see things exactly as they are. Kimmy's gone. It's Arin looking back at me, drawing me out, questioning me. Arin holding my hand, coaxing me, doing her research, and then lovingly taking it all for her own.

For Gen, the world is no longer divided into the performative and the real. For her, Arin is deceptive, whether in real life or in her role on the screen. Arin is the changeling that has usurped all aspects of her experience to her benefit. Despite it fermenting across the first three sections of the novel, I struggled at times, wondering if this animosity is warranted, or if Gen is projecting her own insecurities upon Arin to the point where she sees herself blameless in the act of projection. At times, it did make Gen feel very unlikable as a protagonist.

This was why I did find the ending rather expected. Given how Gen has treated Arin, I did not expect that Arin is going to bury the hatchet when Gen's mother passed away. If anything, it felt like Gen's mother is the last lingering connection that Arin has to Gen, and with the death of the mother, there is nothing holding Arin back to the sibling connection with Gen, allowing her to fully realise her ambitions, while Gen fades away as the shadow, no longer needing to validate herself as the 'original daughter'. It is a bittersweet ending, but also one that is quite predictable.

As a Singaporean reader, I never thought in my wildest imagination that the average struggles that young Singaporeans face would ever be seen in an international publication – 'O' and 'A' Levels, tuition, going down a non-standard career path as a YouTube influencer – and yet Wei has put it on an international stage, not as some opinion piece, but a deep and meaningful question of the value of mindless competition and the desire for greater meaning in life. It carries the Singapore ethos proudly but at the same time isn't afraid to get grimy with its social criticisms. I am thankful that Wei has offered a vision of a Singapore that is not exoticised and yet rooted in brutal realism, a vision of Singapore as a real nation with uncomfortable truths.

_____