By Migs Bravo Dutt

Names Have Been Changed
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Tiny Reparations Books (2026) / 272 pages / SGD 44.86

Ophir, not her real name, is a fugitive on the run, who is on Interpol's watchlist no less. She has taken one alias after another, travelling with counterfeit passports to many parts of the world in her attempts to evade capture. It has been a decade now since she fled from everything she has known – her real identity, her ancestral home, her family, especially her brother Jacob who has always managed to find her when she played hide and seek as a kid.

It has been a decade of her longing for the smell and taste of home, the Singlish sound with its own lexicon, syntax and semantics distinct from American or British English. Years of holding one odd and gruelling job after another is also starting to take its toll on her physically. But with Jacob's help, Ophir now has a choice to upend her life as a fugitive, to surrender to the authorities, serve her sentence, and begin a clean slate back home.

Will she take this opportunity to redeem herself and reclaim her identity? Or will she remain an unremorseful fugitive in America, a country whose huge size can make it easy for her to blend into the crowd and live under the radar? Names Have Been Changed raises several questions, both moral and philosophical, but these are the main ones it poses to its readers.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow's debut novel is fast-paced and tight, following the Chekhov's gun principle where every element, including the logos written on a cap or a sweater, serves a purpose in the story. The novel follows the exciting but dangerous escapade of a fugitive, and along the way, also invites the reader to reflect on the meaning of inherited identity across multiple dimensions including culture, legal manifestations, and the moulding of one's consciousness.

Names Have Been Changed is structured as a weekly podcast first aired during the Covid lockdown on April 17, 2020. It opens with Ophir describing how the Singapore passport, one of the most powerful in the world, can get one into 190 countries without a visa. However, she sells her Singapore passport in Bangkok after having fled Singapore in the wake of her crime as a money mule. She subsequently buys a fake Hong Kong passport bearing the name of Kara Wong. Ophir does not seem remorseful of her crime, believing it to be a minor one. After all, she is just a bit player in a big web of money laundering. This doesn't stop her from being wistful and wondering what could have been had she surrendered to the police and served her jail time. She would still have that much coveted passport. This sums up her quotidian life on the run:

Instead I'm living in a ho‑hum town in the middle of a so‑so country, working yet another shit job in a long line of shit jobs, with no name to call my own.

Episode 1 tackles Ophir's childhood as the youngest of six children. Her mother dies giving birth to her – a misfortune her older siblings couldn't forgive her for, constantly blaming her for all the unhappiness arising from the absence of a mother. In this large mixed-race family living in a landed house, only her father and Jacob show her love. Not knowing how to navigate the death of her father, exacerbated by lockdown anxiety, Ophir starts the podcast with the help of a friend, Tina.

Ophir recounts how she first met her best friend Nirmala at secondary school, but it is also Nirmala who introduces her to Chong, a member of a money laundering network. Both Nirmala and Ophir are recruited as money mules, starting with petty amounts, but moves on to the second episode with Tina's encouragement as she knows what it is "like to live with a secret and how it eventually assaults (one) on the inside". Tina is the first person to call her Ophir, even pronouncing it perfectly and naturally, hinting to a mystery all her own. As Ophir reflects:

The thing about coming from a tiny country – and I mean, really, one of the smallest countries in the world – is that once you leave, there's no one to talk to about the insider things.

As someone in the diaspora, I resonate with this quote because I, too, always feel the need to talk to another person from my homeland, especially during festive occasions or key cultural moments. I am pleasantly surprised each time I hear the familiar accent of my compatriots and increasingly so the farther away I am from my birthplace.

The next episode shifts to Ophir's life in Tokyo as Kara Wong from Hong Kong, then follows with a series of aliases and a series of countries as far as Quito in Ecuador, the antipode of Singapore.   As Ophir continues her podcast episodes from London and Colorado, Tina, the technology expert, ensures that the podcaster's location is protected. Throughout the lockdown and with each new episode the podcast gained greater traction far and wide, inevitably catching the attention of listeners in Singapore, including that of Jacob, who has now become another technology expert in his quest to find Ophir.

Names Have Been Changed is more than an exciting escapade and a compelling read. It also explores the need for freedom at several levels, the weight of life's choices, and most importantly the courage to ask big questions. To what extent would one push their survival instincts in a world beyond the orderly Red Dot? What, if anything in this world, can make a person give up a much-coveted passport? Yu-Mei Balasingamchow addressed these questions realistically, clearly reflecting human foibles, and challenging one to sit with these imperfections, however uncomfortable they could be.

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