By Vika Mujumdar
“Arin didn’t appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven. And she left like this too: suddenly, decisively[,]” begins Genevieve, the narrator of Jemimah Wei’s The Original Daughter. Told in four parts, and moving in time from the present—2015 in Singapore—to the past, the novel tracks sisters Genevieve and Arin in 2000s Singapore. Ambitious and wide-ranging in scope, The Original Daughter is a meditation on sisterhood, place, and what it means to want.
Eight-year-old Genevieve Yang is an only child, living with her parents and grandmother in a one-bedroom flat when Arin arrives, slowly and then all at once, shrouded in mystery. Genevieve’s grandmother has received word from her estranged husband’s second family in Malaysia—in the wake of his passing, burdened by financial difficulties, she is asked to take in seven-year-old Arin. In the wake of this complicated family history, Arin’s arrival creates new, fraught familial tensions. Attempting to befriend the quiet, withdrawn Arin, Genevieve offers to help her return to Malaysia, and thereby begins the complicated trajectory of their sisterhood, which will be built on this gesture of simultaneous generosity to Arin, as well as an almost-cruelty to her grandmother she will enact in the process. “Once Arin escaped, who else could I confide in, who else in this stupid, sad world would understand perfectly the perverted jealousy of standing to the side, mesmerized by the sight of their embrace?” asks Genevieve early on; even as they plan Arin’s return, they become a collective, the only people in the world able to understand each other. Arin does not return to Malaysia; Gen’s grandmother finds them as they plan to leave, and Genevieve, in a moment of cruelty caught up in her desire to protect Arin, flushes the ashes of her grandfather into the sewer systems of Singapore. And so begins the cycle of cruelty both to and for each other, that will come to shape their lives.
Rooted deeply in the postcolonial geographies of Singapore, which are turbulently marked by globalization and development, Genevieve and Arin’s lives unfold amidst shifting social and financial circumstances, marked by both privilege and precarity. At home, both see their mother, with her limitless ambition, thwarted again and again by her lack of educational qualifications. In her desire to transcend the limitations of her job–working at the university library– she begins tuition classes on the side, misrepresenting her university qualifications, which soon results in her losing her job. Alongside, Genevieve and Arin continue their schooling, among children much more privileged than they are—the stakes of this education remain fundamentally higher for the sisters, the means through which they might attain social mobility, as Genevieve’s mother begins a job at a photocopy shop and her father picks up more shifts as a cab driver.
Their first fracture as sisters comes when Arin writes an essay about her abandonment by her first family, her family of birth; Genevieve learns about it from a friend, and the family all attend the award ceremony where Arin will be given her certificate and cash prize. “The feeling she often had, she wrote, was one of loss, yet it was a loss without origin, for with each passing day her life in Singapore grew in vibrance and layered over the remains of her childhood, like in this recurring dream of hers, where she was standing in the center of a small room, ripping the wallpaper off, trying to get at the concrete walls, only to discover the strips of gluey wallpaper were what held the room together, and now it was too late, too late…for without the clarity of memory, what did she have but the few objective facts of her birth and kin?” says Gen, as she reads Arin’s essay. In this breathless stream of consciousness prose, Genevieve’s feeling of betrayal is sharply rendered, a combination of understanding Arin’s circumstances, and yet remaining aware of the acute sense of feeling left behind, unconsidered.
As their schooling progresses, Arin slowly eclipses Genevieve, and they begin to drift apart—while Genevieve struggles, eventually working at an ice-cream shop instead of going to university, Arin excels, first at university, and then at her career working in early online streaming content. “Childish; did I think we’d remain joined at the hip? Life’s acceleration wasn’t her fault, but I still felt forsaken. And her absence intruded on me perpetually[,]” says Genevieve. In this moment, we see this rupture as Genevieve experiences it—she wants the best for her sister, but this desire remains wrapped up in the unfairness of her feeling that the world, and Arin, are passing her by. Eventually, feeling trapped in the impossibility of a career in Singapore, after reaching out to a former wealthy school friend, she takes a job in Christchurch in New Zealand, despite her mother and Arin’s desire for her to stay with them in the one-bedroom apartment that carries history Genevieve cannot escape.
Even as the novel moves in geographic location, it remains firmly rooted in globalizing Singapore—the company Genevieve is hired to work for as a secretary aims to expand into Asia soon. And as Genevieve begins a life away from the only place she has ever known, she remains aware, in the everyday, that her belonging to this place is fraught. As she settles into her life—her job, her small studio, her limited social circle—she becomes cast into the role of the immigrant, the representative of one’s nation. She says: “I suppose these were all signs that I would never be anything but an interloper in Christchurch. No place can exist so unridged except in the imagination; it’s the frictions of living that weave you to a place.” In her leaving Singapore, Genevieve becomes, as we see here, more aware of the tensions of place that shape her life, that have shaped her life, ever since Arin’s first displacement. Amidst the difficulties of making a life alone in Christchurch, Arin comes to visit after Genevieve is assaulted by a stranger while out in Christchurch; soon after, Arin’s first film comes out, and, after Genevieve watches the film, she witnesses the betrayal that now forces them apart more violently than they have been in the past: Arin has used her conversations with Genevieve, her visit, as research for her role as Kimmy. “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, studying me, doing her research, and then lovingly taking it all for her own[,]” says Genevieve, of the experience. Even as Genevieve articulates a betrayal that is shocking in its cruelty, Wei’s prose here gestures to how inextricable their lives are from each other—Kimmy is a symbol of Arin’s new life that takes her away from Genevieve, yet in her noting of Arin looking, Arin questioning, she remains the same girl who arrived, “suddenly, decisively.” Subsequently, after another earthquake in Christchurch, Genevieve’s mother and Arin both repeatedly ask her to come back. Genevieve agrees, eventually, on one condition: that Arin leaves. In Genevieve’s eyes, the flat, their shared history, can only contain one of them.
Arin and Genevieve see each other one final time in the space of the novel. After their mother receives a terminal diagnosis, as Genevieve waits, and waits, and hopes and hopes, she eventually must call Arin—despite their cruelties, they were raised by the same mother, in the same geography; they will be the only two people in the world who understand the weight of this loss. “Her face was transparent with grief. Never in all our years together had I heard her voice sound so utterly lonesome. She had waited and waited for me to call, only understanding too late that as time went by, staying away had been her choice too [,]” says Genevieve of Arin in the aftermath of their mother’s passing. In this moment, finally, Genevieve recognizes Arin—this moment is what catalyzes her ability to see Arin truly in her grief. In this moment, in her articulation of hearing Arin as “lonesome,” Wei reminds us of what Genevieve understands as Arin’s first betrayal of her—the essay that Arin wrote in school, which, in its articulation of Arin’s loneliness, Arin’s feelings about being left here in Singapore, in Genevieve’s reading, discounts her and her family, her parents, her grandmother, who have all welcomed Arin in. In this moment, Genevieve can finally see Arin’s self, aware simultaneously, for the first time perhaps, of both her ambition, and of her generosity and love for her mother, Genevieve’s mother.
In its articulation of ambition, betrayal, and shifting understanding of what success might look like amidst the globalizing effects of the world in the 21st century, The Original Daughter, through the almost-cruelties and cruelties and simultaneously large and generous gestures of love between Genevieve and Arin, draws a complicated and sharply in focus portrait of what it means to be inextricable from the world at large. Sprawling and generous, The Original Daughter renders with precision and clarity the turbulence of sisterhood. In its moments of recognition—and of misrecognition—the novel gets at the heart of what it looks like to be a self in relation to family, what it means to be a daughter and a sister.
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in comparative literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.