AWA Book Review: The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei (2025)
- Mandakini Arora
- Sep 8
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 11
By Mandakini Arora
If your book club is looking for a book to mark SG60, The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei is the perfect pick. Published in the United States to great acclaim, this debut novel is by a Singaporean, about Singapore.
The story, from Singapore’s heartland, is narrated in the first person by Genevieve (Gen) Yang, a millennial like the author herself. Gen, her parents, and her father’s mother live “deep in the heart of Bedok” in a one-bedroom HDB apartment, one of “thousands of high-rise concrete slabs across the country.” Gen recalls each rare occasion that she has eaten McDonald’s food, relishing the taste and texture of a fry. Her father is a taxi driver. Her mother, socially higher ranking, was disowned by her parents when she married. Laid off as a librarian, her mother starts selling pirated examination papers at the photocopy shop in the void deck.
With little warning, the Yangs’ already cramped space is further taxed when Gen is eight. A girl from an unknown part of the family in Malaysia is brought to them for adoption. “Arin didn’t appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven.”
The novel opens in 2015. Gen’s dying mother asks a reluctant Gen to contact Arin. The sisters are no longer in contact, and Arin is now a famous actor in the West. We go back in time to Arin’s adoption in 1996 and gradually learn about the sisters’ relationship, one of deep love and small ruptures leading up to a big rupture, which is startling, making the last quarter of the book a page-turner. The drama spans Singapore and Christchurch, New Zealand (during the 2011 earthquake).
Wei uses words expressively — Arin exits a car “violently” in a flash of pink; Gen sees herself through Arin’s seven-year-old eyes — “my blunt bowl cut and determined manner making me seem like an angry little policewoman”; her mother is fired in “a terribly stylish way.” At times the language is too ornate — “The black umbrella cleaved the downpour, enveloping me in a private curtain of despair” — and expository passages tediously long. While some dialogues are originally in Hokkien or Mandarin, in style the dialogues all sounded similar to me and much like the narrator’s voice.
Yet, The Original Daughter is a good story, quietly providing sociological glimpses of Singapore. Hokkien is “the shrinking dialect of [Grandma’s] authority,” as the Chinese dialect-speaking generation dies out. A shop in the neighborhood hawker center, opened by university graduates, serves ice cream, waffle cones, and coffee “at café prices, as if this was the Central Business District.” Collectively, the void-deck aunties add color to the book.
Wei’s insights into the Singapore education system, the social and academic pressures on youth, the challenges low-income families face, and her gentle treatment of mental health issues make for a rich, layered novel.
 | Mandakini Arora co-chairs the Writers’ Group of the American Women’s Association, Singapore, and reviews books for the online AWA Magazine. As travelling_bookmark, she shares book news on Instagram. A collector and writer of women’s stories, she has a PhD in History from Duke University, where she was a James B. Duke Fellow, and an MA in Creative Writing from LASALLE College of the Arts. She welcomes comments on the books she reviews: mandakinni@gmail.com |
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