The Original Daughter - Softcover

Wei, Jemimah

 
9798217070138: The Original Daughter
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798217070138
Verlag: Random House Large Print Publishing, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In this dazzling debut, Stegner Fellow Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in working-class Bedok, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. As the two girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a place where the urgent insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. Knowing that failure is not an option, the sisters learn to depend entirely on one another as they spurn outside friendships, leisure, and any semblance of a social life in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future.

When a stinging betrayal violently estranges Genevieve and Arin, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is. In the story of a family and its contention with the roiling changes of our rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all world, The Original Daughter is a major literary debut, rife with emotional clarity and searing social insight.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JEMIMAH WEI was born and raised in Singapore, and is currently a 2022-2024 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the recipient of fellowships, scholarships, and awards from Columbia University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Singapore’s National Arts Council, and more. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been published in Guernica, Narrative, and Nimrod, among other publications. She was recently named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers, recognized by the Best of the Net Anthologies, and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. For close to a decade, prior to moving to the US to earn an MFA at Columbia University where she was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow, she worked as a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and has written and produced short films and travel guides for brands like Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon.

https://jemmawei.com/

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1


Arin was somewhere in Germany when my mother got sick again. She’d been sick before, but never like this, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she would change her mind and start asking for Arin. The prospect filled me with dread. My sister and I hadn’t spoken for years, not since she first got famous, not even when my mother was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer a couple of years ago. Back then, too, I’d been afraid that if things got really bad, my mother would want Arin there. But we’d had her breasts lopped off, one after the other, and it appeared to have stopped the cancer’s spread. The subject of Arin never came up.

Our relationship hadn’t been good for a long time, and in recent years my mother’s irreverence had dampened into a more respectable muteness. But after she recovered, my mother immediately became irritating again. She’d lost so much weight from the chemotherapy, it didn’t seem to matter that she had no breasts. She sheared off her fluffy black hair, wore nothing but singlets and shorts, and gleefully told everyone passing by the photocopy shop that between this and menopause, she was finally relieved of the trappings of being a woman. The word she used, one I caught her selecting carefully from the Oxford English Dictionary by our sole electric night-­light, was “liberation.”

Liberation? When had she ever not acted exactly as she pleased? I felt that she was baiting me; I refused to respond. Then, a few days ago, I woke to find my mother still in bed beside me, one arm thrown over her face.

“Ma,” I said. “It’s eight.”

She was usually out of the house by six, either at the wet market or doing exercises at Bedok Reservoir Park with her tai chi group before opening the photocopy shop. To her, sleeping in was something only rich people did, a sign of weak character.

My mother peeked at me from under her arm and didn’t say a word. Rare for her to forgo a chance to tease. I put my face to her wrist, her neck, sniffing. When I clambered over her body and saw the milky splatter of vomit on the floor, beside the massive potted sansevieria my mother insisted on keeping by our bedside as an air filter, she hid her face again.

“Get dressed,” I said after a long moment. “I’m calling Dana.”

Dana was her oncologist, one my mother had scammed into friendship. When they first met, she told Dana she’d been involved with a church deacon years ago who abandoned her when she became pregnant with me, and sweet Dana, in spite of everything one might assume about doctors and intelligence, truly believed God had called her to be the attending physician the day I brought my mother in. All lies. My mother wasn’t religious, and my father was a taxi driver. But when I confronted her, she waved me off with a laugh and stayed in touch with Dana, forwarding her prayers and Bible verses on WhatsApp.

It worked. Dana loved my mother. She dropped by the photocopy shop frequently to bring her food, or just to chat, and even ordered me to bypass the hospital’s call center and ring her directly if we needed anything. When the neighborhood aunties found out, they teased us relentlessly—­of course Su Yang would charm the famously stuffy hospital staff, of course she would be the person to pull the wool over their eyes. Whoever heard of a doctor giving out her personal number, it was absurd, it wasn’t done. But in all their ribbing there was a sense of glee, as if we had won something. Not to me. I found my mother’s relationship with Dana deceitful; I swore we would never call on this favor.

Yet here we were.

It turned out to be leptomeningeal disease. Neither my mother nor I had heard the term before, but Dana was crying as she delivered the news. She knew we couldn’t afford surgery; we were still paying off debt from the first one. Because of her preexisting health conditions, we didn’t qualify for the experimental drug trials. Because my mother belonged to the generation too poor, and therefore too proud, for insurance, there were no secret reserves of cash that could be accessible to us via a sleight of hand in the medical paperwork. It was a terminal diagnosis. Terminal: that I understood. I wanted to know how long she had.

“Anywhere from three to six months with treatment.”

“And without?”

“Four to six weeks.”

I was stunned. Beside me, my mother let out a little sigh. “No treatment. I don’t want to do that again.”

The diagnosis invigorated her. She stood and stretched, then hopped around Dana’s office, peering at confidential folders, fingering the stethoscope and green swimming goggles hanging by the door; making Dana laugh, teasing her for crying. But her voice was too bright, her eyes tired. As soon as we got home, she showered and changed into a fresh set of clothes. We stared each other down in our bedroom.

“Where are you going?”

“To work.”

“They can manage without you, you should rest.”

She didn’t even stop. “Rest isn’t going to cure me. You want me to lie at home like a useless person for the next six weeks?”

I could see her rib cage through the singlet arm holes. She’d gotten so skinny, I hadn’t even realized. She watched my face twist and said quickly: “If you want to help, Genevieve, call your sister.”

“She’s not my sister.”

“I want to see you and Arin together one last time.” I kept quiet, and she pushed further. “I never ask you for anything.” It was another one of her untruths; she was full of requests, both vocal and implied. “Promise me.”

“No.”

“Then you might as well kill me yourself.”

She left.



Later that night, when she crawled into bed beside me, I didn’t turn. I pretended I was asleep. But she pasted her skinny body to my back and began speaking. She repeated that she had never asked anything of me, not even when I left her back in 2010 and moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, maintaining radio silence for six months, refusing to speak to her, refusing to explain how she had offended me to warrant that kind of severance, breaking her heart, shaving years off her life from worry, forcing her to communicate only through Arin, and then when I finally returned, how I exiled Arin, refusing to bend in the last four years, despite being brought up to understand that family was the key, the heart, the cornerstone of life; that, too, broke her heart, how could I be so callous, so cruel, perhaps these rash decisions could be made as a child, but wasn’t I already twenty-­seven, basically thirty, wasn’t it time to grow up, yes, perhaps our childhood wasn’t ideal, but whose is; anyway, wasn’t it kind of silly to hold on to old grudges, and more importantly, she was dying, couldn’t I put aside my own selfish desires for six short weeks, might not even be six, might be four, four weeks minus one day we had just wasted on yet another petty argument, come on, how hard could it be, didn’t I love her, didn’t I care?

By the end of that tirade, the sun was rising. I was crying too. Wasn’t she the one who insisted we would only hold Arin back, wasn’t she the one who said it was better to let her go? She was reverting to her old habits of lying in order to get what she wanted, increasingly convinced by the passionate tenor of her own voice till she truly believed the stories she’d constructed. And me—­kidnapped by her emotions, unable to protest. A child...

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Verlag
Random House Large Print Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217070138
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
527
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
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