THINKING OUT LOUD: Avoidance can become a structure when it is taught, rewarded, repeated, and eventually mistaken for care. It may then become a choice we make when every available choice involves a larger loss. But… larger to whom? And by whose measure? Gen may experience the loss that follows speaking as unbearable, while someone else is already bearing the cost of her silence.
I HAVEN’T RESOLVED:
What do we owe the parts of ourselves we recognise in people we dislike?
Genevieve is difficult company. She is resentful, self-absorbed, and so practiced in the telling of her own suffering that after a while I began to wonder whether anything can reach her without first being made part of it. Mid-way through the book, I found myself growing increasingly tired of Gen’s whining and went scouring the internet for sympathisers. Some seemed devastated by her; others could hardly bear to spend more time with her — strangely, I understood both responses.
Gen’s an unreliable narrator consumed by resentment, and I knew where her bitterness came from. I recognised the pressure of being measured early and often, the smallness of the flat, (I could almost picture her home), the meritocracy that grades your worth before you're old enough to question it. I could picture the Singapore around her with uncomfortable ease. And yet, I found her nauseating. Recognition did not soften my impatience. One might argue it’s the skilled intentional crafting of Jemimah Wei. Not that Gen is unlikable, but that she is recognisable and unlikable at once. I could map her problems onto the Singapore I grew up in with perfect fidelity. And I could not stand to watch her refuse to move. To watch someone so fluent in suffering and so unwilling to relinquish it. The Singaporean in me understood her completely. The reader in me wanted to put the book down.
I kept reading because my irritation began to feel like part of what the novel was asking of me. Gen’s resentment was exhausting, but so was the ease with which I could explain it. I wanted to know what lay between those two responses of understanding a person and being able to live with what that person does.
Is the Real Subject Sisterhood, Or Avoidance?
What Wei’s mapping, I think, is this: avoidance as a way of arranging a life around what cannot be said. In Gen’s family, people go on loving one another while leaving certain feelings untouched. Over time, those omissions acquire their own force. A person learns what will cause trouble, what can be turned into work, what must be swallowed if everyone is to get through the day. Eventually the silence can look so much like steadiness that it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other.
Avoidance as the elaborate systems we build to not say what we mean. To not want what we want. To not grieve what we have already lost. Avoidance, as an infrastructure of silence that passes for love in families where love was never quite allowed to be inefficient.
This is not a Singaporean problem. But it is a problem Singapore has, well, almost perfected. At the risk of generalising, too many of us are adept at turning feeling into something useful: hurt into discipline, wanting into drive, envy into motivation. We develop fluency in everything except the interior. Forward motion can be a way of caring for a family, of making a better life possible. It can also leave little room to ask what that life has cost the people living it. And then we wonder why our families are full of people who love each other at a careful distance. Wei’s novel drew me close enough to a family’s private silences that I began to hear in them a language I knew.
Gen has learned that language well. She knows how to endure, how to account for what has happened to her, how to keep moving inside the version of herself that endurance has made. What frustrated me was that she seemed to remain there even when it hurt the people she loved. But the longer I sat with her, the less adequate my frustration felt. I could see why letting go of resentment might feel, to Gen, like surrendering the only account of her life that made sense. That is a very specific kind of damage, which, from the outside, resembles stubbornness.
“I’d charged forward without pausing, traipsing down the chain of yes yes yeses, now, for the first time I wondered: Did I truly have no choice, as I’d convinced myself, or was I inelegantly trying to restart my life the way one did a dead car engine, making the facts of my life interesting to myself again?”
Speak, And You May Lose
By the time the betrayal arrives, the sisters’ distance has been taking shape for years. The event matters, but it does not create the space between Gen and Arin. That space has been made through all the moments in which something might have been said and wasn’t. Wei lets us feel its size without drawing a neat boundary around it. We learn, as we often do in families, from tone, from absence, from how carefully people move around one another.
This is where the novel became personal for me. I know what it is to defer a conversation because the relationship, as it stands, still contains something precious. I know how reasonable that can feel. Speak, and you may lose the shape of things without knowing whether anything better can take its place. Stay quiet, and you can keep going together—though perhaps not toward each other.
I had been thinking of that silence as a way of protecting a relationship. The book made me less certain that protection was the right word. Gen may experience speaking as the greater loss. Yet while she preserves what she cannot bear to disturb, someone else must live within the limits of what remains unsaid. I don’t know how to measure those losses against each other, or who gets to do the measuring. I only know that calling silence care does not make its cost disappear.
That is why reading this novel felt different from recognising myself in a book set elsewhere. Wei gave me a place I could almost see, and a family whose hesitations I could almost hear. I was close enough to be annoyed, close enough to want Gen to change, and close enough to mistrust how readily I wanted that change from her. Local literature can offer the pleasure of being seen. Here, it offered the less comfortable experience of being unable to look away.
The ending does not resolve the sisters into a lesson about speaking honestly or loving better. It leaves room for the possibility of a different choice, and for the years that choice cannot give back. I finished the book still impatient with Gen, though less certain that my impatience was the whole of what I felt.
