Book Review: ‘The Original Daughter,' by Jemimah Wei

New York Times

06-05-2025

THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, by Jemimah Wei
Jemimah Wei's debut novel, 'The Original Daughter,' lays bare the claustrophobia of familial love, the ache of unfulfilled dreams and the costs of repressed emotion, through the earnest and often knotty relationship between two sisters growing up in Singapore in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Genevieve Yang's parents adopt 7-year-old Arin when her impoverished birth father — the son of Genevieve's grandfather, who abandoned one family and recklessly began another — offers her up in desperation. But for all its tenuous harmony, the Yang household is no haven of privilege: Crammed into a one-bedroom flat in a public housing development in the town of Bedok, they are barely scraping by.
Despite the disruption Arin's arrival brings, 8-year-old Genevieve throws herself into her new role as Jie Jie ('older sister'). The novel's sympathetic but deeply flawed narrator, Genevieve is at once victim and bully, supporter and saboteur. Over the years she will love her increasingly codependent sister, listen to and guide her — and witness Arin surpass her in almost every way.
When the book opens in 2015, the Yang family — the sharp-tongued but magnanimous grandmother; the gentle father who is scarred by his own father's deception, before repeating it himself; the mother, Su, whose persistent optimism both binds and alienates those around her; and the sisters — has been whittled down to just Genevieve and Su, who is dying of cancer. Arin, now a famous actor and 'the only Singaporean in recent years to breach mainstream Hollywood, making her a national treasure,' has left home and left Genevieve behind.
From there the book jumps back in time to 1996, and we gradually learn that the sisters' competition is as much about Su's affection as it is about success. They spend their adolescence working hard in school and beyond, both together and apart, determined to break out of their working-class environment. But eventually Genevieve's rising star stalls, and only Arin experiences the rewards of her labor.