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.
