A Conversation with Shze-Hui Tjoa
BY S.J. BUCKLEY
Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer from Singapore who lives in the UK. Her debut, The Story Game: A Memoir, was released from Tin House Books in May of this year. She has pieces featured or forthcoming in BOMB Magazine, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Millions, Poets & Writers magazine, and Between the Covers podcast. She is a nonfiction editor at Sundog Lit and has received career support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, Disquiet International, and Green Olive Arts, among other organizations.
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The first time I read Shze-Hui Tjoa’s writing, I was an editor at a journal reading submissions for its annual nonfiction contest. Shze-Hui’s work stood out to me immediately. In her winning essay, “On Being In Love with a White Man” (which also appears in her debut memoir The Story Game), Shze-Hui vividly describes her home country of Singapore, deconstructs the country’s colonial myths, and examines how those myths may (or may not) influence her relationship with her white husband.
When I saw that Shze-Hui was publishing a memoir, I knew I had to get my hands on it. The Story Game, which borrows conventions from memoir, essay, and fiction, follows the narrator’s descent into herself as she examines seemingly disparate topics like the tourist culture of Bali, her interracial marriage, and the relationship between depression and blogging.
Meanwhile, the narrator Hui returns to a room—seemingly outside of time—where she speaks to her sister Nin about the things she observes in the outside world. Through her conversations with Nin, the reader (and Hui) begin to see what Hui is leaving off the page and why.
The Story Game is a brilliant exploration of the powers of storytelling, sisterhood, and selfhood. Shze-Hui and I met over Zoom to discuss genre, process, and the messiness of nonfiction. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
S.J. Buckley: Can you talk about the process of writing this book? I know that you’ve previously published a lot of the chapters as standalone essays, so I wondered if you were writing them with this book in mind or if the book’s overall structure revealed itself later on.
Shze-Hui Tjoa: I had this grand idea right at the beginning that I would like to publish a book of essays. I really didn’t think it would be about me, though; I thought the essays would be about politics. I believed I was writing about all these bigger political structures outside of me and commenting on them as a neutral observer. But after two and a half years of doing this, I realized that the essays were going inward. Because I kept observing a dynamic in the world where things looked great from the outside but were broken deep within. And I realized that was actually how I felt about myself—which was why I couldn’t help but project and see the pattern everywhere.
At the two-and-a-half year mark, I wrote the climax of the book, “The Story of Body.” And then there was another year and a half in which I was working on the dialogue, which links all of the book’s sections together. But I didn’t really understand how these different essays, forms, and themes would come together until maybe the three-year mark; I had no idea that this was going to be a memoir and that its overarching theme would be about finding myself.
SB: The book is broken up into sections based on your process of writing it, is that right? There’s “Year One: The Room,” “Years Two and Three: The Depths,” and “Year Four: The World.”
ST: Yeah, the timeline of how this book was written is reflected in the book itself.
SB: The “room” sections between the essay or “story” sections, with the dialogue between the narrator, Hui, and her younger sister Nin, hold the book together. Would you say that the dialogue sections naturally emerged from the process of writing those essays?
ST: It emerged at that two-and-a-half year mark—when I had six essays that were all vaguely about the theme I mentioned, about systems that looked good outside but were broken within. At that point, I just felt like the book wanted me to write one more essay about my sister. I’m a really obsessive person, so I spent eight months trying to write a standard creative nonfiction essay—the most standard essay you can imagine, in a first-person past-tense voice. But it didn’t go well. Every time I attempted it, the essay sounded competent, but I had this strong gut sense that it was somehow not “correct.”
Eventually, I felt so frustrated that I decided to talk to my sister about it. I told her I was trying to write a book about our past, and in response, she said that she didn’t think we’d ever been close to each other. That completely baffled and upset me because I thought the opposite, that we had been—and in many ways, still were—very emotionally close. I couldn’t believe that we had both lived through the same set of events, and yet come to such wildly different conclusions about our relationship. And I think that something about this disjuncture ended up catalyzing the dialogue because I needed to find a form that could capture our two totally different interpretations of the past. An essay couldn’t do that, because an essay is a monologue; there’s no room for somebody else to contest your version of events. Only a dialogue allows for that. So I switched to a dialogue form and it finally felt correct; it was what the book needed.
SB: Those conversations kind of mimic the reader/writer exchange, and Nin seems to represent your, or the narrator’s, inner critic. I’m curious how you were able to access that imaginative space and tap into her voice as well as your own. What was your process for writing that dialogue?
ST: You’re the second person who’s said this “inner critic” thing to me! It’s helpful to hear it from someone else because I didn’t consciously think of it that way. Maybe my inner voice is self-critical, and actually, that’s probably a part of what helps me to write. Because to produce a good piece, you have to be attuned to how it will be perceived by other people; in a way you’re writing for an imaginary reader.
While writing the dialogue, I realized that I was trying to understand my sister as a person—but I couldn’t accomplish that through my memories of our past. Because in most of my memories, I couldn’t actually remember what she had been like, or what she had been doing; I had been so in control of our relationship at the time that I only remembered what I had wanted her to do, but not how she had responded to my demands. For most memoirists, that’s the biggest fear—not having any material to work with or not remembering what happened. I guess I went to that imaginative space as a way of being honest about those gaps. Because I could have lied, right? I could have just made up what Nin said and did. And that’s certainly one way to write a memoir—by filling in all the gaps on your own. I respect that, but I couldn’t do it because for me, the stakes felt very real; this book is about my real relationship with a living person. So I felt the need to honor the fact that there was an absence.
SB: You said something about how you and your sister’s—Hui’s and Nin’s—memories of childhood are so different. “The Story of Hui and Nin” and “Nin’s Story” lead the reader to retroactively revise their understanding of the narrative and the narrator formed when reading the earlier parts of the book, to adjust their view to see what was just out of frame. I thought that that was a really interesting way to capture the kind of “simultaneity” of real life—the way so many things can be true at once—and how that can interact with a linear narrative. Were there any other details you left out of the narrative? If so, what influenced your decision to do that?
ST: I love that word, “simultaneity.” That’s exactly what it feels like; there are the events that happened, and then there are the events that I wish had happened. The reader eventually finds out what my relationship with Nin was really like—that we were estranged and barely spoke to each other. But for many years, I also nourished this simultaneous, fantastical version of our relationship in my head—one where we spoke to each other a lot and continued being as close as we had been in early childhood. I sometimes prefer the fantasy to the way things really are. And to me, the fantasy feels just as real. If I was going to write a book about my experience of the world, I had to include it.
About leaving things out: in one of the book’s essays, “The Green Place,” the reader can actually see me going through the process of deciding what details to include and exclude from my writing. In the first version of “The Green Place,” I left out a detail about how, at the eco-hostel where I was working, the owners would arbitrarily prevent their workers from borrowing bicycles so that we couldn’t leave their forest compound on our own terms. But in the second version of the essay, I was able to include that detail, which led me to discover new information about my own fears and motivations. What we choose to withhold and include as memoirists is so interesting! And I feel like if someone is adamantly unwilling, or unable, to admit something about their own reality, that’s often a clue about where they need to grow. A good example is how, in my essay “On Being In Love with a White Man,” I wrote beautifully about my relationship with my husband. But in the dialogue that followed the piece, I had to admit that we had actually been fighting a lot, and that I had even recently threatened him with a kitchen knife. I had to question why that detail didn’t make it into my essay—and what it said about me.
SB: I wanted to ask about “The Green Place” because I was so convinced by the ending of the first version. I was like, wow, this is a great essay! And then you peel back the curtain in the “Room” section that follows and tell us what you’ve left out. You’ve done that before in the previous sections of the book, but in “The Green Place,” you’re retelling the entire story. When you started writing this, did you already know that you were going to kind of “trick” the reader in this way by writing and rewriting the story? Or did that naturally come out of your writing process, realizing that you had to rewrite it to be more truthful?
ST: I didn’t intend to trick the reader. When I wrote the first version, I was doing my absolute best to tell a story that was convincing. And I guess it was quite convincing to everybody except me—and maybe the people who knew me personally at the time. Because they would never have believed that essay ending where I talk about reforming myself and becoming more eco-friendly—that was totally not happening in my life.
You know, I think that a story always generates its own internal logic and direction based on the stakes within it. And if you follow this internal logic faithfully, you will usually arrive at a conclusion that makes narrative sense. So sometimes, for me, I have to write the whole piece out first and look at where I end up before I can realize that something went wrong along the way. And then I have to backtrack, to locate the place where I was untruthful about my own motivations. With “The Green Place,” it felt like the natural ending of the essay would have been my transformation into a more eco-friendly person. But that didn’t happen. And so, environmentalism couldn’t have been my real motivation with that experience—I realized there must have been something else that pushed me to do it.
SB: This book is great at subtly reflecting on the ways that storytelling can both obscure and reveal truth. I especially found it interesting because the essays are not literally perfect—as the reader, I understand that there’s a lot of nuance in these stories, that the narrator is holding multiple truths at once. But then you show us the real truth, which is maybe a bit more embarrassing or messy or difficult. Could you speak a bit about the impulse in nonfiction—a genre often praised for its nuance and messiness—to obscure the truth just a little bit in favor of a good story?
ST: I think it comes down to vulnerability for me. It’s very vulnerable to show people the messy parts of myself, whether that’s in person or on the page. It can feel like I’m giving people a chance to criticize me because they can see the ways in which I’ve made mistakes. I guess that’s where the impulse comes from for me, to hide behind the veil of a seamless story with no cracks. But at the same time, I’m aware as a reader, what draws me to nonfiction is precisely that sense of human messiness. I want to see the moments in which a person fails to live up to their own story of who they are. Because those are the moments in which change or transformation can happen; they are the only moments in which self-reflection is really possible, when there’s a gap between reality and the ideal.
My fatal flaw as a writer is my instinct to make everything too neat. When there’s even a little bit of mess, I want to push it away. But I found that without the messy parts of The Story Game, I couldn’t explain to the reader why I had moved from one essay to another because they seem to be about very disparate and random topics. It was not possible for me to explain how I got from writing about Bali to writing about my husband to writing about depression without showing the mess in between. Because the mess is the propulsive force. The mess creates momentum.
SB: I’m interested in what you said about the relationship between reality and fantasy. I wondered about your relationship to fiction—were there any fictional narratives that you drew on when writing this book? How do you think fictional narratives can influence our own true stories?
ST: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke was a huge influence. It’s marketed as fantasy, but I feel it’s more like an allegory. The story is about a man who wanders around a huge, labyrinthine house which he feels like he’s lived in since the beginning of time. He’s very innocent-seeming, almost like a primitive man. But one day a small seed of confusion is planted in his mind because there’s another person in the house who keeps calling him by the name “Piranesi”—and somehow he feels like that is not his name. Then his beliefs about who he is and what the house is begin to unravel. I feel like this book captures the painful experience of having forgotten who you are, and then having to recover your true self again after many years. And I really like how vividly Susanna Clarke brought that feeling to life by creating a physical world around it—by turning forgetfulness into a house that one could wander in for years and years, and never see the end of.
The genre I read the most is actually fiction, even though I’m primarily a nonfiction writer. I like that fictional world-building can make implicit truths concrete. And in The Story Game, I felt like I was doing something like that too—creating a world from scratch, especially in the dialogue sections between Hui and Nin. I found it very enjoyable. I think that people can arbitrarily separate fiction and nonfiction when really, there’s a lot of fiction in everyday life. When I’m walking down the street, for example, I’m partly present and sensing the world, but there’s also a part of my brain that’s thinking about completely unrelated things—like, if someone walks by me, I might be imagining their thoughts and feelings, or the places they just came from. And all of that fantasizing is also part of my reality. Ultimately, I don’t feel like fiction and nonfiction are two different modes that I switch between—I’m always doing both.
SB: Were there any other books or pieces of media that you drew from as inspiration for the book?
ST: Jeannie Vanasco’s book, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, was really formative for me. That was the first time I’d read a book where I could see the writer’s process so transparently. In more traditional nonfiction you see the output, but you don’t see what the person had to go through to get there; you just see the final, polished result. But Jeannie’s book is so amazing because it pulls back that veil—and you get to witness her creative process of talking to her friends, talking to her partner, and then, finally, talking to her interview subject. And that journey to produce the book is the narrative of the book. I feel like it showed me that it’s possible to create a memoir with high stakes, where the writer’s behind-the-scenes doings drive the intrigue.
SB: I was so interested in the structure of this memoir and how it creates tension and suspense. A lot of memoirs get the biggest, most climactic “event” out of the way immediately, then spend a lot of time reflecting on that. But in The Story Game, the reader gets the sense early on that the narrator is withholding something, and we don’t know what that is until “The Story of Body” about three-quarters of the way through the book. To me that felt organic, similar to how you described Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—in that the thinking, or the writer’s journey, is the plot. In this book, the thinking is the plot, but The Story Game also seems to have a plot in a way that a lot of memoirs don’t. Can you talk about why you made the decision to withhold the events described in “The Story of Body” for so long, creating a sort of narrative tension that most memoirs don’t have?
ST: This is a personal opinion, but I feel like sometimes experimental books can be a little bit boring. Because although something interesting is going on with the form, I as a reader might not understand why—like why is the author using fragments, or writing in a hermit crab form? For me to feel engaged, I always need to understand the deeper “why” of the structure, why the writer is defaulting to this one experimental style and not another. And I guess that’s where the suspense came in, with my own book—I knew that with the dialogue, I was doing something that readers wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in a memoir, so the suspense was a way of reassuring them that somebody was still in control. Like, “Even though things are a little weird now, don’t worry, it’s all going somewhere!” I like reading books that give me a sense of closeness to the author. I like that somebody is taking care of me and cares about my needs. I guess I wanted to give that to my readers.
But also, to be honest, I had no idea where the dialogue was going while I was writing it. So maybe I also put in the suspense to reassure myself, as the writer of the book—that even if my conscious mind didn’t know where the project was headed, something inside me did.
SB: Could you compare the different stages of writing the book? For example, you said the dialogue came later. I wondered what your process was like for writing each section—do those two modes require different “muscles”?
ST: Totally different muscles. Writing the essays was much easier—I was in my element and I had a lot of control. It’s a very structured form, so I felt able to plan. When I wrote the dialogue it was the opposite: I had completely no control. I think the muscle I was using then was faith, for lack of a better word—faith to keep going even though I had no idea why I was writing this weird imaginary part of the book, or whether it would eventually result in something productive. It felt like over a year of walking in the dark. And the revelation that came at the end of all that writing, which my sister and I actually experienced—it was not something I knew I would arrive at, when I first started.
Both of these “muscles” are really valuable for me as a writer—having a high level of control and being able to lean into mystery and faith. But equally, I think that there’s no point in starting a project if I don’t have that second element because then I’m just producing a spiritless object that I already knew how to create. The thing that makes the work come alive is that sense of mystery, where the book is telling me what it wants to become and something new or unexpected can happen in the process.
SB: It seems like the “story” sections and the dialogue sections are symbiotic. They’re each more successful because they’re connected; they’re in conversation with one another.
ST: I don’t think this book would exist without the dialogue; it represents my growth. I was trying something new that I’d never done before, and for me, as an artist, there’s no point in working on a project if I’m not growing.
SB: How did you get started in writing nonfiction?
ST: I’ve only ever really written nonfiction. I started with poetry, but even my poetry was extremely confessional. I think it comes from having once been very religious—which I talk about a bit in the book, especially in the essay “The True Wonders of the Holy Land.” In my church, we had to write daily journal entries reflecting on what we were learning in our spiritual lives. So I was sort of always practicing this skill of self-reflection and being able to accurately name what was going on in my emotional world.
SB: Do you still write every day? What does your writing practice look like?
ST: It’s going through a transitional phase right now. When I wrote The Story Game, I would write every day for a set period and try to at least push out some words. But lately I feel like my body needs to be in motion—I need to walk around or be physically active in the city, and then I feel words coming easily to me. So I’m not sure if the next thing I create will necessarily be a book. Maybe it’ll be a book in the body; something that people can live. That’s as much as I can say about it, at this very early stage of writing where the essential nature of the work is still a mystery to me. I sense that thematically, though, the book is going to be about motherhood: about my mother, but also about the body, and the sensory world that got lost over the last few decades of Singapore’s rapid economic growth. I’m curious about how far I can push language to bear the full weight of materiality.
SB: Is there any advice you would give your past self (or maybe other writers working on debuts) for finishing a first book, especially a work of nonfiction?
ST: Be patient. That’s the thing I struggled with the most, coming from a high-achieving background and culture. Towards the end especially, I really wanted to say with certainty, “This is what I’m making.” I wanted to be able to define the book as a concrete product, so that I could use it to apply for more artistic opportunities like residencies and classes. But that premature wish to define the project actually made it much harder to finish writing it—because I wasn’t able to stay open to creative possibilities.
I would say that if you feel drawn to writing a book, there’s probably a good reason for that, so just trust that this reason eventually will find its fruition. The book may not end up being what you initially hoped or thought it would be. But it knows what it needs to become, so just give it some time.
SB: We’ve talked about this a bit already, when you discussed your process for writing the dialogue and how you didn’t remember what Nin was actually like. Different nonfiction writers have different ideas about using facts as a formal constraint. Where do you land on that debate?
ST: I think it’s okay to not be factual, as long as the writer is transparent and honest about it. When I’m reading nonfiction, I trust the author more when they first say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember,” and then make something up. But I think it’s pretty unethical to just invent stuff without that initial admission. I always want my words to do justice to the people they’re about; that’s my guiding principle as a writer, that other people are as real as I am.
