I should have been warned by the blub that said this is for fans of Crazy Rich Asians, that this book is going to be exaggerated and over-the-top. Yes, I know this is a rom-com, but there have been quite readable Singaporean rom-coms of late, such as Cheryl Li-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls. This one…well this one is would-be clever, determinedly flippant, trendily scornful and dismissive, and full of personal insecurities and inadequacies, and angst. Quite cliché, in other words. Make that very cliché.
Our protagonist is one Malaysian Chinese, Andrea Tang who has worked in London and returned to Singapore when her father died and her mother went into meltdown. A super achiever in a law firm and resolutely on partner track, she is now 33 and needs to also ‘achieve’ marriage to a desirable man – a man of course, a rich one, of good family, Chinese of course – to provide grandchildren as her mother and extended family are demanding. The novel is all about the plethora of men she dates/fancies, from the too-young to the too-old, from Chinese to non-Chinese, whom she meets from the set-up introductions to social events to dating apps. Tinder features of course, but so does something wit the unattractive name of Sponk (where if you hook up with someone, then you have/are ‘Sponked’) – shudder.
The novel contains plenty of well-rehearsed Singaporean/Oriental/Asian stereotypings, such as the “kiasu” behaviour (where one must always outdo one’s competitors),
Being super competitive, both Suresh and I are facing off in an Escalating Office Face-time Battle, where we stay at work way longer than necessary with no tasks to complete except to score Brownie points with our own overworked and unhappy boss
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There are many capitalised phrases scattered in this novel like Escalating Office Face-Time Battle – others include Chinese Hell, Power Move, Filial Piety, Power Outfit, Millennial Orson (to refer to 23 year old man) – used as shorthand to make reference to pre-established stereotypes, a narrative way of tagging or labelling, conflating the novel form with social media speak.
Some of the language the book is written in can be annoying – not so much in its use of acronyms (such as LGA standing for Little Green Alien), acronyms being a particularly well known Singaporean habit – but more in the habit of overloading sentences with adjectives and more cliches:
LGA was one of those hipster “secret” speakeasy cocktail bars with mixologists so sanguinely youthful that you start expressing breastmilk at the sight of them
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Being crass and flippant is apparently the vogue way to talk and to be, judging by our protagonist’s loudly-professed values and standards.
There is also much name dropping of branded items and lavish description of luxury homes and goods, as is typical in this kind of chick-lit novel:
“You could hardly look around without a Rolex, Omega, or Panerai, real or fake, nearly putting your eye out” (p10)
Over the din of Chinese New Year songs blaring from sleek Bang and Olufsen speakers” (p11)
“Hardwood floors, tasteful lighting, a brutalist chandelier that threw amber-gold light everywhere. Walls done in washes of ecru and pearl, hung with quiet art; a dining room with porcelain vases, brass sculptures, and a crystal chandelier almost as long as a table” (p105).
A novel of this kind not only has to show how the Have-It-Alls live, but must always have their cake and eat it at the same time – so naturally it has claim the protagonist is all things to everyone, as someone who both has depth of character as well as shallow obsessions:
I took a steadying breath and walked in with the confidence of a woman with a thigh gap
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despite her deep pride in her much-vaunted A-star scholastic track record and career achievements. It tries to tick so many boxes and play to so many stereotypes that it is exhausting and incoherent, but you have to give it full marks for trying so hard and intransigently to be funny – rather like the protagonist, I suppose.
But somehow, as the novel goes along, the protagonist becomes less irritating and more genuinely a person. It is a sort of bildungsroman novel, where the protagonist goes through stages of self-development, but this being a rom-com, the bildungsroman takes place against a backdrop of seeking a husband and all the interactions en route to that. Andrea’s thoughts and speech become less a series of soundbites and cliches, and more insightful and more self-aware.
For instance, when her rich fiancée comes to the public hospital where Andrea’s mother is recovering from a heart attack, Andrea refuses his attempts to have her mother transferred to an expensive private hospital and be looked after by a top-rated consultant. He is hurt by her refusal, and explains he was not trying to control her, nor be disrespectful, he was only trying to give her and her family the best. Andrea in turns explains he made her feel that she had no say in the matter because she doesn’t have as much money as him, and takes it one step further in being able to analyse her own reaction:
To me money is a form of control. My mother always kowtows to my aunt because she paid for my father’s hospital bill […].
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Clearly, this is no greed-crazed, flibbertigibbet as the start of the novel may have had the reader believing. As the novel unfolds, Andrea is less and less a robotic, kiasu, materialistic walking cliché, and more and more a surprisingly likeable, generous-spirited young woman who understands the traps of her society and her own ready adherence to these. She still exaggerates and overdoes everything – particularly drinking and binging – to extremes, but she is also uncomplaining and resilient, and incurably sunny-natured.
There are also some culturally accurate insights in the novel – such as when some work colleagues were discussing how much money (in an ang pow) one has to give at a wedding reception (though it didn’t ring true that Suresh wouldn’t know about this since he had spent a year in Hangzhou studying Mandarin before coming to Singapore, and is shown to be conversant in other aspects of Chinese culture). As a Singaporean Chinese colleague tells him,
You can’t just give any sum you want – there are market rates!
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These rates, which one of them has put into a matrix for calculating, takes on board whether it is lunch or dinner, a 4 or 5 star hotel, the status of host and guest, whether going alone or otherwise, and such factors. The matrix is apparently not just for weddings, but also for funerals and other events. And while this is of course to overstate, there is a lot of truth in this that Chinese do judge these amounts very finely, and such monetary gifts are carefully recorded and used to Give Face (oh heaven help me, this capitalising is infectious!)
Also, there are moments where Andrea drops her manic, short-hand bursts of social-media speak, and demonstrates a rather more lyrical and perceptive side to her; in considering moving back to Malaysia for a job, she thinks,
To relearn the serpentine roads and the fractal skyline, snarling traffic jams, raintrees, and roadside vendors; the snatch-thieves, hawkers, buskers, beggars; the smog, heat, bustle and wet chaotic beauty of KL – it should be interesting.
p389
A rather accurate thumb-nail sketch of KL indeed, affectionate without being sentimental, nostalgic without being treacly. When one starts this novel, one rather regrets doing so, but by the time one has finished the novel, one almost regrets it is finished. For a would-be humorous read which is not really funny, this novel has a surprising amount of potential – even if it is written by yet another one of those lawyers-turned-authors who seem to be jostling onto the publishing scene of late.
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