Shze-Hui Tjoa for OtherNarratives
Writer and Senior Non-Fiction Editor of Guernica Magazine, Shze-Hui Tjoa, talks to OtherNarratives about her acclaimed memoir 'The Story Game' and her work with Fossilfreebooks.
On Saturday morning in Marrakesh at the English Book Festival, Shze-Hui sat down with us to talk about her debut memoir The Story Game, her journey from Singapore to Palestine and the impact it had on her worldview, and her fossilfreebooks.org project in the UK where she lives and works as a writer and senior non-fiction editor of Guernica Magazine. She kindly shared book recommendations which you can discover below.
To find out more about Shze-Hui and her work:
A transcript of the interview is available below.
Works recommended by Shze-Hui
Interview Transcript
Yzza Sedrati (YS): Hello everyone, thank you so much for listening to our first interview of OtherNarratives. I’m Yzza and I'm here today in Marrakesh for the English Book Festival with Mhania Alaoui, one of the members of OtherNarratives and also author of The House on Butterfly Street.
Mhani Alaoui (MA): I'm an anthropologist by training and a fiction writer.
YS: And today we will be interviewing Shze-Hui about her debut memoir titled The Story Game. So let's begin!
MA: Thank you, Yzza, for that introduction. Thank you, Shze-Hui, for being here. We're delighted to have you here with us in Marrakesh, all the way from Scotland. Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer. She's also the senior nonfiction editor of Guernica. And what we would like to hear about today is – it's a two part interview where the first part would be where Shze-Hui will talk to us about her memoir, The Story Game, and the second part would be her work with fossil free books, and these two are connected. You will see how. And so now, let's begin. So tell us about your memoir, which is also your debut work. And had a great reception and critical, to critical acclaim.
Shze-Hui Tjoa (SHT): Thank you. That's a generous introduction.
YS: So if you don't mind, can you tell us a little bit about your book and just introduce it to the people who are reading slash listening to this interview.
SHT: Okay, sure. So it's a memoir, my debut memoir, and it's published by Tin House Books in the US and Canada and by Faction Press in Southeast Asia. So Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. It's a memoir about, well, I mean, the big themes are sisterhood. The cost of expectation, and also it's a meta memoir. So it also goes into the power of storytelling, how a story that a person tells themselves about their life and about the world around them can be reshaped basically in a way that brings hope and allows freedom from the constraints of stories. So the structure of the book is probably the most interesting thing to talk about, but it's a series of essays about various themes that move from the political down to the personal and eventually into a discussion or a kind of reclamation of my own childhood memories and exploration of C-PTSD, which is what I suffer from even now. But in between all these essays, There is an interlinking structure, which is a dialogue between two characters, two sister characters who sit in a room together. And one of the sisters is telling the other sister stories. So the younger sister says “Oh, can you tell me a story?” And the older sister says “Okay, come, let me tell you the story about my life.” And the stories progress and move from the political into the personal. So it has a structure that blends fantasy and fact.
YS: It's so creative. And now I wanna have a second podcast, like a second episode of the interview where we really dig in the, you know, the technical aspects..
SHT: I can give you a book everyone aha. So the story game, it's my debut memoir, and it kind of began its life as a series of essays. So I started thinking I was writing a book of political essays about all these big political themes… I studied cultural criticism actually in Cambridge. That was my starting point. And I left university with this big arsenal of theoretical knowledge, but I felt that everywhere I looked around the world, I kept seeing the same pattern repeated over and over, which is that I constantly saw these systems that look very beautiful outside, but on the inside, it was hiding something that was rotten or that was kind of very problematic. So to give some examples, the very first system that came to my mind was when I went to - my father is from Indonesia - I went to Bali for a holiday. It's a very beautiful touristic place, but they actually suffer from very devastating ecological crises because of the water shortage on the island, precisely because of tourism. So, you know, this is one example. And then after I wrote an essay about that, I was like “Oh okay, I think I want to write a book about this theme and write more about it, find more examples and create this political book.” I thought I was so clever. I was like “Oh, great. I know what I'm doing.” But after about two years of trying to write all these essays, I gradually sort of realized that I was stuck in my own mind because everywhere I went, I just saw the same pattern. And then it occurred to me: maybe I always see this because it's the lens of my own psychology. Like maybe that's how I feel about myself, like, somebody who looks very good outside but inside something is broken. And I think that was the turning point for me when the book stopped being about politics and became a memoir about PTSD. So it was like this journey of discovering that actually everything I saw out in the world was a reflection of myself and I had to solve the part that was “me” first before I was able to be a politically responsible person who could really see other people for who they are, not just who I want them to be. And that's what the memoir is about. So it kind of ends with this. I guess the climax of the memoir is like an essay that's a personal essay fully about what happened to me when I was a child growing up in Singapore, and it's a hyper competitive, hyper capitalist, and authoritarian education system, and how that kind of perfectionism or that drive to treat myself like a resource to be used and influence my life. And, you know, that's how the story game came about. So it was a very unexpected journey. I did not expect the book to be about me at all. And it was a surprise to get there in the end.
MA: Thank you for that. Can you tell us a little bit more about your journey from Singapore? And, I suppose, from what you're saying, that you can't really escape that culture of excellence and that pressure so it becomes both personal but also a system, which is what you're interested in. So can you tell us about the journey from Singapore and then I guess to Cambridge to the UK and how did that transform you? And also, I think, in the memoir, there's also an essay about your journey to the occupied territories. And if you'd like to explain to us how all of this connects to you, to your personal journey and to what you were saying about–
SHT: Okay, I will try my best. I think this is a really big question. But yeah, so actually in terms of chronology, that journey to Palestine came first. So, Palestine was actually the very first place that I ever traveled to by myself after leaving home because in Singapore, we end our education system at the end of the year and the British school system starts in the middle. So there was a gap of a few months. And during that time, I grew up in Singapore in a Christian church, and I don't know how much the people listening to this podcast might know about religion in Southeast Asia, but Singapore used to be a British colony. So there was an influx of Christianity there in the pre-independence days and it kind of took root very deep in certain parts of society, I think especially Chinese people, which is my race. But there's a lot of Zionism in that church culture because I think that for a lot of Chinese Christian Singaporeans, including myself (when I was a child and a teenager) we do not realize that the Israel in the Bible is different from the modern political state that exists, which, you know, is a little understandable because the wall is so big and we are so far away from this place. So for a lot of people, they read all these Bible verses where God says “I'm blessing Israel” and they think of Israel on the map now. And it does not really occur to them that maybe part of this is historical and maybe also a little bit figurative. Rather than literal, it's almost like Israel is this fairyland place.
MA: It's mythological.
SHT: Exactly. It's a myth that people don't realize is a myth. So when I was growing up, it was the same. In my church, for example, the pastors were really obsessed with Israel. I remember there was one pastor in particular who was really obsessed with this horn that came from Israel. So he would bring it on stage and play the horn. And we would pray for Israel's success every week without even really understanding what we were praying for. Maybe some people understand, but for me, it's just like “this is a thing I say and I don't know why.” So that was my life until I was 18, 19. But when I was in junior college in Singapore - I guess the American equivalent is high school, or British sixth form - I had a teacher who was half Lebanese and half British in our history class, world history class. And one of the topics he had to teach us was the “Israel-Palestine conflict.” I mean, that's what we called it in the syllabus “Israel-Palestine conflict.” And he told us “I'm Lebanese, so I have a strong point of view about this issue, but I'm not going to tell you who's right and wrong. I'm just going to give you all the resources and then you can go and discover for yourself.” And he had so much confidence, basically, that if we actually read the materials, we would come to a conclusion. He didn't feel a strong need to control everyone's thinking on this topic, which I found really special. Yes, liberating, but also unusual in a Singaporean context because I was so used to being told by the state what I should think about everything. That this man had such supreme confidence in the integrity of the material was so shocking to me. So because of that, I became really interested in this one area of the world. Out of everything I learned in the Singapore education system, this was the one thing that really stuck with me. So after school, when I had that few months break between school and university, I looked online for a way to go and visit Jerusalem. And then I found a work program where they let me wash their dishes and I would do chores around the hotel and they let me stay for free and that was how I ended up going to Jerusalem.
MA: I just wanted to say it's incredible how you can meet one person, one teacher, and it changes, it can change your course.
SHT: Totally. So actually when the genocide first started happening, he was one of the first people I wrote to. I wrote an email to him and he doesn't even live in Singapore anymore. He retired to Sri Lanka, but we were just exchanging emails. And I told him “I'm so thankful that I met you because I feel like the way you gave me autonomy as a teenager influenced the rest of my life. It changed the course of my thinking for my whole life.”
YS: Yeah, and I really love how it resonates with the way that people are talking about Palestine today, which is that talking about Palestine helps us deconstruct and criticize the systems that we are in.
SHT: Exactly.
YS: And how you were saying that, like, you know, it really sharpens all of the contradictions and how you were saying that it made you even reflect on the authoritarian state that you are under. And that this person was like “here's how you study history, here are all the facts.” And you said “Oh, okay. So if I study that way and I can acquire this kind of critical thinking, I can reflect on that, but also on what is happening here.”
SHT: Exactly. I think I saw this. So there's this slogan that gets repeated sometimes like Palestine frees us all. And I think in my experience, that was so true because it was like this one corner of the world where this totalizing narrative - I don't want to say the best, but that, that the people in power have put out - this totalizing narrative just failed to cover that one ugly spot, you know? And I think because of that, when you peel it back or you make the effort, you see so many things about your own system and the complicity of the system that it’s covering up, you know?
MA: So I always think of it as there's an apple and there's the worm and this tiny part of the apple - the whole apple is us as a species - is being, it's permeating.
SHT: Yeah, totally.
MA: So do you want to continue telling us about your experience? In occupied Palestine when you arrived after that, when you started working at the hotel?
SHT: Yeah, for sure. So the part of Jerusalem that I ended up going to just out of pure luck because of who accepted me when I made this random online application was a nunnery, or a convent, that was in the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. So it's a very famous pilgrimage. And they house pilgrims, but the people who run the convent - I think this is a very typical dynamic, maybe in some parts of the world - the people in charge of the convent were mostly like white people from Europe and the Americas, but then the staff of the convent were local people. And because I was in this, I want to say like a liminal kind of position, where I neither sympathize immediately with one group nor the other, I was doing physical labor alongside all the Palestinian staff and we just became friends very easily. I think because we did bodily tasks next to each other. Like we literally washed plates together or full clothes together. And then we just chat, you know, and they were all around my age. So a lot of them were teenagers or finishing school. So we had a lot of things to talk about. They would be like “Oh, your eyebrows look really ugly. Has nobody taught you how to do your eyebrows?” Or they would be like “Oh, do you have a boyfriend? Show us a photo.” And they kept teasing me because maybe also for a lot of them, I mean, I didn't realize this at the time, only much later, they have never met somebody from East Asia. So because of the difficulties of traveling out of Israel as a Palestinian person. But of course I didn't know all this. I was just like “Oh, these are nice people who accept me.” So we just became good friends. And then they would invite me to their house or they would tell me about university. And I think because I'm by nature quite a perceptive person - and I think I like to play the role of the listener - when they were telling me about their daily lives, I would just pick up small--I had these like small inklings that their freedom is not the same as mine, but it was very hard to describe. For example, one time, one of my colleagues was really late for work because her university was in Bethlehem and she has to travel from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to work and she said it's because of a checkpoint and I didn't realize there was this thing. And then afterwards my friend told me the anecdote about herself passing through a checkpoint, she didn't belabor the point or anything, she was just like “Yeah, sorry, I'm three hours late because I have to go through a checkpoint.” But then after that, when I went traveling, I went traveling with a friend who was American and she's a white American woman. And I noticed we were treated completely differently when we passed through the checkpoint because the guide didn't want to let me through because they, I mean, I don't code like the acceptable person. And they were very suspicious of me. They detained me for an hour. They had to call Ben Gurion airport and she refused to believe that I didn't need a visa to travel in Israel and so on and so forth. So I was just like “Oh, there are these small signs that people are treated very differently here based on their race, how they look, and maybe that comes from being someone who doesn't slot seamlessly into the system.” Like people look at me and they're not sure where to place me. And I felt that whenever I was traveling in Israel, that usually led to a sense of danger. Like people would be like “Oh, so do you have Arab friends?” You know? They immediately want to know things about me so they can slot me in. And that's like the first sign of an appetite system, right? Basically you are judged. You're judged based on your skin straight away. So there were all these small signs and then I guess that because of that it actually really challenged my point of view. Because I feel like learning about it in school is one thing, but to experience it with my body, right, to go through the checkpoint and then there's a person with a gun who refuses to let you through, is a totally different experience. And for me, it just, It was like the feeling went into my gut and I understood that there was a lot of unlearning for me to do because, you know, I was from this church system and I believed in God still at that time and I was like “I think I need to go home and I need to extract myself from this system that produced me so I can have some distance and reflect.” So it actually led to me leaving my faith in the long run. It was a long journey after that. Maybe five years, six years.
MA: You were a teenager when you left this journey.
SHT: Exactly. So maybe only until my mid twenties, I realized I can't really be in the system anymore. Because I'm not sure that I want to pray for Israel's success every week, you know.
MA: “This is the Israel of the Bible. Not the same one as you said.”
SHT: Yeah exactly.
YS: I want to talk about so many things that you mentioned, like how it's embodied and sometimes it's not like we think that when we say critical thinking it's a lot of studying and stuff like that but it's also a lot of feeling and a lot of like sharing these like embodied moments as well. And your story really captures all of that together. I don't know if we should move ahead?
MA: Yeah so thank you for sharing, it also takes a lot of courage to embark on this journey because you can lose people that you love along the way. I don't know if that's something that happened to you or how you reconcile all these different parts of you and, you know, people in your life.
SHT: That really resonates with me.
MA: I don't know if you want to mention that briefly? Or we can also talk about how that led you to, you know--so we're in the midst of a genocide and people around the world are also re-envisioning what's happening in Palestine and they're opening their eyes to what's really happening, what you went through. But as Yzza was saying, in an embodied moment, because you were actually there and most people do not go there, that we just see it through our screens. But then, it also led you to you know, you have your work, but it also led you to some form of activism through your work actually. So if you want to discuss a little bit about your work with Fossil Free Books and what Fossil Free Books does, what they are, when were they created? And it seemed that there's a link between Fossil Free and maybe ecology and the environment, which also seemed to resonate with you and your first essay on Bali and the harm massive tourism can do to a place and to its people. So yeah, if you want to discuss that and if you want to talk a little bit about the courage it takes and also the sacrifices that people have to make on these kinds of journeys?
SHT: Losing people, I really resonate with that.
MA: If you feel comfortable discussing it and then the activist work with Fossil Free Books.
SHT: Yes, of course. I mean, I think about that all the time, actually. Like, the courage it takes to rethink your own narrative of the world, precisely because it means you're going to lose some of the communities you've built so far. Because they were built on the basis of a shared story, right? And then once you extract yourself from the story, it's like, “Okay, so can we continue being friends?” Actually when I went to Israel at that time as a teenager, like to the occupied territories, I went by myself to this convent, but at the same time, I also had another friend from church. She was my cell group leader. So she was like the leader of the Bible study group I was in. And she also went actually, and I think she linked up maybe with the university there. She had a very different experience. And I remember one day we met up for coffee and we took a walk together to reflect on our time, like the last few months we had. And she said “Oh, you know, this really upsetting thing happened to me, which is that I went into a shop and then the person told me I cannot go in because I'm Filipino and my friend is not Filipino. First of all, she's Chinese Singaporean, but second of all, it's like, why can't a Filipino doesn't go into a shop in Israel?” And later on, of course I found out about it because of the guest workers who come from Southeast Asia to work there. There's a hierarchy also. But my friend just had this premonition that maybe something was wrong, and maybe the society we are visiting doesn't treat her as an equal, but you know, we just had that conversation and then we left it. And then she went back to Singapore to the church to be part of the community again, the Zionist community. And until now, I think she's still pretty involved. And we're still friends. I mean, I still love her, but I think about that all the time when I'm reflecting on why some people might not be able to leave the narrative. Because after I came back from Palestine, I went straight to the UK for university. I was already in a phase of life where it would have been possible for me to drop a lot of these connections and make that sacrifice, right? I had the privilege to make that sacrifice, but my friend did not. I mean, she had to go back to our country and she had to live there for many, many years. And over the past year when I was reflecting on people's responses to the genocide, because sometimes it angers me and it just fills me with rage, sometimes people cannot respond. I'm just like “Why is it that all our eyes are seeing the same thing on the screen?” But some people's response is to just keep holding on to the story, even though, you know, they have to tell themselves all kinds of nonsense, lies to hold on to that story. And then I remember this about my friend, you know, maybe some people don't have the privilege to say the truth or even think the truth. And that gives me some grace, I guess, for my friend.
MA: It's food for thought. They don't have the privilege to think something.
SHT: Yeah. And okay, so that’s the part about sacrifice, I think.
MA: Can you tell us about your work with and what does?
SHT: So Fossil Free books. It actually pre existed the beginning of the genocide in October 7. So, it was around for a year before that, but at that time, a lot of the activism was focused on ecological activism. The founding authors in the United Kingdom were very upset because they realized that, although the content of the books that gets published in the UK is typically very environmentally conscious–So people are calling out state complicity and greenwashing for example big business, they would call out all these things with the text. However, when you look at where the money is actually coming from within the industry, these companies continue to have complicity and ties. So they take the money from these companies that are perpetuating greenwashing or environmental collapse, but then they can say whatever, you know, they can speak freely. And I think this is a big contradiction that exists particularly in the UK. I'm not sure about other countries, but some of these authors were like “We must dismantle the system more fundamentally. It's not enough to just write pretty words. We must also, like, look at the money.” And so they started doing this protest, I think, particularly against one investment firm called Bailey Gifford, which is an investment firm that has a lot of links with– At first they call themselves a conscious company, but then I guess there's some hypocrisy in terms of what they actually fund. So these authors were speaking out against it because they fund a lot of book festivals. So they did a campaign where I think one author walked off stage - a very prominent author who writes a lot about activism. She refused to do that event basically. And then it got media attention and so on and so forth. But then when the genocide started happening, I think for a lot of people in the UK and a lot of people within the publishing and literary world, we felt so helpless because it feels like what can you do, you know, as an individual? And then that was part of what led to the growth of this fossil free books movement because so many people were looking for community and the outlet in a way to work with other people to strengthen our voice. And I think one of the main things that we've been able to accomplish as a collective is worker power. The kind of core belief of Fossil Free Books is that we organize as workers. So we are not necessarily organizing only as individuals with our own thought processes, our own psychology or whatever. We are organizing on the basis of our labor.
MA: You are a union.
SHT: Yes, basically we are kind of a union. We have actually also an authors’ union that we are organizing around because the union in the UK is not strong. But yeah, essentially it's the mobilization of a union where we're like, you know, we contribute the labor that funds this billion dollar industry and we can take away that power anytime. So probably the most effective things that we've done so far is that we organized a big boycott of Israeli media institutions and publishing institutions together with big names across the industry. So a lot of Pulitzer Prize winners, a lot of people who are-- you know when you see the name, you're like “Oh, okay, I've read that book before.” Just to get public consciousness. For me, I always think that one of the biggest things an author can contribute is face, right? Like we are literally the face or the voice sometimes of these movements. And so maybe the biggest power we have is to just withhold, withhold the face, withhold your voice, you know, and be like: “I will not sell my books to an Israeli company anymore.” So yeah, I think joining Fossil Free Books is about being part of a bigger collective and understanding also that books are about text but they're also about the means of production, right? And maybe it's easy to do the text part as an individual, but to really contest the means of production and stop the genocide as far as we can, we have to also look at material conditions. I'm very proud of what we've done at Fossil Free Books, actually. I mean, it's been a year and we continue to organize. Oh, they're based in the United Kingdom, sorry, I should have said that.
MA: Is there a city in the UK or are they all over?
SHT: Everywhere in the United Kingdom, but I think the two hubs are London and Edinburgh. So I live in Edinburgh but, It's open to anybody who has any links to the UK. So if anyone listening to this podcast is interested to join, feel free. There was also something else I wanted to say. Ah, that one of the reasons why this collective exists is also to explain the links between the environmental degradation that is happening at the moment and the genocide. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this already known about this, but the genocide has really hastened the collapse of the environmental system that we live in, which was already extremely under threat, right? But they dropped so many bombs in such a short span of time, I think it's almost like the cherry on top of this horrible cake, you know, it's just, it's unprecedented. It's unprecedented and terrible that this is allowed to continue, that one country's actions affect the entire world. So I think that's part of also the mission of Fossil Free Books: to help people understand this link.
MA: This interconnectedness.
SHT: Because we all live in this world, right? We share this world. How can it be that the small selfish actions of such a small minority have such an outsized impact on billions of us? That is not fair at all.
YS: I mean, in so many ways, from even what you were telling us about the church in Singapore and now the ecological aspects, we see all of the complex entanglements of Israel in the global state of power that is-- completely imbalanced dynamic that we're in. And we have to always keep our eyes peeled to remove the layers and observe those material conditions and be aware of the history behind that. And now we're essentially looking ahead.
MA: People have made connections between the LA fires and Gaza. And some people have been offended by that parallelism, but I think it's valid in some ways because it's a system of brutality and greed, this disconnect with nature, with earth, and which you see in Gaza, it's exponential. But you see it in the richest city, one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world. And there's nothing they can do. So it shows.
SHT: That's something that I will never understand, but maybe because I'm from Singapore and I think our government is very competent in some ways, but yeah, it's crazy to me that your own citizens can be going through such brutality and yet the money goes to another country to oppress people. That's crazy because your own people are suffering and yet you're funding their suffering, you know, through this outward channel, outward flow of money. It makes me sad for both my friends in Palestine and my friends in LA. I mean, I have friends in both places and I'm just like, I wish that people could see that their suffering is interlinked, you know.
MA: It's interlinked. There is a couple in California that has access to most of the water resources. It's the Resnicks. And they apparently also fund Israel. And so you see this inequality that's at the base of this late stage neoliberalism in the United States and the occupation and genocide in Palestine. There's like a new election.
YS: Yeah, power just takes so many forms and affects people in so many different ways. 10:34.
MA: This was really wonderful. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for all your insights for enlightening us to things that are not necessarily clear to us because like you say, you know, Singapore, East Asia is far, but in the end we are all so close to each other. Our future is shared. And for people listening: fossil free books, you can join online and as authors, as publishers, as part of the industry. There is definitely a connection between work and means of production. If that rings a bell for some people, much people said that before us. Yeah, so thank you so much, and would you like to say something to conclude, or?
SHT: No, thank you for this platform and for the work that you're doing at OtherNarratives. I think it takes such bravery and to have to follow your integrity in this way, so I'm grateful that you gave me this chance to be in an interview.
MA: Well, we've been lucky enough to meet great people along the way. We lost people, as you were saying. We also meet wonderful people from all over the world, like yourself. And OtherNarratives is also-- we're hoping to, you know, have all these connections.
YS: I mean, my world does-- It keeps getting richer and richer because we talk about this. I get to meet so many people, encounter a lot of new ideas, other collectives, and it's really enriching.
- Closing theme and end of conversation -