Jemimah Wei on charting a new course with her debut novel

Since its release on May 6 this year, Jemimah Wei’s novel The Original Daughter has been collecting accolades. It was a National Book Foundation 2025 5 Under 35 Honouree, an Editor’s Pick on New York Times, and lauded on multiple book clubs, including that of Good Morning America and Chinese-Icelandic jazz-inspired musician Laufey.

Growing up, 32-year-old Jemimah could never have imagined the possibility of being the full-time writer she is now – let alone being celebrated on the international literary stage. Most practical Singapore parents of her era banished the trade of a fiction writer to a life of hunger; a doctor or lawyer was the assumed path towards financial freedom and, with it, happiness.

“Just get a degree and you’re okay. Back then, there was that idea,” explains Jemimah, highlighting the pressure put onto the young. In the novel, scenes of children working on verb tenses and basic addition are normal post dinner routines. “And it’s not enough that you need to be the best; you need to be the best by a wide margin to number two.”

Singapore’s stressful academic system is one of the underlying themes in The Original Daughter, which traces the complex relationship between two sisters, Genevieve and Arin. The latter had been adopted from the illicit second family of Genevieve’s trifling grandfather after his passing.

The image of a society driven by the urgency of survival through uncompromising excellence is painfully accurate and poignant in the book, woven through the day-to-day struggles of a working class family.

Jemimah’s childhood realities – and that of many other Singaporeans – seep into the story’s familial and urban contexts. She comes from a similar working class family and had to navigate demanding challenges in order to carve out her own possibilities.

Financial limitations provided one such challenge. “I have been working part-time since I was 14, while simultaneously studying. I have given tuition, sold apple strudel and uniforms, and sang Christmas carols in malls for vouchers or cash,” she says.

“I’ve also been a mascot giving out flyers. But I didn’t do that for very long because it was so gross – I’d get so sweaty,” she adds, scrunching up her nose at the memory. Jemimah even straddled a full-time copywriting job while studying for her undergraduate English literature degree at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where she also completed a masters in creative writing.

Singaporeans might also recognise Jemimah as a host on digital channel Clicknetwork in the noughties – one of her many jobs but “way more fun”. 

Seeking precedents

The articulate and confident girl from the heartlands now divides her time between Singapore and New York. She shares that in her younger days, writing was something done with leftover time from work.

Even so, being a full-time writer seemed like a far-off dream; being published – even further. “There were no real [local] models of people writing fiction that seemed sustainable for a career, and not something that was a side to something else,” Jemimah reflects.

But a meeting with Malaysian writer Tash Aw at a writing master class at NTU pivoted her focus towards being a serious author. Tash is a rare success story from this part of the world: His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, has been translated into 20 languages, and won multiple awards, including the 2005 Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award.

“It was the first time I had met somebody who was writing fiction full time in a pretty major way. That was impactful for me because if someone else can do it – and he’s also from a working class background – it stands to reason that it’s not impossible [for me] as well,” Jemimah shares.

Moving abroad

In 2018, Jemimah made the leap, heading to London for a few months to research how the publishing industry works. “It was empowering to me because publishing a book didn’t seem like a magical thing. There’re many steps, but at least you could see the steps, so it didn’t seem so mysterious and insurmountable,” she says.

A Masters in Fine Arts scholarship at Columbia University’s School of the Arts allowed her to just study and write; for the first time, she did not need to work. However, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Jemimah returned home for 18 months and became severely sleep deprived due to the time difference of her online classes. Her empty flat in the US was “haemorrhaging money”. The novel took a creative hiatus. 

Up till this time, Jemimah still was unsure if she was cut out to be a writer. “So much about being a debut writer is that you don’t have that confirmation externally that what you’re doing is valid; nobody can tell you if your book will work out and if you give up, nobody cares,” she notes.

Was she good or was she just one of the many students accepted because she paid the fees? Was it just a string of lucky events that got her up to this point? At this point, Jemimah only had one year to finish her novel before her visa ran out. Time was ticking, and her pockets were also emptying. 

Some success

A friend mentioned the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; it was the dream scholarship, with awardees being sufficiently paid to just write with no need for tangible returns for two years. It was a long shot, but Jemimah applied – and got it.

“I was mind-blown,” Jemimah recollects. She’s the first-ever Singaporean recipient of the grant, given annually to only five poets and five fiction writers. This also provided the affirmation she needed – she was destined to write.

Without the pressure of finances, Jemimah was able to finally put in the time and mental energy to complete The Original Daughter. At the time of publishing, it had been 11 years since she first conceived the book.

While busy with book tours, she takes time to be in Singapore, where she is now mentoring a fiction writer and giving master classes. “As a writer from Singapore rather than from the global publishing majority, I feel this responsibility to talk about my work publicly because I myself had seen these [successful] writers that made it and did not know how to get there,” she explains.

It was also important that the book captured her Singapore – not the glossy, cosmopolitan version – as well as the complex and inextricable bonds of relationships of the non-romantic kind. In The Original Daughter, love plays out – whether nuanced or broken, through envy or anger – between the sisters and those around them.

“One of the driving artistic questions for me was: What can love endure?” Jemimah expounds. “There’s a real strength to the fact that back home, these intense bonds we have with friends and family can be simultaneously suffocating and frustrating, yet immensely nourishing.” 

These relationships are not just found in Singaporean families – something Jemimah realised from dialogues with book signing fans. “Interestingly, when I was writing the book, I thought this was a very Singaporean story, so maybe only Singaporeans would care. But when I’m on book tours, I’d be in the middle of a random city I’ve never visited in America, and someone would come up to me and say: ‘This is my story, this is how I feel’ – and they’re not even Singaporean,” she shares.

Many of these readers were second- or thirdgeneration immigrants living in a Western context with Western values, but still carrying their own community or family relationships.

“And then there are Americans and British people who come from legacies of many generations, who also feel very strongly about these complicated familial bonds,” Jemimah says. “So I thought, maybe there’s more we have in common than not with one another, even though we come from different contexts and backgrounds.” 

Helping the next generation

As she reflects on her struggles with Singapore’s pressure cooker academic system, I ask Jemimah if she has any tangible ideas on how things can change. She thinks for a while, before lamenting the inequality of arts-related experiences in the different stratum of schools.

“When you look at the secondary school level, there is a stratified sense of who can afford to do the arts, and who can afford to pursue certain passions,” she says.

Jemimah believes more funding should go towards those who cannot afford to pursue artistic passions on their own. “If you fund the broadest thing possible, you are not just supporting the people who have already made it; you are changing the options available to people at a younger level. It changes the downstream effect,” she explains.

One thing she feels that will help to expand the options for those like her is for more individuals to offer scholarships without any strings attached. “Most scholarships available for people not from a wealthy background are from the government, schools or firms with vested interests,” she says, on the multi-year bonds that commit 18-year-olds to a life that they may only realise much later is not suited for them.

It would be similar to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship she received, which came with no expectations and no milestones. “They just believed in me,” she says gratefully. “That kind of freedom is different.”

PHOTOGRAPHY: DARREN GABRIEL LEOW, ASSISTED BY: MELVIN WONG
CREATIVE DIRECTION & STYLING: LENA KAMARUDIN, ASSISTED BY: MANDY TAN & KALINA WOJCICKA
ART DIRECTION: RAY TICSAY
FLORAL STYLING: FAWN WORLD
HAIR: CALVIN GAN/HAIRLOOM (JEMIMAH WEI)
MAKEUP: LASALLE LEE, USING DIOR BEAUTY