The Story Game opens with an endless night in a dark room in Singapore. Hui, the narrator, reaches over to her younger sister, Nin, who lays next to her in bed, and asks if she wants to play the story game. The game goes as follows: as they lie in bed in the darkness, Hui tells Nin tale after tale about the outside world, and Nin can ask her questions or make requests to nudge the stories into different directions. Hui, being the older sister, defaults to stories about her experiences as an Indonesian by blood but not by upbringing, as an immigrant in the UK, as a consultant who helps businesses greenwash their products and services, with some kind of teaching, to show her sister that the world is riddled with complications—from colonial legacy and environmental tensions—and that it is far from fairy tales. But these stories don’t satisfy Nin, who, for reasons concealed throughout most of the memoir, is unable to leave the room to live through these stories with Hui, and who wants to reconnect with her sister and understand Hui’s emotions and personal experiences.
From the premise to the structure, moving between the stories that Hui tells Nin and the dialogue between the two sisters, The Story Game provides an unconventional approach to memoir writing. Instead of being the listener, readers observe as Hui narrativizes her life, picking the stories and angles to fit her audience. The memoir is thus highly self-aware: it highlights how important and natural storytelling is to us as human beings, and it also shows how different one’s life could look like depending on the kind of stories one chooses to tell. As Hui opens up and attempt to be more honest with her sister, we see her stories go from the didactic reflections of an intellectual to the more vulnerable admissions of exhaustion and hurt between siblings.
Hui’s first story about her complicated relationship with Indonesia, her father’s distant homeland, sounds like the discussion of a graduate seminar, featuring discussions of Clifford Geertz’s anthropological practice and its limitations. In her second story of how she fell in love with her husband, a white man, after moving to the UK, she talks about the gender and racial politics that inevitably plagues their interracial relationship—and the power that desire has in overcoming it: “I cannot help wanting to be with him, despite knowing what I do about the picture that we make—even though I know that our bodies, walking down the street, will instantly cease to be our own; that they will turn into vessels for the usual play of power.” In a moment of empowerment, Hui says with conviction to Nin that to desire without letting these dynamics bend you is to be free.
Yet, as lucid her intellectual mind seems to be, freedom seems out of reach for Hui. Even as she tells these stories, reflecting on her experiences and their socio-political meaning with eloquence and sharpness, she feels a crippling reluctance to leave this mysterious room. The precocious Nin points out at the end of each story that each feels forceful and ingenuine—the stories feel dressed up, as if to hide something underneath. By the fourth story, Nin becomes frustrated by Hui’s relentless reluctance to open up and pushes her to really be honest. In response, Hui runs away from the room, leaving her sister behind.
More than her inquisitive comments, it is the mystery of who Nin truly is and why she is stuck in this pocket of a room, insulated from reality, that keeps the pages turning. One suspects that Nin is a spirit, a figment of Hui’s imagination, a voice in Hui’s head. From there arises a much more complex understanding of the stories being told: Hui is not only concealing her emotions from Nin and the audience, but she is also keeping herself from feeling and processing them. What had happened to Nin? Was there ever a younger sister? If there was, then why were the sisters separated, and how does this separation affect the way that Hui’s telling her stories?
In this way, the key to understanding Hui’s story and what she is hiding from everyone, including herself, lies in understanding who Nin is. This key presents itself at the end of the book—in a story where Hui lets her body, as opposed to her mind, recount what she has experienced. The key lifts the curtain and shows readers the scenes behind, the physical and mental strains that Hui had undergone as a child with musical talent and potential in a society driven by intense competition, and how this talent affected her relationship with everyone, including her little sister. Singapore is home to plenty of world champions and high achievers—at the same time, students in the country are also among the most stressed out in the world. To cope with the memories of her intense childhood, Hui builds for herself a mind palace with walls and walls of intellectualism and musings that cover up the hurt child at the heart of it all.
The remarkable thing is, through The Story Game, author Shze-Hui Tjoa reconstructs this mind palace for the reader to walk in. She guides the reader through the way she had interpreted her own life, demonstrating how her mindset has been the very thing keeping her from facing the pains and pressures she experienced the child who carries the dreams of her parents. And by telling the story of her body and how it remembers, she also lets us witness her healing process. In playing with the form, Tjoa creates a memoir that at once engages creatively with the art of storytelling and exposes herself to the reader in a personal and raw way.
One could emerge from reading The Story Game with food for thought on various issues, from decolonialization to migration to sisterhood—about all of which Tjoa offers insightful introspections. But what will stay with me for a long time after reading this memoir is the way in which Tjoa built with words and stories the state of mind that she was in during her twenties, so that, as readers, we could come as close as possible to walking in her shoes. At its heart, The Story Game is an exercise in empathy.
The Story Game
by Shze-Hui Tjoa
Tin House Books
Thảo Tô is a writer from Vietnam. Her writing can be found in Sine Theta Magazine, diaCRITICS, The Augment Review, and elsewhere.
