Jinny Koh and Wong Shu Yun on family, expectations, and unconditional love

What happens when a lie changes the entire family (Atonement by Ian McEwan); your child becomes a mass murderer (We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver); a mother is unable to love her child after the loss of another (Ordinary People by Judith Guest)? This is an excerpt of a conversation between Jinny Koh, author of The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually, and writer Wong Shu Yun on the complexities of parent-child dynamics and the expectations of unconditional familial love at Deep Cut: un/conditional love.

SHU YUN

What makes your novel powerful and memorable are the characters. You have developed really strong characters to explore the themes of expectations, loss and trauma in a family context. Why have these characters and themes been important to you?

JINNY

My parents have their fair share of differences and growing up, I witnessed a lot of their quarrels which I tried to capture a sense of through Anna’s eyes. I think conflict within a family can have a huge impact on a child’s sense of security and emotional stability. I used to be pretty angsty as a teenager, but as I got older, I was able to understand things better, and I began to realise how complicated relationships are, and how, when a relationship breaks down, it is often the fault of everyone and yet, at the same time, the fault of no one. I know it’s contradicting, but relationships and emotions are contradictory. I think writing this book was a way for me to unpack all this complexity through the eyes of each family member. Maybe that’s why I had such strong feelings when writing the book as well, because even though the premise of a missing child is unusual, the conflict and issues that surfaced from it are universal.

SHU YUN

Su Lai, the mother, slowly loses her sense of judgement, withdraws and relinquishes her role as the nurturing mother. Meanwhile, her young daughter Anna is the one sensing that things are not right with her intuition. She eventually steps up with the capacity for forgiveness for herself and for her mother. She grows up faster and almost overnight – but for the better. We can't choose family; and at times, we can't choose what happens to our family. It's not a simple topic to deal with in a novel. What were the challenges you faced when writing about family?

JINNY

Writing about family and the loss of a child can easily veer towards melodrama and sentimentality, and those were the two things I tried to avoid when writing this book. This is not to say that the story cannot be dramatic and moving, but I didn’t want it to be overly sentimental. So it was a fine balance to try to bring out the sadness and struggle of each family member in a very restrained and measured way that still leaves the characters with a lot of dignity.

On a technical level, I wanted to bring out the conflict between each family member in as convincing a way as possible, often through inner monologue and dialogue. Even though the novel’s main focus is on just four family members plus Angie, each of them has their own trajectory. There is, of course, the relationship between Anna and her mother, and Su Lai and Kim Meng, but there are also subplots between Su Lai and Nai Nai, Anna and Nai Nai, and Anna and Kim Meng. Even Anna and Fishy—some might argue that Fishy is a character! And then there’s Anna and her teacher, and Anna and Farah, and Su Lai and Ah Gui. There are many relationships that are building up and breaking down across 290 pages, and the difficulty was in weaving all of them together so that they can stand on its own as well as relate to each other in the different scenes.

SHU YUN

One of the reasons why your characters are so relatable is because the Tan family seems like a typical Singaporean family. Kim Meng is the breadwinner and the more stoic or quiet father figure, while Su Lai is, in many ways, a typical mom. At one point in the book, Anna thought about how no one would cook for her, care for her when she was sick, and help her with her homework if Su Lai was not around. Why did you choose to write characters that seem stereotypical at first glance?

JINNY

I do think that child-caring often revolves around domestic stuff, especially in the eyes of a child, and throughout the book, you can see that Su Lai is the one who cooks for the family. But I also think it was a deliberate attempt on my part to highlight the limitations of a family that subscribes too much to gender norms.
For instance, Kim Meng continues working when Angie goes missing whereas Su Lai quit her job. It was a joint decision that Kim Meng should take on the breadwinning role in the family, but overtime we saw Su Lai’s mounting resentment towards him about it, as though she forgot that it was something they had both agreed on. She also resents that Kim Meng doesn’t “lead” the family enough when he is “the man” of the house, on top of the pressure from her own mother who thinks Kim Meng is not capable enough as a “man”. I think these pressures on masculinity and what a mother should be—for instance, Su Lai thinks no one loves a child more than a mother—actually contributes to the eventual fallout, where Su Lai couldn’t see herself beyond the role of a mother she has defined for herself. Ironically, after all the condemnation she has heaped on Kim Meng, you see him taking up the role of dual parenting at the end of the book, showing his ability to be resilient by breaking out of the stereotype set before him.

SHU YUN

This is a good time to delve deeper into the theme for today’s session, which is about the unconditional love of parents. In The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually we see how Su Lai struggles to divide her love between Anna and Angie, and her struggle to forgive Anna after her terrible lie. Some people may question Su Lai’s love for Anna because of what she put Anna through, and in that sense, she had failed as a mother to Anna. What are your thoughts on that?

JINNY

I’ve always been very interested in the notion of unconditional parental love, even more so after I became a parent! There is this huge expectation and pressure for parents to love their children unconditionally – but is that always this case? To what extent can a parent forgive their child for a mistake? To what extent can you hold a child accountable for her actions? Can a father and mother truly be unbiased in their love for their children?

It is almost a taboo to even discuss whether or not parents favour one child over another, although we know this happens all the time. And I think part of the difficulty in discussing about the frailties of parental love is the huge sense of judgment and self-condemnation that come with it. As a child, it can be hurtful to realise that your parents love your sibling more, or if you are the sibling, would you feel stressed to live up that kind of love? Do you feel guilty for taking away your parents attention from your sister or brother? And for the grown-ups, what kind of parent does that make you if you actually prefer one child over another? Are you unfair? Or is it simply human nature to have a preference?

SHU YUN

Is that why you decided to tell the story through the eyes of a child and her mother?

JINNY

Yes. I wanted to show the different sides and dynamics of a parent-child relationship, and how both people, on different levels of maturity, respond and react to the same tragedy in different ways. A lot of the story between Anna and Su Lai is about forgiveness—both within themselves and from each other. I think under Su Lai’s tough exterior is a mother who also feels a lot of guilt at the way things unfolded after Angie went missing. And it’s almost contradictory, but I think her guilt from being unable to love Anna unconditionally is what hinders her from loving Anna more.

SHU YUN

Another big theme that your characters play out is hope. The epigraph in your novel by Emily Dickinson is about hope – "Hope is the thing with feathers ..." Each character in your novel manifests hope differently. For Su Lai, it is about not letting go no matter the costs – and the costs can be high, such that her hope is also a grey area of denial. For Anna, hope is in her resilience – she is constantly adapting to the fragile situations for a higher goal: to keep her family together; but then she does lose part of her family in the end. For Kim Meng, hope is in acceptance – he does what he can to overcome the tragedies around him; yet he is emotionally passive to his wife. Can you talk more about the complexity of hope?

JINNY

We all need hope in our lives. That’s how we can push forward in the worst crises. But sometimes the desperation that comes with hope can be so focused, so persistent, that we unwittingly become a destructive force ourselves.

SHU YUN

Your novel contains some very local images that people of our generation can really relate to. These images include the setting to everyday life (having packed fish ball soup only to realise the soup has seeped out of the container), the language used (Singlish dialogue) and our small desires (treasuring our Polly Pocket toys and receiving pencil cases as birthday presents). Did writing a local story come to you naturally, or was it something you arrived at after experimenting with other narratives?

JINNY

At the start of my MFA, I did try to adopt a more "westernised" approach to my writing by setting my stories in America because I was worried that my classmates wouldn't be interested in Singapore. But it didn't feel natural, so after a couple of months, I switched gears and wrote my first short story with a Singaporean character – and my classmates and lecturer loved it. This was even before I begin The Gods. This made me realise that there is an audience for our local stories. As the saying goes: write what you know. And I love Singlish – in fact, I speak that way – so writing the dialogue for the book came pretty naturally to me.

SHU YUN

So do you think a professional writing programme had helped to shape your writing journey?

JINNY

Definitely. On a very practical level, it forced me to be disciplined and to work towards a deadline. I'd workshopped sections of my novel with my classmates and teachers and it was helpful to get feedback on what worked and what didn't. And of course being in such close community with fellow writers was really great because we help to sharpen and encourage each other – writing can be such an isolating activity!

SHU YUN

You were a former journalist in local mainstream media, and then you diverged to a different writing path in 2012 when you did your MFA. Is becoming a novelist something you've always had in mind?

JINNY

I've always enjoyed reading and writing since I was young, and I used to write short stories during my free time when I was in primary school. But I never really gave that idea serious thought because even at that age, I knew that wasn't a viable career. Maybe because I wasn't exposed to many local writers – apart from Catherine Lim – it didn't feel possible. So I went for a more practical route and did media and journalism instead. So I'd say that no, being a novelist wasn't something I’ve always had in mind.