Shze-hui Tjoa's experimental memoir The Story Game plays with silence and gaps

Singaporean writer Shze-hui Tjoa's memoir is framed by a cryptic game — adult Tjoa tells a series of unrelated stories to her sister Nin, who is frozen at eight years old and listens obediently.

- Shawn Hoo

THE STORY GAME By Shze-hui Tjoa Memoir/Faction Press/Paperback/ 300 pages/$30 ☆☆☆

They play the coy narrative game in their humid imaginary room, where Nin fishes for more but Tjoa is avoidant, reticent, digressive and forgetful.

Or, indeed, Tjoa — called Hui in the memoir — is repressing something. She wants to talk about the perils and pleasures of dating a white man as a woman with Indonesian heritage, but begins with an academic anecdote about Balinese cockfighting by anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

When recounting a scammy Baltic eco-hostel, she spins an improbable tale of victimhood and Nin calls her out.

What exactly is Hui hiding from Nin? And what accounts for this faux therapeutic relationship the sisters share?

The blurb explains that the memoir is an attempt "to recover memories lost to complex PTSD". While the term "post-traumatic stress disorder" never comes up in the book, it evidently experiments with silences, narrative gaps, red herrings and unreliable narration as its literary symptoms.

It is an intriguing and ludic conceit for a memoir — the biggest Singaporean memoir in recent times to be read and reviewed among global independent outfits.