Bookwild - Rage, Myth, and Magic in 1970s Singapore: Wen-Yi Lee's When They Burned The Butterfly

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

This week, I talk with Wen-Yi Lee about her adult fantasy debut When They Burned the Butterfly—a fierce, Sapphic story of rage, inheritance, and transformation set in post-colonial Singapore. She shares how her homecoming to Singapore shaped this deeply personal book, how real history and mythology intertwined to form her world of fire magic and girl gangs, and why female rage and found family remain at the heart of her storytelling. We also dive into her creative process, from “chasing the shiny thing” when writing to reimagining real-life places and histories that have since disappeared. If you love Jade City, The Poppy War, or any fantasy that blazes with feminist fury, you will love When They Burned the Butterfly! Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week I got to talk with Winnie Lee about her adult fantasy debut when they burned the butterfly. If you really enjoy fantasy with female rage, specifically in this case in the 70s, you definitely want to pick this one up. Singapore, 1972. Newly independent, a city of immigrants grappling for power in a fast modernizing world. Here, gangsters are the last conduits of the gods their ancestors brought with them and the back alleys where they fight are the last place where magic has not been assimilated and legislated away. Loner schoolgirl Adeline Seow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a housefire with a butterfly seared onto her skin, Adeline hunts down a girl she saw

in a back alley bar fight, a girl with a butterfly tattoo. She discovers she's far from alone. Ange Tian is a red butterfly, one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess, and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline's mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Adeline's bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother's killer and the gang's succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girl's dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian. But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light districts to fuse with a strange new magic.

Adeline may have found her place for once. With the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it. There's a lot going on there, as you can tell. And I feel like there are a lot of different elements that a lot of different readers would connect with. It also at the beginning says a fierce, glamorous, sapphic fantasy reimagining the secret societies of post-colonial Singapore for fans of Jade City, Sylvia Moreno Garcia, and the feverish intensity of R of Kwong's Poppy War. So, if any of those authors or any of those books have clicked with you, you're also really going to love this one. Well, I am so excited to talk with Winnie Lee about when they burn the butterfly. however I always want to get to know a little bit about you first before we dive into stuff

about the book so what was your journey to writing like did you always know you wanted to write like how did that all come together hey thanks for having me yeah uh yeah i think it's a i always get this question and it's always a weird one to answer because i think i've always been the kid who was writing like out of the womb yeah like I think my parents can attest I was filling notebooks I was passing them around class and everything I was like annoying all my friends into being my first like email subscribers oh and I would like send them like little word documents of like my chapters um obviously I was a what pet kid I was a fanfic kid so I've always been writing I think um and I've always been like a fantasy girl um but yeah I mean I would say

I think the point where I started writing and the point where I figured out what I wanted to be writing and to actually pursue writing was a completely different thing. And I think that was very much sort of in when I was in college and that was sort of the point where a lot more Asian fantasy was starting to debut. R.F. Kwong was starting to debut. Fondali was putting out Jade City. Zenscho was putting out. out her short story collection was putting out her books and suddenly i think after you know an entire sort of childhood of of seeing fantasy one way i was exposed to suddenly a lot of fantasy that felt a lot more like home like a completely different you know mode of writing and a mode of storytelling um that i never even sort of conceived of and that was when i started thinking that oh you know maybe I can write like this.

And so, yeah, I start exploring, I think, a lot more fantasy and a lot more spec-fick grounded in, you know, where I came from in sort of that mythology, in that background. I say all this, and then my first book was completely had nothing to do with where I came from. It was very much like a theater piece, and that was a, it came from another part of me. But I think this book in particular has been like the biggest, I think, it's been the most I've written about home ever. And I think the whole process was like a whole excavation

and sort of return to my roots in a way because I also wrote it as part of like a homecoming. So it has been really nice to see it come all this way. Yeah, that's really, that's powerful. That's how it all came together. How, so how did your writing process develop? Do you outline? Do you follow the vibes? Are you like a mixture in between? I try to be an outliner. I have tried many, many times. Especially now that I've got like my agent and publishers like on my case, I try so hard to be an outliner and to let everyone know what I'm going to do in advance. And it just doesn't work out because my book doesn't want to be written in advance. I've never stuck to an outline in my life. I do think a story is something that I need to find.

as I'm writing it and I need to uncover it in layers as I revise. So it is very much vibes, I think. I normally go into a story or I know I want to be developing a story when I've got a certain spark and then I've got some clear idea of where it's going. So I can't even, yeah, it's not the kind of thing that I can describe. It is very much, I think, vibes. It's a sort of internal feeling of like, okay, this story is strong enough that I want to chase it. Yeah.

And I think it is always just me, like, chasing, like, some kind of hyperfixation or some kind of thing that I need to, like, dislodge from, like, my chest. Yeah. I had a writing instructor at a workshop I did once call it chasing the shiny thing. Yeah. So we were talking about a writing process, and it was, you know, talking about do you write linearly? you just jump around like following the spark and I very much just sort of whatever catches my brain most at the moment I follow it and the story sort of unveils itself along the way I've come to realize after many attempts of trying to corral it into a structure that I just have to let it lead me

and I think that's where my writing has always been best when it just leads me yeah I mean that makes sense and it's like if you're really interested or hyperfixated on what you're writing about it's it like you can typically feel it in the book when the author really likes what they're writing about yeah i can feel it as a writer i can feel when i'm forcing it and i can feel it when it's just coming and i can feel it as a reader like like you said i think you can tell when the author loves what they're writing you can tell when the author like it just needed to come out of them yeah um and yeah i i think those are my favorite books when you can tell like the author was just obsessed about something and i'm like i can see that come through on the page yeah yeah

I totally agree. And I am prone to hyperfixations as well. So I feel you there. Every book just represents like a different half of it's right. Yeah. What about the characters? Do you know them pretty well when you start writing or do you kind of get to know them as well as you write? I get to know them. I think I tend to start with a clear idea of who I want to tell the story through. but it is always the fact that I find out more and more about them and their relationships with other characters and who these other characters are as I find the story and I figure out what the story needs because I think I always see characters in service of the plot

and in service of the greater themes that I'm trying to tell I want all the characters to have a point so it's always about figuring out sometimes it goes back sometimes I have a really strong character and who doesn't quite fit in yet and I'm like you fit in somehow and I just haven't found it yet and so it takes a few revisions to get there and that was very much the case with the love interest for Butterfly who Tien she's sort of one of the leaders of this girl gang that Adeline this sort of restless schoolgirl like you know becomes falls falls into trouble with and falls in love with at the same time

but their relationship I think went through like a billion revisions I knew I always wanted them together I sort of like knew who they were like aesthetically and like yeah vibes but I didn't quite figure them out as a character and like what exactly their dynamic was and Hu Qian was as a character

until like several revisions in which was very interesting I think for a relationship that's such a core part of the book it really drives a lot of the story but yeah it changed so much and what it meant or like how it sort of affected the turning points of the book changed a bunch which is always interesting I think with trying to figure a story out yeah yeah yeah they're quite the dynamic duo that's for sure together they go to some interesting places together yes they do they do well kind of diving into the book

then so one of the one of the first things like even in the synopsis is it does take place in the 70s in 1972 um and this was uh right after sorry I totally lost my my thought there um 1972 right after independence was there a reason that you chose that time period to set it in I love this question because I can always decide whether I want to choose the really intelligent answer or the most intelligent answer, which is that originally I picked it for the fact that I was looking for fires that had happened in that time period because I knew I wanted to write about a girl gang with fire magic in sort of 50, 60s, 70s, Singapore. So I was trawling through like Wikipedia and like, you know, old like historical records.

and I just had a list of like fires that like significant fires that had happened across like 20 years and originally it was going to be set around Singapore's most significant fire which happened in 1961 and is now forms quite a significant backdrop of the book's backstory of the Red Butterfly's backstory but I ended up landing on 1972 when a department store burned down at the end of the year and I couldn't even really tell you why that I picked that specific fire in the end

but it turned out to be like the most serendipitous thing which has been I think the coolest experience of writing historical fiction so far as my first go at historical fiction the coolest part about this process has just been like finding out how much click into place even though I chose this almost completely at random you know as I was like looking into it 1972 picking that period just after independence as opposed to pre-independence turned out to be I think the perfect environmental parallel and the perfect environmental backdrop

up to this main character's coming of age, because then it allowed me to write this setting that was also equally sort of influx, equally anxious about its own survival, equally, you know, its strings have just been cut, it's figuring out who it is, it's sort of changing itself rapidly in order to sort of secure its future, it's making all these drastic choices at the same time that she's doing all of this. And so that was very much working in parallel. And you have all these things, like the Merlion, which is, you know, one of Singapore's sort of big tourist symbols went up that year. And that was, that plays into like a big scene about, you know, self-mythologizing and creating your own symbols. And, you know, in 1972 turned out to be the year that the first

articles about the queer community in Singapore were published in the local newspaper. And it turned not be the first year that, you know, certain buildings went up or the first queer film came out from Hong Kong. And that sort of comes into the book because the main character is sort of a fan of films. And that's also because of, you know, the changing backdrop of entertainment and Westernization and, you know, all these things getting imported in. So although I chose, yeah, the year sort of completely randomly at first, it turned up. out to be something that I guess was leading me as well you know like the story was leading me and the setting was leading me apparently yeah because yeah it turned out to be sort of the perfect

time that's so cool that I because there were some mentions of some of those things and I didn't I hadn't like taking the time to Google if all of it was like really did happen then that is that's just like magical for lack of a better word and I think that's the trick um with writing historical fiction um where i try and i tried to do a lot of research yeah and i tried to be so convincing about the things that were real that you're also convinced that everything i made up is also real so just making sure that no one could tell i think because i didn't make quite a bunch of things up right i did want to yeah i i sort of see it as like the iceberg where it's like if i put in all the work into everything above the surface, you're going to believe that the rest of it is real, too.

And then I can have my playground to sort of move things around. Yeah, that's really cool. Oh, that is so cool. If you're an author who's listening right now, I'm sure that sometime recently you thought to yourself, I really just want to write and I don't want to have to think about social media. The good news is, I have a couple of solutions for you. If you just need help brainstorming ideas and building out posts and Canva, my monthly consulting might be good for you if you're about to publish a book i can help you with a book trailer the

other option is accumulating a content bank of both long and short form content that can be used now and generically into the future i love reading your books and i know you don't love figuring out how to post on social media so i would love to help follow the link in the show notes to learn more so all of those all of those themes obviously or like all of those events like speak to some of the themes of the book as well. But it also, I read that it was inspired by also like a real all female gang as well. So can you talk about that and like creating this girl gang? Yeah. It was it was kind of wild actually. It's one of those things that like, you know, sometimes I'm trying to find a story and I kind of have ideas. But like,

I know it needs to cook more. I know it's not quite there yet. And there are some ideas that just sort of grab you and you instantly know that you will have to chase down its answer or you will not be able to rest. And this was one of those occasions where it was like I sort of, I was thinking about I wanted to write something historical. I wanted to write something female-centric.

I was looking at the Sam Sui women who were these group of female migrant labor. in Singapore, who were also pretty iconic. But I couldn't quite find my way into that, couldn't find a character, couldn't find, you know, something particularly compelling. And then maybe in a very Gen Z thing of me to say, my friend sent me a TikTok. Yes. And it was this TikTok, it's one of those, you know, historical, educational kind of accounts.

But it was this TikTok about this all-girl gang called Red Butterfly that had existed in Singapore in sort of the 50s and 60s. And she said, you would love this, write a book. And I was like, you are so right. And sort of by that evening, I sort of had like a pitch done. Because immediately I was just obsessed with them. I was obsessed with, you know, when we think about gangs, when we think about these, you know, Chinese triads or whatever,

it's a very hyper-masculine male-dominated image. And so I was just immediately obsessed with figuring out the answer to how a group of girls would exist in this environment and would navigate this environment. You know, what does power look like to them when they're sort of part of this world, but also very much not part of this world? They still exist in very, very vulnerable female bodies. What does that mean in this world, especially, you know, in this time period? and especially because a lot of them come from marginalized backgrounds, you know, for class, for education in this book, particularly a bunch of them are queer. So, you know, how does that complicate this idea of, you know, masculine power or like female power and how they navigate this world, even though they have this magic, how does that endanger them as much as empower them? so a lot of people asked me why I decided to give them fire magic and again it was one of

oh yeah that was going to be my next question yeah it's not even one of those choices that was something that I really thought hard about I knew I wanted to put a fantasy spin on it yeah and I think you know immediately you think about I think fire is just the first place you go and you especially when you have a name like red butterfly it's like a god's gift to fantasy writers. So it's like the most like symbolic, evocative kind of name. Yeah. Especially when I started thinking about, you know, it's about spirit.

It's about transformation. Yeah. It's about anger. It's about power. And, you know, I grew up on characters like Azula. Obviously, we already talked about characters like the Poppy War. So, you know, I'm not inventing a wheel here. the angry Chinese girl with fire magic or angry character with fire magic even is not you know

I'm not claiming any sort of innovative credit for it but it yeah I think it just became like such a instinctive and like powerful choice especially because it became about I think the first book is a lot about transformation and it's a lot about destruction and fire is all of that as well. Yeah. So it was really interesting to put together a group of girls that were Marley Gray. I think it's,

I want to say it's feminist, but it's also feminist in like that complicated, like none of them unnecessarily like pure people. They're all making different choices based on what they want to do to survive, based on their own priorities, based on their own loyalties. Yeah, it's, they have autonomy to do that.

And, you know, there are found family as much as they are sort of, you know, having fraught relationships with each other. So that was really interesting, I think, because I had started out, you know, with the concept of, oh, they're going to be like this girl boss, like, try it. And they're going to, like, just, like, you know, roam around stabbing people and, like, killing men or something. And then that just became immediately, like, the least interesting path of storytelling, I think, as opposed to actually. figuring them out as complicated people totally yeah I think that that works

that's something that works well for me and lots of genres where it's like kind of what you're saying like many most stories that we all read are not reinventing anything like there is so much similarity

which is like why we even have our favorite genres and stuff but when the characters feel really real and like fully fleshed uh fully fleshed um i feel like it makes it more memorable even if there's always going to be tropes in a story so it's like that can be there but if you can connect with the characters and they feel real that's what ends up like sticking with me about a story um yeah absolutely i mean tropes originated well tropes got popular in the first place because

they worked so well narrative yeah right it's not they're not bad things it's just they sort of have to come naturally with the characters and with the story totally yeah and the fire like i feel like i was thinking the same thing like it symbolizes rage so much too so it like it fits for these these women these girls i couldn't see her having anything else yeah totally um so she our main character is it adeline or adeline which way do you pronounce it it's adeline okay adeline okay so she basically is it you've kind of talked about identity and even your own personal mythology she basically learns after her mom uh dies in a fire who her mom had been within this gang and then has to kind of figure out what that means for herself um did you kind of always want that

story for her um is that kind of how you went into it knowing like the main character would kind of be finding out something they didn't know about their parent while she was alive. Yeah, I think in the original ideas, like there was a dad in the picture, and then I quickly realized I didn't know what to do with him, so I immediately took him out of the picture. I mean, I'm obsessed with stories about complicated mother-daughter relationships, where it's fraught, but they're both also just kind of trying their best, and their arc is about like finding their way back to each other and realizing that they are sort of she is sort of her mother's daughter and yeah so i i always knew i think that i wanted her to have to transition from

one sort of comfortable um middle upper class world very dramatically into this violent underworld and that needed to be marked by a very significant loss that needed to be marked by a very significant loss that need to be marked by something that sort of, you know, upended everything that she had, basically cut off all her only tethers because at the start of the book, you know, her mom is, they kind of have this codependency thing going on. They're the only people she believes that have this fire magic. She's the only child of a single mom. So they're very, very attached, but they're also like kind of toxic to weird to each other as things go. Yeah. And, And so her mom is really sort of only her whole world because she's this loner at school.

She doesn't really have anyone else to relate to. And then her mom dies very dramatically in this mysterious house fire sort of like two hours also after she's had like her gay awakening with this girl that she sees in the bar. So it's a very like world upturning night for her. Yes. A world upturning like three hours for her. Yeah. And then obviously she goes. runs after this girl with a butterfly tattoo

finds out her mom is the leader of this gang and now her sort of bloodline is the only thing keeping these girls goddess together and so she's sort of drawn into this world she's trying to figure out what happened to her mom but she's also sort of involved in these

succession battles, power plays kind of thing so it's very complicated for her but I did always know that I wanted it to be about a lineage of women and sort of the core of that is always going to be a mother and a daughter. Totally. Yeah, and you mentioned

like the magic is really tied to gods and like you're saying with succession, the like the inheritance of the powers. so what yeah like how did you approach incorporating like grounding the magic in that I think it's interesting that you talk about as inheritance because I guess also like a core tension of the book is that previously well Adeline is in this world the first person to

sort of inherit that power through blood previously you've had to inherit that power through blood previously you've had to inherit this power through taking these oaths and undergoing these initiations. And these gangs have always been about found family outside of your blood family and outside of these traditional structures. And suddenly she's coming in and she's upending everything and sort of in the background, you know, magic is also changing. And that's also the whole setting that nothing quite operates in the same way that everyone thought it did. And it's that whole new status quo and I guess I was also thinking about that because right now where the characters are you know these gangs formed as almost mutual aid groups I suppose for migrants from the same

village or the same region who had come from China and this is sort of historical as well as in the book but you know they came to this foreign country they they didn't have any connections didn't have any resources so of course they banded together and you know as as more people came in they sort of recruited people from their kin basically and that's how these groups formed um and you know initially it was about survival it was about having these connections but obviously as the generations go um as now you know turn of independence all these characters are naturalized citizens they're all residents of this country this is

kind of their home now and so what does that power and what does that family and structure look like when it's not necessarily for the same kind of survival when the goals have shifted so I think

all these concepts of inheritance and all these concepts of power and all these concepts of family have sort of dramatically changed and so I think that was also like my approach to the fantasy element. It was very much looking at what was historical.

And, you know, not even all of it is historical. A lot of the things that I was drawing on are still practices that people are practicing today, believes that people are still have today. I was drawing on a lot of Chinese spirit medium rituals where, you know, there's a spirit medium who channels a god and the petitioners come to this conduit to speak to the god on their behalf and these are still things that are very contemporary and they are things that happen you know these gang rituals sort of less so now but they are i was sort of drawing on some of these real rituals that did happen in actual gangs um and so it was a lot of drawing

on real stuff and seeing where I could just play it up a little bit or blend it with a little bit of mythology or make it just a little larger than life. I think there's a bunch of Chinese mythology in there. There's a god, a shape-shifting gang who is sort of a blend of this real robber who died in like a police shootout in 1972 and he was known for cross-dressing and disguised. And then so I sort of crossed him with this shapeshifting demon from Johnny to the West, this Chinese classic called the White Bone Demon. And so now you've got a gang of robbers who can shapeshift and they're called the White Bone Gang. So it was just, it was a lot of fun, I think. I never wanted to give it like a very structured magic system,

quote unquote. I wanted it to feel almost like, I always wanted to feel a little bit unreached. like the gods and like all this I think the characters don't quite have a grasp on the world I think the world is kind of spinning a little bit out of control it's sort of slipping a bit out of their grasp so I wanted the magic to feel a little bit unreachable as well yeah wow this is still blowing my mind how many things happened in 1972 yeah it's cool actually I mean the cool part right because once you zoom in onto a period of history Even if you zoomed in to today, you know, whatever day in November, 2025, if you looked all over the world, the more you zoomed in, the more, like, stories you would find. And I think life is just, like, unending stories. Yeah. So it's really interesting to, like, try and, like, figure out what to capture in a historical piece. If you love the Book Wild podcast so much that you'd love to be a part of a Book Wild community that gets early episode releases and no ads in the episodes, you need to check out my Book Wild Patreon. If you don't know what Patreon is, it is a social platform where you can have exclusive content and community, all in one space that isn't Instagram or YouTube.

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Signing up is easy. Just follow the link in the show notes. Right. I mean, a lot of what you were just saying is even kind of becoming necessary in America right now, unfortunately where the mutual aid is almost what is like the most like accessible to a lot of essentially minority at this point with the way ICE is being and all of that um so yeah i mean obviously like you were pulling more from like Asian inspiration for this story but even when you were just talking about that i was like that's even what we're needing to do here right now yeah and

mean, I think it's so compelling to me also because I think it's just a constant universal theme that when, you know, the original system doesn't serve you or when the original system is not made for you, you're going to have to find bonds of your own and you're going to have to find support of your own. And sometimes that puts you in conflict with the structures in power. And that's really unfortunate a lot of the time because a lot of the people creating these, you know, unorganized. Orthodox structures and unorthodox groups are people who are marginalized by the system in the first place. And I think it's also, I mean, it's really, it can be really empowering in some sense to see how people form community. And I think that was also something that I was playing with in the book where, you know, I never want to be romanticizing gang violence necessarily. But there's something to, you know, that sense of found family and that sense of like creating your own sense of power when you've been so disenfranchising. empowered elsewhere um you know especially when they're queer again not saying that queer people and gangsters are the same but again that sense of untraditional kinship um and sort of making your own laws i think is a very compelling theme when there is a lot wrong with the system

yeah yeah it's like when people here talk about how violence is never the answer and it's like well if you're being violently oppressed sometimes that is the like that is going to be the only way out of it like yeah it's it's the oppressor's fault that it gets to that fault or to that uh to that point not the oppressed basically yeah yeah with i think that also is kind of something well i you know i don't know i think the book is also kind of a lot about generations and a lot of built-up history of people doing things to each other and existing within the space

and sometimes people make a choice to break out of that and sometimes people take a choice to make a stand in that and I think that all leads them in very different directions. And I don't think there's never an easy answer and I think that complexity is also sort of what drives it. Yeah, yeah, that's, I love the idea of things being black and white and easy to understand. It feels like you could control it more, but it's just not the case.

Unfortunately, we kind of talked about the butterfly as a symbol as well, but it kind of, it functions in so many different levels. So Adeline is going through a very large transformation herself. And then even the shape shift. like when you're kind of talking about the like the inspiration for that as well um like people who are are trans or enjoy cross-dressing that's even kind of like a version of transformation as well so were you were you thinking about the symbolism of the butterfly like when you even like named the the not the book named the gang but also the book um or

did it just kind of fit so well the same way that 1972 ended up. Yeah. I mean, again, like Red Butterfly was the historical name of this actual girl gang. And again, it was just like kind of gift, gift horse, gift wrapped, fell into my lap. I, you don't even have to reach very far for the themes. Like you said, it's the most obvious in the world. But yeah, it just ended up fitting so, so perfectly with the themes that I was exploring. and I kind of love that you brought up the trans community as well because I think one of the coolest things that did come up of writing this book and of exploring this time period

was this uncovering of this place called Bogus Street which was this nightlife street that was very known for trans women and drag queens and it was kind of like a nightlife place you had a lot of soldiers stopping over at the time the Vietnam War was going on so you had all these foreign soldiers stopping by on their time off or whatever on the way to and from Vietnam and that sort of comes in of like

what kind of foreign influences are coming what kind of violences are going in and out who are the new migrants now who are the new refugees and the discovery of Bougar Street because Bougar Street was eventually sort of repossessed by the government torn down and redeveloped

for modernization reasons in the late 1970s or early 80s, I want to say. I shouldn't know this because I'm working with it for the next thing I'm writing. But yeah, you know, it is sort of within the next 20 years, it wouldn't exist anymore. It was gone by the time I was born. And, you know, this whole community that had formed there, sort of scattered and had to find other places. And so on one level, it was just such a joyous, like,

like physical embodiment of like this very queer, vibrant, um, on traditional space, um, sort of outside of, you know, civil society or whatnot. But it also sort of works in this portentous way for people who know about it.

And eventually I want to lean into that, but for people who know that this place doesn't exist anymore. And a lot of the book was me sort of writing into that, that sense. that a lot of the things that I'm writing and describing in this book no longer exist in this present DNA, which is very strange. But also quite like, it struck me quite hard, I think. I was like, oh, this is the city that my parents grew up in. And it has been the case where we had my book launched the other day and we were mentioning a couple of these places. And it was, you know,

people like my parents and people in that generation who actually recognize these places and could tell you about them. So that's been pretty cool. Yeah, I bet. And you said it was kind of like a homecoming. Did you grow up in Singapore as well? I did. And then I went to the UK for uni and then COVID hit as I was in sort of later from years of that. So I came back at the perfect time that you want to come back to your childhood home. So it was very tumultuous. I guess that was also sort of my inner chrysalis needing to find my way out. I was really, I think, you know, obviously you go away and then you come back,

especially over something like college, you sort of come back as a whole different person as more of an adult and trying to like fit back into your childhood city. I think there was a lot of reconfiguring happening and also I think I was sort of coming out at the time and I was also figuring that out so it was a lot of like reinvention a lot of like trying to have to like remake all my spaces and all my people

yeah so I do think in you know when I was writing it I started writing this in like 22 and I couldn't have I think it's always interesting with a book when I write it and then as I'm writing I realized why I needed to write it for myself or like what I was actually drawing on. I didn't sit down to write a book and to be like oh I need to write about my relationship with homecoming but as I was writing I realized that sort of that is what I was

doing a little bit. That's so cool. I think that's always the best thing when I can start feeling where a book is actually coming from. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the readers you can you connect to it more when the writers really connected to it as well yeah yeah yeah that's yeah that's really cool did you so with some of the places that you're saying they're like they're either not the same anymore or they're not there at all did you go visit any of them at present when you like knew you wanted to include them i did a couple um so a couple of my favorite ones, Bougu Street, there's this island that used to exist in the middle of the Singapore River called Fulal Saigon that was filled in again before I was born. And it just was

like the most wild magical thing to be like, what do you mean? There was an island in the middle of the river and it's not there anymore because they just connected it to the mainland and now like a condo is on top of it. So yeah, you know, a lot of these places that have since been redeveloped entire towns or entire islands that have changed over the course of those couple of decades. I did go and visit a couple of the places in Chinatown, just because I was curious. It was the kind of thing where it's like I didn't know about their history until I started doing research for this book. There's a street called Sego Lane that used to be known as the Street of the Dead because there were all these death houses and funeral parlors

where poor people especially would just sort of go and wait to die because they didn't want to for superstitious reasons they didn't want to you know die where all their colleagues or everyone else that they were living with were living um and sego lane is now sort of a shopping street it's just a bunch of shops and like you know hawkers and stuff it's not that anymore um and it's it's a place that i would never have sort of paid attention to if i had written this book. And right opposite Sega Street is this building

that at the time of the book and it's where a scene in the book takes place the old metropole theater so it's an old cinema that has since been taken over by a church. And so that building is still there

but sort of under very different ownership. Right. And I was just, it was one of those unkillable darlings but I was like once I found this out I wanted to find a way to keep it in the final book because it just also fits so well with the themes of the book which is also sort of looking at the shifting religious landscape

of the Chinese Singaporean community from religions like Buddhism and Taoism into Christianity and that was tied to upward mobility. It was tied to class. It was tied to education. It was tied to English language education, which was very much tied to missionary schools and obviously, you know, teaching of Christianity.

So all of that was there. So it's been very cool, I think, to uncover all this history. Yeah. And yeah, definitely made me feel more at home, I think. That's cool. Yeah, I have been on more of a history kick myself, but America's is not as comforting. so there are parts of it that are

a lot of yeah black marks in its history too yeah yeah but you know I think that's always the thing about history it's better to confront it than not knowing about it at all yes yeah yeah we don't want to be hiding history in most cases oh really I can't think of any case well obviously I loved it I talk about female rage a lot

so for anyone who loves those recommendations historical fiction but it's it's like 1970s like I think I think it's pretty approachable even if you're not a historical fiction person typically so um everyone needs to go read it basically and you can DM both of us I would assume you would yeah DMs about it too take me if it's good if you if you don't like it don't yes keep that to yourself totally um valid but don't let me know yes yeah I I do normally ask at the end if you have any books that you always recommend. Oh, this is so stressful. Every time someone ask me this, I've suddenly never read anything in my life.

Oh. You know, I always recommend, I think in this vein, I always recommend Jate City. I think it's just such an... I need to read that one. Interesting take on... Yeah, no, please do. I love Jate City. I always recommend Jate City.

I'm obsessed with Lockoom The Lockoom is like one of those selective recommendations where I only recommend once I've sussed out someone's vibes and I'm like people either love it or hate it so I need to know if you're the kind of person who will love it before I recommend it

because I will be very sad if you hate it. I get it. I have somewhere like it's hard to say I recommend this but I enjoyed it. I mean I hold for the right reader I wholeheartedly recommend the lock If I know you will be obsessed with it, I will push it on you until you read it.

And I've, like, converted several people. So my mission is on track. Yeah, but I love, I tend to love weird stuff. I tend to love, like, horror-leaning stuff. Yes. I'm currently reading Hiran Ennis, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, but it's called The Works of Vermin. Okay.

And their debut was called Leach, and Leach was this, like, Gothic, sci-fi just so interesting and the works of vermin is about like this city in this like it's a fantasy about this city that exists in the stump of this like ancient abandoned tree and like the roots dangle down into this river that's like infested with vermin and the vermin like sort of invade the city and the main characters and exterminator I just love weird stuff yeah that's very unique I love that if the goodreads reviews are like this was too weird for me I will probably love it. Yeah.

So, yeah, I love good, like, voice. I love good, like, rich prose. Yeah. I love Julianne-onfield. I love Kamamir Macado. I love The Vegetarian by Hong Kong. I could go on. Yeah.

But, yeah, I think you get a sense of the kind of things I like. I know. I know. Oh, my gosh. I need to add all of these to my library holds. Yeah, those are some fantastic. ones well i'm going to try those out to make anyone's reading list longer you totally that's like the whole point of this podcast and i have i like really got into horror in the last year like

became one of my top genres so now i'm intrigued by this other version sorry what the world's kind of horrifying yeah um yeah and i i've been really like historical fiction which uh blended with horror is really fascinating for me. I feel like it's like an interesting way to learn about the horrors of history, honestly, I guess is where I was going with that. I just read a book called Scream With Me, and it's a professor who breaks down how horror movies between, I think, 1968 and 1978 and 1978, how horror movies were like actually displaying and reflecting whether they meant to or not like female struggle for autonomy at that time so that was so fascinating and I'm just like I'm so intrigued by how people can use horror so now you've like given me a whole other

lane of horror to kind of think about yeah I love horror as the genre again I think also just for I love what the medium can do in terms of what it can represent the kind of feelings that it can bring out the kind of issues that can address because a lot of the world is kind of horrifying and I love when a genre can like grapple with that to like fullest extreme. Yeah in the in the like literally the like forward of that book she talks about how she started to also really realize that um like the way that it makes you empathetic for things that happened that you didn't experience is is somewhat different than other genres because a lot of horror is about like really having that visceral fear. It's such a human genre. Yeah. Yeah. And so you really connect with like, oh, especially when it's

like historical and horror. You're like, oh, this is what people were living through in certain situations. So yeah, I have become obsessed with horror. It's been, I think horror's on the rise right now. I think it might be. There's a whole thing happening. Yeah. Yeah. I just finish working on a cannibalism essay, which should be coming out at some point, but it was about like why we're seeing so many cannibals in fiction right now and why I love that theme and the different ways that people have used cannibalism in literature so you can oh my gosh is it like um on are you like publishing on your website or where can um it's gonna come out on reactor okay cool well i want to read that too i do see more cannibalism and there's like quite the uh eat the rich attitude here

for lots of different reasons right now so i feel like that's even part of it here a lot of people just it's aspirational cannibalism yes like people deserve it well thank you so much for spending time with me and talking about it um and i can't wait to see what you write next thank you the catabolism essay is the next thing you can look up for thank you so much for having me Thank you.