The Brooklyn Rail

In Shze-Hui Tjoa’s debut memoir, The Story Game, the protagonist Hui is obsessed with power and how it works. She and her sister Nin lie together on their shared mattress in their childhood bedroom in Singapore. Right away, Shze-Hui signals that there’s something strange about the room. Nin is seven or eight years old. Hui is twenty-six. “Can you tell me a story?” Nin asks, invoking a ‘story game’ that she says they once played every night as kids. Instead of the usual stories about talking animals or flying carpets, Nin wants to hear true stories about her sister’s life outside of the room. Hui is reluctant. The world is disappointing and broken, she says. But Nin insists.

In Hui’s first story, she describes traveling with their parents to Bali, where their father had grown up. Outsiders think of Bali as an “island paradise,” but Hui knows better. Everywhere she looks, she sees how Dutch colonization froze Bali in time and doomed its locals to perform their culture for tourists on a loop—tourists who then patronize the luxury hotels that leech the island of its natural resources.

The memoir’s structure alternates between Hui’s stories and conversations between the sisters in the room. Hui considers her marriage to a white man in the context of colonial mythologies; she traces how Tumblr and organized religion fueled her disordered eating and crippling depression; she recalls the Palestinian teenagers she befriended on a volunteer trip to a convent in Jerusalem, and the haunting silence from the nuns when she tried to learn if her friends were safe amid violence in the city and the Israeli military’s invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2014.

It is no coincidence that Shze-Hui’s protagonist tells stories about power that showcase her own powerful intellect. The author later writes that Hui’s mind, “with all its degrees and diplomas, is always capable of dazzling a crowd.”

Hui even has dominion over this mysterious room that she shares with Nin. There, Hui is the storyteller. Nin is her audience. Hui can leave anytime she wants. Nin cannot. At one point, Hui says something that she fears will hurt Nin’s feelings. “You know that’s not something I have a choice about,” Nin replies.

But Nin is not without power. Through this character, Shze-Hui crafts an elegant and poignant rival for Hui’s intellect: a sibling. Nin expertly cross-examines her sister. She can tell when Hui is leaving out key details in her stories, and when she’s lying. Sometimes Nin goes silent for entire pages of dialogue. Sometimes she is patient, and sometimes she’s harsh. Why are none of Hui’s stories about herself, Nin wonders? She sounds like she’s reporting the news. Hui insists that her stories are “higher-order and intellectual.” She isn’t interested in sharing “frivolous” personal anecdotes. Nin pushes back. What is Hui’s husband like, besides being a white man? Is she aware that, in the room, she looks like she did when she was eight years old? What does she look like now? Why is she even in the room at all, instead of outside in the real world?

Nin identifies a large gap in Hui’s memory from when they were kids. Nin seems to know what happened; she was there. But she needs Hui to remember on her own. Shze-Hui masterfully balances the push and pull of the sisters: as Nin shepherds Hui closer to this painful part of her past, Hui’s resistance gradually softens and she becomes a willing participant in recovering her memories.

The story of what really happened to Hui justifies the intellectual fortress that she had built around it, and explains why Shze-Hui has written a protagonist whose mind is so dazzling and whose body is invisible. It also explains Hui’s obsession with power. Following her seismic revelation, she is subdued and forthright in her final dialogue with Nin. Gone are the five-dollar words and lofty ideals that adorned Hui’s first stories. Notably, Nin goes completely silent in the final pages with the two of them in the room. She lets her sister solve the memoir’s final mysteries on her own.

Critically, Hui reckons with the origins of the story game—and confronts how it was actually an abuse of her power as the older sibling. She felt so helpless outside of their room that she invented the game as a reclamation and means of survival. Nin was collateral damage. “I made you act out these scenes like a puppet,” a penitent Hui tells Nin, “with no control over your own words or actions.”

For years, Shze-Hui has been publishing the essays that would find their way into this memoir. The Story Game is the latest and most complete version of Hui’s story, which presumably mirrors Shze-Hui’s own recovery process. What she’s created here is a profound, clear-eyed, and harrowing explanation of what it takes to confront and heal from traumatic memories. It’s also a bid for reconciliation with her estranged sister.

Shze-Hui ends with the beginning of another story: Hui and Nin, both adults, talking in the real world outside of the room. Like any good ending, The Story Game’s doesn’t tie up every loose thread. It’s frustrating to not know whether the sisters will re-establish their bond. But Shze-Hui does leave her readers with notes of trepidation, hope, and childlike wonder.