THE INTERPRETER'S DAUGHTER

A British-based Singaporean journalist probes family silences surrounding her beautiful and mysterious great-aunt.

Lim began researching her Chinese great-grandfather soon after she arrived in England in 1992 with her British husband. Over time, the one family member who came to intrigue her most was her great-grandfather’s youngest daughter, Fanny, who chose not to marry and “built a bridge between the orthodox and the modern for the later generations of women in her family.” A single family photograph dated from 1935 marked the beginning of Lim’s journey into her family’s past. She combed the archives of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies and the British Library for clues about the great-grandfather who had left a crisis-ridden, unstable China to work as an interpreter for British colonial administrators in Singapore. Piecing together family stories, Lim describes how her liberal-minded great-grandfather allowed Fanny—who rejected all Chinese anti-feminist traditions—to take a public oath of celibacy.” Her "sworn spinster" status allowed her the freedom to learn English, study at Hong Kong University, and pursue a career as a schoolteacher. It also gave her the means to support her elder sister when she left her husband for taking a concubine. Still, Chinese tradition still held power over Fanny. When the Japanese army marched into Singapore in 1942, she killed herself in what her family believed was an act of self-protection from the dishonor of rape. Yet Lim believed Fanny’s suicide could not be so simply explained. The Japanese arrested and executed thousands of Chinese men during their brief reign of terror, among them Fanny’s brother. Her death was meant as a symbolic expression of anguish for a family member she loved. Rich in the little-discussed history of Singaporean Chinese, this multigenerational memoir offers a timeless tale of the quest for identity, wholeness, and truth.

An eloquently enlightening family history.