"The Original Daughter" with Jemimah Wei In-Person
Join us for a conversation with Jemimah Wei, a Hemingway Writer-in-Residence at The Community Library, about her award-winning novel The Original Daughter.
Singapore, 1996. Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in Bedok, she is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead.
At once collaborators and sisters, Gen and Arin grow up inseparable, navigating the intensity of life in working-class Singapore – where urgent insistence on achievement demands self-immolation in the realms of imagination, work, and play. But as the rapidly modernising, winner-take-all world threatens to leave one behind as the other’s star rises exponentially, the sisters must weigh their allegiances and bonds, the cost of success and ultimately reckon with who they’ve become. What results is a story that cracks open the fault lines of Singaporean society, our desperate need for acceptance and our yearning to be loved.
Registration requested to join us.
- Date:
- Tuesday, September 22, 2026
- Time:
- 5:30pm - 6:30pm
- Time Zone:
- Mountain Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
- Campus:
- The Community Library
- Categories:
- Lectures & Conversations
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and splits her time between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and formerly held the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship at Stanford University and Columbia University respectively. Her highly anticipated debut novel, The Original Daughter, debuted at #1 on The Straits Times bestseller list, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. The Original Daughter won the Country Award for the Chommanard International Women’s Literary Award, is longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and was named a Best Book of Spring by TIME, Foreign Policy, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, and more.