Learning to Play The Story Game: A Conversation with Shze-Hui Tjoa
Before we tell a story to another, we often repeat it to ourselves. We arrange each polished detail like a game of dominoes—See what I’ve seen—until, laid flat, our listening party might observe the bigger picture. But what happens when the listener we’re trying to convince is ourselves? When, in the midst of narration, we realize the pieces have been rearranged by a sleight of hand? This is the duplicity of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD), something I’ve found in my own diagnosis—how the brain protects itself through deception and resists truth-making when the pieces of Then no longer reflect the Now.
Shze-Hui Tjoa’s debut book, The Story Game, characterizes this memory-excavation in an unusual hybrid of memoir and collected essays. Tethered together by vignettes of The Room—a dissociative space where the narrator, Hui, uncovers her traumatic past via conversations with her younger sister, Nin—The Story Game offers a glimpse into and out of the maze of trauma.
In this interview, Tjoa and I spoke over email about craft, memory, and how to navigate the violence and colonial narratives that can dictate our lives. And how, too, narrative can—and, in The Story Game, does—disrupt this system. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Jessika Bouvier: Narrative disruption is a core pillar of the memoir’s framing, one we return to in The Room sections. Through Nin and Hui’s conversations, the reader learns not only what the story game is, but how to play it. While reading, I wondered if I was another player—if, as Nin accuses Hui, I was seeing only what Hui wanted me to see.
How you did arrive at this structure? Were the essays written independently and woven together later or were they always imagined within this framework?
Shze-Hui Tjoa: I love that you felt like a recruit in the story game! That’s exactly the kind of relationship I’d like to have with my readers—where we can work as equals and mess with the usual “rules” of a book together on the page.
As for the structure: I initially wrote all these essays as stand-alone pieces without the disruptive dialogue weaving between them. I wrote them in the exact order they appear in the book. It was only after I got to “The Story of Body”—the book’s climactic essay, where I solve the mystery of what happened in my childhood—that I began to feel this urge to write one last piece about me and my sister. But no matter how hard I worked, that essay wouldn’t come together. I spent eight months trying to write it in a traditional “A happened, then B happened” kind of way, in a first-person, past-tense voice, but the results didn’t feel right.
Eventually, I realized it was because I didn’t know enough about my sister’s inner life to depict her properly on the page; in some ways I felt very close to her because of our shared past, but in others, we were complete strangers. That realization prompted me to construct the dialogue form: I realized the book needed a weirder, risk-taking structure to accommodate this major contradiction in our relationship.
JB: The Room sections felt like they were dipping into a speculative world. How did you go about crafting this space of play and dissociation? What feelings did you want to evoke in readers as they “sit” in The Room with Hui and Nin?
SHT: I crafted The Room by being honest about how it feels to experience disconnection from the past. But it wasn’t easy to acknowledge my own forgetfulness and create a physical symbol around it! I still remember how—at a writing workshop I attended—my workshop-mates said they couldn’t imagine the appearance of The Room because I had described it in such scant and vague detail. And to be honest, my initial response to this (very helpful) feedback was to panic. I considered looking for old childhood photos or even interviewing my parents so I could patch up the visuals in my head and flesh out The Room more, but then I realized this would be practicing a kind of dishonesty: If I papered over the gaps in my memories, I would not be telling my readers the truth about who I am and how my brain works. So, eventually, I decided to acknowledge the incomplete nature of The Room; I literally wrote: “I don’t know what furniture or wall decorations there are in this place.” That helped to create its mystical atmosphere.
I think developing the confidence to say I don’t know and just leaving it at that was an important step for me artistically. It was a way to accept myself and spotlight how my brain works instead of hiding it from others. I hope readers can feel the intimacy of that gesture.
JB: The opening essay, “The Island Paradise,” has many thematic Easter eggs. I highlighted a line, one which comes after a description of how Bali’s tourism industry exacerbates ecological and sociological devastation across the island: “[T]his is paradise, where nothing is ever permitted to run out.” I was also struck by a parallel line in “The Story of Body” on how Singapore’s education system tolls against its people. You write: “Here, the prevailing philosophy is: Every child must be stretched to their limit, so that no drop of potential is wasted.”
I’m wondering if you could say more about the overlap of these two ideas—in particular, I’m thinking about how citizens are so often destined to bear the brunt of their nation’s failures.
SHT: You’re right that both essays touch on this exploitative way that one human being can treat another. I’m very sensitive to this dynamic. Maybe because I was once so potently subjected to it myself as a child growing up in Singapore: this insatiable urge to suck every last valuable thing from a person or community… to extract all their material and psychological gifts, without any consideration of sustainability or their desires or happiness. It’s a form of dehumanization, right, this greed that reduces someone into a resource to be used. And personally, I don’t even think a nation has to be the one exerting the dynamic; people do it to each other all the time too, in terrifyingly casual ways. Sometimes, I even find myself slipping into the dynamic in my daily life when I’m not paying close enough attention to others.
I guess I want to push back on this idea slightly, that certain groups (e.g. authority figures, the state, people who make up “the system”) are destined to play the role of the exploiter, while certain others (e.g. the people, citizens) can always be safely thought of as innocent. I don’t feel like it’s so simple—or that the division between the two roles is necessarily always so clear-cut. When I was growing up in Singapore, I saw how locals like me could embody both roles simultaneously—on the one hand, bearing the disgusting legacy of colonialism from sixty years ago as the victims of continued white/European privilege, but then also internalizing this dynamic and flipping it, so we could step into the powerful or abusive role in our own mistreatment of more vulnerable groups in our midst: children or migrant workers or even our subordinates at work.
I think even ordinary citizens can become exploiters if they want to. It’s all a matter of very small decisions we make day-to-day. I want to believe it’s possible for those in power—the “nation”—to go on a journey too, to recover the “citizen” part of themselves that can see others as full and equal human beings, rather than just objects.
JB: One of the most powerful images in the book is also in “The Island Paradise.” I’m referencing your description of puputans, mass ritual suicides Balinese people conducted in front of Dutch invaders—“both protest and decree” in response to colonial violence. You draw a thread about consent here: how there’s both power and tragedy in these deaths. Power in the refusal; tragedy in its gruesome reality.
I kept this in mind while reading sections that explicitly describe Hui’s dissociation, like “The Sad Girl Variations.” As someone also diagnosed with c-PTSD, I thought the sections of negotiation between Mind and Body were so well-rendered. I wondered if this was Hui’s body conducting its own dual “protest and decree,” how c-PTSD is its own complicated mixture of power and tragedy. Does that comparison resonate?
SHT: Thank you for telling me about your diagnosis! It means a lot to me that you connected with my book’s depictions of c-PTSD as someone who goes through it too.
Your comparison does resonate. What you said about c-PTSD being a source of both power and tragedy—it actually reminds me of a section I really related to from Stephanie Foo’s memoir, What My Bones Know. She talks about how, during the COVID lockdowns, she found herself uniquely able to navigate the fear and anxiety sweeping her community, because c-PTSD had equipped her with these quick and instinctive responses for surviving emergencies. I think the “gifts” from my own experience of c-PTSD have been my imagination and my outsized—sometimes outlandish—optimism. When bad things happen, I can dissociate quickly and look far into the future in a somewhat wishful manner, into a time when all the tension and uncertainty have been wrapped up satisfyingly. And I recognize that because of this, I can often galvanize others to take action, because my mind is able to create a better reality for them to believe in and work towards, even as their bodies continue to suffer in the present moment.
I guess the “power” of my c-PTSD has been my staunchly hopeful outlook on the world and how I can use it to fuel change around me. The “tragedy” has been how this orientation disconnects me from other people, because I’m unable to see and acknowledge the painful things happening to them in the present moment. That happened with me and my sister. I wasn’t able to look at the hurt between us for a very long time.
JB: There’s a prevailing thread of change, gentleness, and forgiveness in these essays. I particularly loved “On Being in Love with a White Man” for your exploration of how we must constantly untangle ourselves from the instinct to role-play colonial narratives. I read an implicit call that we should always consider ourselves and those around us as “entities under construction.”
For me, this idea ties back to The Room, which we learn, along with the figure of Nin, is a constructed (reimagined) space. How did you think through the various ways “construction” appears for Hui while writing?
SHT: This idea of “construction” is always at the forefront of my mind; I’m deeply fascinated by how storytelling is an act of self-fashioning that allows people to present as more palatable or touched-up versions of themselves. On the one hand, there’s something quite beautiful about these acts of self-creation—they’re fun and imaginative. On the other, they also create layers of cushioning between the self and the Other that make it harder to access that space of vulnerability where true emotional connections can happen.
I think my first instinct as a memoirist is to pull back the layers and journey towards a more raw, authentic, and unfinished place. Sometimes, being imaginative or making stuff up is part of that process, as contradictory as that might sound. It’s about acknowledging the fantasies running through my head and shaping the way I see and approach the world. These fantasies and constructed narratives—even the weird or emotional or potentially embarrassing ones—are a huge part of me. They feel as real as my physical self, like a parallel life I lead every day, alongside the one happening that others can see.
Shze-Hui Tjoa (@shzehui) is a writer from Singapore who lives in the UK. She is a Nonfiction Editor at Sundog Lit and previously served as Fiction Editor of Exposition Review. Her work has been published in journals including Colorado Review, Southeast Review, and So to Speak, and has been listed as notable in three successive issues of The Best American Essays series (2021-2023). Her work has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Disquiet International, and AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program.
Jessika Bouvier (@jessikavbouvier) is a queer Cajun writer. Her work has appeared (or soon will) in Waxwing, Puerto del Sol, Catapult, monkeybicycle, Electric Literature, Black Fox, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist in Washington Square Review’s New Voices Award and in fugue’s Prose Contest. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of So to Speak, an intersectional feminist journal.