Cheryl Lu-lien Tan’s comic novel barhops through Singapore with the sarong party girls
US-based journalist’s debut novel, Sarong Party Girls, depicts a Lion City subculture of twentysomething singles desperate for mates to make Eurasian ‘Chanel babies’ with. Her narrator, Jazzy Lim, is an indelible soul
When author and journalist Cheryl Lu-lien Tan looks out of her window in New York, she gazes at the stately Lincoln Centre, with its modern concrete archways, walls of glass and massive sparkling chandelier. It’s a view that, for many people, would signify one thing: you’ve made it, babe.
And yet, for Tan, who has lived in the Big Apple for 13 years and enjoyed an enviable career writing about fashion, travel and food for the likes of The New York Times, InStyle, The Paris Review and The Wall Street Journal, there is a view that touches her heart and soul – and certainly her stomach – even more. And that’s the one from her family home in Singapore.
“From my mum’s front window, I can see her mango tree. It seems unable to stop growing and produces hundreds of mangoes a year,” Tan says.
In many ways, Tan, who moved from the Lion City in 1991 as an 18-year-old to study journalism at Northwestern University, in Illinois, seems to have left her hometown only in body. Her mind – and her taste buds – remain in Asia. As evidence, take the three books she has penned in the past decade. In 2011, she made her publishing debut with A Tiger in the Kitchen, a food memoir set among the hawker stalls and Tan family kitchens throughout Singapore, in which she learns clan recipes and closely guarded family secrets along the way. In 2013, Tan put the city-state back in the spotlight by editing Singapore Noir, a collection of essays by 14 authors that captures the darker, more mysterious side of the seemingly strait-laced island.
Now, Tan returns to her homeland with her first novel, Sarong Party Girls. In this comic tale, the 41-year-old author takes on some of Singapore’s fiercest, craftiest and most determined citizens. Sarong party girls (SPGs for short) are women in their late 20s, ageing out of the singles market, who will stop at nothing to marry a foreigner with a fat bank account and produce a designer Eurasian child, referred to in local parlance as a “Chanel baby”.
