“The Chanel of babies”: Subversion and self-exotification in Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s <i>Sarong Party Girls</i>

Riding on the blockbuster success of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, there has been renewed interest in Singapore as a setting in genre fiction. Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is one such novel. Billed as “ Emma set in Modern Asia”, the novel blends now-familiar images of skyscrapers, neon lights, and conspicuous hyperconsumption with an equally familiar story: protagonist Jazzy is handsome, clever, single, and in desperate need of a husband. But not just any man will do. Jazzy, a Singaporean-Chinese woman, only wants a white husband. The racial dimension of Jazzy’s goal pitches the novel into uncomfortable territory, and Tan does this deliberately to expose the societal norms which have produced a character like Jazzy. Neither native informant nor tour guide, Jazzy is a view into the subjectivity of a woman doubly oppressed by colonialism and misogyny, who has yet to decolonize and deprogramme herself. Tan wields romance conventions to examine the racialized politics of desire, where East Asian subjects like Jazzy who are fetishized by a white male gaze equally fetishize the white men who are doing the looking. In order to net her white husband, Jazzy exotifies herself, adjusting her appearance, speech, and behaviour to best appeal to this imagined gaze. However, as much as the novel critiques Jazzy’s self-exotification, it also plays into a kind of neo-Orientalism where Singapore is representative of contemporary Asia. Like Jazzy, the novel exotifies itself for an international reader, producing a version of Singapore where the glamour and wealth on display grant voyeuristic pleasure as much as they belie an existential hollowness. Sarong Party Girls thus demonstrates the tension inherent in works of genre fiction which attempt to subvert their genre, as the novel is still beholden to the desires of a global readership located beyond Singapore.