Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game is an innovative memoir-in-essays that explores both memory and the self startlingly.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“An intimate exploration of a woman’s identity. . . . Memory, loss, trauma, and powerlessness emerge as salient themes in this probing memoir”
In her own words, here is Shze-Hui Tjoa’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Story Game:
Music is an extremely important part of my creative process. When I was a child–back in the days before I started writing–music was my most natural and best-loved medium of expression. Today, I often still turn to it in particularly tricky creative moments – using rhythm, melody, and lyrics to process subconscious thoughts that might feel too strange, complex, or fleeting for the strictures of language.
The events narrated in my memoir, The Story Game, took place over approximately four years. I listened to music more or less continuously as I lived through these events, while simultaneously writing about them in real time. I think that the music gave me a kind of psychic protection, in order to write from such a direct and potentially vulnerable position. It helped me to lean into and process my experiences – so that I could eventually go on a journey of recognizing the c-PTSD that I was suffering from, and healing from it.
This is what I listened to while writing The Story Game:
- “The Beginning of Memory”, Laurie Anderson
In this spoken-word piece, Laurie Anderson tells of how – in ancient days before solid land had formed on the earth – birds flew round and round the ether. When one of these birds died, his daughter buried him in the back of her own head, because there was nowhere else to put him – “And this was the beginning of memory / Because before this no one could remember a thing. / They were just constantly flying in circles.”
This isn’t mentioned within the pages of The Story Game itself – but the germ of the book actually arrived in my mid-twenties, when my father asked me to write a biography of his dad. In my family, we all vaguely knew that my grandfather had survived ethnic cleansing in Indonesia as a Chinese person, before he migrated to Singapore in the late 1960s. But because he never spoke concretely about his experiences, it sometimes felt like our family were the birds in this story: unable to remember or process our pain; doomed to fly in endless circles.
I wrote the first essay of this book – “The Island Paradise” – because I was trying to engage with this wordless part of my family’s history, however obliquely. The funny thing is that from that point onwards, the book ended up going in a totally different direction and becoming about me, rather than my paternal family. I think that might actually be one of my grandfather’s greatest gifts to me: by refusing to foreground his own suffering, he left a blank space in which I could write the story of my own life. In a way, his silence made The Story Game possible.
- “Something Has to Change”, The Japanese House
This song reminds me of how I felt around the time when I wrote the third essay in this book, “The Sad Girl Variations”. The maddeningly static beat, the melody that incessantly loops round and round a single home chord, even when the lyrics (about trying to make “a change”) are trying, and failing, to pull it in different directions… this is a song about being hopelessly stuck. It’s about reaching the limits of your current sense of self, and not knowing how to break out of its ingrained thought and behavior patterns.
My psychoanalyst once told me that in life, a person will often reach a point where it feels like they’ve been running and running, but suddenly, they come up against a towering brick wall. Realizing that their feet can’t get them over in the usual way anymore, they’ll have to make a choice: either they turn around, but live forever with their curiosity about what lay beyond the wall; or they could try and do something different, and evolve beyond the act of running. For instance, they could try to fly.
The last two essays in Part I of The Story Game – “The Sad Girl Variations” and “The Green Place” – represent the moment when I reached this wall in my own life. The stasis that I was mired in, by that point, felt overwhelming and undeniable. Something had to change; I had to try growing wings.
- “Dive Into Me”, Subsonic Eye
Subsonic Eye is a band from my home country of Singapore. This song – with its beautiful, hazy blend of shoegaze and dream pop influences – reminds me of how the physical environment of Singapore feels to move through: the wetness and humidity, the too-muchness of the heat, the residual sounds and smells of the tropical rainforest climate that our government will never be able to completely stamp out or box away, despite its iron fist.
I listened to this song a lot, during the transition from Part I to Part II of The Story Game. It soundtracked the big shift that happened in my life during that time – where I quit my seemingly impressive marketing job in London, got semi-divorced, and moved back to Singapore to live in my parents’ house again for the first time since my teens. In the book, I write: “there’s something about [this arrangement] that also feels… right for me, somehow. Even though I know that by most people’s measures, it’s a downgrade.” Listening to this song helped me to keep walking forward during this period of uncertainty.
- “Run Boy Run”, Woodkid
The emphatic pounding beats and high drama of this song feel like a shot of adrenaline! They capture the sensation that I had while volunteering at the Baltic eco-hostel described in “Story Four Again: The Green Place” – of being trapped against my will and feeling helpless, while simultaneously nursing grandiose plans of escape.
For me, these feelings will always be strongly connected with childhood – as that era felt like a particularly powerless time, when the world was ruled by the whims of tyrannical adults. So I especially like that the lyrics of this song address a “boy” – as if we’re listening in to the child’s own internal monologue, goading him on towards action and survival.
- “Hoppa Lele”, Apo & The Apostles feat. Aleen Masoud
This is the song I would pick to represent my time in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of East Jerusalem – which I wrote about in “The True Wonders of the Holy Land”.
The music itself is so upbeat and always makes me want to dance – with the clapping in the background, and that cheeky out-take of “Halas!” that caps off the recording. But you know, this is a Palestinian band, whose lead singer is from the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, and whose band members are from Bethlehem in the Occupied West Bank. In interviews, they’ve spoken about how Israel’s apartheid restricts their freedom of movement so much that they often can’t even meet for gigs. This dynamic – of something that looks fun and zesty on the surface, but actually is a testament to pure, superhuman resilience in the face of brutal systemic injustice – reminds me of the spirit of the Palestinian friends I made in East Jerusalem, back when I was a teenager.
Translated into English, the lyrics of this song are: “They wasted our days, and I lost my mind, I lost my mind. / The last word is ours, hidden between rocks. / We’ll keep living our lives, no playing around.” I hope that my Palestinian friends will get the last word. I hope that the cruel occupation regime that still rules their lives today (and is, in fact, currently committing one of history’s most transparent genocides against other Palestinian people in Gaza) will one day be held accountable for its many decades of crime, so that my friends can have equal human rights. I hope that we will one day be able to meet up again in their homeland, when it is finally free and peaceful, to dance to this song together.
- “Dead Hearts”, Stars
I listened to this song constantly, in the period when I was working towards writing “The Story of Body” – the last full essay of my memoir. I would listen to it on loop on my headphones, while walking around my neighborhood in Singapore late at night when the temperature had cooled down.
This song reminds me of the “kids that I once knew” growing up: my primary school, secondary school, and junior college classmates, who were earmarked by our authoritarian state to rule the country at a very young age, but at the cost of their own political independence, physical autonomy, and authentic sense of self. Many of these friends now work for the government in some capacity, as adults – and it can sometimes be difficult for them to acknowledge the suffering that they endured to get to where they are now, because the state’s narrative has always been that they were privileged enough to receive its best resources. But I can see that many of them are still children actually, struggling along day by day in adult bodies. In a way, they grapple with having “dead hearts” now precisely because they never got the chance to fully be children, in the past – to do things like play, explore, or make mistakes without punishment, expectations, or stress.
There is a lot of unprocessed trauma in the segment of Singaporean society that I come from. This song helped me to connect with that collective pain, so that I could eventually write about my own personal experiences too – sometimes, I need to feel empathy for other people first, before I can feel empathy for myself.
- “body”, Gia Margaret
I think that this song is a perfect match to “The Story of Body”, the climactic essay of my book. I don’t want to say too much else about it – so as not to give inadvertent spoilers! But I love its opening lines: “All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head”.
- “Can’t Go Back Now” and “Ever Said Goodbye”, The Weepies
Although these songs are both duets, there is a big difference in how the two voices dialogue with each other. In the earlier song, “Can’t Go Back Now” (2008), the voices are so entangled that neither melodic line can stand on its own without being buttressed by the other. But in the later song, “Ever Said Goodbye” (2015), the voices are clearly differentiated even as they function together – one leads, while the other remains in the background in a harmonic support role. I feel like this change in the singers’ dynamic mirrors the transformation in my relationship with my sister, Nin, throughout the “Room” sections of The Story Game, as our codependence unravels.
The line “I didn’t know what love was, but I loved you anyway” always makes me teary, as it reminds me of our relationship. Listening to this folk band, The Weepies, was actually one of the very last past-times we did together, before everything described in The Story Game happened to us. As a tween, I found out about the band via a church friend’s blog – and I showed the songs to my sister, so that we could sing them together in duets that I orchestrated. When The Weepies did their last-ever tour in 2022 before breaking up as a band (and also getting divorced as a couple), we considered flying all the way to America from Australia and the UK separately, to see them play once in real life. Of course, this was a pipe dream, and we didn’t manage it. But we spoke about what the band meant to us both – acknowledging that in spite of everything that had happened between us, we had once been two girls who shared a love for the same songs, in our childhood bedroom. We shared a vulnerable moment of remembering our past together, and that meant a lot to me.
The childlike simplicity and directness of this band’s style will always remind me of my sister.
- “Wherever You Will Go”, The Calling
This song is how I feel about my sister now. I don’t know if we’ll ever lie in the same physical room again, sharing a mattress on the floor like we do in The Story Game. Maybe we never will; or maybe we’ll only get to do it after many decades have passed, when we’re both old women who have lived whole lives without each other.
But there will always be a version of us that I’ll carry with me, wherever I go in the world. Our childhood selves will live on for as long as I do, in my memory – and in this memoir that I’ve written, too. Knowing that allows me to relinquish my desire to control our relationship in the physical world – to accept that we might lose each other there, or even voluntarily choose not to be close to each other anymore, depending on how things go.
“If I could / Then I would / I’ll go wherever you will go.” I suppose that’s ultimately why I wrote The Story Game: to give the love that I will always feel for my sister a place to go on living.
Shze-Hui Tjoa is the author of the debut memoir The Story Game (Tin House).