by Nicole Gantz
May 21, 2024
The Story Game: A Memoir by Shze-Hui Tjoa; Tin House; 208 pages; $17.95.
In her form-defying memoir The Story Game, Size-Hui Tjoa confronts the indefinite wounds of psychological trauma with an innovative interrogation of memory, autonomy, and loss. Told in three parts that take place over four years, Tjoa’s memoir is framed around sporadic, amorphous conversations between sisters as they lie together in an undefined dark room. While the titular character, Hui, fields probing questions about her identity from Nin, the audience is slowly introduced–through multiple perspectives–to a woman engulfed by a haunting violence that shrouds much of her childhood in mystery. Confounded by the suggestion that she is hiding something and reluctant to look deeper for the answers, the elder sister resists Nin’s inquisition until she’s forced to accept the horrific truth that refuses to be forgotten: As a small child, she experienced a profound loss of bodily autonomy at the hands of her parents who locked her in a dark room and forced her to practice piano for hours at a time.
Confident and astute, Tjoa’s experimental form guides readers through a refreshingly nuanced portrayal of Complex post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that can develop after experiencing chronic, long-term trauma rather than acute. Tjoa’s imagination is meticulously employed in a kaleidoscopic narrative with alternating perspectives. In the first part of the novel, which is titled “Year One,” we begin with “The Room,” where Tjoa writes in first person present tense, suggesting we will receive Hui’s perspective throughout the first part of the memoir. But after “The Room,” Tjoa alternates between an ambiguous perspective in “Room,” which is written in pure dialogue. Though we assume the perspective is Hui’s, Tjoa offers no tags or exteriority to confirm this point-of-view. Given the later switch to Nin’s point-of-view, we cannot be confident the “Room’s” sections are from Hui’s perspective any longer.
Throughout “Year one” Tjoa also writes in a combination of past and historical present from Hui’s perspective in “Hui’s Story.” At Nin’s insistence, Hui’s anecdotal short stories explore the nature of Hui’s own identity. These six eponymous sections of The Story Game are framed around a variety of socio-political issues–colonialism, racism, sex, consumerism, the environmental crises, social media culture, mental health–nothing is off limits as Tjoa expounds upon the discursive conditions of Hui’s experience as a half-Indonesian, female immigrant from Singapore living in the United States. Readers are thrust back into “Room” as Nin questions the relevance of each story to Hui’s journey back to their childhood bedroom and encourages her to expand on or rethink her connection to the outside world. There, Tjoa again holds us captive alongside the sisters in a largely undefined space until Hui’s next section of storytelling, where we are once again ushered into a more material narrative space. Though each story is artfully constructed and thoughtfully conveyed, Hui’s stories–as Nin points out–do not adequately explain why Hui is secluding herself from the outside world. While Nin’s prompting leaves readers with the sense that she knows exactly what Hui is hiding, readers remain ignorant to the impetus of Hui’s isolation. This is not without its benefits, as the mystery motivates us to continue reading, and the revelation of her traumatic experience later in the memoir kindles a stimulating retrospective analysis.
Though the “Room” sections contain a contrived sense of immaturity that may make some readers skeptical of the style, these sections are brilliantly grounded in a convincing sisterhood, woefully arrested and cautiously spoken in the dark. Immersing herself in repressed shadows of childhood trauma, Hui’s imagined conversation with her sister disrupts conventional frameworks of traumatic memoirs. Unlike popular contemporary memoirs like Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know or Tara Westover’s Educated, The Story Game does not approach traumatic memories directly. Instead, Tjoa’s unreliable narrator camouflages her wounds in seemingly unrelated memories. It is the self-imposed Socratic dialogue that indirectly adds subtext to Hui’s stories. For example, in “Hui’s First Story,” Hui hears bitter hatred in a singer’s cover of a popular love song and doesn’t understand why the performance leaves the audience feeling so nonplussed. Despite not being familiar with the singer, Hui expected the resentment that seeped into her rendition. We are given no explanation for this detail until a third perspective toward the end of the book, “The Story of Body,” adds enough context to Hui’s history to confidently infer why she anticipated the spirit of this performance. For a woman who associates music with torturous hours of practice, she cannot imagine it any differently. However, it is only the pure dialogue with Nin in “Room” that enables this inference. Thus, there is a lacerating rawness to Hui’s conversations with Nin, a shapeless suspension of time and space that uses the brutal imprecision of traumatic events to expose Hui’s stories as–ironically–an obfuscation of “self.” The testimonial style confessions give voice not to a woman but to a shadow, to the obscurity of psychological wounds. In this way, the alternation between “Room” and “Hui’s Story” is not just a subversion of traditional form, it is a deterritorialization of form itself. Tjoa does not just use form to show readers how the events in the memoir transpired; in The Story Game, form is an event in and of itself, and this is an extremely insightful continuation of the memoir’s main conflict: The manner in which Tjoa shares her trauma becomes a necessary reflection of it. Thus, just as the content of the story describes her experience, the form of the story embodies the undefined shadows of her loss.
The climax of the memoir is arguably “The Story of Body,” where–in a stunning portrayal of material consciousness–Tjoa employs a scaffolding point-of-view. Written in third person narration within a first person narrative, Hui begins “Body’s” story as if it belongs to her, but very quickly “body” is revealed to have an intrinsic autonomy. Tjoa writes not of Hui’s body, but of Body’s “self” in the third person; it is not “I feared” and “my parents” but “it feared” and “its parents.” Sentient in its own right, “body” exists wholly independent from Hui’s mind as she explores a traumatic loss of autonomy in her childhood. Soon Hui’s mind is similarly separated, until the final section of “The Story of Body,” Hui brings them together again to signal a positive direction in her healing process. Together, the immaterial world of “Room” and the soul-stirring materiality of “The Story of Body” serve as boundaries for a narrative space with an inaccessible threshold. We cannot know the meaning behind “Hui’s Story” without acknowledging the abuse she endured as a child. This is a narrativized gestalt of trauma, best understood through the liminal spaces that chain us to it. For its only through this disembodiment that the true nature of Hui’s trauma is revealed and the anecdotal stories become less ambiguous. It is in the totality of this formless narrative space where Tjoa’s storytelling is at its most compelling.
Within the context of what is revealed in the other sections of the memoir, the repetitive, unreliable, and emotionally distant narratives of Hui’s stories contribute to an incredibly insightful portrayal of c-PTSD. Most striking is the common compulsion to manipulate one’s environment to purposefully relive trauma. By strategically ensuring the continuation of a familiar suffering, Hui’s decisions allow her to retain a sense of control, to maintain a link to an intrinsic, recognizable identity. We see this common symptom of c-PTSD play out in Hui’s self-destructive behavior throughout the memoir. It is only when we are given the entirety of Tjoa’s narrative that readers can process and deconstruct Hui’s choices and motivations. Like Hui, we are left without recourse to understand the extent of her trauma or the utility of her coping mechanisms until the shadows of her past are lifted.
The third and final part of The Story Game, “Year Four,” is written from Hui’s perspective again. In “The World,” readers are given a brief glimpse into Hui’s life as it unfolds in the present. From therapy sessions to real conversations with her sister, Tjoa offers–perhaps in consolation–a glimmer of hope for other survivors of childhood trauma. This encouraging snapshot feels like a gift–a reason to stay on this new path of self-discovery, an incentive to do the work and commit to a journey of healing. Like most c-PTSD memoirs, this more uplifting denouement to The Story Game reflects the nature of processing trauma: a successful memoir is genuinely reflective, which is not possible without some degree of amelioration.
What sets Tjoa’s storytelling apart from other memoirs is the degree of authenticity her reflections manage to capture. Through multiple perspectives–each one presented as if independent from her own, as well as Hui’s repression and obfuscation, Tjoa avoids falling victim to the questionable verisimilitude of personal accounts by confronting the allusive nature of authentic storytelling directly. Any perspective consciously given and processed into narrative will contain the unavoidable subjectivity of human experience, but the genius of Tjoa’s memoir is her commitment to remaining as close to the ontogenesis of her traumatic wounds as possible through the subversion of a traditional memoir’s form. With an admittedly unreliable narrator, Tjoa comes clean about the deceptively subjective nature of memoirs. In this way, The Story Game is not only an artifact of trauma; it is also a confession. For, just as Hui’s perspective reflects the cognitively elusive nature of one’s trauma, the unconventional form itself acknowledges the unconscious dissimulation of personal narrative.
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Repression and Confession: Narrative Form in Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game
NONFICTION REVIEW
Image by Pragyan Bezbaruah from Pexels
Nicole Gantz is a writer and literary critic from Charlotte, North Carolina. She received her Masters in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work has been published in L'Esprit Literary Review, and another critical essay will be published in Journal of Modern Literature later this year.
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