Amanda Lee Koe: "I was not wrong, I was only in the wrong time and place"
Q&A: A Singaporean author on her debut novel, growing up under the influence of cultures not rooted in her own reality, and how she built her own.
A jolt of jazz
I loved Amanda Lee Koe’s debut short story collection, Ministry of Moral Panic, when I read it a few years ago. She’s a brilliant stylist, her voice a jolt of jazz: completely alive on the page, always a hint of mutiny in even the most down-and-out characters.
So I was excited about reading her debut novel, Delayed Rays of a Star, and having a chat with her about it for Electric Literature. We ended up talking about many things: the multitudes we all contain, the blurred lines between art and life, how and where we find our most “authentic” selves.
In truth, in asking Koe about her experience, I was also exploring ideas I’ve been thinking about that I think she expresses really well in her published writings and on Instagram—growing up in places like Singapore and Malaysia under the influence of cultures not rooted in one’s own reality, how that shapes one’s identity, and how one might convey that to the rest of the world, to be better seen.
Seeing as all that’s completely in line with this newsletter, I’m reposting our conversation here, with an additional back-and-forth that was left out of the published version. I daresay you’ll find something in it you’ll connect to.
Republished from Electric Literature:
In 1928, at a glamorous soirée in Berlin, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt takes a black-and-white photograph of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl, immortalising the three actors before the height of their fame. This brief, shining moment, where the women’s lives intersect, is where Singaporean author Amanda Lee Koe begins her sweeping, richly imagined debut novel Delayed Rays of a Star.
Spanning eras and geographies, from Weimar Berlin to Los Angeles Chinatown to the Bavarian Alps and modern-day Paris, through the rise of Hitler and World War II: Delayed Rays of a Star follows the three women as they move through the world in their different ways, in pursuit of art, ambition, fame, and love, while navigating thorny issues of identity, ego, and integrity in turbulent times. They all want to be, as Leni expressed in the book, “the reason for things.”
And evolving around them, sometimes intertwined with them, are a secondary cast of characters. Among them, a Chinese housemaid beginning to intuit the ways of a woman of the world, a German-Turkish-Kurdish young man struggling with his multiple identities, and a German soldier on leave from North Africa grappling with a secret love. Amanda Lee Koe brings each of them to life in deeply specific, textured detail, so that their dreams are no less bright, and their desires no less fervent. Like the three actors, they’re feeling around, sometimes blindly, for a heightened existence.
I’d enjoyed Amanda Lee Koe’s debut short story collection, Ministry of Moral Panic, which made her the youngest person to win the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014, at the age of twenty-seven. And in a way, her debut novel also feels like a tapestry of short stories, with a dazzling rolodex of characters, including cameos by J.F.K, Davie Bowie, and Hitler. In her hands, even in a pithy exchange between two people, you can sense their burgeoning humanity, the multitudes they contain.
Emily Ding: First, let’s talk about that photograph. What about it captured your imagination? What drew you so completely into this world?
Amanda Lee Koe: It was a photograph that was so unlikely, one that opened up many questions. To see pre-Hollywood makeover Marlene, early flapper-styled Anna May, and pre-Nazi propaganda Leni together, it was like a Pandora’s box.
Not just as a writer but as a person, I’m always looking for the intimate gap in history, the lateral wormhole in time. These were three women who would soon all be pioneers in their own ways; here they were at a party, being coy for a man’s camera. If you know Marlene at all, you’ll know that once she became that blonde femme fatale we all know her to be, she wouldn’t be caught dead smiling so sincerely and guilelessly for the camera. Once she had her star image in place, it was something she was very aware of performing for the camera.
Marlene meant a lot to a younger, half-formed version of me. I grew up with a gigantic poster of her on my wall, and I think in some invisible, personal way, she must have helped me to grow into the adult I wanted to be. So I guess it’s fitting that, eventually, I somehow managed to create an aesthetic universe that was capacious enough for her to exist in.