'For the first time in my life, I saw my mother in relation to her family, and I didn't recognise her any more . . . These Singaporean roots of hers, this side of her—and possibly of me too—were unacceptable. I was determined not to belong, not to fit in, because I was Australian, and Mum ought to be Australian too. The tug of her roots, the blurring of her role from wife and mother to sister and aunt, angered me.
'On the eve of her mother's wake, Grace Tay flies to Singapore to join her father and brother and her mother's family. Here she explores her family history, looking for the answers to her mother's death. This beautiful and moving novel steps between Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia, evoking the life, traditions, and tastes of a forceful Chinese family as well as the hardship, cruelty, and pain. Written in a fresh, contemporary voice tinged with biting humor, this is a story about resilience and a story about migration, but in many ways it is a story about parents' expectations for their children.' (Publication summary)
'Teo Hsu-Ming’s Love and Vertigo (2000) follows multiple generations of a family through Singapore and Sydney, as they are racialized in these neoliberal contexts. It also repeatedly explores the dynamics of decision-making, presenting its characters with impossible choices and lose-lose scenarios. This article investigates the relation between choice, neoliberalism, and migrancy in Singapore and Sydney, the main settings of Teo’s novel. It argues that the idea of choice is mobilized here to illustrate structural limitations to decision-making in the context of neoliberalism’s regimes of racialization. By exploring the way choices are circumscribed and then made, the dynamics of neoliberalism and racialization in Sydney and Singapore are examined afresh. In so doing, this article interrogates the degree to which choice is liberating and celebrates the ways in which “decision and domination” (following Jane Elliott) can be resisted.' (Publication abstract)
