Fragmented Foundations: A Review of The Story Game

By Augustus Schrader

Shze-Hui Tjoa | The Story Game | Tin House | May, 2024 | 208 pages

In The Story Game, Shze-Hui Tjoa attempts to get into the thick of things, to wade into the deep waters of memory and trauma to take a long look in the mirror and try to understand the life experiences that have shaped her. The book could be described as an experimental memoir, with various stories from the author’s life being strung together with frequent narrative interjections. Hui shares these memories with her younger sister, Nin, in an imagined childhood bedroom setting in which she feels safe to explore their emotional impact. Readers are brought along with Nin as Hui works her way through memory gaps and self-deception induced by PTSD.

The stories told by Hui are fragmented but are held together thematically and are bridged narratively through the interspersed conversations with Nin. The first few stories are more essay-like and focus on broader discussions on topics like colonization, race, and cultural expectations. As the narrative progresses, Hui is pushed by her sister to confront the gaps and inconsistencies in her memories, eventually uncovering the source of her trauma which she had previously buried as a result of PTSD. While the specifics are never revealed to the reader, we discover that Hui was pushed by her parents during her formative years to master the Piano to the point of extreme exhaustion, to the detriment of her own mental wellbeing. This confrontation with trauma eventually culminates in Hui stepping outside of her imagined bedroom and reaching out to her now distant adult sister in real life to address their fractured relationship.

The Story Game takes many risks, including the choice to have the story take place within an entirely interior, imagined setting. This led to the book having a claustrophobic, limited feeling, despite the stories taking place in varied settings across different times and places around the world. The childhood bedroom is meant to function as a grounding, objective respite from these opinionated, subjective stories. By having the bedroom itself exist in the mind of Hui, however, any potential objectivity that Nin could offer as a second perspective is undermined. Despite this shortcoming, the choice to bridge the stories through narrative does not fall entirely flat, still providing a functional, if imperfect, stage for the emotional confrontation that takes place over the course of the book. It is also indicative of the book’s willingness to experiment with form and break tradition, aligning with its own themes of the same character, such as the subjectivity of perspective and the value of reinterpretation.

This experimental character is also reflected in Hui’s writing style. The prose is engaging and sometimes even poetic, functioning as an effective engine to the plot. Descriptions are smooth and often offer conjure bizarre and beautiful images. However, there are moments when the book falters slightly, particularly in a stretch where the same story—about a stay at a ‘Green’ hostel—is retold back-to-back with only minor variations. While this repetition highlights the fluid nature of memory and stays in line with the theme of subjectivity, the differences are too subtle to justify the length of the retelling, leading to a sense of redundancy.

One final issue that should be addressed is an overall feeling of disorganization and vagueness. Hui’s stories jump around in time, yet when they take place in the context of her life is rarely established, leading to an even greater sense of disconnect to the already ungrounded narrative. The stories have few if any internal connections or references to one another, placing the heavy burden of bridging the gaps entirely on the interspersing conversations between Hui and Nin. Despite its best attempts to cover up these gaps through dialogue, this often leads to obvious and clunky transitions. As mentioned previously, this problem is mitigated slightly by an overarching thematic consistency, but I cannot shake the suspicion that Shze-Hui Tjoa wrote the stories separately as individual essays and decided at a later point to compile them into a book.

If nothing else, The Story Game was an interesting read that was willing to take big risks, many of which unfortunately did not pay off. However, there is a lot to be loved about this deeply introspective book, including its delightful prose, poignant commentaries, and thematic consistency. It offers many insights into the effects of trauma and potential roads to healing. A more grounded setting and stronger narrative connections between the stories would result in an even stronger book, and perhaps touch readers more deeply.

Augustus Schrader is an undergraduate in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin Madison.