The Waiting Room

by Choo Yi Feng

A man's complicated relationship with his abusive mother seeks resolution when her spirit calls to him from beyond the grave. A sex worker finds temporary salvation with a returning Australian tourist professing his love. A dreamlike afterlife is the host to a vast museum dedicated the discarded jetsam from the living world. In this debut fiction collection, these imagined worlds are set variously in plural Singapores, Southeast Asia and beyond, and illuminate the urgent need for human connection even beyond death.

Genres: Queer

Paperback

First published April 1, 2024

About the author

Choo Yi Feng's short stories have been published in PR&TA, Alluvium: The Journal of Literary Shanghai, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Curios, the annual student journal of Tembusu College in NUS. His story "Spider Hunters" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his aspirations are divided between becoming a fiction writer and a marine biologist. The Waiting Room is his debut collection of short fiction.

Reviews

[Wen-yi Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Official blurb!

Brimming with debris and surreal dreamers, The Waiting Room makes phantasms of its tenderly rendered lives. Choo Yi Feng tells of queer Singapores and their ecologies with cluttered shores, open wounds, temporary bodies, and a fateful voice. I'll be watching what he comes out with next.
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queer singaporean speculative collection with ecological leanings i am HERE FOR U (and prepared to pull strings for an early copy)

[Zubin Jain · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of short stories; vivid, relatable and disturbing at the same time.

[Karolina Góras · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What she learned from watching their reactions was that they paid her class act to indulge in themselves that feeling—the one that oscillates somewhere between sympathy, shame and disgust. The same kind of feeling discharged by other single-use bodies: migrants, refugees, sex workers.
But unlike the glamourless poor, plastic awkwardly refuses to die. And they wanted that feeling contained, guilt-free, something to be watched, enjoyed on the beach, then forgotten about in sleep. And so she was, and continued to be, the plastic bag girl."

[Simran Sandhu · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story I enjoyed reading most was the titular The Waiting Room. Unfortunately, I really struggled with the rest. The writing style is verbose and unfocused. A congealing soup, weighed down by the increasingly number of descriptive and unnecessary words. I mean, I’m a reader too - who doesn’t love words? But it became harder to parse through the story itself and it was distracting.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some great writing and ideas. A few of the stories could have been more developed, but a superb first collection.

[thenightingalereads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Choo’s collection of short stories features distinctive, deeply sympathetic characters that will tug at your heartstrings, following each persona through their own tragic tales of love lost and societal rejection. The characters in The Waiting Room are no heroes; they simply exist, each grappling with their own hidden struggles and societal invisibility.