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Foreign Bodies
Trouble often comes with a late-night phone call. So it comes to Mei, a twenty-something Singaporean lawyer about to face the greatest trial of her life. Her English boyfriend Andy, working in Singapore as a teacher, has been arrested, accused of masterminding an international betting ring. Under Singapore's draconian system of justice, he has but nine short days to prove his innocence or face life in prison. With time running out, Singapore native Eugene, Andys best friend and Mei's childhood playmate, flies in from Holland to help uncover the truth, a search that will unearth long-hidden secrets and forever challenge the moral, ethical, and spiritual framework of their lives.
Exploring the chasm between Singapore's pop culture and traditional values, the friends' Gen-X cynicism and their gnawing hunger for direction and meaning, Hwee Hwee Tan delivers a powerful novel of clashing cultures and swirling spiritual quests, in which the wit is as sharp and unafraid as the insight it offers.
Exploring the chasm between Singapore's pop culture and traditional values, the friends' Gen-X cynicism and their gnawing hunger for direction and meaning, Hwee Hwee Tan delivers a powerful novel of clashing cultures and swirling spiritual quests, in which the wit is as sharp and unafraid as the insight it offers.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
Hwee Hwee Tan
5 books7 followersHwee Hwee Tan grew up in Singapore and the Netherlands. She studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She published her first novel, Foreign Bodies (Penguin), at age twenty-two, while still a graduate student at the University of Oxford. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, where she won the New York Times Fellowship for Fiction. She now lives in Singapore.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
January 12, 2016
1/19/2016
This is a unique book.
That's not clear at first though. In the first hundred pages, I kept wondering what the relative fuss was about. It just seemed like a pretty boilerplate character study framed by a crime mystery. But stick with it, the book is so much more than that! The surface descriptions of life in Singapore or England are just window dressing for a chilling and powerful reflection on modern life. It allows for a lot of mystery, refusing to give the satisfying answers we want because we realize that although we may understand the nature of the central crime, that alone cannot answer the really difficult questions the rest of the books forces the reader to ask. The book is desperately, unhesitatingly real. I don't know that I can fully grasp its implications, remaining this close to finishing it, but I am very confident that the book will stick with me for a long time. This is special and very worth the short time it takes to read.
3/5/23
It's really hard to believe that it was seven years ago that I first read this book. It was a striking episode for me in a low period. I was as unrelentingly sad as I'd ever been and have ever been since. I felt trapped and unmoored for a variety of reasons and for no reason at all. This book did not save me, but it offered me a vision of the world that felt like a life raft. It didn't make me happy, but it did make me feel less alone.
Rereading my original review feels a bit strange. I still write reviews like I did then, with an eye towards their being read. But that review feels all the more artificial because I was wholly unable to explain the experience of reading the book.
I didn't put the pieces together at the time, but the text is also about that phenomenon. Characters find themselves possessed and unable to escape the experiences that they cannot put into words. Sometimes those experiences feel like an encounter with God. But sometimes they feel like a vision of injustice. Sometimes they feel like a power over others. Sometimes they feel like weakness. All of us have seen visions and dreamed dreams. These things are flashing and momentary, but being human carries with it the experience to see something that feels, if only briefly, bigger than humanity.
When I first read this book, I was suffering, among other things, from the smallness of my humanity. There was too much I couldn't explain about my life to that point, about the lives of others, about its scale and its brevity. What I found in the book was a reflection of the pain I felt in trying to find answers that weren't out there, not in the way that you can get your arms around them anyway.
I still don't really know what this book is about. I'm still not sure if I've made it more than it is. Andy was hit by a car. Mei was found hiding under a table. I read this book sitting in my tiny apartment in Richmond, VA in 2016. None of us can explain what those experiences meant or why they stay with us. But the book gave me permission to be loyal to an absence of knowledge, to believe, if only intermittently, in being satisfied with a dearth of answers.
What would I say if I could talk to the person who wrote that first review of this book in 2016? I wouldn't tell him that it's all going to be okay, that he'll feel better moving forward. Who's to say? The pain I felt then will likely come again and will come more severely. I can't lie to him and say that the pain will end. The hurt and the fear he was feeling isn't gone. But neither is he. I'm still here. I'd let him know that the book gave me permission to be loyal to an unknown, to trust the irrational thought that life was still worth exploring. This book made me feel like I didn't need an answer, didn't need to be able to explain the world to live in it.
And now I'm doing precisely what the book shows I can't do; I'm trying to make you see the vision and dream the dream. In some ways it was hard to revisit the self that needed to dream this dream in 2016. But when I pretend like I'm a different self than I was then, that's mostly defensive. I still need to see the vision this book gives me. I have no idea whether anyone else will see what I see when they see it; you can't dream my dream. But I needed it. I need it. And I'm grateful.
This is a unique book.
That's not clear at first though. In the first hundred pages, I kept wondering what the relative fuss was about. It just seemed like a pretty boilerplate character study framed by a crime mystery. But stick with it, the book is so much more than that! The surface descriptions of life in Singapore or England are just window dressing for a chilling and powerful reflection on modern life. It allows for a lot of mystery, refusing to give the satisfying answers we want because we realize that although we may understand the nature of the central crime, that alone cannot answer the really difficult questions the rest of the books forces the reader to ask. The book is desperately, unhesitatingly real. I don't know that I can fully grasp its implications, remaining this close to finishing it, but I am very confident that the book will stick with me for a long time. This is special and very worth the short time it takes to read.
3/5/23
It's really hard to believe that it was seven years ago that I first read this book. It was a striking episode for me in a low period. I was as unrelentingly sad as I'd ever been and have ever been since. I felt trapped and unmoored for a variety of reasons and for no reason at all. This book did not save me, but it offered me a vision of the world that felt like a life raft. It didn't make me happy, but it did make me feel less alone.
Rereading my original review feels a bit strange. I still write reviews like I did then, with an eye towards their being read. But that review feels all the more artificial because I was wholly unable to explain the experience of reading the book.
I didn't put the pieces together at the time, but the text is also about that phenomenon. Characters find themselves possessed and unable to escape the experiences that they cannot put into words. Sometimes those experiences feel like an encounter with God. But sometimes they feel like a vision of injustice. Sometimes they feel like a power over others. Sometimes they feel like weakness. All of us have seen visions and dreamed dreams. These things are flashing and momentary, but being human carries with it the experience to see something that feels, if only briefly, bigger than humanity.
When I first read this book, I was suffering, among other things, from the smallness of my humanity. There was too much I couldn't explain about my life to that point, about the lives of others, about its scale and its brevity. What I found in the book was a reflection of the pain I felt in trying to find answers that weren't out there, not in the way that you can get your arms around them anyway.
I still don't really know what this book is about. I'm still not sure if I've made it more than it is. Andy was hit by a car. Mei was found hiding under a table. I read this book sitting in my tiny apartment in Richmond, VA in 2016. None of us can explain what those experiences meant or why they stay with us. But the book gave me permission to be loyal to an absence of knowledge, to believe, if only intermittently, in being satisfied with a dearth of answers.
What would I say if I could talk to the person who wrote that first review of this book in 2016? I wouldn't tell him that it's all going to be okay, that he'll feel better moving forward. Who's to say? The pain I felt then will likely come again and will come more severely. I can't lie to him and say that the pain will end. The hurt and the fear he was feeling isn't gone. But neither is he. I'm still here. I'd let him know that the book gave me permission to be loyal to an unknown, to trust the irrational thought that life was still worth exploring. This book made me feel like I didn't need an answer, didn't need to be able to explain the world to live in it.
And now I'm doing precisely what the book shows I can't do; I'm trying to make you see the vision and dream the dream. In some ways it was hard to revisit the self that needed to dream this dream in 2016. But when I pretend like I'm a different self than I was then, that's mostly defensive. I still need to see the vision this book gives me. I have no idea whether anyone else will see what I see when they see it; you can't dream my dream. But I needed it. I need it. And I'm grateful.
October 23, 2020
Five stars not because it's a perfect novel but because of what this book has meant to me. This was my third or fourth reading, but my first in years.
Told through the perspective of three different narrators, we get interesting takes on 1990s Singapore and internationalism, conversion and Christian faith, and what is or isn't justice. The theme of foreign bodies - those experiences that lodge within us and do harm and become hard to reckon with and heal - is what has abided with me the most.
Told through the perspective of three different narrators, we get interesting takes on 1990s Singapore and internationalism, conversion and Christian faith, and what is or isn't justice. The theme of foreign bodies - those experiences that lodge within us and do harm and become hard to reckon with and heal - is what has abided with me the most.
July 5, 2026
This review doesn’t really contain spoilers: I allude to a spoiler, which, unless you’re a bit dense, you see coming a mile away and can even guess from the Goodreads book description. But I’ve flagged it as a spoiler review anyway.
Foreign Bodies was recommended to me as Singaporean literary fiction (set in and written by an author from Singapore), ahead of my visit there.
As a novel of Singapore, it benefits from seeing through the eyes of someone somewhat on the sidelines (football pun intended – far too much of this book bored me about football). Hwee Hwee Tan grew up in Singapore, lived in the Netherlands, studied in England and then lived in New York. The novel’s view of Singapore is deeply informed but far from laudatory. The critical distance with which the novel gazes on Singapore is increased by the fact large sections are from the perspective of an English twenty-something male. (The depiction of a nowhere town in England in the 1990s is so expertly captured, I was unsurprised to discover the author lived in England for a time).
Chapters are told from the perspectives of three main characters: Mei, the Singaporean girlfriend of Andy, who is also implausibly his lawyer; Andy, an “ang mo” (a problematic Hokkien term for a white foreigner, literally meaning “red-haired”, which Andy is too), who appears to have been framed for a serious gambling offence (the football), by a person unknown; and Eugene, a friend of both and who… you can guess. And that’s a fundamental problem with this novel. What else is Eugene doing as one of the narrators in this book if not the obvious?
Another problem is the chapters are divided very much unevenly. Although we start and end with Mei, there are many chapters in a row headed “Andy”, such that this is as much, if not more, his story than hers. Only a few chapters are Eugene’s.
Hwee Hwee Tan has said (in an interview at the back of my WSP copy of the book) that she was pleased the critics did not call her characters flat. I’d grant her that, too. Mei and Andy were utterly convincing, as were their surroundings; even Eugene, though underused, was not underdeveloped.
Thematically, besides justice, accountability, retribution, the inequitable treatment of women and foreigners within the Singaporean social and legal systems, and exploring class-based prejudices, this novel also deals with child sexual abuse. It does so powerfully, and so it feels particularly harsh to say this: the theme feels out of place, as though two novels (or three – see below) were being written at once. The connection between Mei’s and Andy’s struggles is the injustice both experience, but the reason Andy faces injustice and the reason the sexual abuse goes unpunished are utterly divergent – unless one were to blame Mei’s silence for both injustices, which one could, but which surely was not the point Hwee Hwee Tan was trying to make.
There are extraordinarily strong passages of prose concerning the emptiness of modern life, but those all culminate in one message: “Jesus saves”. Jesus, God and – in later pages, perhaps retrospectively trying to bolster a theme – Job, take up strange positions in the novel. Mei and Andy both expound upon Christian teachings and beliefs while seemingly failing to live out their principles. At one point Mei swears an oath on the Bible which stops her acting in her client’s best interests and thereby perpetuates injustice; seemingly she failed to read the part of the Bible which says, “But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all” (Matthew 5:34), still less “Do not pervert justice” (Leviticus 19:15). Faith seems central to and, simultaneously, tagged-on to the characters’ – and dare I say the author’s – thinking.
Too much was competing in this novel for it to hang together well. The Eugene sections could have been cut, and we could have seen Mei’s and Andy’s interactions with him from their perspectives instead, which would have hugely increased the suspense in the novel, helped with pacing and removed the Netherlands sections (which seemed to be included to show the author can vividly depict not one, not two, but three settings).
This is a religious morality tale – oddly more along Old Testament lines than New – which is barely concealed within a poorly crafted whodunnit, albeit one that is at points beautifully written and extraordinary well observed.
Foreign Bodies was recommended to me as Singaporean literary fiction (set in and written by an author from Singapore), ahead of my visit there.
As a novel of Singapore, it benefits from seeing through the eyes of someone somewhat on the sidelines (football pun intended – far too much of this book bored me about football). Hwee Hwee Tan grew up in Singapore, lived in the Netherlands, studied in England and then lived in New York. The novel’s view of Singapore is deeply informed but far from laudatory. The critical distance with which the novel gazes on Singapore is increased by the fact large sections are from the perspective of an English twenty-something male. (The depiction of a nowhere town in England in the 1990s is so expertly captured, I was unsurprised to discover the author lived in England for a time).
Chapters are told from the perspectives of three main characters: Mei, the Singaporean girlfriend of Andy, who is also implausibly his lawyer; Andy, an “ang mo” (a problematic Hokkien term for a white foreigner, literally meaning “red-haired”, which Andy is too), who appears to have been framed for a serious gambling offence (the football), by a person unknown; and Eugene, a friend of both and who… you can guess. And that’s a fundamental problem with this novel. What else is Eugene doing as one of the narrators in this book if not the obvious?
Another problem is the chapters are divided very much unevenly. Although we start and end with Mei, there are many chapters in a row headed “Andy”, such that this is as much, if not more, his story than hers. Only a few chapters are Eugene’s.
Hwee Hwee Tan has said (in an interview at the back of my WSP copy of the book) that she was pleased the critics did not call her characters flat. I’d grant her that, too. Mei and Andy were utterly convincing, as were their surroundings; even Eugene, though underused, was not underdeveloped.
Thematically, besides justice, accountability, retribution, the inequitable treatment of women and foreigners within the Singaporean social and legal systems, and exploring class-based prejudices, this novel also deals with child sexual abuse. It does so powerfully, and so it feels particularly harsh to say this: the theme feels out of place, as though two novels (or three – see below) were being written at once. The connection between Mei’s and Andy’s struggles is the injustice both experience, but the reason Andy faces injustice and the reason the sexual abuse goes unpunished are utterly divergent – unless one were to blame Mei’s silence for both injustices, which one could, but which surely was not the point Hwee Hwee Tan was trying to make.
There are extraordinarily strong passages of prose concerning the emptiness of modern life, but those all culminate in one message: “Jesus saves”. Jesus, God and – in later pages, perhaps retrospectively trying to bolster a theme – Job, take up strange positions in the novel. Mei and Andy both expound upon Christian teachings and beliefs while seemingly failing to live out their principles. At one point Mei swears an oath on the Bible which stops her acting in her client’s best interests and thereby perpetuates injustice; seemingly she failed to read the part of the Bible which says, “But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all” (Matthew 5:34), still less “Do not pervert justice” (Leviticus 19:15). Faith seems central to and, simultaneously, tagged-on to the characters’ – and dare I say the author’s – thinking.
Too much was competing in this novel for it to hang together well. The Eugene sections could have been cut, and we could have seen Mei’s and Andy’s interactions with him from their perspectives instead, which would have hugely increased the suspense in the novel, helped with pacing and removed the Netherlands sections (which seemed to be included to show the author can vividly depict not one, not two, but three settings).
This is a religious morality tale – oddly more along Old Testament lines than New – which is barely concealed within a poorly crafted whodunnit, albeit one that is at points beautifully written and extraordinary well observed.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 25, 2023
Rounded up from a 3.5 as Foreign Bodies doesn't deserve such a low rating on GR! I first read this half a lifetime ago in JC after my English Lit teacher introduced Tan Hwee Hwee to us. I can't remember if he'd also taught her, but she's unfairly underrated as a Singaporean writer. While the "foreign body" aspects of the novel seemed shoe-horned and certain bits were a tad jarring (like Andy a Brit worrying about SAT scores and saying 'soccer'), I loved the Singaporean dialogue and the apt descriptions of 90s Singapore. So much of that world has disappeared and it's beautiful to see it captured for posterity within these pages.
July 6, 2010
Snappy but full of feeling. A bit showy. Heavy theme -- basically an exploration of "vengeance is mine, saith the lord" from the perspective of the frustrated and wronged. Tan writes so eloquently about Christianity that I assume she must have been a Christian at some point. Now I hear she is some kind of Buddhist guru??!?
July 20, 2011
Good, fast-paced GenX novel/mystery, surrounding three friends coping with one's arrest for gambling in Singapore. Unexpectedly good, almost Raymond Chandler-esque writing, interesting religious twists. A mystery novel not quite like any other I've read.
February 28, 2018
There were a couple of aspects of the ending I did not like that maybe could be forgiven. Overall an engaging and interesting read. In some ways its a typical Englishman abroad gets into trouble tale but with some extra stories woven in.
October 11, 2024
Thoroughly enjoyed this book!! Found it at a random book store for $4 and it was such an interesting read. Religion, crime, trauma, satire all beautifully wrapped up.
Read
November 11, 2012I REALLY disliked this book. It's a thin story about a young woman in Singapore and two good friends. But the message is heavily Christian as is the unlikely and unbelievable "climax." Of course the guy doesn't mind spending time in prison for a crime he didn't commit because now he has religion. What really bothered me was this book was not identified on the cover as Christian lit. Don't read it.
February 16, 2008
I read this in college and felt it worth mentioning because it's still on my bookshelf and I've re-read it many times. Certainly it's not the most well-written story, but it captured my thinking in a way that nothing else had. The two main characters work through a rocky relationship and salvation comes when they least expect it.
October 29, 2016
I loved how Tan is able to bring the the aspects of how humans struggle with the concept of Christianity and God. How she is able to bring philosophical thoughts about the relationship of God and man throughout the plot.
April 25, 2010
I really enjoyed this novel, even though sometimes I got pretty frustrated with the characters. But that's real. :P
August 27, 2010
I read this in college & really enjoyed it ... but am having trouble remembering much about it now. I remember enjoying the multinational expatriate context. It seemed young, modern & fresh.
March 6, 2011
I liked it....and have been thinking about it again recently, so will likely re-read it soon.
May 1, 2011
I didn't like it. The backstories dominated the book and the actual main thread wasn't terribly long - i won't recommend it.
May 28, 2014
Quite a good book if you're interested in Singaporean culture. OK book if you're just looking to read a book.
January 20, 2016
At times very readable, at other times this book dragged. i did not like the ending at all.
Read
April 27, 2011Singapore punters
April 19, 2017
Started well but may have to feature on a Listopia "Books With Totally Lame Endings". Fizzled out into a lot of religious philosophising. Disappointing.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews