Sarong Party Girls

A sarong party girl is beautiful Singaporean girl, spotted at clubs and bars looking for wealthy, Western men.  In Sarong Party Girls, 26-year-old Chinese-Singaporean Jazeline Lim decides to get serious about finding a rich ang moh husband, before she’s too old to land one.

Jazzy is a sort of Singaporean Scarlet O’Hara, who blatantly schemes to get a  husband.  But, like Scarlet O’Hara, you can’t even blame her — marrying a wealthy foreigner and having a mixed-race “Chanel baby” is the closest thing to a guarantee of success in her world. On her way to this goal, she assesses her friends pretty bluntly, but she can’t figure out how her best friend and the prettiest of the foursome got married to an average Ah Beng (local Chinese guy) instead of a rich and handsome foreigner. She’s pretty blunt about sex, too, in a way that’s chatty and hilarious, but had me thinking, oh, girl, noooo, more than once.

Jazzy doesn’t want to destroy the ever-present system of wives, semi-official mistresses and sexual playthings, she just wants to win. From the beginning, Jazzy agrees that those feminist graduates with the sexual harassment claims just make trouble for everyone, but as the book goes on, and she sees the club dancers, strippers, and KTV girls selling sex and youth, she has questions.

Most of the ang moh guys are there for massive international businesses, but Jazzy’s mother still wakes her up early to shop the wet markets. Fortunately, the novel avoids those cliche highrises-and-hutongs moments, mostly because Jazzy has a teenage eyerolling attitude towards her mother’s generation, as well as a healthy skepticism towards the promised gender equality of the future.

There’s a disturbing scene when —  wait, no, the actions aren’t what’s disturbing, it’s more that Jazzy’s rationalizations after the fact are disturbing. Let’s just say someone thinks he’s entitled to Jazzy, and she, uh, well, thinks about how he did buy her drinks and drive her home, after all. UGH. One of the saddest parts of #metoo is discovering how many smart, successful women all have a story about how our nos were ignored, and how many of us try to rationalize that if she wasn’t forced with a gun, it wasn’t really rape.

This novel manages to be incredibly fun, like a wild night out with hard-partying friends, and also deeply upsetting. As Jazzy becomes aware of the ways that misogyny and exploitation have limited her life, it’s impossible not to think about how gender limits all women.