“The Chanel of babies”: Subversion and self-exotification in Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls

The sarong party girl in the Singaporean imagination

The origins of the term sarong party girl are somewhat murky. A search on NewspaperSG, an online archive of Singaporean newspapers, shows that it was used as early as 1989 in two reviews of Mixed Signals (1989), a satirical comedy by Singaporean playwright Michael Chiang. Both reviewers refer to a female character, Amanda, in a “sarong skirt” as a “sarong party girl” (Lye, 1989: 19; Chia, 1989: 8). Chiang (2014: 137) does not actually use the label in the play script; instead Amanda’s “long, straight hair”, “tan” complexion, and “batik sarong” are enough to signal to the audience that she is a sarong party girl. It is clear that Chiang and the reviewers are referencing an existing stereotype, and the sarong party girl already has a presence in the Singaporean cultural imagination. Her defining characteristics — long hair, tanned skin, and preference for white men — are solidifying into cliché. The sarong party girl is therefore a, possibly threatening, model of the new Asian woman: westernized, hyper-feminine, and much maligned for her sexuality.

What cements this image of the sarong party girl in the public imagination is the publication of The Official Guide to the Sarong Party Girl in 1994, referenced above. Aitchison (1994: 26) describes the sarong party girl as “the embodiment of the male Caucasian dream: the exotic, erotic Oriental girl, Suzie Wong in a sarong, complete with flashing eyes, a sexy figure and a sexually alert personality. She is the girl he dreamed of finding in the East”. Here, he explicitly sets out what the text’s opening illustration had implied. In the Guide, the typical features of a sarong party girl are exaggerated even further throughout the text’s illustrations, almost to the point of parody. Aitchison’s sarong party girl is an armless, exaggerated S-shaped torso on stilt-like legs, her large breasts and buttocks defying physics and the limits of human anatomy. Her long hair is swept down her back, her clear complexion is labelled “dark tan”, her eyes are drawn as slits, and her lips are full and lacquered with makeup — once again she is reduced to a kind of shorthand for the “exotic” East Asian woman (Aitchson, 1994: 40). Though the Guide claims to be humour, its comedy comes at the expense of its subject, and the sarong party girl is lampooned for her promiscuity, vapidity, and fetishization of western culture, the latter of which she invariably fails to understand. Aitchison’s text punishes its female subject, and says little about the men doing the objectification and exotification in the first place.

However, the exact content of Aitchison’s book is less important than its effect on Singaporean popular culture. By 1996, two years after publication, The Official Guide had spawned two sequels and sold 21,000 copies, a substantial number of sales in a market as small as Singapore’s (Wang, 1996: 20). Critics like Chris Hudson note that “what is important” about the success of the Guide “is not so much the continuing tradition of exoticizing and eroticizing Asian women, but the multiplying effects of this stereotype in public discourses” (2015: 18–19). Aitchison did not create the sarong party girl as much as he reproduced, reduplicated, and amplified the image of her, no longer just Suzy in a tight skirt but a “discursive object” (Hudson, 2015: 23). Her transgressive sexuality therefore became a matter of public discussion, her appetite and choice of sexual partners not an individual’s preferences but “unauthorized behaviours” which “simultaneously threaten the hegemony of the Singaporean male” and “recall a colonial history of domination” (Hudson, 2015: 23). A moral panic about the sarong party girl followed the publication of The Official Guide, where she became the figurehead of the Singaporean state’s alarm over “the general moral degeneration of its citizenry” as she imperilled the “set of shared common and desirable social values” that “supports the existing socio-political structure” (Eng, 1997: 37). The act of spurning Asian men to sleep with white men thus became a matter of Singaporean national security. As with other contemporaneous moral panics over perceived crises like the decline in marriages among graduate women and the so-called “single mother syndrome”, women’s bodies became sites of national importance (Eng, 1997: 37).

Like the sarong party girl, single women and unwed mothers were marked by their reproductive deviancy. These manufactured moral crises are based in a conservative and biologically essentialist gender ideology, where a woman’s value to the state is determined by her ability to produce the next generation of Singaporean citizens within a heteronormative and ethnonationalist framework. According to this logic, good Singaporean women must not only bear children within a heterosexual marriage, but also marry within their own Asian community. ¹ When the sarong party girl spurns local Singaporean men for white foreign men, she is seen as re-enacting the colonial-era dynamics “of white superiority over Asians” (Eng, 1997: 44). At the same time, she disrupts the Singaporean state’s use of “Asian Values”, defined by Debbie Ho and Hannah Ho (2019: 147) as a set of neo-Confucian social norms which emphasize family values and filial piety, and which the state wields to ideologically distinguish and defend Singapore from external, usually labelled as “western”, political and social influences. Though westernization was seen as a key to material success and economic growth under neoliberal globalization, it came with the perceived threat of eroding Singapore’s “Asian” identity and attachment “to Eastern principles, values and morals” through the introduction of “vices perceived to derive from the West, such as divorce and promiscuity” (Ho and Ho, 2019: 149–50). Pitting “East” against “West” is, of course, a false dichotomy. The vagueness of these terms does little more than stake out the Singaporean state’s conservative ideological positions, but the context is important for understanding why the sarong party girl was viewed with such suspicion. More than a stereotype, the sarong party girl is a symbol of several interrelated anxieties about race, sexuality, gender, and national sovereignty made manifest through a deviant female body.

This is the context which Tan engages with in her novel Sarong Party Girls. Published in 2016 on the cusp of the #MeToo movement, Tan is keenly aware of the sarong party girl stereotype and the fraught gender politics in which it is enmeshed. She describes Jazzy as the quintessential sarong party girl, with the now-familiar long straight hair, a penchant for tiny black tank tops and tight jeans, and a laser focus on snagging a white husband. By doing so, Tan plays with the stereotype to examine how Singaporean societal norms, its “Asian Values”, have produced a character like her protagonist. Tan portrays Singapore as a patriarchal society where gender roles are entrenched. Men are the breadwinners. Women are expected to be housewives and mothers, and are reliant on their husbands if married and on their parents if not. While shopping for groceries at the wet market, for example, Jazzy’s mother tries to teach her how to select fresh produce, admonishing her that, “with men — you must always know how to feed and pamper them, otherwise their stomachs will lead them outside” (36). To Jazzy’s mother, learning these domestic skills is essential to securing a husband and thus financial security. In another instance, Jazzy’s friend Imo learns that her father has another family and her mother is his mistress. While he works and spends his weekends with his first wife and their children, Imo’s mother spends her time “sitting at home cleaning the already-quite-shiny altar for the fifth time that day or rearranging the framed photos of Imo on the living room wall” (65). It is clear from these examples that “divorce and promiscuity” are not only “western” vices. Both Jazzy and Imo’s mothers are defined by their roles as homemakers, emphasized by how they are not named in the narrative and are instead only referred to in relation to their daughters or husbands. They are women who have fulfilled the societal role expected of them by marrying and having children young, and are rewarded by a lifetime of domestic servitude to their husbands. To Jazzy, then, marrying an Asian man means submitting to the patriarchal systems which have trapped her mother and her friends’ mothers. If choosing a partner is one of the few times where Jazzy can exercise her autonomy, then marrying up and marrying white becomes an escape.

While the Guide depicts sarong party girls dressing provocatively to attract the attention of white men, Tan reclaims this depiction to make a broader point about how women deploy their sexuality as a means of survival. Jazzy works at the fictional newspaper New Times as an assistant to the editor, a much older Singaporean man named Albert. It is an open secret in the organization that Albert exclusively hires young women to be his assistants, onboarding them at 22 and off-loading them to another division when they turn 24. At 26, Jazzy is aware that she is two years past Albert’s cut-off. In order to keep her job, she tries to make herself as useful as possible and, more significantly, dresses and moves in ways that cater to Albert’s fantasies. If she is “wearing heels and a tight or short skirt”, she sits on the sofa in Albert’s office to give him “a good view” of her “red panties”, telling herself to “let the boss look lah. Job security is always good, right?” (28–29). Even though Jazzy minimizes Albert’s behaviour, excusing it as “he just likes to window shop”, Jazzy is aware of the power imbalance between herself and her boss, and recognizes that her value as an assistant is contingent on him finding her physically attractive and sexually available (29). Tan demonstrates here how Jazzy is circumscribed by the male gaze. She knows she is being looked at and adjusts her appearance and behaviour to best appeal to the men, Asian or white, who are doing the looking. Though she may derive a sense of empowerment from being desired, she is still operating within the gender roles defined for her, to be one of the “pretty girls” for Albert and his male clients “to look at”, where her function is to “[j]ust drink, smile, listen” and not interrupt (26). While Tan also critiques Jazzy’s materialism and self-exotification, as the next section will discuss, she is careful to turn her criticism outwards, towards the patriarchal and neocolonial systems which lead women to become sarong party girls.

Subverting genre tropes: Sarong Party Girls and chick lit

At first glance, the cover of the first edition of Sarong Party Girls (2016) published by William Morrow locates Tan’s novel in the chick lit genre. Sandra Ponzanesi highlights how the cover design of chick lit novels, with their reliance on bright colours, illustrations, and typography, and the incorporation of feminized consumer products like makeup, jewellery, handbags, and champagne, signals the genre of the book and “visually represents the hip young protagonist inside the cover with whom the reader is meant to identify” (2014: 158). To Rocío Montoro (2013: 17), the covers of chick lit novels are “semiotic resources” which are “especially successful at encoding meaning for the genre as a whole rather than for individual works”. These design elements, in other words, are a visual shorthand for the genre of chick lit, and works which use these elements evoke associations with the genre. Lisa Lau and Emma Varughese (2015: 20) emphasize the link between book covers and the machinery of the publication industry, describing the cover as “a marketing device” which locates the novel “within the complexities of bookshop taxonomies and marketing and promotional strategies”. Furthermore, Lau and Varughese find that the design of these book covers reflects and amplifies “the dominant discourses of the marketplace and prevalent expectations and stereotypes” around writing in English by Indian women writers, and so propagates a pervasive kind of Orientalism through their depictions of India and Indian women (2015: 35). Covers can therefore determine a novel’s categorization in a genre like chick lit, and signpost the kinds of exotic stories, characters, and locales which a reader will encounter, regardless of the text’s actual contents.

To return to the first edition of Sarong Party Girls, a cartoon illustration of a woman takes up the centre of the red cover, hands on her waist, hips slightly cocked, her face and body turned directly to face the reader, as if she is defiantly looking out at them. Her straight black hair is cut into a bob with the fringe swept over half her face, framing her full red lips and the slash of one slanted and exaggeratedly elongated eye, features which recall the images of sarong party girls in Aitchson’s Guide, and which, yet again, work as exotic signifiers of East Asian women. However, she has swapped the sarong for a black miniskirt, a sleeveless orange V-neck blouse, and a stack of beaded bracelets on one arm. Behind her is the silhouette of Singapore’s skyline, replete with skyscrapers, and landmarks like the Merlion and Singapore Flyer sketched in pink. This is a modern sarong party girl, her clothes and hairstyle as cosmopolitan as the city-state of Singapore. The cover promises a fun, frothy read, where the reader follows Jazzy on her quest to marry her “Mr. Right”.

A closer look, however, hints that Sarong Party Girls is not the straightforward chick lit narrative it appears to be. Adorning the front and back covers are review quotes from Paul Theroux, an American novelist and travel writer who lived in Singapore for a three-year stint, and Julia Glass, a National Book Award-winning author. The protagonist is compared to Scarlett O’Hara, the complex female protagonist of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. The blurb draws attention to the “contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore’s glamorous nightclubs”, minefields which Jazzy must navigate. Most importantly, the blurb makes clear that Jazzy is not so much looking for a “Mr. Right” than a “Mr. White”. The racial dimension of her quest, to marry a Caucasian man and produce “half-white children”, problematizes Jazzy’s motivations and alludes to neocolonial attitudes which Singapore has not yet been able to escape. While I acknowledge that publishers and marketing departments set the cover design and other elements like review quotes, rather than authors, analysing the cover of Sarong Party Girls is a useful exercise to demonstrate how a text may play with genre expectations. ² As I will show, Tan plays with a number of chick lit tropes to structure her critique of Singaporean society.

Romance is central to the chick lit genre, where the events of the novel lead to the heroine finding romantic and emotional fulfillment in the arms of a good man (Gill, 2007: 143–44). These love stories are usually heteronormative. Even if the characters are initially sceptical, or blunder through a series of ill-fated flings, they eventually settle down in a happy, monogamous, heterosexual relationship. Stephanie Harezewski notes how the genre produces “a sexual theory of late capitalism” where “men function as accessories or a means to them and courtship is described in the idiom of business” (2011: 10). While most chick lit narratives mask these motivations in a romance plot, where the husband-hunting heroine is “typically united with a man she does love but also one who is, conveniently, financially fit”, Jazzy’s marriage quest in Sarong Party Girls is nakedly mercantile (Harzewski, 2011: 38). When fantasizing about her future husband, Jazzy does not describe his appearance or personality, instead focusing on how “[m]arrying an ang moh means you get a honeymoon that’s not a cheapo Malaysia or Indonesia trip” (50). ³ To Jazzy, marrying a white expatriate is a financial upgrade over marrying a Chinese-Singaporean man, as she believes it will grant her greater access to consumerist pleasures like expensive European honeymoons. Romance, finding, and keeping the man she loves, is purely secondary. Jazzy may be a gold-digger, but Tan demonstrates how marriage is the only way that Jazzy can escape her dead-end job at the New Times and gain a modicum of financial security.

Chick lit is also a genre which is keenly aware of consumer culture, with texts referencing a bevy of products, brands, television shows, movies, news stories, and women’s magazines. These references are drawn from popular culture rather than “high” culture, and, as Caroline J. Smith notes, “chick lit authors often create fictional worlds in which their protagonists participate in the production of consumer culture mediums” (2007: 11). Chick lit protagonists therefore display a wealth of knowledge of the brands and media they consume, and are depicted as products of consumer culture as much as its drivers.

Eva Yin-I Chen observes how “this consumerist discourse of female empowerment” found in Chinese chick lit like Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (2001) “seems able to transcend national borders and address […] a global sisterhood of financially and sexually confident cosmopolitan women” (2009: 74). In Sarong Party Girls, Jazzy is a member of this global sisterhood, dropping brand names like Marc Jacobs, Seven jeans, Gucci, Loewe, and Prada as she attempts to consume her way up the social ladder. Tan then takes Jazzy’s materialism to its absurd extreme, and positions Jazzy’s desire to marry a Caucasian man as “only one step away from the number one champion status symbol in Singapore — a half ang moh kid. The Chanel of babies!” (2). Tan problematizes the aspirational cosmopolitanism which consumer culture offers to its participants. Jazzy signals her cosmopolitanism through the consumption of global fashion brands, and though these brands have multiple stores in Asia and Singapore, this is still a kind of homogenized cosmopolitanism which is oriented towards the cultural centres of Europe and the United States, where these brands originate. Culture emanates from these centres into the periphery, and Asian cities like Singapore are considered cosmopolitan partly due to their perceived proximity to these centres. Jazzy therefore lives in a society that not only is status-obsessed, but also devalues itself in relation to the “West”. Her wish to flaunt her mixed-race child like a designer handbag points towards a deeply-internalized racism, where she views Caucasian men and “western” culture as superior to Singaporean men and Singaporean culture. Through Jazzy’s flawed worldview, Tan satirizes the discourses of diversity which accompany globalization, thereby exposing the lingering colonial hangover that dogs former colonies like Singapore. Consuming designer goods may offer a path to bettering your social status, but only if you buy the “right” things.

Crucially in the novel, Jazzy and her friends construct their self-images through the media and products they consume. When Sher, Jazzy’s estranged best friend, marries, her dress is “designed to look exactly like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s [sic] negligee-style wedding dress”, and is reproduced from a photo that she had cut out of a magazine years prior (21). Bessette-Kennedy was a publicist for Calvin Klein and an American fashion icon famous for her minimalist style. The white slip dress she wore at her wedding to John F. Kennedy Jr. redefined wedding fashion for a generation of American women (Burchfield, 2021). Sher referencing Bessette-Kennedy at her wedding, down to duplicating the latter’s hairstyle, speaks to the influence of the global fashion industry and how images of American women like Bessette-Kennedy are disseminated globally. To be clear, Sher does not want to be white. But by copying Bessette-Kennedy’s style, Sher aspires to the images of New York City glamour and sophistication she consumes in her magazines, where she says, “‘marry an ang moh prince must have ang moh-style princess dress’” (20).

As Jazzy is set on acquiring a white husband, she is keenly aware of how white men look at her. She works to specifically appeal to their gaze, telling her friends that they “must know what kind of things ang moh guys like” (10). Thus, she modifies her behaviour in ways which exoticize her, as seen during her first encounter with Roy on the dancefloor of an expat nightclub: She smiles and acts demure, “even fluttering [her] eyelids” because “drunk ang mohs really love that geisha shit”, and so plays into the Orientalist fantasy of the innocent but sexually alluring Asian woman (56). In a similar vein, when describing herself, she takes pride in how “[t]he ang moh guys I’ve met are always talking about how glossy and black my long hair is and how soft and smooth my skin is” (10). Jazzy evaluates herself based on how she looks to the white male gaze, and the features she focuses on are, yet again, racialized and exoticized in this gaze. In order to net her Caucasian husband, Jazzy believes she must play into their fantasies of Asian women. By embracing “that geisha shit”, Jazzy is taking part in a kind of recursive Orientalism, where images of the “exotic” Asian woman constituted in the white gaze bleed back into Asia and change how Jazzy views herself.

However, the women in Sarong Party Girls are not just influenced by American fashion magazines and this neocolonial gaze. While Sher is inspired by Bessette-Kennedy’s chic minimalism, physical beauty standards for Asian women (or at least Singaporean-Chinese women) in Singapore are set elsewhere in Asia, namely in Korea and Japan. Jazzy repeatedly draws comparisons between the real-life women she sees and images of Japanese and Korean models and performers. In one example, she likens her friend Imo to “the cute Japanese teenagers in those Kao Biore face soap advertisements” (9). ⁴ In another, when looking at photos of nightclub hostesses, she compares them to “K-pop girl bands” and their “Korean-Korean look” with their “long light brown hair, wispy fringe falling all over [their] face, sort of fair skin, big eyes, full lips” (96). Tan highlights how Jazzy and her friends work to meet the beauty standards exemplified in these images. They buy skin whitening creams, and Imo specifically outlines her eyes so “they look round round, big big one, like those Japanese anime girls that guys always want” (9). In turn, this complicates the centre-periphery model of globalization referenced earlier. Jazzy and her friends may buy products from American or European-based fashion brands to accrue social capital, but they also model themselves after commercial images of women from other East Asian countries. Singapore is therefore placed on the periphery of two cultural systems, where Jazzy and her friends are influenced by the Asian media powerhouses of Japan and Korea as much as they are by New York fashion week. This in turn complicates how Jazzy sees and constructs her self-image. Jazzy has internalized both neocolonial structures which position white “westerners” as superior to Asians, and a new cultural hierarchy within Asia. Desirability therefore hinges on looking like the “right” kind of East Asian woman, one doubly constrained by the white neocolonial gaze and East Asian beauty standards.

The emphasis that Jazzy places on looking and appraising women’s bodies indicates how she has internalized this dual gaze. While her internal narration does not spare men who are not classically good-looking, as seen with how she dings Albert for his “mouse eyes, flat backside, [being] a bit too skinny” and his funny walk, she saves her harshest criticism for other women (24). She constantly draws attention to how various women fail to meet the beauty standards forced on them, criticizing their acne, pudgy hips, bad teeth, flat chests, old-fashioned dress sense, and so on. When comforting a former schoolmate who suspects her husband is having an affair, Jazzy’s advice is to lose weight and go shopping, because “guys, even after they are married, still care about looks […] to keep their attention […] maybe you need to look nicer a bit” (140–41). The scrutiny which Jazzy places on her appearance and that of the women around her is the end result of applying consumerist logic to romantic relationships, of turning marriage into a marriage market. If a single man derives his value from his wealth and his social status, a woman’s value is determined by her desirability to these men.

Sarong Party Girls and the commodification of Global Asia

As much as Jazzy courts a husband, Sarong Party Girls courts a reader. While Tan subverts genre tropes as part of her social critique, her novel is still beholden to the expectations of its readership. This readership is located in the Anglophone world by dint of Sarong Party Girls being written in an English variant, but it is not necessarily located in the Anglophone centres of the United States and the United Kingdom. Writing about Chinese chick lit in English, Wenche Ommudsen finds that its popularity and international circulation point towards a “crossover readership” that spans “the traditional centres of the English-speaking world to English-literate and English-learning markets across the globe”, thereby creating a “global reading room” of young, upwardly mobile female readers that are “less likely to fetishize cultural difference than to seek out the commonalities of women’s lives” (2008: 343). The global popularity of chick lit is fertile ground for examining what Ommudsen identifies as the “ongoing debate about what it means to be part of a global modernity, how to negotiate different ways of being modern, and the different roles carved out for women” (2011: 120). However, I would like to unpack “the market power of exoticism” which attracts readers to non-“western” chick lit writers and their texts (Ommudsen, 2008: 343). Singapore, it should go without saying, is not part of China. It is a small South-East Asian city-state located two degrees north of the equator. However, novels set in Singapore like Sarong Party Girls and Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2011) before it position Singapore as representative of Asia. Doing so elides the existence and experience of minority communities in Singapore, while simultaneously playing up the exoticism of the setting for the international reader.

Depictions of Singapore in popular fiction tend to laud its cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity, often in ways which chime with Singapore’s own national narratives. Yuan Ding’s analysis of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, for example, finds that Kwan’s use of Sinitic languages and Colloquial Singapore English (or Singlish) affirms Singapore’s multiculturalism and “contributes to Kwan’s panethnic project of racial uplift” for the Asian diaspora (2020: 72). Cheryl Naruse uses the term “Global Asia” to illustrate the “aestheticized, transnationalized narrative” woven around the Singaporean state, and the product constituted within state-sanctioned discourses and literary works (2023: 6). Singapore’s appeal to international readers rests on its unique positioning as a kind of Asia-in-miniature while still retaining its “anglophonic legibility” (Naruse, 2023: 7). In other words, Singapore’s ethnic and cultural diversity is read as representative of Asia as a whole, but an Asia which is accessible and relatively readable due to its westernization. This narrative of diversity depends on a compromise between opening Singapore to globalization and maintaining a coherent and recognizably “Asian” national identity, as reflected in Singapore’s national language policies. English is one of Singapore’s four official languages, with the other three being the “mother tongue” languages of Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. While English acts as an inter-community bridge within Singapore and links the nation-state with the global Anglophone world, the “mother tongue” languages inculcate a kind of Asian cultural heritage in their speakers (Rudby and Tan, 2008: 5). Crucially, the “mother tongue” languages are meant to act as a bulwark against the perceived threat of westernization as symbolized through English-language acquisition, and access to this Asian cultural heritage is contingent on belonging to one’s prescribed ethnic group (YY Tan, 2017: 97). While the sarong party girl no longer causes moral panics in twenty-first-century Singapore, the ethnonationalist framework which birthed her still lurks beneath the surface. Diversity in Singapore comes with caveats. Multiculturalism is expressed through the CMIO model, an administrative framework which categorizes Singaporeans according to four main racial categories: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other (CMIO) (Goh and Holden, 2009: 3). Only certain forms of diversity are endorsed by the state, and the “Global Asia” narrative furthered by some Singaporean Anglophone novels is one such example.

Singapore is therefore depicted as an Asian metropolis, its skyscrapers and shopping boulevards home to a diverse citizenry which is recognizably culturally Asian but still fluent in English. Angelia Poon identifies these twinned processes of signifying towards a greater Asia and positioning Singapore as an Anglophonic global city as the commodification of Singaporean cosmopolitanism for an international readership (2024: 151). Significantly, she argues that Anglophone writers from Singapore like Kevin Kwan may intentionally capitalize on this commodification through their English-speaking Singaporean-Chinese characters “by presenting cosmopolitanism as normative in Anglophone Singapore and emphasizing its pleasures for an elite ethnic Chinese minority” (Poon, 2024: 151). Sarong Party Girls does a similar kind of commodification where Tan explores the dark side of cosmopolitanism and Singapore’s status as a global destination for international businesses and peoples by taking the reader on a tour of the island’s sex industry. ⁵ The exoticism which the novel offers international readers thus becomes more fraught.

The Singapore of Sarong Party Girls is depicted like an urban jungle, categorically similar to other global cities like New York or London. Buildings tower over its landscape, its night clubs and public transportation systems teem with people, and its many malls are adorned with the same designer brands found on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue or London’s Oxford Street. Jazzy buys lattes from Starbucks, drinks white wine at trendy bars, and shops at Ferragamo, behaviours which are indistinguishable from those of other young, financially independent women around the world. What distinguishes Singapore’s urban landscape from other global cities in Sarong Party Girls is a distinctly culturally Chinese exoticism. This Chinese flair is further amplified in locations where sex and sex-adjacent work take place. For example, when Jazzy accompanies a friend, Kin Meng, and his business clients to an upmarket KTV lounge, a kind of private karaoke lounge where patrons can sing, drink, and buy companionship — and sometimes sexual services — from women, she describes the space thus:

The flashing signboard outside the building was so large it almost covered the entire front of the three-story building. The sign was shaped like a pagoda — like the actual Temple of Heaven in Beijing […] and outlined in Chinese New Year red and lucky yellow neon lights. And right in the middle were the two Chinese words for Temple of Heaven: Tian Tan. And underneath that, in words that were almost as huge: MARTELL. (108)

In contrast with the urban anonymity of shopping malls, the lounge is located in a cultural elsewhere, outside of Singapore. Pagodas and the Temple of Heaven in China are exaggerated signifiers of Chinese culture, with the colour descriptors of “Chinese New Year red” and “lucky yellow” gesturing that Tan’s imagery is oriented towards an international reader who may be unfamiliar with their cultural significance. The effect is reinforced by the two women in “tight red cheongsams” who greet Jazzy and her friend, the round doorways which remind her of the “Qing Dynasty Village” amusement park, the “shiny red wallpaper”, and the booth cushions “covered in shiny red silk” (108–10). This is less the representation of Chinese culture than its simulacrum, magnified and distorted for the pleasure of the lounge’s patrons and the reader. Furthermore, Tan’s descriptions here inadvertently treat Chinese culture as representative of Asia, flattening Singapore’s complex racial and cultural politics and those of the region as a whole. Absent of other cultural referents from, for example, the South Asian, Malay, and Eurasian ethnic minorities in Singapore, or from other South-East Asian countries, Sarong Party Girls hits the same representational blindspots as Crazy Rich Asians. The “Asia” that Singapore is supposed to represent is narrowed into a kind of Anglicized Chinese culture, westernized but distinct from Anglo-American culture, and indexed through a handful of familiar but still exotic tropes.

I would like to clarify, however, that in all of the scenes depicting Singapore’s sex industry, Tan is critiquing the societal chauvinism and misogyny that her characters encounter and display. In particular, Tan excoriates sex tourism and sex tourists, where men from affluent, usually western, countries travel to Asia to buy sex. When Jazzy and her friends go to a bar in Orchard Towers — a mall on Orchard Road that is a notorious haunt for sex tourists — and observe Caucasian men fondling young Asian sex workers, the women are shocked and disgusted. While Jazzy justifies her search for a white husband as a way to improve her social and financial status, the men she observes exploit vulnerable women. Similarly, after Jazzy visits the Temple of Heaven KTV lounge and sees “young girls getting picked and rejected like chickens in a wet market”, her perception of Kin Meng, a married Singaporean man, completely changes (114). The fault, Tan makes clear, lies with these men.

Tan’s depiction of the sex industry in Singapore is therefore nuanced by how it falls into a kind of Orientalizing gaze. A problematic and potentially uncomfortable exoticization of female sexuality occurs throughout Sarong Party Girls, narrated through Jazzy’s point of view. The sex industry workers that Jazzy sees, and cattily describes, are defined solely by their appearance and described in terms which reinforce their Asian-ness. While at the night club Lunar, Jazzy refers to the club’s waitresses, hostesses, and go-go dancers as “China girls” and “cheongsam sluts”, with her narration drawing attention to how each of their black skirts was “so short it couldn’t even cover their whole backside — whenever they moved you could see their frilly white panties underneath” (45–47). The scenes in the KTV lounge are particularly graphic: the Chinese sex workers are described as wearing identical “dark red lipstick and tight cheongsams with big slits down each side”, and so are solely referred to by their physical characteristics such as their large breasts or long legs (112). Through Jazzy’s gaze, these women are segmented into a series of body parts in a way which echoes Aitchison’s male gaze. But while Aitchison does so to titillate his presumably male reader, Jazzy attempts to distinguish herself from these so-called “China girls”. She may be a sarong party girl, but she is not like these other, and othered, Asian women. Though she does not enter these places for sex, Jazzy is herself a tourist. Her judgment demonstrates how she has internalized the Orientalist and misogynist gazes which have trapped her and the women she looks at.

Conclusion

Sarong Party Girls does not end with a love confession, kiss, or big white wedding. The novel ends with Jazzy figuratively and literally walking away from her quest to find a Caucasian husband, reconciling with her estranged best friend Sher, and resolving to find her own way. This is, perhaps, Tan’s clearest reversal of chick lit romance tropes. Jazzy realizes that she does not need a man to complete her, and the narrative rewards her with something more prized: self-actualization. However, Jazzy’s new self-knowledge is balanced by an ambiguity about her gaze and its attendant politics, as she has not yet begun to undo the years of internalized misogyny that have shaped her perspective. As a text, Sarong Party Girls is held in a similar bind. Though it seizes and reverses the male colonial gaze which produced the image of the sarong party girl, thereby reclaiming and humanizing the stereotype, it must still work within the structures of the global publishing market. Cultural difference remains a commodity, and exoticism continues to be rewarded. Writers like Tan must therefore perform a balancing act, positioning their texts as geographically, culturally, and thematically different enough to entice readers from a broad range of markets, but not too different that they lose this international appeal. Despite their best intentions, their texts may end up reproducing the same Orientalizing gaze they attempt to repudiate, or effacing the cultures they attempt to represent. Sarong Party Girls is a novel that embraces these overlapping but contradictory pressures, and points towards how places like Singapore are likewise entangled in narratives about colonialism, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and consumer and commodity culture.