AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Ophir is the host of a hit podcast, but Ophir isn't her real name. She's in hiding and on the run from Singapore police after skipping town with a duffel bag filled with $60,000 in cash.
YU-MEI BALASINGAMCHOW: (Reading) I haven't been crying. I just stare into space and feel my insides twisting tighter and tighter. I gasp and strain for air until I remember where I am and come back to myself. For those of you listening for the first time, this probably isn't what you expected. Tina told me we had lots of new subscribers after the last episode, like, thousands and thousands more. There's been quite a tizzy in Singapore over me, a long-lost wanted criminal telling my story to the world, resolving a loose end in a sensational public murder.
RASCOE: That's author Yu-Mei Balasingamchow reading from her debut novel, "Names Have Been Changed." Thank you so much for being with us.
BALASINGAMCHOW: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: Names carry a lot of weight in this book. The narrator goes by Ophir, but also Hui Ying and Haylee and Kara (ph) and other names. But we never hear her real name. Why not?
BALASINGAMCHOW: I think names are something very ordinary, but when you're deprived of it against your will, almost, that it suddenly takes on additional emotional weight. And so Ophir - when she flees Singapore after committing a crime, she stops using her real name because she doesn't want to get caught, and that just seems to be the logical thing to do. And she starts using assumed identities, all the names that you were just referring to.
But the more time passes, the more she really just wants someone to kind of acknowledge her real name. I think one of the first few things she tells us in the book is, I just wish someone would call me by my real name. It's been about 10 years that she's been on the run, and so it's almost like she's lost sight of herself in that process of hurtling forward, you know, around the globe.
RASCOE: Well, tell us more about who Ophir is and why she had to go on the run.
BALASINGAMCHOW: Ophir is someone who was leading a fairly ordinary life - unremarkable, so to speak. She's the youngest of six children and was getting by as a voice actor until her best friend pulls her into a scheme or a scam, rather. They become money mules. And Ophir falls into it kind of almost without thinking too much about the consequences. She just thinks, oh, this is a great way to make some extra cash, and it seems pretty foolproof, and no one will know what I'm doing, so let's just go for it. It's only much later that she has to stop and reflect on that.
And it's fascinating to me, characters - like, how they behave under pressure, when sort of push comes to shove and they show you who they really are. I think I was interested in a so-called, like, ordinary person, and if you get wrapped up in something like this, how do you make sense of it after that? And how do you live with yourself or with the consequences, at least, of what you've done?
RASCOE: So the book is her doing a podcast, anonymously telling her story. But there's also just, like, this focus on language. Like, it seems like one of the things that she misses most about home is the language. Tell us about this idea of Singlish. What is that? How does that sound?
BALASINGAMCHOW: Yeah. After Ophir goes on the run, she decides she's going to disguise her voice. She's not going to adopt a Singaporean accent, which is the natural way she would speak. And she's not gonna use Singlish. Singlish is like a creole language in Singapore. If you live there, you kind of absorb it into you with the water, that kind of thing. It's not, like, a formal language, but it's a vernacular. Everyone speaks it. And she decides not to use it because it's too much of a giveaway to her identity as a Singaporean.
What she doesn't realize after she's been denying herself this is that she's kind of cut herself off from part of her identity. I think the way we speak - like, you know, the body, the way we actually make the sounds, and especially when we're talking to ourselves in, you know, what we would call our natural voices, like, that's, in some way, maybe the most honest part of ourselves coming out. I like to think that. And for Ophir, when she's on the podcast, and she thinks, OK, she says, I'm going to speak my mind and live with it. And she also feels safe. Like, she's kind of created a safe space for herself with the podcast 'cause she could have listeners around the world, but nobody knows where she is.
RASCOE: Ophir calls Singapore a tiny, crowded, sweaty, glorious island and also a place a lot of people probably couldn't find on a map. You were born there. I know that you've lived in other places, but what do you hope that readers learn about the country, and how do you feel connected to Singapore?
BALASINGAMCHOW: Singapore is really small but really culturally rich and a complicated place, like, politically complicated, socially, you know, too big to fit into a novel. But I think what I tried to do with this book was to show the range of many different kinds of people and choices that people make living in Singapore, as well as those who have left it.
RASCOE: There is this turning point in the book when Ophir meets a doctor, a Singaporean woman living in exile for political reasons. Why does she see herself in that doctor?
BALASINGAMCHOW: The doctor is a character who has been in exile for something like 40 years by the time Ophir meets her. And hearing the stories about the time that she left Singapore, Ophir realizes, oh, my gosh, it is possible that someone who leaves a country really has no chance to go back at all. It's like the horrifying future that Ophir didn't quite fully picture for herself. So I think that there is a sort of sympathy there in some ways, even though otherwise, the two characters, you could say, wouldn't have very much in common.
RASCOE: Obviously, it's a unique story to be on the run, but there are people who do have to leave their country, their home country, and they can't go back, whether it's because they don't have the means to go back, or too much time has passed, or, you know, maybe their immigration status is unstable, so they can't go back. Like, was part of this also just that exploration of, well, who are you if you can't go home?
BALASINGAMCHOW: Yeah, I think of the novel as exploring diaspora rather than immigration, in that sense. And so, Ophir, the doctor, many of the other characters that Ophir meets around the world - they are Singaporean women who have left the country for different reasons. I mean, Ophir's the only one that's a criminal.
RASCOE: Yes, yeah, yeah.
BALASINGAMCHOW: But even though they choose to live abroad - or in the doctor's case, she can't go back - they're always kind of glancing over their shoulder back at Singapore and remembering it. And also they have this sort of active relationship with Singapore. They still want to know what's going on there. They haven't cut themselves off. And I think especially today, with all the technology we have at our fingertips, it's easier to, like, leave a place but still be quite strongly tethered emotionally to it.
RASCOE: That's Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. Her new novel is called "Names Have Been Changed." It's out this week. Thank you so much for joining us.
BALASINGAMCHOW: Thanks so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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