Ponti will haunt the scene for a long time

IT is a queer, sultry summer, the summer that Hong Kong singer-actor Leslie Cheung died, and Szu does not know what she is doing in the Whampoa Convent of the Eternally Blessed.

There is something of the static heat of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) in Singaporean author Sharlene Teo’s debut, something of the dream-like disquiet of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993).

Yet, what Teo has created with Ponti transcends these earlier models. It is a languid, mesmerising debut that makes teenage girlhood in Singapore into something rich and strange, yet at the same time achingly familiar.

Ponti has three narrators: Szu, 16, trapped on the “hot, horrible earth” that is hazy 2003 Singapore; Circe, her wealthier best friend with an acerbic streak; and Szu’s unbearably beautiful mother Amisa, a washed-up B-horror movie star.

Though Szu and Circe part ways after secondary school, Amisa comes back to haunt a 33-year-old Circe – now divorced and stuck in a marketing job she hates – when her firm lands the account for a 2020 reboot of Ponti!, the 1978 cult movie in which Szu’s mother starred as the eponymous pontianak.

Teo paints Singapore in striking, unerring detail – the reek of haze, a school wall the “shade of carsickness and cheap mint ice cream”, pandan cake for birthdays, and fashion bloggers posing for photos against shophouses in Haji Lane.

She also captures perfectly the idiosyncrasies of local bureaucratic speak: a team-building instructor called Clarents Goh Bok Tin or Circe’s habit of saying “I’ll action that” as early as secondary school.

She makes little effort to simplify this setting for the global readership it has been primed for. There are no footnotes.

Szu is a name that will trip up foreign readers, just as Circe will be Greek to Singaporeans. Ironically, Amisa – formerly Tan Xiaofang of Kampung Mimpi Sedih, Malaya – rechristens herself after a mispronunciation of a movie heroine’s name.

Teo’s female characters are drawn with marvellous complexity – they’re gawky, alluring, manipulative, vulnerable, goddesses with bowel movements and career women with tapeworms.

Ponti turns a critical eye on Singapore’s modern obsession with nostalgia. It is sharp in its unpicking of glamour. It is sad, too, with the intense loneliness that collects in the pockets of a swiftly changing city.

Debut this may be, but Teo already dazzles. The spectre of this Ponti is one that will haunt the scene for a long time to come.