I first met Yu-Mei Balasingamchow when she was part of the Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Publicity Cohort. Every cohort, I’m invited to teach a class, which I treat as an hour-long AMA that goes more in-depth on the data I shared here.
Her debut novel, Names Have Been Changed, is the last to be published from that cohort and was one of 2026’s Best Debut Books published in the first half of the year.
It follows Ophir, a globe-trotting fugitive whose life unravels after a petty crime in Singapore forces her to abandon her home and identity. As she reinvents herself across continents, she recounts her crimes, secrets, and regrets while searching for belonging, only to find herself facing a choice that could alter her future forever.
Yu-Mei joined the podcast (listen here or here), where we walked about how Singapore shaped her and the U.S. guided her fiction. You can read the conversation below.
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Adam Vitcavage: What’s your unofficial bio? Who are you outside of reading and writing and being a debut author?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow I was thinking about this question because I knew you would ask it, and it stumped me a little because, to be honest, I’ve been thinking of myself as a writer for about 20 years. I started out doing nonfiction in Singapore. Some of it was work for hire: copywriting, travel writing, and research for museums in Singapore. Then gradually I started to put my feet into fiction writing, which I’ve been doing for 15 or 16 years.
What I’m trying to say is that even though this is my debut novel, it’s been a long time coming. I’ve been calling myself a writer, and now I feel like: oh, I also have a novel out. I’m still a writer, maybe at a slightly different stage, which is exciting.
Besides writing, I’m from Singapore, which is in my bio, but I think what’s not in it is that I lived there for most of my life. I went to college in the U.S. and then moved back. I lived in London for a year and then moved back. Most of my adult life and childhood were spent in Singapore, which probably still shapes the way I see myself, even though I’ve been in the U.S. for some years. I came here to do my MFA and stayed.
One thing that’s important to me, but maybe isn’t obvious to a lot of people, is that my family is mixed race. On my dad’s side, my grandfather was an immigrant to Singapore from what is now Sri Lanka. It was called Ceylon during the British Empire days. He moved before World War II, then met and married my grandmother, who was an immigrant to Singapore from China. That kind of interracial marriage was highly unusual in the 1930s. I wish I had thought to ask them questions about it before they passed away, but it’s kind of lost to history.
They had a bunch of children, including my dad, and then my dad married my mom, who’s of Chinese descent. When I was growing up in Singapore, it wasn’t very common to be of mixed-race descent. If you look at my last name, Balasingamchow, that’s basically my parents amalgamating their names to create it. In that sense, it’s a made-up name. I’ve always felt a bit uncertain about who I am. Sometimes when people are talking to you, they’re just curious, they’re not being hostile, but they’re trying to figure out: Who are you? What are you? That question has always been on the edge of my consciousness.
A lot of writers and artists talk about growing up feeling like an outsider in some way. When I was younger and first heard that, I was like: yes, that makes sense. We feel like outsiders. We may not visibly look like one or behave like one, but it’s permeating your consciousness when you’re looking at the people around you and how you’re interacting with them. I don’t know. It sounds too weird.
Adam Vitcavage: No, that makes sense, especially with your grandparents and your parents, being mixed race and having different immigration stories. Do you feel more like you in Singapore or more like you here in the U.S.? Is it easier to be you in one place?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Wow. Tough question. I don’t think I can choose. In Singapore, I still go back and visit at least once a year. Every time I go back and I’m talking to people I know, or I’m in places I know, and I hear Singlish or a Singaporean accent, I’m like: I know this world. I know how to operate in this world. I know what’s what in a way that I sometimes don’t in the U.S.
I’ve been lucky to be in social groups and communities here that are very welcoming, but sometimes I’m still like: wait, what’s that? Or: I don’t get that cultural reference. Or there are certain behavioral norms I don’t fully understand.
On the other hand, I was just reading Peter Ho Davies’s book The Art of Revision, in which he talks about revising fiction but also weaves in personal stories. He talks about being an immigrant from the U.K. who came to the U.S. to study creative writing, and he’s been here for decades. He felt that coming here enabled him to become a writer in some ways because people here didn’t have expectations of who he was. Whereas in the U.K., they already knew him in a certain job, in a certain family environment, in the town where he grew up. Here, he could start from scratch as a writer.
I sometimes think about that. Even though I was writing fiction in Singapore before I came here, being away from certain expectations from home also liberates you to tell a certain kind of story you maybe didn’t try before, or to think about fiction and writing and reading in fresh ways. That’s been invigorating for me. I enjoy that imaginative space. I’ve also been very lucky in finding my footing in the literary community in the U.S. and making friends. Not just friends because we’re writers, but people with whom you find lots of connections beyond writing, and that’s really meaningful.
Adam Vitcavage: I’ll come back to the literary community in the U.S. and the Get the Word Out publicity cohort, which I think is amazing and worth talking about. But going back to Singapore: before this debut novel, you were the co-author of Singapore: A Biography, the editor of How We Live Now: Stories of Daily Living, and co-editor of In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel.
Singapore isn’t just home. It’s also a subject you’ve spent time thinking about as a writer. Why? Not everyone wants to write about home.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: That’s true. When I was living there, especially for the books you just mentioned, most of which I worked on between the late 2000s and mid-2010s, I think I was trying to figure out why Singapore is the way it is.
When you live in any environment, whatever society you’re in, you take certain things for granted: these are the norms of society. We do these things because everyone around us does them. Some of that is behavioral, not so much political, though it can also be political. Why do we talk like this? Why do we always use that phrase? Why do we believe this is more important than that?
At one point, I was trying to puzzle out Singapore culture for myself. I grew up here, but why are we doing things this way? Why do we believe these things?
Singapore: A Biography is a history book that covers 700 years of Singapore history. It came out of me working as a researcher and writer on a project for the National Museum of Singapore. After that, my co-author, Mark Frost, and I realized there wasn’t really a book that put together all that information in an accessible way for the general reader, the non-specialist reader.
When I was doing that research, I would come across all this stuff about Singapore history and think: no one taught me this in school. This is fascinating. This would have been great when I was 13 and bored in class. Why didn’t they teach us this interesting stuff about social revolutions, how different cultural groups interacted, and the long histories of people in the region before the British arrived? The British arrived in 1819, but there was history before that, and I wasn’t taught it in school. I think now they do teach a little more of that long view.
It also made me think about belonging. What does it mean to belong to a place when so many people who pass through Singapore, which is a small island state, have been immigrants in one way or another? Of course, there are also people who are born there. But as someone who lived there and didn’t question these things for a long time, I started to question some of them.
The anthologies you mentioned were both about fiction and other ways of thinking about home. The airport one came about partly because a lot of people in Singapore take pride in the airport being number one in the world, which is a strange thing to take pride in. But when you’re in a small, very urban country, and you want to take a break or have a certain kind of leisure or work or travel, you often have to leave the country. Even before the current number-one-airport era, people would hop on a ferry and go to an island in Indonesia or Malaysia across the border. Singapore is so small that you have to cross the border.
To me, it’s fascinating: how does that inform your psyche? I belong to this country, but my country is really small, and if I want a certain kind of fun or leisure or work or travel, I have to leave. That’s the opposite of the U.S., where you can travel and there’s so much to see and do here. Psychologically, it’s so different: a small country, a big country. I’m always interested in how those things shape how people think and behave.
Adam Vitcavage: This week, as we’re recording this, someone I know who also has a debut coming out and lived in Singapore for a decade was in town. We were driving to an event I was hosting, and I realized I couldn’t place Singapore on a map at all. I also swore the flag had blue in it. We were just discussing how, as an American, there’s so much I didn’t know about Singapore. It’s something like 50 kilometers wide by 30 tall, smaller than the Denver metro. Like you said, you have to leave the country to see certain things, whereas in America you could drive a day and see something completely different.
You mentioned you’ve been writing for 15 or 20 years, and this is now your debut. You did nonfiction and these research projects. You got your MFA from Boston University. What year was that?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: 2019.
Adam Vitcavage: So pretty recently. When did fiction come into your life? I know some of those anthologies were fiction, but when did you go from writing a history of Singapore to feeling like there was fiction you wanted to explore?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: That was around 2011. It started because someone who knew the work I’d done on history was putting together an anthology about different neighborhoods in Singapore. Because I had been writing about place and belonging, she asked if I wanted to try writing a short story.
Like a lot of writers, when I was a kid, I thought: I’m going to be a writer because I love to read, so naturally I want to write. Then as I got older, I didn’t really see a path for how one becomes a writer. It became this fantastical thing, like a unicorn job. That’s why I didn’t consider it seriously.
Writing nonfiction gave me some confidence. I knew how to make sentences flow on a page. I could tell a mini story in nonfiction. Maybe I could try and play around with fiction a little. So I worked on the story for that anthology. At the same time, I had an idea for what I thought might be a novel and started working on that.
Around 2011 is when I started dipping my foot into the fiction world, and over time I found that I enjoyed it more than nonfiction and wanted to spend all my creative time on it. At some point, I remember thinking: if I want to write fiction, I’m really going to have to put my heart into it because I need to learn so much and I need time to do it. I was working day jobs, and the writing was happening in the evenings and on weekends. If I wanted to work on fiction, I had to stay home and write. I couldn’t just go out and have fun every weekend.
I made that conscious choice, then started reading like a writer and trying to learn from other people, whether through public lectures, informal classes, books about writing, or YouTube interviews with writers where I could hear about how they did it. I got more and more into it, until I decided to apply for an MFA and see whether that would give me a boost and help me take it further.
Adam Vitcavage: So the MFA was really: I have the passion and I have the work, but I need the time and the education. It felt right.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: It definitely felt like the right time to do it. I was also in the middle of a second novel at the time. The first novel I mentioned, I had written a few bad drafts and didn’t finish. At some point, I looked at it and thought: I don’t think I’m that interested in this story. I had a germ of an idea, and I stretched it out, but it actually isn’t that interesting. Even though I’d worked on several drafts, I wasn’t interested in going back into it.
But working on it had taught me a little about novels. You learn by doing. Writing is an apprenticeship. I learned about novel mechanics, moving characters around, and making things happen. It was a good learning experience.
Then I had an idea for a second novel, and I thought: this is it. This is going to be the one. I worked on that one for more than five years. I was doing it before my MFA, then I came to the MFA thinking it would help me learn how to write a novel. I worked on it during the MFA. After the MFA, I had two-thirds of a first draft and told myself I just needed to write the last third, then start revising.
But I never did, because by that point I had planned a lot of that novel. When I got to writing the so-called last third, I felt like I was just trying to make characters do things because they had to, because my plan said they had to. I wasn’t having fun. They weren’t having fun.
Then I had an existential crisis with the novel because I realized it was a success narrative. Basically, the protagonist wants something, various obstacles get in her way, and eventually she more or less gets it. I realized I wasn’t interested in success narratives. I was also not interested in making her not get it. Then I thought: oh goodness, I have spent five years on this. But it felt very real, like a light bulb went off. I realized: this is why you’re struggling, because you’re really not interested in telling this story right now.
Adam Vitcavage: I’ve been asking writers a lot lately about this, because most writers’ first published novel is not their first long-form attempt. With the second novel, you went through an MFA with it and then realized it wasn’t it. How does it feel to not throw away five years, because you obviously learned so much, but to come to America for an MFA with this idea and then have it gone?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: It felt terrible at the time. This was also happening in late 2020, and we all know what a wonderful year 2020 was for everyone. On top of everything else, I was asking: what am I even doing here? Am I ever going to write again? I had this awful feeling.
I knew for sure I wasn’t going to touch that project for a while, and I really did put it aside. I still have it on my laptop, but I have no inclination, no interest in opening that folder.
Then I went back to basics. I started noodling around with brand-new ideas. I thought: maybe I’ll write a short story. Let’s see if my brain knows how to write anymore. Let’s start something from scratch.
In that low-stakes noodling, I had an idea for a short story and started writing it very slowly, very playfully, with no pressure. Then one day, while daydreaming as one does when writing, I thought: what would happen if someone committed a crime, ran away from Singapore, and couldn’t go home? What would that be like?
The next thing I knew, there was this voice chattering in my head with opinions about that. It felt surreal. I started to type because I thought I better write it down before it went away. The next thing I knew, I had a thousand words on the page. I sat back and thought: wait, what just happened? What is this?
It was completely unrelated in voice or style to the things I had been working on. Then I had the first words of the novel. I just had to figure out the rest from there. It was an emotional roller coaster from pit bottom, walking away from a project I’d spent more than five years on, then slowly picking my way back up to a place where I could have an idea that felt fresh and exciting.
Adam Vitcavage: So you have a thousand words, you have the voice, and you have a nugget of an idea. Then you said you had to figure it out. What was figuring out what became this novel like? Did you outline? Did you let it happen on the page?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I decided to abandon outlining because I was afraid it would straitjacket me the way it had previously. I was terrified of outlining at that point, so I wrote it without a plan.
After I had the voice and the idea of a criminal runaway, I started asking: what’s she doing? Who’s she talking to? Why is she telling this story? I knew she was going to go around the world, and I was interested in having her meet other Singaporeans who were around the world for different reasons. Basically, the diaspora. People who had left the country not because they were criminals, but because they moved abroad to work, to study, to follow their loved ones. One character is a political exile.
I wanted my main character to meet these people, and each encounter would cause a re-evaluation of her relationship to home. That was the loose idea. She’s going to go around the world. She’s going to meet one, two, three, four, five people, or whatever the number was, and some stuff is going to happen. Then I just wrote chapter by chapter and saw what happened. I got to know these characters until I had a full first draft.
At the end, when she was done meeting all these people, I thought: now I have to write the ending. What’s going to happen? I printed out all the early pages and read them, not to edit or revise, but to look for clues for the ending. I had written some of those pages a year earlier, so I didn’t really remember what was in them.
It became this weird fever dream of intensive reading. I told myself: don’t edit, don’t revise, just take notes, look for clues. I read my own manuscript, took notes, and let the ideas percolate. Then I figured out that she was going to have to make a choice. She was going to have the opportunity to go home, and she had to make a choice. Then other things happen, without saying too much. That was the emergence of a plan rather than having one at the beginning.
Adam Vitcavage: After you figured out what the ending might need to be, after draft one, what did it look like to tighten it up and really figure it out? You found these clues and read through it without editing. What were the next steps?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Because I was afraid of losing touch with the voice, and because I had two previously unfinished novels, when I started writing this, I tried to write as fast as I could. I still had work commitments, but I really prioritized it. I wrote faster than I’ve ever written in my life and finished the first draft in a year and a half. For me, that’s incredibly fast.
Then I took a break from it and came back. I spent about six months revising it. Revising was really about shaping: making certain things more cohesive, figuring out what the emotional beats were, making them clearer if they needed to be, and moving little details around. After six months of that, I thought I was ready to query.
In fact, I was not ready to query, because it took me a year and a half to find an agent. During that time, I also shared the manuscript with a couple of friends to get feedback. They were very gracious to read the whole thing and give me thoughts. I also took breaks from the manuscript for a month or two, wrote other things, then came back to it with fresh eyes. Suddenly I’d see something and think: this chapter can be a better version of itself.
During that year and a half of querying, I was also revising and revising, using feedback from friends and my own thinking. All told, I spent about two years revising it in various versions.
What’s interesting to me is that the skeleton of the book hasn’t changed since the first draft. She starts telling you her story. It’s been ten years and she’s on the run. She tells you about going to Tokyo, then London, then Colorado, and then the ending. That structure has been in place, and the main characters have all been pretty much recognizably themselves. It was about shaping the story, the pacing of the full novel, and deepening the interiority and emotional beats, which is really fun. That’s the best part of writing for me: everything going on below the surface.
Adam Vitcavage: How successful was querying during that year and a half? Was it just no, no, no? Were there partials? Did you get feedback from agents? How high were the highs and how low were the lows?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I did about three rounds of querying. From the first round, I had a couple of agents ask for the full, which was encouraging. I thought: okay, the query works, the first few pages work. But after that, it was either silence or polite nos.
During the year and a half, even though there were a lot of silences and nos, there were a couple of people who responded to say no but encouraged me. They said: this is not for me, but I’m sure you will find someone soon. That gave me hope to keep persevering when I had nothing else. I also talked to friends who had queried, and somebody said: how many people have you queried? Wait until you’ve queried a hundred. So I felt like I just had to be patient.
I wasn’t querying nonstop. I only did three rounds. I would query, wait a while, work on my manuscript, and then maybe six months later query again. The highs were getting those encouraging rejections. The lows were when you never hear back. You start out so hopeful, but then you have to tell yourself there could be a lot of reasons they didn’t reply. I shouldn’t sit here and speculate. Just move on. That is the business.
Adam Vitcavage: Eventually you signed with your agent, Lucy Carson. Is she editorial? What was the process like once you started to form that relationship?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Lucy really fell in love with the manuscript, which, after a year and a half of querying, was a complete shock to me. Even the first time I spoke to her, what was affirming was that as she reflected the novel back to me, she was picking up a lot of the emotional undertones and things that I knew were there but had never spelled out in my query or to anyone.
It’s one of those things where you want to let the reader discover it for themselves, and she had discovered it and was enjoying that discovery. So I thought: okay, maybe my manuscript works. It’s got something. That was affirming.
Lucy can be a very editorial agent. I know that from her having worked with a couple of friends she represents. But for my manuscript, she felt it was structurally okay. She had comments, and she sent me her notes. I took care of the revisions within about a month. A lot of it was zooming in on moments and asking: can we linger a bit longer here? Can we drop in and stay longer with the character and understand their motivations better? It was stitching everything a little tighter together. After a month of revisions, she said she thought it was great and that we would go on submission. She laid out her plan.
Adam Vitcavage: And now here we are. Was selling relatively easy, hard, demoralizing, fun?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I was lucky. My novel was sold in a preempt to Tiny Reparations Books. I don’t remember the exact dates, but I think it was within a month or so of going on submission. After that came more revisions.
Once the book deal was done, my editor, Amber Oliver, shared her editorial letter with me, which was about ten pages. Similar to Lucy, she didn’t have big structural changes about moving major pieces around. It was more about zooming in on individual relationships and scenes to talk about what else could be done to make them stronger. It gave me a lot of good fodder to chew on.
I spent three or four months on revisions, and I think I did even more than what she asked for because sometimes someone asks you a question about a character in a scene, like: I don’t really understand why Orfeu behaves this way toward the mother. Could you find a way to flesh it out? Then you think about it and the next thing you know, you’re rewriting half a chapter because you have a better idea of how to flesh out that relationship.
One thing I learned from writing Names Have Been Changed, which I didn’t have with my earlier ones because I never finished them, is that I’m not afraid of revision anymore. Once you have the first draft, you can go back with new ideas and fresh eyes and make it a better version of itself. It’s fun because you realize you’re getting a little closer to the platonic ideal of what your novel might be.
Adam Vitcavage: I think that’s something to latch onto: if you’re afraid of revising, maybe the story or the novel isn’t it. Maybe you want to be excited about revising.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: A novel is so big. You can’t see it in full until you have a full draft. Then you can read the whole thing and have a different perspective, not the same perspective you have when you’re writing at the micro level. That back and forth between big picture and small picture is something I really love. It’s so much fun to move things. I’m writing something now, and I can’t wait until I have a first draft so I can revise. I can’t wait to get to revision.
Adam Vitcavage: I just talked to ‘Pemi Aguda, who wrote Ghostroots and whose debut novel One Leg on Earth just came out. She talks about the idea of a zero draft. She just wants to get through it so she can really start revising and really start writing. I think that’s smart.
I love talking about editing and writing, but I also love talking about the business side: publicity, marketing. You were part of Poets & Writers’ Get the Word Out publicity incubator, which is a cohort of first- or early-career writers. I love that they do it. How did you find out about it, and why did you pursue it?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: A friend of mine had done it the year before: Jessie Ren Marshall. Her short story collection is Women! In! Peril!, which is a great read. Because I knew Jessie had done it, it was on my radar. As soon as I got my book deal, I wondered what the deadline was. In fact, the deadline was in a week or two, so I quickly got my application together. Fortunately, the application was very succinct. When I got the acceptance, I was thrilled because I knew nothing about book publicity.
Adam Vitcavage: What did you not know, and what came out of it? What do you have a better grasp on now? Not a master grasp, but a better grasp at least.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Definitely not a master grasp. Far from it.
What I knew before was next to nothing because I had never publicized a book in the U.S. before. The basic nuts-and-bolts information everyone needs was helpful. But our facilitator, Jennifer Huang, was also such a calming presence and a voice of reason. She encouraged us to think about our dreams for our novels beyond the book launch. How would we like it to find its readers? What kind of life can you imagine for this book? What’s important to you as a writer, which may not even be something you want to share publicly? It might just be a private desire. She made us feel like we could claim those things for ourselves and have individual priorities for what we wanted our books to do, which didn’t have to be exactly what the publisher or agent wanted.
She also reminded us that most things are beyond your control. No matter how hard you work, or your publicist works, or your publisher works, some things are wildly beyond your control. If you obsess about them, that way leads to madness because you can’t control it.
We also had great guest speakers, including you. Some were authors who had done the publicity and book-tour thing, and they gave frank advice. One person said to be careful not to burn out because you can really easily burn out, and then you don’t feel like doing anything at all. Hearing that from people who had been down the road already helped us know that just because it’s your debut novel, you don’t have to do everything.
Adam Vitcavage: That’s my biggest advice: more is not always better. Sometimes it’s better to do a small selection of things, do them well, and then reuse them as much as possible. Here’s this article. Here’s this one podcast I did. I’m going to share it monthly instead of doing a monthly podcast, or whatever. The burnout is real. You’re not a publicist or a marketer. You’re a writer who’s become a public face, but you don’t have to do all of this. The global you, not you specifically. All debuts.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: And most of us only have the experience of our one book. We have no idea what journeys our books have been on, or how the industry works at that level. It’s too much to know.
Adam Vitcavage: Speaking of journeys, I know you used to be a bookseller, so I’ll let you put your bookselling hat back on. What books have you been enjoying lately?
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I just finished Good People by Patmeena Sabit. It came out earlier this year. It’s set in a community of Afghan immigrants in Fairfax, Virginia. There’s a mystery. You’re trying to figure out what happened to this particular family, but it’s told in the form of interview transcripts, which is why I picked it up. A writer friend recommended it, and I thought: let me take a look at that.
It’s really pacey, and you get different voices because every other page or so is a different person giving their version of their recollections of what happened and what this person was like. It builds and builds. The mystery gets thicker and richer along the way. I’m not going to spoil it, but it was a good ride. You also feel like you’re getting to see a microcosm of a world at a particular moment in time. A lot of the characters were refugees from Afghanistan, so they were caught up in the winds of history. Then they landed in this community in Virginia and rebuilt their lives, their hopes, their dreams. It’s a good read.
You already know about The Memory Museum by M. Lin, but I just finished that a couple of weeks ago, and it’s excellent. That resonated with me because a lot of the characters are between countries, between societies, between worlds. That kind of thing pulls me in a lot as well.
A book I’m in the middle of, which isn’t fiction, is a collection of essays about translation called Violent Phenomena. I think it was published in the U.K. a year or two ago, and the U.S. edition is out now. It’s edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang. Different translators talk about contemporary translation, decolonizing language, who gets the right to tell which stories, and how gatekeepers decide whether a story is readable, accessible, or marketable.
As a writer, even though I don’t translate, I sometimes also confront expectations about what constitutes a quote-unquote good manuscript or good story. Hearing different translators’ experiences and expertise has given me a different way of thinking about language, storytelling, and what stories get to travel the world. Whose stories get told in English or in other languages? That’s an important political question.
Love this interview!! Excited to read the book
Excited for Yu-Mei's novel!!! Ophir is a brilliant character!