The Story Game

“an exceptional account of the impact of trauma, the struggle for healing, and the very real chance to find freedom.”

Enthrallingly imaginative, The Story Game will challenge what you think you know about truth, childhood trauma, and how we create our identity.  

How do you write a memoir if you can’t remember the greatest part of your childhood? Author Shze-Hui Tjoa takes on that challenge in The Story Game.

In this four-year odyssey, the reader is introduced to “the room,” a place in which Hui and her sister Nin lie in the dark and talk to one another. Hui, the elder sibling, is charged with telling Nin stories, and that’s where we are taken into Hui’s past.

It's clear from the opening pages that Nin is not Hui’s sister, but another part of Hui’s psyche. In the room, Hui is in her twenties while Nin is a child. Nin’s also a little girl who is forever in the room when Hui comes to visit.

Nin is demanding, asking for stories from Hui, preferring stories that are about Hui’s life outside the room. Nin challenges Hui about the veracity of her personal narrative. She picks out the holes and insists that Hui retell the tales in fuller, more truthful ways. She demands that Hui share her feelings. Hui has difficulty with this, but as her world crumbles and her marriage is threatened, Nin helps Hui to reshape that narrative.

Through this process of reshaping narrative that Hui calls “the story game,” the reader is given a fraught glimpse into the internal world of someone who has experienced significant trauma. Hui’s personal narrative becomes something created to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense and is sometimes too painful to face.

In one of the early stories, we learn that Hui is of Balinese descent through her father, but doesn’t understand why she isn’t accepted as Balinese on a brief visit to Bali with her parents. Hui creates a narrative to make that rejection make sense.

But there’s no emotional connection to this created narrative, which Nin points out in one of her discussions with Hui. “You’re still not getting it,” Nin protests. Nin longs for human connection, for stories about the richness of human life and feelings. Hui cannot immediately give Nin what she asks for, though in each successive tale, she reveals more.

Through the course of the book, Hui begins to find connection to her past by retelling her stories from different perspectives, adding details that she hadn’t recalled or that now seem worthy of inclusion. Nin applauds these efforts. She’s candid about her desire to feel closer to Hui. It’s a yearning for integration, to be part of Hui’s life outside the room, as well as within.

Progress is slow and painful for Hui. She must take breaks and get the support of a psychologist outside the room to improve her story game and conversations with Nin.

Creatively told, The Story Game gives the reader a glimpse into the difficulties of living through the aftermath of traumatic events and the imaginative ways in which the psyche protects us from trauma. The book is rooted in the disconnected and emotionally unavailable point of view that many trauma survivors experience, often without knowing it.

For example, in the second half of the book, Hui shares the story of “Body.” Body doesn’t want to play piano anymore, so it stops eating, specifically being able to swallow food. When Body is taken by the parents to the psychologist, Body realizes in conversation with the psychologist that it wants freedom. “What it wants most isn’t to die. What it really wants is in that penultimate picture, where the man has already leapt off the bridge, but his feet haven’t hit the water yet. What Body wants is that feeling of flying.”

How does one experience that freedom in day-to-day life? How does one chart a path to healing when the foundation of our lives, the narratives we tell about ourselves to create our worldviews, are missing or filled with half-truths or lies?

The answer is using the same mechanism that had helped Hui to survive—changing the story. Just as Hui chose which facts to forget to survive, she can choose which facts to remember, to weave a new tale about who she is.

In an unexpected twist, it is revealed that Nin is not solely part of Hui’s psyche, but also an actual sister who, although brought up in the same home, lived a very different life than Hui. She did indeed participate in “the story game” when they were girls. That part of the narrative is factual. However, the sisters have grown apart, much of that due to Hui’s envy of Nin’s ability to live a life Hui desires, a life with freedom.

Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game is an exceptional account of the impact of trauma, the struggle for healing, and the very real chance to find freedom. It provides insight into the ways in which stories create our experience, and how we can change those stories to heal. It’s also a story that hints at the power of connection and the importance of relationships, if we take the risk of trusting others with the fullness of our stories.