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Amazon's "Best Book of the Month"A brilliant and utterly engaging novel - Emma set in modern Asia - about a young woman's rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism.On the edge of twenty-seven, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends: Sher, Imo, and Fann. Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh - Western expat - husbands, with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow. Razor-sharp, spunky, and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman who doesn't lose.As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and seedy hawker centers. Moving through her colorful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes which threaten to crush her dreams. Desperate to move up in Asia's financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed?Vividly told in Singlish - colorful Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang - Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy, but her city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.
About the Author
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is the New York City-based author of "A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family" (Hyperion, 2011) . She is working on her second book, a novel, and is the editor of "Singapore Noir," a fiction anthology that Akashic published in 2014.
She has covered fashion, retail and home design (and written the occasional food story) for the Wall Street Journal. Before that she was the senior fashion writer for In Style magazine and senior arts, entertainment and fashion writer for the Baltimore Sun. Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire and The Washington Post among other publications.
She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, where she completed "A Tiger in the Kitchen," Hawthornden Castle, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the Studios of Key West. A native of Singapore, Tan was awarded major grants in support of her work in 2011 and 2012 by the National Arts Council of Singapore. She has spoken on memoir and food writing at various book festivals, including the Brooklyn Book Festival, Miami Book Fair, Shanghai International Literary Festival, Singapore Writers Festival, Wordstock and Hong Kong International Literary Festival, as well as the Museum of Chinese in America and Asia Society.
Born and raised in Singapore, she crossed the ocean to go to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., after realizing that a) she wanted to be a journalist and b) if she was going to be as mouthy in her work as she was in real life, she'd better not do it in Singapore. Unsure of whether she would remain in the U.S. after college, she interned in places as disparate as possible. This led her to hanging out with Harley Davidson enthusiasts in Topeka, Kan., interviewing gypsies in about their burial rituals in Portland, Ore., covering July 4 in Washington, D.C., and chronicling the life and times of the Boomerang Pleasure Club, a group of Italian-American men that had been getting together to cook, play cards and gab about women for decades in their storefront "clubhouse" in Chicago.
She started her full-time journalism career helping out on the cops beat in Baltimore -- training that would prove to be essential in her future fashion reporting. Both, it turns out, are like war zones. The only difference is, people dress differently.
