Amanda Lee Koe

Amanda Lee Koe is a Singaporean-American novelist and short story writer.

Quotes

• Having grown up watching Hong Kong movies with gorgeous Chinese leads and casts, I didn’t feel starved of representation the way I might likely have felt if I had grown up Asian American in the US, or as a minority race in Singapore…
  • On not being as starved for Asian representation as opposed to Asian Americans in “A Secret Cut in History: Amanda Lee Koe Interviewed by Leah Dworkin” in BOMB Magazine (2019 Jul 11)

• When writing, I often feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience in which I’m as ageless, sexless, classless, raceless as I can ever humanly get…I have to forget myself so I can be fully committed to understanding my character’s motivations in a way that isn’t facile or boxed in…
  • On finding voices for her characters in “A Secret Cut in History: Amanda Lee Koe Interviewed by Leah Dworkin” in BOMB Magazine (2019 Jul 11)

• Change is effected by instruments of the state directly—and quickly—on the sociophysical body of the city itself. As the inhabitants of this body, these modifications rub off on us, whether we are aware of their effect on us or not, whether our class cushions us less or more…
  • On how she characterizes Singapore in “The City and the Writer: In Singapore with Amanda Lee Koe” in Word Without Borders (2018 Jan 8)

• My responsibility, as an author, is to the novel I am writing, nothing more and nothing less. How that novel comes about to me is a mysterious thing that then becomes a rigorous process, and the balances that I do worry about keeping are narrative, aesthetic, or technical. I’m not willing or able to see myself as any one nationality or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or species when I write, I am just an amorphous storyteller whose personal biography is moot…
  • On whether she feels compelled to stay true to her Singaporean roots in “AMANDA LEE KOE ON HER DEBUT NOVEL AND WHAT TO EXPECT FROM HER BOOK TOUR” in Harper’s Bazaar (2019 Aug 20)