Vogue Dialogues: Amanda Lee Koe on snake spirits, the contradictions of writing, and her transcendent new novel

When Amanda Lee Koe writes, she enters into a sort of fugue state. She sits at her computer screen, sipping habitually from a large carafe of cold black coffee. Her fingers fly across the keyboard. The hours stretch on.

“I usually lose track of time,” she says, describing her process. “It’s pleasurable and productive, but can also be quite disorienting. It makes you feel detached from reality.”

She pauses then pipes up again. “Writing is also quite sedentary, right? You feel exhausted at the end but you’ve barely moved. Maybe that’s why Murakami needs to run!”

We burst into laughter. Earlier in the conversation, we had been discussing an essay the novelist Haruki Murakami had once written for The New Yorker, where he explained how essential running had become to him for the way it balanced out the stillness of writing. (“Can’t relate,” we had joked.)

The practice of writing is full of contradictions, Lee Koe and I agree. Writing depletes and energises you like nothing else. It’s a cerebral art form—but at its best becomes completely visceral. “In that moment, you are no longer thinking about the construction of the story,” she says. “It feels like it’s just flowing out of your fingers.”

This instinctual way of working has defined Lee Koe’s trajectory as a writer. Her debut title, Ministry of Moral Panic, arrived in 2013 as a set of short stories exposing the underbelly of her native country.

For Lee Koe, it was an opportunity to offer her audience an elusive glimpse at the real Singapore—the writhing humanness that lay beneath its forced homogeneity, its veneer and its artificial gardens. For her readers, it was the first taste of an extraordinary new voice.

In the few years that followed, Lee Koe would go on to become the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in fiction for Ministry of Moral Panic, then move halfway across the world to do a Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University.

Her first novel, Delayed Rays of A Star, came in 2020. In a thick volume of historical fiction, Lee Koe traced the lives of three female cinema legends: Marlene Dietrich, the German-born American actress and singer; Anna May Wong, the world’s first Chinese American star; and Leni Riefenstahl, infamous for directing propaganda art films in Nazi Germany.

Weaving together the three women’s tumultuous stories through rigorous research and razor-sharp writing, Lee Koe excavated the complex realities of chasing your ambition as a woman, the glittering black hole of Hollywood, and the devastating effects of racism, sexism and fascism in the 20th century.

“I am after the texture of variety. I want to see what each form can offer me and what I can offer each form.”

As her second title, Delayed Rays of A Star did perhaps the opposite of what most emerging writers seek to do with their first few releases. Rather than establishing a signature style, form or subject matter canon that she could thereafter be expected to operate within—and that would, presumably, make her more marketable—Lee Koe chose to subvert completely what readers of her first book might have expected her to write next.

“I would rather grow laterally than linearly. If we had many different lives, then I would be happy to commit to a signature style because I would know that in the next life, I could try something else. But given that—as far as I understand—we only have one lifetime, I can’t risk it,” she says, a cheeky glint in her eye.

Her tone turns pensive. “I am after the texture of variety. I want to see what each form can offer me and what I can offer each form.”

Which brings us to Sister Snake—Lee Koe’s third book, second novel and at the time of our conversation, a release she has to sit on for another month.

Tensely paced, tightly written and dripping with, well, sex, Sister Snake is the kind of book you can read in one sitting. The novel follows two sisters, Emerald, a nihilistic sugar baby living it up in New York City, and Su, the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Different as they are, the two of them are bound by an ancient secret: once, they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang dynasty China.

As Lee Koe’s first venture into the genre of magical realism, the snake spirit metaphor is central to the story. Otherworldly and eccentric as it may feel, it holds deep personal resonance for the author. A snake desperate to be human symbolises the guttural consequences of otherness and nonconformity in our society, two fundamental ideas that Lee Koe’s body of work—and personhood—is drenched in.

The writer describes growing up on a steady diet of late-night Channel 8 dramas and Hong Kong martial art epics. The snake spirit character, which she animatedly explains had “the best outfits and really dark, alluring, almost gothic make-up”, was almost omnipresent and always her favourite.

“I’d always felt so broken-hearted when they were either vanquished or had to hide their powers and submit into being more ‘normal’,” she says. “The most iconic film for me was Green Snake. When Joey Wong’s husband finds out she’s a snake spirit, he faints and almost dies. I was only eight when I watched the movie but I remember rolling my eyes, thinking to myself that if I’d been in his shoes and my lover had revealed to me that he or she happened to be a centuries-old snake spirit, I would have been so excited and proud.”

According to Lee Koe, in Chinese culture, the ultimate goal for an animal spirit is always to self-cultivate to a state of humanness. “There’s always a yearning to be human; a feeling that as an animal or even an animal spirit, there is something impure about them,” she shares.

“But I feel that to be an animal with human characteristics is so powerful and beautiful. Emerald as a character encapsulates that comfort with otherness really well, whereas Su is bent on rejecting one part of her.”

“In Sister Snake, the core difference between Emerald and Su is how willing they are to accept or reject the increasingly narrow boxes that society puts them in.”

Lee Koe laughs when I confess that while I wish I could be Emerald, if I were to be honest, I probably was a lot more Su. She reassures me: “When I first started writing the book, I thought that I was writing into the notion of opposites. But as I worked on the characters more, I realised that it was actually duality I was writing towards. In most of us exists the capacity to be both Emerald and Su.”

She continues: “The core difference between the two of them is how willing they are to accept or reject the increasingly narrow boxes that society puts them in. Getting to explode those boxes through these characters has allowed me to think about which one best represents me.”

Lee Koe lets me in on the fact that while she, too, initially identified with Emerald, the more she wrote, the more common ground she found with Su. “We can all be autonomy-seeking,” she ponders. “But we do require certain safety nets in order to feel comfortable enough to seek that autonomy. If not, we would fall apart.”

We meditate on this idea of balance. Creativity and spontaneity are sometimes mistakenly seen as synonyms. Lee Koe is fiercely creative through and through—you can tell just by looking at her—but she has found routine to be equally as important for her creativity as spontaneity might be. When she is deep in the ideation phase for a new novel, for example, Lee Koe finds herself frequenting the same cafes on a daily basis.

“Sometimes I sit there and I just think. Sometimes I people watch or dog watch. I scribble down notes. I’ve been trying to keep a notebook to retain as much touch time as I can because I know the writing process later on is going to be between me and a computer.”

Lee Koe gets excited talking about her love for music or how she occasionally enjoys a rave (mainly for the bursts of movement it gives her amid the largely inactive nature of a writing routine). But she returns, ultimately, to the idea of balance.

“As much joy as I find in my impulsive nature, I think it’s equally important to be able to find a sense of equanimity and stability within yourself,” she muses. “Only then can you access the best parts of your creative self and be an arbiter of your creativity. Isn’t that the beauty of routine?”

Welcome to Vogue Dialogues, a series in which we spotlight key writers, poets and literary voices driving change for good through groundbreaking work.

Vogue Dialogues is presented in partnership with Chanel. A long-standing patron of arts and culture around the globe, Chanel has deep roots in the literary world, led by key initiatives like The Literary Rendezvous at Rue Cambon which brings together writers to discuss important themes like female empowerment. With their support of Vogue Dialogues, Chanel joins Vogue Singapore in celebrating our local and regional literary scene, as well as amplifying the voices of Asian and female writers all around the world.

Associate lifestyle editor Chandreyee Ray
Director of photography Lenne Chai
Producer David Bay
Styling Nicholas See and Jasmine Ashvinkumar
Gaffer Timothy Lim
Second cam operator/camera assistant Herdy Herqury
Sound recordist Ye Min
Post-production Amok
Hair Yuhi Kim using DunGud and Woorailoora
Make-up Kat Zhang/The Suburbs Studio using Chanel Beauty
Manicure Ann Lim using CND
Location: Basheer Graphic Books

The December ‘Gratification’ issue of Vogue Singapore is available online and on newsstands now.