0. Editor’s Note

First Light Of A Crooked Sun — August Linn

Machine Learning — Tan Jing Min

Grape, Backwards — ash chua

And They All Lived: Remembering the Happy Smiley Writers Group — Ng Yi-Sheng

Searching for One’s Roots 2.0 — Shawn Seah

Island — Stephany Zoo

Falling into a black hole — Ann Grá

Monsoon Season — Zavier Seow

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 2
— Vivekanandan Sharan

When They Burned the Butterfly: An Interview with Wen-yi — Megan Chee

Strange New Worlds — Brandon David Servos

When They Burned the Butterfly: An Interview with Wen-yi

Megan Chee

Megan Chee is a Singaporean author who has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, and is currently based in Singapore. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and other venues.

I first became a fan of Wen-yi Lee’s work when I read her short horror story “Laura Lau Will Drain You Dry” in Nightmare Magazine in 2023. It’s a creepy, beautifully-written tale about a Singaporean schoolgirl seeking revenge-by-mosquitoes. At the time, I was an aspiring speculative fiction author who had just begun to publish short fiction in the kinds of magazines that Wen-yi was writing for, and it was wonderful to see a young Singaporean author making such strides in this genre. I was so impressed by her sharp, incisive writing and the way she uses dark speculative elements to interrogate the everyday familiar. Since then, she has published two books and has recently been nominated for a Nebula Award. Wen-yi’s work continues to impress, provoke and push boundaries. It was my pleasure to interview her about her latest book ‘When They Burned the Butterfly’.

Can you start us off by giving us an introduction to yourself, your work and specifically your most recent book When They Burned the Butterfly?

Hi! I’m Wen-yi and I’m a Singaporean writer of speculative fiction that I say often deals with troubled (and troubling) women, history, bodies, and ghosts. I like reading and writing fixations. My long-form work includes a gothic-esque YA horror, The Dark We Know (a retelling of the play Spring Awakening), my adult debut novel When They Burned the Butterfly, and its upcoming sequel. I also write short fiction (in 2025 I published both a dystopian riff on BTO and a historical magical realism piece inspired by the Pulau Senang prison riot) and the occasional essay about things like cannibalism in fiction or the monstrous feminine.

When They Burned the Butterfly is a sapphic historical fantasy set in an alternate 1972 Singapore, where the Chinese secret societies have magic from gods they’re bonded to via their tattoos; specifically, it’s about a girl gang called Red Butterfly, their fire goddess, and the schoolgirl Adeline that becomes entangled with them after her mother’s death in a house fire. It’s about coming of age, postcolonial transformation, and grappling with belonging, survival, inheritance, and identity.

Let's talk about your research process on the historical details of this book. How did you approach this? How committed were you to accuracy, vs willing to take creative license?

Say worldbuilding is a three-part pyramid: the base is the broad setting, the middle is the groups and streets within it, and the narrow tip are the little details. I was committed to accuracy in the first and last category. I read books about secret societies and spirit mediums and comfort women and I scaffolded the whole story around the actual timeline of historical events–there’s a significant fire, there’s things like elections and hungry ghost month and new laws and the construction of certain buildings; the gods and gangs are inspired by real life practices and histories. I scoured newspapers and blogs and the internet for small environmental details to make the setting feel convincing–types of street lights or cars or soft drinks, real movie theatres and real newspaper headlines.

Then with that sandwiching doing the verisimilitude work the whole middle band is where I played sandbox. Made up the gods, made up the gangs, obviously made up the magic and then tweaked the world a bit around them to make them fit. At the end of the day it’s a piece of fantasy fiction, so when it came down to it I always chose the spirit of the times over the letter of it. But it was also really important to me that it was a historical fantasy in which the history was inextricable from the story–context of time, place, social and political zeitgeist. Whether or not I was fudging the details, I wanted it to be very sharply in conversation with the landscape of 70s Singapore.

I WILL say the sequel I’m working on is less committed to timeline accuracy and condenses a broader sweep of changes across the whole decade of the 70s. Sequels need scale, and all that!

Are there any particularly interesting real historical details you sprinkled into the story that you'd like to talk more about?

I mean, at the core of it has to be the fact that I discovered that a girl gang called Red Butterfly existed in Singapore in the 50s and 60s, and that sparked the entire book. There’s also a lot of different little historical details sprinkled all throughout out the book that I mined from trawling newspapers from 1972; a few beautiful thematically-appropriate historical coincidences that occurred in 1972, like the Shaw Brothers’ first queer film, the first articles about the queer community in Singapore, and the Merlion statue being unveiled. But my favourite historical excavation, which I engineered the plot in order to include, was the islet of Pulau Saigon that once sat in the middle of the Singapore River. It was connected to the mainland by the 90s before I was born, so it’s just wild to imagine there used to be a whole little island in the water. It’s so emblematic of Singapore’s relationship with land and permanence.

Modern-day Singapore is so different from the 70s-era city portrayed in Butterfly: cleaner, safer, richer. Can you tell us more about your decision to choose this historical period? Could you imagine writing a fantasy version of modern-day Singapore, and how would your approach be different?

I was roughly bound to this historical period because of when the real Red Butterfly gang existed, although I made the choice to go forward a decade or so into the post-independence as opposed to colonial era, because it just became more thematically interesting to think about young scrappy characters amidst a young scrappy nation. I think postcolonial periods are also underrated in fantasy–so many stories about overthrowing the regime, not many stories about what it takes to build something new afterward.

My approach to writing fantasy these days is often extrapolation–picking up on something real that already feels a bit magical or strange and just dialling it up to 11. So I think my approach to writing contemporary Singapore fantasy would be similar to how I do historical–look for the febrile spaces that feel a bit raw and full of potential anyway. In my daily life I find that in nature spaces, in growing things, in grungy (scrappy!) live music events, in queer spaces, in the inexplicable relationships between people, in the way the city continues to shift (I’ve been thinking a lot about speculative urbanity–city as organism, etc). I don’t think it’s difficult to draw imagination from a place if you know it and care about it, because every place has its strangeness if you dig deep enough. There are so many tensions and interesting things that exist in current-day Singapore.

What other books set in Singapore by Singaporean authors do you recommend? How do those books portray a different facet of Singaporean society or history than Butterfly does?

I could give a whole reading list, but some books that I see in spiritual concert: My godmothers of unhinged Singaporean girls are Amanda Lee Koe’s Ministry of Moral Panic and Sharlene Teo’s Ponti; I was struck at an impressionable teenage age by the provocative relationships, the messier Singapores, and the unabashedly unlikeable yet complex girls, which all seemed to be a form of local story I’d never encountered. I keep calling Myle Yan Tay’s catskull–about a disillusioned, angry Singaporean schoolboy who becomes a crime-fighting vigilante and grapples with themes of justice, violence, race, and masculinity–a fellow coming-of-rage story.

Insofar as Butterfly is about historically migrant groups and specifically women within these systems, I think Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Now You See Us is very much looking at how these positions have shifted into modern Singapore. It follows a group of female Filipino domestic workers that become entangled in the murder of one of their employers, and touches on current migrant groups and adapts the AWARE saga, one of the more significant recent civil scandals, involving the women’s association. Otherwise, Felicia Low-Jimenez’s Tiger Girls is a Southeast Asian-inspired fantasy/dystopian YA graphic novel about an island group of women escaping persecution on the mainland for being born in the year of the Tiger, and also deals with a lot of female rage and morally grey choices.

A couple other recent books have also grappled with a changing Singapore in the mid 20th century: Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation and Fairoz Ahmad’s Neverness, with points of view ranging from Chinese kampong to Malay kampong to nascent civil servant. It’s cool to approach the same period from such vastly different perspectives.

Found family and sisterhood is a strong theme here, but you don't only focus on the positives. Tribalism, co-dependency, shifting allegiances and internal politics are all at play here among the Red Butterflies and other gangs we meet in your book. What was your thought process in crafting these dynamics?

It was really important to me to capture the whole spectrum of relationships! I like gnawing at characters and character dynamics and making them as complicated as possible. I wasn’t even interested in an uncritical girlboss feminism kind of take on Red Butterfly as a girl gang; I wanted them to both harm and help other women, including each other, based on the lots that they themselves have been presented in life. I think gangs are just so rife for character stories because they’re human-driven at their core; they form because people are searching for very particular forms of belonging and power.

I was interested in the psychology of that. From the beginning I knew the arc of this book was going to be Adeline’s journey from restless schoolgirl into this powerful, fraught, god-adjacent young woman, and as I developed the book, the more I had to dig into how that arc was propelled by those dynamics with the Butterflies, with her love interest Tian, and in conflict with the other gangs. Human motivations and yearnings are really the driving force of the story here, to wonderful and also terrible ends. And again, it’s interesting as a microcosm of the nation’s changes, because you have all these groups who should be united under a common identity–be it their own gang, or the larger underworld of the kongsi, or as the newly formed citizen identity of ‘Singaporean’–but obviously everyone has different ideas of what that means, and how they impose that on the people around them.

If you had to become a member of any of the kong si in this book EXCEPT for the Red Butterflies, whose gang would you join?

It will be obvious to anyone who reads the book that my second favourite children are the White Bones, who are a gang of shapeshifters inspired by a real life gangster (Lim Ban Lim) and the White Bone Demon from Journey to the West. I’m very compelled by fluidity and performance and wearing multiple faces, either literal or metaphorical. Shapeshifters appear in multiple forms across the book, and the White Bones are just the literal embodiment of it. Also, they’re the only other group that takes women, so I guess the choice is pretty self-selecting.

Apart from being a novelist, you also have a great portfolio of speculative short fiction. Can you tell us more about the differences in craft between long form and short form? Has your short fiction career influenced the way you wrote Butterfly at all?

The editor who ended up buying Butterfly for Tor was an editor I had initially connected with for a short story (my dark academia novelette “The Name Ziya”, now on Reactor), so quite literally yes!

But on a craft level, immersing in short fic has had a big impact on me on the line level. Word limits really teach you word economy. I strive for tight efficient lines and exchanges that capture interest and character and tension within a few sentences, and I actually struggle with writing long conversations for novels because my dialogue tends to be so compact. I’ve also had to teach myself to let scenes extend and spill over in my books, and to indulge in beats instead of quickly moving on to the next. Which is ironic since I started in novels as a kid. But short fic and novels are two completely different structural headspaces, so there’s always some stumbling going from one to another.

I want to say short fic taught me to play. It’s great for experimentation because it’s short, it makes you cut to the chase, you’re kind of forced to hone your hooks, you learn different ways to play with scale and voice and form. I’m sure a lot of my interest in character writing is also grounded in short fic, because if I know how to look at 5000 words as a compelling arc, then I have no excuse not to make a novel do 15, 20 times the amount of character work with all that extra space. Same with worldbuilding. If I can sketch a world with x depth in 5000 words, then multiply by n for a novel. And I’m always challenging myself to increase x. Sorry for the math in a literary interview.

Anything new you're working on that you'd like to highlight?

I’m working on the Butterfly sequel, whose title and premise I can’t disclose at the moment, but it moves ahead in the decade and touches on things like the river clean-ups, islander movements, and cemetery excavations. I’m also putting together a YA horror anthology that’s different from everything I’ve done so far, and that I’m super excited about! I would love to get back to short fiction, though. It’s been a long time since I’ve really gotten to work on it.