The Disappearance Of Patrick Zhou

By Ally Chua
Mystery/Epigram Books/Paperback/280 pages/$26.90/Epigram Bookshop (str.sg/aNQz)
4 stars

The Zhou family has a long list of enemies, any of whom could have been responsible for Patrick Zhou’s disappearance 15 years ago.

Layla’s grandmother is on her deathbed and her final wish is to know what happened to her eldest son.

A skilled journalist and the only one not involved in the family’s palm oil business, Layla investigates her uncle’s disappearance and realises her family keeps many secrets.

Upon realising some of the darkest ones, she concludes: “The Zhous are morally ambiguous. The Zhous are morally bankrupt.”

The book is divided into four sections, each part marking a shift in how Layla sees herself and her family over the course of her investigation.

At the end of the first part, nearly halfway through the book, journal entries from Layla’s father appear, filling in the backstory of his relationship with Layla and the rest of the Zhous.

Boston-based Singaporean author Ally Chua transitions successfully from poetry to prose, a skill that does not come easily to many writers.

A finalist for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, this debut novel retains a similar sense of grit and gore present in her poetry collection Acts Of Self Consumption (2023) without coming across as unsavoury or perverse. Rather, the elements add to the uneasy sense that digging into the past can only lead to unwelcome revelations.

No one in the novel is truly likeable, a collection of characters forced to connect with their dark sides to survive the cut-throat business environment created by Layla’s grandfather, Joseph.

Layla thinks to herself: “We are all horribly depraved. My father and his heartlessness, my grandfather and his poisonous words, my uncle and his manipulation. I cannot say I am clean – I know, from the way I experimented with the chickens and how I watched Sayang (the family cat) die, that I have my own morbid fascination with death. Our family and our litany of sins and small crimes.”

As she digs into the people who knew Patrick best, she encounters lies, threats of physical harm and illegal employment.

From his former assistant to his ex-fiancee, each person reveals that the uncle she once loved for telling her horror stories might not have been as good of a man as she thought.

Ramping up the action in the last 90 pages, Chua skilfully weaves together 15 years of secrets in a manner that leaves one flipping pages for more answers. Tensions grow as Layla pieces together the inconsistencies of Patrick’s final day and discovers a particularly dark secret that reframes the way she views her family.

While the conclusion is not satisfying, it is realistic and befits the story. The fallout Layla and the Zhou family face speaks volumes not only to how power and money have kept them safe from public hate, but also the lengths the family is willing to go to protect its own.

If you like this, read: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St James (Berkley, 2020, $16.63, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3SWrQiy). Haunted by the disappearance of her aunt Viv in 1982, Carly finds work at the Sun Down Motel, where Viv was last seen. As she attempts to solve the mystery, Carly discovers that forces beyond her imagination could be linked not only to the motel, but also other crimes in town.