Stanford grad's escapist novel set in Singapore high society lands her a two-book publishing deal at the age of 23
When Singapore-born Kyla Zhao went looking for a light read to entertain her during lockdown in the United States last year, she couldn’t find one that suited her taste. So she wrote her own.
Now The Fraud Squad, a dip into the city state’s high society, has landed the 23-year-old a two-book deal with Berkley Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
“I started writing The Fraud Squad last summer because I was craving a fun and breezy book that I could escape into amid the malaise of our pandemic-ridden world,” Zhao says.
“But most of the books in this genre feature Western settings and characters."
“Writing a book set in Singapore, with Singaporean characters, was also my way of staying connected to home while living alone in California, 9,000 miles (14,500km) away from loved ones, and unsure as to when I’d see them again because of travel restrictions .”
Zhao moved to California in 2017 to study, graduating this year from Stanford University with an MA in communications (media studies) and a BA in psychology. She is now a fashion and lifestyle writer for Vogue Singapore.
“Almost everyone in my immediate and extended families has a background in science and engineering, but my whole life, I’ve been the ‘humanities/arts’ oddball,” she says, adding her only other work of fiction is a Harry Potter fan fiction piece she wrote aged 10.
“It’s still out there on the World Wide Web and it’s about Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger flirting through pickup lines."
"Thankfully, the romance scenes in The Fraud Squad are better written.”
Zhao says she grew up “devouring anything Enid Blyton wrote” and “everything in the Sweet Valley High series; even today, I can recite from memory the description of the Wakefield twins from the Sweet Valley books: blonde hair, blue-green eyes, size six – the epitome of a Californian girl."
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“But it wasn’t until I was much older that I realised how much I had internalised the Eurocentrism in those books and that I never saw myself reflected in the characters I grew up reading."
"It was only in the last two years that I started intentionally reaching for books written by authors of colour and which feature characters of colour.”
The Fraud Squad, which will be released in 2023, tells the story of Samantha Song, a young Singaporean woman from a shaky financial background who ends up writing for the city’s snobbiest high-society magazine.
With the help of a socialite friend and a wealthy billionaire heir – the trio make up the titular Fraud Squad – she climbs the socio-economic ladder, but soon realises that the glitter of high society has a grittier side.
Working at three society magazines – Harper’s Bazaar Singapore when she was just 16, Tatler Singapore and now Vogue Singapore – gave Zhao valuable insights into high-society life.
“Some characters, plot points and settings are inspired by personal observations,” she says.
“And as someone who studied psychology and who has always loved figuring out what drives people – their desires and their fears – I was able to put myself in my characters’ shoes."
“I captured a lot of the glamour, glitz and fun of the socialite scene – decadent parties, colourful characters, the most indulgent fashion one could imagine – since this is supposed to be escapist fiction after all, offering the exact opposite of the gloom and doom of our world in the past one and a half years."
“I also included the less savoury aspects of being a part of the most elite set: the judgment by others and the expectation that you have to do what’s best to uphold your family’s reputation even at the expense of your personal desires, compounded by Singapore’s collectivist culture where family comes before self.”
Zhao says she was shocked when she heard her passion project had landed a lucrative two-book deal. “The day my auction closed was so exciting – I was riding high on adrenaline,” she says.
“I tried meditating but my mind was all over the place, so I gave up after a couple of minutes."
“Because of the time zone difference between New York and Singapore, the auction ended at 2am and my agent wanted to tell me the offers over a video call so she could see my reaction."
“I was speechless but the most amazing thing is that I got to publicly announce my book deal exactly one year after I wrote the first word of my book – it felt like I’d come full circle.”
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This article was first published in South China Morning Post.
