Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I Was Writing on Faith and Following My Instincts
In this interview, author Yu-Mei Balasingamchow discusses tackling place, culture, and identity in her new novel, Names Have Been Changed.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow was born in Singapore and moved to Boston, where she was a bookseller at Papercuts Bookshop and where she teaches writing workshops at GrubStreet. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize special mention and been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. She has an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Singapore’s National Arts Council. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
In this interview, Yu-Mei discusses tackling place, culture, and identity in her new novel, Names Have Been Changed, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Literary agent: Lucy Carson, The Friedrich Agency
Book title: Names Have Been Changed
Publisher: Tiny Reparations Books
Release date: June 23, 2026
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Previous titles: Singapore: A Biography (co-author)
Elevator pitch: Names Have Been Changed is a confession via podcast by a woman who’s been on the run around the world for 10 years after committing a crime in Singapore. It’s a picaresque adventure story that also explores questions around diaspora, identity, and belonging.
What prompted you to write this book?
I often write about characters who suddenly find themselves thrust into the position of the outsider. With Names Have Been Changed, I took this to one particular extreme: How would a person live after she committed a crime and fled her home country without thinking? What would she do to survive and not get caught?
The day I started musing about this, a voice abruptly bubbled up in my mind: urgent, prickly, demanding to be taken seriously. I started writing, and the character behind the voice, Ophir, gradually emerged. I realized the story would be about shifting identities, concealing one’s true self, and, for Ophir, an eventual reckoning about who she really is.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I took a year and half to write the first draft, then almost two years to revise it while querying agents. After finding my agent, Lucy Carson, things happened quickly: She made some suggestions, I worked on revisions for a month, we went on submission, and the novel sold. I spent about another six months with my editor, Emi Ikkanda, on further revisions. All told, it took just over four years from writing the first words to completing copy edits. During that time, I was working multiple part-time jobs as a bookseller, writing teacher, and editor. I wasn’t a full-time writer, but the novel was the top creative priority in my life.
The core idea hasn’t changed from day one: Ophir bounces from one country to another and gets entangled in romance and subterfuge with diasporic characters, a number of whom are from Singapore. What changed during revision was that I went deeper into everything that had emerged in the messy first draft. All the characters’ motivations became sharper and more distinctive. The action moved more quickly to match the emotional urgency of Ophir’s retelling. Most importantly, I got to know Ophir better, in all her confounding hardheadedness, and I still found her unruly—and compelling!—at the end of the writing process.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I thought I was familiar with the rhythms of the publishing process from my previous work experience and from what I’d heard from friends. What surprised me was how it felt to go through it as an author. There would be long periods of quiet, when it felt like nothing was happening, as if my book didn’t exist (even though I knew people at the publishing house were busy with it). Then suddenly emails would appear and decisions had to be made quickly, say, about the cover design or proofreading changes. I had to plunge back into the headspace of the novel after not thinking about it for weeks or even months. Then, once the task at hand was completed, everything went silent again. That start-stop-start-stop motion is very strange to experience.
Fortunately, lots of people had advised me that the best thing to do while waiting for a novel to be published is to write another one! That’s what I’ve been doing. It keeps me grounded and gives me something to look forward to every day, regardless of what else is happening.
The biggest surprise—and delight!—was when I received the cover design for Names Have Been Changed. I’d told Emi, prior to the design process, that I hoped the cover would use bold colors, convey Ophir’s energy and pacey storytelling, and hint at mystery and sensuality. The draft concept by Lynn Buckley, associate art director at Penguin, hit all these notes and more. I fell in love with it immediately! After one minor tweak, it was good to go. I still feel really lucky about this. I’ve heard of situations where cover designs have been through many rounds of revisions or didn’t quite represent the story between the covers. I’m grateful that Lynn intuitively understood the DNA of my novel and brilliantly captured its spirit, and Ophir’s, with the cover design.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I wrote this novel without an outline, and I’m still surprised that I pulled it off. Initially, I was following the impulses of Ophir’s voice. As my thoughts coalesced around exploring diaspora and identity, I made a bare-bones checklist of where Ophir would go (Tokyo, London, and Colorado, which are places I’ve lived in or visited) and what kind of diasporic character she would meet (for example, a college student with a secret double life, a political exile). But I didn’t know what would transpire between Ophir and these characters until I sat down to write the scenes, and I didn’t know how one incident would lead to another until I had to stitch them into a coherent narrative. I was writing on faith and following my instincts, even when they seemed silly or outrageous. I used to be a dedicated outliner, and “pantsing it” brought a freshness to the characters and the dramatic action that I didn’t know I was capable of, even as it felt like an impossible high-wire act. I was surprised at how many bold moves I could make and still bring the reader along with me. Now I wouldn’t write a novel any other way.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
A fun read, first and foremost! The novel is a fast-paced adventure, and I hope readers will connect with Ophir, who’s prickly but also funny and vulnerable. At a deeper level, I hope readers will recognize that place, culture, and identity are quite complex and can mean different things to different characters—and that’s a good thing! In the current climate, the voices espousing binary positions and a zero-sum calculus are very loud. I hope Names Have Been Changed will give readers some respite from that. Ophir’s world is harsh and uncomfortable, for sure, but it’s also one where alternative ways of being exist and unexpected moments of tenderness are possible.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Write the things only you can write—that’s how you find your voice. Write toward the things you’re afraid of—that’s how you push yourself to be bolder on the page. Love the story you’re writing, regardless of whether it gets published. You are the only person who will ever care this much about the thing you’re writing.
