Books
Stories that were too big for a Facebook post.
The cover of The Table goes here.
A novel by Alvin Huang
The Table
The table cost $1,200.
Siew Lan bought it in 1985, seven years after she moved into her HDB flat in Toa Payoh. Solid wood. Six seater. She wanted big because she wanted everyone to fit.
Forty-one years later, everyone fits. The table is right there. But nobody sits.
Her son is on the couch with his phone. Her granddaughter is behind a closed door with her Airpods. Her grandson eats on the living room floor. Her daughter-in-law stands at the kitchen counter, scrolling. And Siew Lan sits on the edge of her bed in the small room at the end of the corridor, listening to the flat not eating together.
The table is right there. But nobody sits.
The table has a crack in it that nobody talks about.
Then one night, the thing that has been holding the family together for forty-one years stops holding. And the family has to decide: is it too late to sit down?
The Table is a multigenerational novel about a Singaporean family and the dinner table that witnessed their love, their silence, and the sixty-four-year distance between saving someone and saying something. It is a story about tins and shirts and emojis and the invisible labour of the women who hold families together. It is a story about a nine-year-old boy with a bookmark at page 174. It is a story about a fourteen-year-old girl who performs for strangers because the one seat that mattered was empty.
It is a story about sitting down.
You eat together or you don't eat.
A mother in a kampung that no longer exists.
For every grandmother who loved in a language nobody could read. And for the grandchild who finally sat down and listened.
More on the way.
The Table is the first. If you'd like to hear when the next one is ready, you're already on the right list.