Jonathan Han reviews Yu-Mei Balasingamchow’s genre hybrid which blends crime, confessional and migrant fiction to create a paradoxically grounded and restless novel that both celebrates and mourns the pains and pleasures of movement.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Names Have Been Changed (Penguin Random House, 2026), 272 pp.
Ophir is a woman on the run. A petty crime in Singapore has forced her into exile, travelling from Bangkok to Tokyo, London and Colorado, as well as countless other places that Ophir mentions in passing. With each new country comes a new name—Ophir being the latest by which she is known, and the name that she asks her listeners to identify her by. From an undisclosed location and an encrypted network, she begins her tell-all story through a podcast, navigating through a painful past with details changed, obscured, or altogether omitted.
Ophir’s constant movement propels the story, but what grounds the narrative is her longing for Singapore. Homesickness wells up each time she hears Singlish spoken by the people she meets, or whenever she sheds her adopted accent, as she does for the podcast. For the few but vital times she encounters another Singaporean, Singlish becomes an immediate method of recognition.
Because the moment I heard a Singaporean accent or the sounds of Singlish, it was like a spell. It transformed me into my real self, except instead of like in fairy tales when the street urchin turns out to a princess or a prince, without my disguise I was just an unaccomplished, indigent, homesick petty criminal who also knew how to say hex and swear in seven languages and understood immediately when was funny about saying mee siam mai hum.
Even when leaning on Singlish too heavily becomes tropey, these excesses are taken in stride, as a characteristic borne out of Ophir’s earlier profession as a voice actor. Having discarded almost every artifact of home — her passport, her contacts, her name — only Singlish remains as a reminder of the world Ophir left behind. With its treatment of dialects, Names Have Been Changed follows a tradition of migrant fiction, such as Native Speaker and Americanah, that explores migrant identity by way of accent and code-switching.
Written in the form of a transcript, Names Have Been Changed blends the exile and confessional genres into a tale about measuring one’s sense of belonging against one’s freedoms. However, in adapting the podcast medium to fit onto a page, Balasingamchow is performing a balancing act. For instance, the novel retains the authentic messiness of a podcast while trying to ensure a coherent narrative on the page. Fail on either count, and the narrative risks a break in the immersion. Balasingamchow takes a deft and playful approach, prefacing pauses with apologies, amping up the interaction between Ophir and her audience:
I’m not going to reply to any of your emails. I’m not trying to win your hearts or redeem my sins, make friends or convince you to love me. And I’m most certainly not going to debate your interpretation of what you think I really meant when I said what I said. No, no, no, no, no. I’m talking, you can listen — or not. That’s it.
Sorry, I’ve got to blow my nose.
Ophir is tough, hardened by the years on the road, but not humorless. What her toughness veils is a pervasive fear of attachment. This can be justified as a defensive mechanism, where her own freedom depends on limiting communication with strangers. But as Ophir recounts the episodes of her past, it becomes clear that her injuries, both physical and psychological, have only encouraged her to retreat from the life that she once knew.
Although much of the novel is spent looking back, if there is something to look forward to, it would be Ophir’s own podcast. With each episode, Ophir finds more listeners joining in—many send messages to Ophir’s proxy, some scavenge the news, a few even manage to identify the people mentioned in the stories. The act of narration, therefore, has its own consequences, among them the unraveling of her anonymity. Despite the risks, Ophir pushes through with each episode. She does, however, pose a simple reason why, but she quickly refutes it:
I thought saying it aloud, instead of keeping it in my head, would make me feel lighter, freer, but it’s like I’ve sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There’s no sunlight or beauty. I’m deep in the murk, my feet are in wet sand, and I’m still sinking.
Am I saying too much or is it not enough? If you listened to this whole episode, will you come back next week? If a podcast has no listeners, does it mean anything?
If no one calls me by my real name, am I still here?
These questions, posited near the start of the novel, expose an insecurity that resonates throughout the book. For all the risks that Ophir takes, she can only hope that her listeners bear witness to her existence, even if they are never sure where she is, where she is going next, or what name she might take up. In a twist on other migrant fiction, Names Have Been Changed does not name a destination as its conclusion, but affirms that inner peace and a settled identity is grounded deeper than where one’s running from—or running to.
Jonathan Han is the former editor for Clarion Magazine. His work has been published in Essays in Criticism and Asian Review of Books. His chapbook Quinquennial was published by Pen and Anvil Press. He currently lives in Hong Kong. Follow his Substack @jhantheman
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