It’s 1972. Singapore is in its seventh year of becoming a new nation, having ousted the British for good and riding the waves of a new era. But as crime watch channels and whisper networks report, its underground thrives on as ever, run by magically-superpowered secret societies, each worshipping the gods they first brought to the island as immigrants.
In Wen-yi Lee’s When They Burned the Butterfly, mean and irreverent Catholic schoolgirl Adeline Siow falls straight into the city’s underbelly after discovering her mother’s secret double life as a high-class department store owner and the head of an all-girls gang called the Red Butterfly. For years, she served as the conduit for their vengeful fire goddess, letting their tattooed members wield flames for their gain.
But when her mother dies in a mysterious house fire, Adeline starts unraveling all her mother’s secrets to find her killer, alongside another Red Butterfly sister, Ang Tian, who wants to take Adeline’s mother’s place as Madame Butterfly. Together they track down a string of strange murders in the city’s red light district.
When Lee first set out to write, she wanted to commemorate a country that no longer existed, one her parents and grandparents had grown up in, while fueling her obsession with ghostly hauntings and girls with bite.
“That was always what I was interested in—figures of women, or how much womanhood or girlhood or accepted femininity is tied to how much other people think that you fit that mold, and how much it’s considered proper,” she said. “What that looks like both for other people and for the girls’ configurations of themselves when they’re actively choosing to reject those standards of propriety.”
In our conversation, Lee discusses writing queer characters from the past, delving into historical archives, and how horror and fantasy often go hand in hand for her.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Reema Saleh
When did the novel first start for you?
Wen-yi Lee
In the most Gen Z way, it started with a TikTok. I had just come back from studying overseas, and I was searching for something historical, something around a woman or group of women in Singapore’s history that was underrated. One day, my friend sent me this TikTok about this girl gang that had existed in the 50s and 60s called Red Butterfly. By the end of the day, I had a pitch because the idea was so compelling to me.
I like strong women, and I like female stories. I like women who have power in slightly untraditional ways. But it was also so unexpected. When you think about Chinese gangs and secret societies, it’s so overwhelmingly male, so overwhelmingly about brotherhood and this hyper masculine space. I was immediately captured by what it would look like for a group of women to exist in this structure. How do they both potentially subvert and reclaim, but also maybe appropriate some of this power structure?
It started out as a very girl boss idea, but then it became much more morally gray and complex, as different girls navigate, assert, and exchange power. A girl gang like this is comprised of a lot of very marginalized women in society—sex workers, poorer women, queer women. I was very interested in what marginalized femininity looks like, or non-traditional femininity, both in behavior and appearance, in societal roles.
It became a coming-of-age for this one girl who figures out she’s a lesbian, and she’s got fire magic. Her coming of age by being thrown into this world and finding herself through trial by fire. All that is set against the backdrop of this rapidly transforming post-independent, post-colonial nation-building, early years of Singapore, where both the country and the main character, Adeline, are changing incredibly quickly.
Reema Saleh
It’s interesting that being in the Red Butterfly makes the girls viewed as “not girls” in the minds of other gang members. When did you first start thinking about the characters?
Wen-yi Lee
The main character came to me very quickly. I was really looking at an arc of transformation—red butterfly evokes that very immediately, fire, transformation, metamorphosis. Because my background is from Christian schools, missionary schools, I started thinking about the landscape of Singapore Chinese communities’ religion and how there was a gradual shift over the generations from Buddhism and Taoism and traditional Chinese religions to Christianity. A lot of that is tied up in modernization, tied up in missionary English schools being tied to good education, social mobility, and economic development.
I thought that was such an interesting contrast and conversation within the Chinese culture, within the generations. Her entering this world is very much questing after her mother in multiple ways that she might not even articulate. There’s a lot of conversation about religion and ritual in general, both in Christianity and in Chinese religions, but also about their gods’ magic.
Tian didn’t actually click for me as a character until I really started exploring her masculinity and how being a masculine lesbian shapes how she navigates the world, shapes how she moves through the world, and how she relates to others. Even within this subset of girls with fire magic and very violent girls, as lesbians, as a masculine lesbian, there’s a trans woman who looks very different for them as a subset.
Reema Saleh
It’s a coming-of-age story for the country as well. It seems like normal people think it’s a thing they can leave behind, maybe development for instability, but the writing seems kind of skeptical about modernity.
Wen-yi Lee
That’s potentially my bias coming in. Historical fiction is always an exercise of retrospection, of coming from the future. You sort of know how this all turns out, especially because I was trying to keep fairly close to the arc of history. Singapore right now is grappling with—we did all the rapid development, and now there’s a lot of conversation about the losses we actually incurred, the trade-offs.
In the sense of leaving the gangs and really leaving that all behind, I think maybe it is a bit more of a futile exercise than a lot of them hope or think. That’s something I explore more in the second book. Something like this is always going to have its hooks into you, always going to leave an imprint. The sense of your past haunting you and never being able to quite let that go is something that affects all of the characters, even the country.
As much as they want to exact their justice or vengeance or make this huge decision and then be done with it and move on to a clean slate, that’s not really how any of it works. The past and history are always going to shape you, always going to follow you, and those mistakes are always going to follow you.
I do think narratively it’s pretty cynical about your ability to leave anything behind and to free yourself from the clutches of these structures that you’ve baked yourself into. As much as the nation-building era is portrayed with a lot of hope and optimism for the future, I was really looking at the weight of the choices that they are making in this moment and the kind of future that potentially awaits them.
Reema Saleh
In a way, it’s like all these characters are doomed by decisions their parents made.
Wen-yi Lee
It is a multi-generational story in some ways, even though it focuses on just one set of girls in this one set of time. There are a lot of cyclical threads, of things recurring, of echoes of the past coming back. Adeline’s mother’s decisions haunt her and shape the story quite a bit. Mothers and a couple of parent figures have quite a big role in the story, even though it is focused on the young generation.
That’s also true about how we think about the world now. It’s always the decisions that the boomers made, or your parents’ generation made, and how that impacts the world that you live in today. Thinking about the world in the span of generations is very scary, but also kind of epic in scale. I was doing a lot of balancing between the intimate and having a more epic scope of things, and the multi-generational aspect really underscores all of that.
Reema Saleh
What drives you toward horror?
Wen-yi Lee
My first book was young adult horror, and this book does have a bunch of horror elements, which were very fun to write. Even when I’m not writing genre horror, there are always little bits of those elements in there. I love a bit of body horror, female-centric horror, and social horror.
I love horror most when it has something to say. I love horror as a genre because it’s such a human genre. Sometimes fantasy is very big, very about the world building and these big epic plots, but I’ve always been a very character-driven reader and writer. I gravitate towards horror because it’s so human, so centered on our fears, anxieties, desires, and wants. Sometimes those things are treated shamefully or they’re repressed, and hence they come out in slightly horrific or negative ways.
Horror gives so much scope and so much room to play with confrontation, and then subsequently catharsis. It really lets you take a real-world or shapeless monster or shapeless feeling and blow it up into almost a metaphorical monster that you can actually tackle within the scope of the narrative. I’ve always found it very freeing to write. A lot of big emotions go into it, and I’ve always been attracted to a sense of rawness and viscera in my narratives. Horror is a very nice match for that.
Reema Saleh
There is definitely a lot of body horror, especially with the shape shifters’ gang, but also, everyone is so haunted. Some places are just haunted all the time.
Wen-yi Lee
I love body horror. I think that’s also very tied up with ideas of femininity and gender and queerness. You get a lot of body horror from queer writers and female writers. So much of the female experience is external exertions and internal pressures on your body, and the pressure to shape your body for other people or for yourself in order to secure a good life for yourself, which is very thematic for the book.
On the note of hauntings, it’s an interesting thing to think about whenever I think about Southeast Asian stories or Asian stories. Challenging genre definitions of what we consider fantasy and reality, and supernatural and natural. In the West, you have ghosts or gods or people channeling spirits and summoning these entities, and that’s very clear-cut fantasy or horror. But with Southeast Asia, you do actually get these ghosts and gods and people and mediums and shamans with these practices and beliefs today. It’s very much a fabric of reality and daily life here.
I’ve always found it interesting to think about how we define things about ghosts and hauntings and spirits. Singapore is sort of infamously, maybe slightly tongue-in-cheek, haunted everywhere. That’s something that I like a lot about the region, about Singapore, and maybe that’s why I’m always reaching for the past. I write a lot about ghosts and hauntings.
Reema Saleh
Is there any trepidation for you in writing about where you live?
Wen-yi Lee
I think there’s simultaneous trepidation and joy in writing about home. My first book was not set anywhere remotely close to Singapore or where I live, and that felt like a very safe distance. It was quite emotionally raw in other ways, but in terms of the setting, I had a lot of fictional distance, a lot of hiding behind that.
With this one, it was a joy to really mine the history of where I grew up and the fabrics and the versions of the city that no longer exist, to try and imagine the version of Singapore that my parents and my grandparents would have seen. I do feel like I have a more complex relationship with Singapore right now.
You never feel closer scrutiny than from your own community. There’s always a sense of being more closely perceived when you’re writing about home, especially when you’re also living here at the same time. You’re writing about the people around you and the spaces that you walk in every day. I’ve definitely felt that tangibility of that responsibility, in some way. It definitely feels a lot more real, and I’m very curious how it will be received.
Singapore is so famously considered sterile, or like a very urban, modern, clean city, often defaulting to being slightly boring. I was very interested in helping to add depictions of it that are messier and a bit more gritty, that focus a bit less on the Crazy Rich Asians side of things and more on the underworld in literal and various other ways.
Reema Saleh
What did your research process look like?
Wen-yi Lee
It was a lot of reading. I was always conscious of not tying myself down. Sometimes, if I go down too many rabbit holes, I become too obsessed with trying to fit everything in, and I have to remind myself I’m not writing a thesis, I’m not writing a historical ethnography of Singapore in 1972. I’m writing a piece of fiction, fantasy at that. I was conscious of leaving myself the space for that creative license.
I was doing a lot of reading on the secret societies, the history from the start of Chinese migration, how they evolved over the years, their rituals and practices, and their relationships with the law. I was looking a lot at Chinese mediums for that summoning of the gods, what I could adapt, and what actually exists in real life.
Beyond that, it was a lot of textual detail of day-to-day. I was probably the number one user of our National Library’s digitized newspaper archives. I’m now the number one advocate for these archives because they’re such an incredible resource. I was going through newspapers from 1972, seeing what the headlines were talking about, how people were talking about certain issues, what kind of movies they were watching, what the theaters were showing, what the advertisements were selling, and what people were buying. That actually, more than anything, really gave me a sense of the world and something to grip onto.
A lot of those tiny details make it into the book. There is a whole scene set in this shopping mall that would have been recently built, a pioneering architectural project in 1972. The whole reason I ended up setting something there was because I stumbled upon this newspaper article about this metrication exhibition being held at this mall. I thought that was so interesting, because it’s such a backdrop detail of Singapore trying to convert the whole country into the metric system to ease global trade and launch itself as a modern trading partner. It was such a minor detail, but it structured that whole scene and informed that whole setting. That mall in itself encapsulates all the building that was going on at the time, all the sense of innovation. The building was also built on the site of a fire, which I was really latching onto, historical fires in the country. That’s what I ended up appreciating the most about the process of really getting a sense of the day-to-day.
Reema Saleh
There are a lot of almost artifacts you put in. I really love the magazine about lesbians that just keeps popping up.
Wen-yi Lee
I’m so glad you brought it up. This book had a lot of serendipity. I chose 1972 because a famous fire happened that year with a department store, and I was looking for a big fire in history to anchor the story around. But as I went into it, so many things just clicked about 1972. It was the year that the statue of the Merlion went up, which is now Singapore’s very famous tourist symbol. In a sense, it’s very emblematic of Singapore’s construction of its own mythology, because it is literally a mythological creature that doesn’t actually exist. But the Tourism Board decided that we needed a symbol, so they made one.
It was the year that Hong Kong had its first lesbian film. That also makes it into the book because I’m self-indulgent. It was the year that I found out the first newspaper articles about the local queer community were published. It was a series, first on gay men and trans women, and then a follow-up series about lesbians. I was actually kind of stunned when I came across that. What are the chances? It was really special because you still don’t get a lot of documented queer history, specifically for Singapore. There’s not a lot of official recording of what they would actually have been doing and thinking and saying and feeling at the time.
Reading this article, which interviews a lot of mostly anonymous lesbians and sapphic women, was really special and kind of heartbreaking, because it was filled with a lot of tragedy. Everyone was very fearful and very lonely and very sad. That resonated with what I was already writing for the book. It got shuffled around a bit in the revision process, but I knew I wanted to keep it in somehow.
Reema Saleh
Are you going to follow the same characters in the sequel?
Wen-yi Lee
It is meant to be a duology, and it does follow the same characters. It’s set a little bit in the future, in 1975, at the turn of Singapore’s first decade. I see the first book being about destruction, and the second book being about reconstruction—the post-colonial almost as a necromantic act. It’s very much grappling with—we’re starting technically new, but now we have to grapple with our past and decide which pieces we’re going to take from it and how we’re going to shape what has come before into a national narrative or national myth. It’s a very active sense of building and creation and almost engineering.
After all this loss, or amidst all this rapid loss, what are you choosing to hold on to? What are you choosing to let go of? And how do you grapple with all of that? That is the arc that I always had in mind, and it makes a lot of sense thematically as two sides of a whole.
FICTION
When They Burned the Butterfly
By Wen-yi Lee
Tor Books
Published October 21, 2025
