Inspired by director Ang Geck Geck Priscilla’s own childhood experiences and long-held reflections, the Singaporean filmmaker’s debut feature Ah Girl follows the resilient Swee Swee (Ah Girl) as she journeys through a childhood scarred by hardship and bruises.

Set in the 1990s, the 7-year-old Ah Girl (Xuanjing ONG), and her younger sister Ah Tian (Sydney WONG) are facing difficulties after the separation of their carefree parents. However, unlike many, Ah Girl never compromises easily when irrational things happen to her, though things don’t always turn out as she wishes. Whenever the family is falling apart, she will be the one to glue it back together. 

Their mother (Carrie WONG), who works as a tour guide, occasionally brings bubble gum home for Ah Girl as a gift from work. At school, the treat is secretly turned into a black-market trade that earns her popularity and pocket money among her peers. Ang cleverly scripts the bubble gum as a survival strategy for Ah Girl, revealing her resourceful and sometimes impish personality.

Beyond that, Ah Girl is also very kind and sensible, in a way that she would do anything within her power to want the best for everyone she cares about, and if she can, she would solve their problems with her own hands. Hidden behind the profitable bubble gum business, it’s her utmost effort to earn money to solve the financial problem that bothers her family.  

And yet, such an innocently generous heart of hers is underestimated and read as mischief. There, the film points out a cruel fact that adults often simplify kids’ behaviour and their intentions behind it with arrogance. In fact, the way children perceive and understand their surroundings is way more exquisite than adults could imagine.

Two young actresses, Xuanjing ONG and Sydney WONG, quietly win fondness among the audience with their charm. Without training, their performance implies genuine purity that we can’t help but emphasise with their characters.

At times, Ah Girl brings to mind The Florida Project by Sean Baker, where children are again placed in similarly vulnerable circumstances, left with no choice over who they live with. But here in the film, instead of being lost in uncertainty, Ah Girl creates a world of her own where her family and loved ones are protected.

Beneath its story of familial conflict and the complexities of the adult world seen through a child’s perspective lies the film’s focus on the constant exclusion of children from truth and the refusal to respect Ah Girl’s wishes – to keep her long hair and to stay with her family – revealing the helplessness often ignored in children.

The director restores a childhood set in the 1990s, when children did not have instant messaging technologies or constant connection, and when loneliness and the longing for company were rarely experienced by children today. It feels familiar and distant now that we are adults.

Ah Girl presents childhood as a time of helplessness, but also of hope and joy, brought only by innocence. Swee Swee’s world is like bubble gum, fragile and elastic, always close to bursting; yet each time it does, she breathes harder to blow an even bigger one.

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Written by Jane Wei

Featured image courtesy of Ang Geck Geck Priscilla

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