Audrey Chin

Nine Cuts

Learning to Fly

The Tjoa ash house originally intended for ancestral tablets has stood at the top of Kota Cahaya's exclusive Green Hill for a century. Now, it is all drooping lintels and sagging roof; a haunted house with a haunted heir in it--Arno Tjoa, a Barbie-doll fixated cripple whom Sister Mary Michael, the clairvoyant nun, has been sent to set free. Arno believes that Bing Fa--the fascinating spirit of a pipa-diva trapped in a ghost marriage to his grandfather--is the key to solving the misfortunes plaguing the house. All will be well with Girl, the comatose maid he is obsessed with, Irene Tjoa his controlling aunt, and the Tjoa fortunes if Bing Fa is released from her doll-house prison. However, as the family's skeletons are unearthed, the nun realizes it is not in her power to save everyone or everything. Who must be sacrificed? What must be left to turn to dust? Set in a 21st century Southeast Asian port city where spirits still linger, The Ash House weaves between the visible and invisible to tell the story of an overseas-Chinese merchant family haunted by the legacy of love gone wrong, with an ending both unexpected and heartbreaking.

The Ash House

Constance Singam

"The Singapore woman: who is she? career woman, foreign domestic worker, expatriate? Who was she? Kampong girl, Nonya matriarch, colonial 'mem', mui tsai, Samsui woman? In this bumper of a book, a rich collection of essays, anecdotes, and selected works offers a multi-faceted view of what it means to be a woman in Singapore." -- BOOK JACKET.

Singapore Women Re-presented

A searing story about a Vietnamese man's struggle to balance the many faces of belong and loyalty in a Vietnamese family torn asunder by war and unresolved peace. In Thong Tran's Vietnam, everyone is at war and no one is who they seem - not his adopted father, a French civil servant, not his Blood Father, the Viet Cong rooster master, not his pro-American journalist tutor. Like them, the boy from the Mekong Delta cannot escape the war. And like them, he too must create shades of himself to survive. But even a conflicted heart needs a home. Thong yearns for a true father and a cause to give himself to. He chooses independence, liberty and happiness - his tutor and the Viet Cong.Tragically, there's no independence, liberty or happiness at war's end. Re-invented as an American aerospace engineer, husband and father - the Viet Cong informer must spend another half a lifetime crossing the Pacific as a defense industry dealmaker before he can set down the bones rankling in his heart Audrey Chin works with numbers as a financial steward by day and with words at night. Her mission is to tell the ASEAN story to an international audience from the point-of-view of a multi-cultural Peranakan woman in Singapore. Her debut novel, Learning to Fly, was a fictional romance of a couple drawn together by their love of trees. She has since co-authored Singapore Women Re-Presented, which tells Singapore's social history in the perspective of Singaporean Women.

As the Heart Bones Break

In Thong Tran’s Vietnam, everyone is at war and no one is who they seem. But even a conflicted heart needs a home. Yearning for a true father and a cause to give himself to, Thong chooses independence, liberty and happiness –his tutor and the Viet Cong. It is a choice with karmic consequences he will spend the next half century criss-crossing the Pacific to outrun.Can Thong set down the bones rankling in his heart? And at what cost? A searing story about a Vietnamese man’s struggle to balance the many faces of belong and loyalty in a Vietnamese family torn asunder

Audrey Chin

About

Books

Join the club