This Place Called Absence
Lydia Kwa’s first novel is both a lyrical and unsettling piece of prose that spans a century and an ocean. As the book opens, Vancouver-based Lim Wu Lan’s life is in a period of turmoil and mourning. Following a breakup with her lover and the suicide of her father, Wu Lan suffers a nervous breakdown and takes a leave of absence in her position as a psychologist.
While Wu Lan tries to reconcile her feelings of helplessness and guilt, her musings are joined by the voices of three Singaporean women; her mother Mahmee, and two turn-of-the-century prostitutes, Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui. Mahmee, though haunted by the ghost of her late husband, provides a much-needed lightness to this work with her humorous ruminations on the fate of her daughter. While Wu Lan’s emptiness is palpable, it is the suffering and surrendered hopes of Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui that are most moving and disturbing. Sold into sexual slavery and addicted to opium, the two an ku cling to each other for love and companionship.
The voices in this book often paint a depressing and restless portrait, but for all of that, Kwa writes in a poetic, almost dream-like voice that offers just a glimmer of hope beyond the horizon. The author, herself a Vancouver-based psychologist, offers a bibliography of sources, including material on nineteenth-century Singapore.
