Description
Running an impressive Chinese silk factory in the Malaysian region throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Johnny Lim finds his life complicated by his son's belief that he uses the factory as a front for illegal businesses.
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This is the story of Johnny Lim - textile merchant, petty crook, and inventor of the Amazing Toddy Machine - and his marriage to Snow Soong, the most beautiful woman in the Kinta Valley. In 1940, with the Japanese threatening to invade, Johnny and Snow embark upon their honeymoon, recounted in Snow's captivating journal, to the mysterious Seven Maiden Islands, accompanied by a mercurial Japanese professor and Peter Wormwood, an Englishman adrift. Many years later, Wormwood looks back on this defining journey, while Snow's only son goes in search of the truth of his mother and the infamous Chinaman she married.Set against the backdrop of a country in crisis, this novel is both a mystery and a confession that dramatises the ambiguous nature of identity.
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