Songs in the Night

...She heads for the door to the living area where she expects to find her grandparents’ shrine overlooking the entrance. She stops, shocked. Where the door should be is a brick wall. The wall seems to declare her past null and void. Behind it she can hear a little girl chanting happily ‘A man, a pan, a man and a pan…’ her first clutch of English. Scenes of her father and uncle quarrelling, a bowl of wriggling baby mice and her mother crying all come at her like darts. Then she feels the anguish of a teenage girl…… Stunned by her father’s sudden death, Chiew Chiang, a cardiologist in London, rushes back to Malaysia. Robbed of the chance to make peace with him, she knows that there’s another journey she has to make beginning at the shophouse 22 Hakka Street, where she was born. But can she face up to what she might discover? A compelling and emotional story of a woman coming to terms with the loss of her father.