Writing saved my life I don’t know what would have happened if I had not started putting words down on paper. “I started writing a year after chemotherapy, when I felt very low.
Siak, who has a degree in physics from Britain’s Southampton University and a doctorate in Theoretical Condensed-Matter Physics, turned to writing when she had to battle cancer in 2009. In that, she’s following in some familial footsteps: Her maternal great-grandfather was the father of the late Chin Kee Onn who wrote about the Japanese Occupation in the nonfiction book Malaya Upside Down (Jitts & Co, Singapore, 1946). None of the characters resembles a real person – many are entirely made up, as are the events.”īasically, the book is a “historical epic family drama”, as Siak puts it.
“Then I remembered the dream I had of writing a story loosely based on her life. “I heard a lot about her while growing up but all I did was to store those stories somewhere inside,” Siak says in an e-mail interview. The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds was inspired by Siak’s maternal great-grandmother who died in 1941.
The book’s editor, Elizabeth DeNoma, agrees, saying her senses were “bewitched by descriptions of sizzling garlic and burbling coconut milk”. One describes it as “a masterpiece”, saying that the descriptions of nonya food in the book are so vivid that one can almost smell the kuih being made. Readers have given it enthusiastic reviews at. Loosely based on Siak’s baba-nonya roots, the story tells of a girl who embraces her Chinese-Malay heritage and in so doing discovers her talent as a cook. Her novel, The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds, was selected by editors of Amazon Publishing as one of their six choices for the Kindle First programme for the month of October, prior to its Nov 1 official release. “I fear I may be a wreck by November,” she wrote at .Īs it turned out, the Ipoh-born, London-based former investment banker has no cause to worry. Two months before the launch of her debut novel, Selina Siak Chin Yoke confessed in a blog posting that her “emotions are starting to cause havoc”.
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