The Monsoon Bride

Winsome is just married and filled with anticipation. Her new husband is a stranger - one of the suitors chosen for her and the other mixed-race girls from the men who apply to the orphanage. But as the night train rattles towards her new home she sees possibility in this uncertain destiny. She knows she is headed for a new life in the metropolis.

Rangoon has always loomed large in my imagination. I was born there, the only one of my siblings born outside of Canada, and throughout my childhood, heard stories about Rangoon. These included the retrospective gossip of my parents and grandmother, stories of my babyhood and of my parent's youth (golf club trophies, tennis parties, dances, food, the type of snacks they ate, midnight feasts at boarding school, tiger hunts, clothes the tailor would make, private railway carriages, things the servants would do, snakes, crickets etc). Many of the stories described a kind of luxurious, colonial lifestyle. But there were much darker stories too. Some of these were about the terrible upheaval of the Second World war, some about the subsequent civil struggles and some, scandalous. These last ones were for adult ears only and told in whispers but of course, I was a great eavesdropper.For me, Rangoon was always a place where my imagination could run riot, a kind of parallel to my everyday world in Canada. In my mind, it was a city where any and everything was possible and perhaps most important of all, Rangoon belonged to me. So, although the book may seem highly fictionalised because it is set in the past, it is also very personal.' Michelle Aung Thin

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