Mindgame
MINDGAME came out of a dark period. My grandmother had just died and I was back in Malaysia with my family for the memorial service. The landscape was shrouded in thick smoke from the Indonesia forest fires — the days and nights seemed white with the Haze, fittingly the colour of death in Chinese tradition. It was hard to breathe, the smell and taste of smoke everywhere and in everything.
At that time, the big debate in Asia was on Asian Values. Pundits and luminaries wrote about it in the papers and regional magazines. ASIAWEEK carried articles and counter-articles. My extended family in Canada, Australia, the UK and at home in Malaysia and Singapore weighed in with their views by email. Curiously, the older generation who had chosen to emigrate to the West to seek a better life for their families were the most pro-Asian and anti-Western. It was an issue that held within it the drama of contemporary Asia — the tension between modernity (or is it “westernity”?) and tradition played out in so many families and in wider political and social arenas.
In MINDGAME, the career of ambitious young lawyer Fei-Li Qwong looks set to sar as she steers her major clients to the successful launch of their visionary sanitorium. Piers and Ginny Wyndham claim their Centre for Mental Health and Excellence will revolutionise Asia’s health care practices. Fei is proud to be part of the team.But Fei’s professional success masks a turbulent private life as she tries in vain to reconcile her Western education and outlook with the restrictions of life in Kuala Lumpur and the feminine qualities of charm, modesty and family-mindedness demanded of tranditional Asian womanhood.Her problems have only just begun. As she begins to uncover the dark reality behind the Wyndhams’ public front, Fei finds herself drawn deep into a pall of intrigue and murder to a secret experiment that could enslave Asia under a terrifying new tyranny.
