by Wena Poon (Author)
At the turn of the 20th century, thousands of poor Japanese girls were tricked or kidnapped by zegen - Japanese "impresarios". The girls were smuggled onto steamships and sent to Singapore, where they were sold for sex to a largely male population while the British authorities struggled to contain prostitution and disease. In 1906, a young magistrate in Nagasaki meets the son of a prostitute, who tells him an incredible story of human trafficking. The two men recruit Sparrow, an American woman boxer and stowaway, who had no money and was "basically game for anything". The three friends hide themselves on board the luxury steamship the Tobi Maru bound for Singapore in pursuit of the greatest zegen of all, the legendary Oguri.
Author Biography
Wena Poon is an American novelist and photographer. Her first novel Alex y Robert, about a Texan woman bullfighter in Spain, was adapted by the BBC and broadcast as a 10-episode Radio 4 series. Her play The Wood Orchid, about the Chinese woman warrior Hua Mulan, was professionally staged in Westminster Abbey, London by the Bush Theatre. Author of 14 books, she won the UK's Willesden Herald Short Story Prize and was nominated for France's Prix Hemingway and the UK's Bridport Prize for Poetry. She was also a two-time nominee for Ireland's Frank O'Connor Award and the Singapore Literature Prize. Wena is known for her work on diaspora culture, transnational identity, and gender roles. She has been interviewed for her work by the BBC, Huffington Post, Vice, Marie Claire, The Japan Times, South China Morning Post, and The Straits Times. From 2011 through 2017, her short stories are studied by thousands of high school students in Singapore sitting for the Cambridge O Level Exams in English Literature. They have also been studied by British, American, Hong Kong and Singapore academics as examples of transnational literature. Born and raised in Singapore, Wena graduated magna cum laude in English Literature from Harvard College and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is a lawyer by profession.www.wenapoon.com