Alison Wong's outstanding first novel is set in Wellington in the early twentieth century and spans the years 1905 to 1922. For most people in the wider community, the area known as Haining Street has an infamous reputation in the city, allegedly full of opium dens, weird food, gambling and strange Chinese cultural practices. Nice Europeans stay away. But for the tiny number of Wellington Chinese, it is a safe haven, a refuge from the scarcely believable and often violent anti-Chinese racism which pervades the wider Wellington community. It's the setting for an unlikely love story. Katherine is a lonely European widow struggling to support her children. Yung is a young Chinese man who runs a vegetable shop. We also learn he has a wife back in China. At first tentative, their love affair is conducted in secret, away from the daylight. Later, they grow in confidence. But in this climate how can a European woman have a successful relationship with a Chinese man? When her hostile son discovers what is happening, a tragic outcome seems the only possibility.

AWARDS
Shortlisted for Nielsen BookData New Zealand Booksellers' Choice Award 2010.
Winner of the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards - Fiction

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wong, Alison (1960 – ) is a poet and fiction writer. Born in Hastings, New Zealand, she has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Victoria University of Wellington and is a graduate of Bill Manhire’s Original Composition class at the same university. Wong has lived and worked in Shanghai and New Zealand as an information technology analyst and writer.

In 1996, Wong held a Reader’s Digest-New Zealand Society of Authors Fellowship at the Stout Research Centre and a New Zealand Founders Society Research Award. She was a founder of Porirua’s now defunct Poetry Café. Wong was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 2002.

Wong’s first collection of poetry, Cup (Steele Roberts, 2006), was shortlisted for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.The collection is described by Megan Fleming in The Lumiere Reader (14 February 2006) as, being ‘mostly accessible: there are the details of domestic moments, the wonder of a new child, the falling out of love – but she lends these subjects a humble and attentive form, drawing the reader in, to rest in the space between.’

Wong's first novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (2009) was published by Penguin in New Zealand, and Picador in Australia. It will be published in the UK, France and Asia in 2010. It has been reviewed favourably across the world, with a reviewer from the Epoch Times saying, 'She has produced a thought-provoking, deeply affecting work about the choices we make and the courage to stay true to oneself.'

Alison Wong recieved the 2009 Janet Frame Fiction Prize. 

She lives in Porirua.