This Place Called Absence is the first novel from Vancouver writer Lydia Kwa. With its lyrical prose and compassionate voice, the book is an auspicious start, and Kwa is a welcome addition to the growing chorus of Asian-Canadian writers.

When the story opens, we learn that Wu Lan, a Vancouver psychologist originally from Singapore, has just lost her father to suicide. His death reverberates throughout the book; Wu Lan finds herself so preoccupied that she is unable to counsel her patients, and she decides to take a leave of absence.

During an afternoon at the library, Wu Lan happens upon a journal article about prostitution in Singapore at the turn of the last century. The lives of two prostitutes in particular, Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui, catch her attention. Her imagined story of their love affair weaves itself through Wu Lan’s inner journey, as she comes to terms with her father’s death.

This novel is not a traditional plot-driven one; rather, it is a string of episodes and musings that give the reader a window into Wu Lan’s quest for self-reconciliation. Although as a reader I was generally sympathetic to Wu Lan’s circumstances, I found myself growing impatient with her inertia, which sometimes bordered on self-indulgence. Her modern, comfortable, middle-class life – drinking coffee at the Java Cat, strolling around Vancouver, engaging in successive love affairs – contrasted sharply with the more dramatic and compelling rendering of the two prostitutes.

Kwa has done a splendid job in her portraits of Chow Chat Mui and Lee Ah Choi. Her writing about the anguish of their lives is so vividly detailed that one can see the tiny cubicles where they serve clients, smell the hot summer sweat of Singapore, and feel the glimmer of hope that they find in their doomed and forbidden love.