Learning to Fly

by Audrey Chin

A tenement child in Chinatown, Swee Lian had looked out of her many-storeyed home, wishing that she, like the pigeons, could take wing and rise above the mundanity of her life.
It is a wish that is to come true for her when her entry into university puts her in the way of John Thomas, botany professor and later her husband. The vistas he presents open the way for her to find voice and a life work studying the practices of the Bornean jungles' native peoples.
Step by faltering step she learns. As a winged creature emerging from a chrysalis, she becomes. And int he path that she forges for herself, she finds spiritual strength to fly, even in the face of an inexorable mortality.

200 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1999