I am psychic, like all the women in my family. I see things others do not see and go to places others do not visit. I inherited this ability from my maternal grandmother and her mother before her. In 1932, my grandmother foretold momentous events in the Far East. But her prophecies were ignored and history remained unchanged. This is a tale of the supernatural and the earthy, religion and hypocrisy, revenge and death, bigotry and love, arsenic and fried noodles. Those events in which I was not involved, or was too young to recall, were related to me by my grandparents, parents and siblings. I was born in Singapore, one of nine children of Chinese parents, during World War Two in the penultimate year of the brutal Japanese occupation. At my birth, I was given up to die, but survived without proper medical care, thanks to a stroke of luck. After the Japanese surrender, Singapore was returned to the British and my family moved to the shophouse where I spent my childhood. During this period my psychic ability manifested in terrifying prophetic visions and out of body experiences. Our neighbourhood, with its little shops and five-foot ways, its gossips and intrigues, wife beaters, transvestites, Special Branch informers, triad members and law-abiding folk like my parents, all from varying racial backgrounds, was typical of many in Singapore. I was educated in a convent school dominated by a sadistic Mother Superior. In the post-war years, the communists who had fought against the Japanese continued their fight against the British. Rioting, followed by curfews, was a part of life in my schooldays. As a child, my life was dominated by an insistence on filial piety and the threat of corporal punishment if I did not study hard. I was not allowed to socialise with my friends. Sometimes, I escaped my physical existence, to roam strange locations. At the age of seventeen, like my grandparents before me, I sailed to an exciting future in a foreign land. In London I studied architecture and met my future husband, a gweilo ("foreign devil"). I then had to choose between marrying someone of my choice, or return home to marry a man of whom my parents would approve. I returned to Singapore. After an unbearable separation of eighteen months I flew back to England where I married without telling my parents. My husband and I worked for four years in the Far East before returning to London. In 1986, I secured a job as a director with a company in Hong Kong. The last great British colony was to be handed back to the Motherland in 1997. In Hong Kong, the office in which I worked was in turmoil, under investigation by a government agency. I resigned, amid threats and blackmail, and set up a consultancy firm of my own. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the stock market crash of 1989, I was in debt and suffering mentally and physically. To solve my problems I resorted to unorthodox methods and became a Reiki Master, giving healing. In 1998 we returned to the UK where I worked as a professional psychic before taking up writing. MAY LIN