For Joan Wong, growing up in a Chinese family in the political turmoil of 1960s Guyana, family history is never straightforward. There are the examples of her grandmothers – Clarice Chung, iron-willed matriarch who has ensured the family's survival through unremitting toil, with her pride in maintaining racial and cultural identity, and Susan Leo, whose failures have shamed the family, who found comfort from harsh poverty in relationships with two Indian men and adopting an Indian life-style. Later, when Joan Wong makes her own pilgrimage to ancestral China at the turn of the twenty-first century, there are surprises in store.

Jan Lowe Shinebourne is a Guyanese novelist who has published a collection of short stories and three novels; Timepiece (1986), The Last English Plantation and Chinese Women (2004). In addition to being an author, Shinebourne also worked in London as an editor for several journals, as a political and cultural activist and as a college and university lecturer. She now lives in Sussex.