The Painter from Block 59
by C.S. Chan
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Pub Date Apr 26 2024 | Archive Date May 18 2024
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Description
She does everything for everyone, only to learn that it still isn’t enough.
An old apartment building in Singapore is about to be demolished. But twenty-eight-year-old Jie-Li and her parents can’t afford a new place. When her job as a nurse becomes increasingly difficult, Jie-Li fears she can no longer support her ailing parents.
Thankfully, Mr. Kwok, a former neighbor, appears, offering Jie-Li good money to retrieve a family treasure he had left behind. Jie-Li charms her way into the apartment next door, where an American artist now lives, a naïve young man who aspires to travel the world. But as Jie-Li spends time in the apartment, repressed childhood memories of her painting pictures with Mr. Kwok begin to surface, forcing her to lose sight of her quest to save her family.
Will Jie-Li recover the treasure and stop her family from becoming homeless? Or will the truth behind her early years scar her for the rest of her life?
Available Editions
| ISBN | 9798986068039 |
| PRICE | |
| PAGES | 350 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Dave B, Reviewer
The Painter from Block 59 is a quirky book set in one of the parts of Singapore that tourists rarely see. A few MRT stops from the modern city centre,the amazing Malls ,expensive hotels and luxury condominiums are the apartment blocks the workers live in, small,basic and often crowded.
Nurse Jie-Li lives in one of these with her parents,single at 28,struggling with a job she's started to dislike and mounting money problems she's at a loose end in her life. Things look up when she meets a former neighbour, Mr Kwok, who makes an unusual proposition , find the "treasure" hidden by his late wife in their former apartment and he'll give her half of its value. Jie-Li does find treasure next door in the form of the American tenant,a young artist, before she even begins to look for Mr Kwok's treasure.
Being in the former Kwok apartment stirs confusing memories for Jie-li and her search for answers has ramifications for everyone.
This is an involving tale largely about a young woman trying to find herself and what she wants in life as those around her try to keep secrets and avoid opening old wounds that were largely healed until Jie-Li begins to look for answers. As she does so she's torn between advice from her family that more money is the answer to every problem and her laid back partner saying the opposite, likewise she constantly wants answers to things that happened in the past while those she asks have already come to terms with those events and see no need to revisit them. It's a book about different perspectives, all of the main characters at some point in the book jump to conclusions and their errors cause friction and misunderstanding.
This is a hard book to characterise, there's a bit of romance,a family drama....but not a melodrama and , despite Jie-Li being in her late 20's, almost a coming of age story as she learns to see things from the point of view of others rather than just her own ,often somewhat self-centred ,thoughts. On a personal level I also enjoyed the insights into Singaporean culture and the lifestyles of ordinary working people in the city state,a place I've visited a few times and find endlessly fascinating..
