FireWife (2007)

Tinling Choong's novel draws on the Chinese creation myth of the battle between fire and water. Nin, a fledgling photographer who leaves her corporate job in California to photograph women around the world, meets in Taipei Zimi, who leases her forehead as advertising space, in Bangkok the fourteen-year-old prostitute Ut, and in Tokyo a woman on whose body sushi is served, and their chapters alternate with her own. Three chapters first appeared in The Sun, The Minnesota Review and The Literary Review. (Open Library)

Watches

Casio (unidentified model): In the chapter "Nin: Vessel", Nin remembers a childhood afternoon at the Kinta House of Other-Grandma, her father's mother, in the tin town of Kinta, when as Jie, the big sister, she cast Mian as the brave one who kills the Monster Centipede and Liang, born with a slow tongue, as the Robot in a game of Lost in Space played on pillows and a bench under the hibiscus. Looking at the Casio she has just been given for her birthday, she announces the start of the game in two minutes, at three p.m. sharp. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Looking at the Casio watch I just got for my birthday, I announced, "Let's start playing Lost in Space in two minutes, at three p.m. sharp!" (Tinling Choong, FireWife, scan cataloged as Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2007, p. 24, in the chapter "Nin: Vessel", which begins on p. 21, with the OCR's stray quotation marks regularized; Internet Archive scan OCR)