Kist: The first part of the Orphan Country trilogy

Kist - a short novel - brief synopsis. Available on Kindle. First in a trilogy Family secrets, racism, prostitution, fiction.

Imagine being haunted by glimpses of family secrets and reminders that your foster family doesn’t want you to know the truth of your origins.

This, in part, is the story of Ruth.

As a baby Ruth is adopted into a European family in apartheid Cape Town. She is Chinese. Ruth tries to stitch together the threads of her identity in a complex society marked by racial oppression and violence. Being of Chinese origin makes navigating her coming of age even more complicated. As she grows, she sometimes encounters a Chinese boy, Simon, who is the same age as her, and similar in appearance. She starts to believe he is her twin brother.

Then things get a little weird.

Kist is the first part of a loosely connected trilogy of stories titled Orphan Country, set in both South Africa and China. It explores how we are shaped by the cultural myths we tell each other, which then form our shared and individual identities. The crumbling of those shared national myths at the end of Apartheid led to a frequent tabula rasa of identity for some, or a negation of the ideas on which they had built their identities.

Welcome to the opening story of Orphan Country.