The Button Tin

About this book

Mei did not want to spend the holidays at Nenek's narrow blue shophouse. She wanted her own room, her own street, and her parents to stop whispering about the move. Then Nenek lifts down a dented biscuit tin full of buttons, and each button becomes a doorway into family memory. Behind one is a fire her great-grandfather walked back into. Behind another are a wedding kebaya, a wartime bowl of rice shared six ways, a flag stitched before Merdeka and a brother who did not come home. As the holiday unwinds, Mei learns to listen, to sew and to understand that she is the newest bead on a very long thread.