This book was offered to EarlyReviewers on LibraryThing. I won a copy to read and provide an unbiased review.

I have to confess that I skimmed a lot of this book. For my interest there was way too much explanation of different dialects of Chinese; perhaps a person who spoke one or two of those dialects would have found it more interesting. Also, there were numerous grammatical and spelling errors which always makes me impatient. I guess I was looking for more human interest stories about the Chinese people who settled in Singapore and Malay from the 1800s on. The back of the book seemed to promise this when it started out with "A coolie's life sucked..." Some of the history was interesting but I really would have liked to have seen more about the Japanese occupation as, to me, that seems a major turning point.

There is no doubt that the author researched this book well. You just have to look at all the footnotes and graphs to see that.