it is Mary, weeping quietly at her husband's infidelity in a Hong Kong apartment, a cheap, imitation leather handbag in her lap, who offers the most telling image in Louise Williams's gentle exploration of the lives of Asian women. Here, alongside the likes of Benazir Bhutto and Aung San Suu Kyi, and the young prostitutes and mistresses and maids, all with dramatic and often horrific stories to tell, the sly repression of Mary's life speaks volumes about the ordinary brutalities and inequalities faced by so many women across the region. Born looking like her father, Mary was shunned by her own mother after he ran away from home. Desperate to escape an unhappy home life, she married young and worked briefly as an embroiderer before giving birth to two children. She stopped work. Her husband's occasional infidelities increased. She caught one sexually transmitted disease, then another. Her husband stayed away from home more and more, gaining status and prestige from the string!
             of young mistresses and other wives he found across the border in China. Mary's status slipped. In her tiny apartment in the chaos of a Hong Kong high- rise she weeps for a wasted life and a loveless marriage and a society that has branded her a cast-off. Louise Williams, a veteran foreign correspondent and award-winning reporter in her native Australia, has done the honourable thing with this book and allowed the women to talk. By doing so, she has managed to dispel what she calls the "entrenched cliches" which have surrounded Asian women. "Oriental beauties, manipulative Asian sex goddesses, mail-order brides, victims of the sex industry." "Right across the region women occupy positions of extraordinary power and excruciating powerlessness," Williams notes early on. So she takes us to Nguyen Thi Chien, the Vietnamese guerrilla commander who led a team of women soldiers against the French in Vietnam, and Corazon Aquino still fighting for a better deal and ...