Her Story

Once a corporate lawyer used to the high life, Choo Waihong now spends half the year with an ancient matriarchal tribe. She tells Lauren Tan about being accepted into the community that inspired her book

- Lauren Tan

THERE ISN’T a Porsche or even a car in sight. In fact, donning a sun visor, she not only walked here but was so early she’d stopped at the nearby coffee shop for a cuppa, promising the noodles stallholder to return for a plate of his prawn wonton mee after her interview.

It’s been more than a decade since Choo Waihong featured in these pages, and we’re glad to connect again. Formerly a corporate lawyer with top law firms in Singapore and California, she embraced early retirement in 2006, putting aside 15-hour workdays to lead the enviable, if peripatetic, life of a global citizen; shuffling between homes in Singapore and Yunnan, and visiting friends and family all around the world.

In March, she released her first book — The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains — a first-person account of her experience living among one of the last matrilineal and matriarchal societies on earth, along China’s invisible mist shrouded border with Tibet. In the few months since, the first-time author has seen her book enter its second print and foreign language rights sold to Finland, Spain, Japan and Korea.

“I’m so excited about that!” she says, while getting her makeup done for the photograph you see here. “It started on a lark, and now it’s come to this.”