May Chan
Silent Waiting
Can you fully love someone new while still carrying an old wound — and can a man who quietly rebuilt you deserve to keep you?
When Cheng Yi arrives in New York with little more than a university acceptance letter and a heart she has not yet learned to name as broken, she does not expect to find a family. Yet that is what she finds — in the eccentric Ye household: a warm, chaotic patriarch; a gentle wife; a gifted, wayward young man named Allen who arrives hungry on Christmas Eve and never quite leaves; and Ye Mingzhe, the composed, controlled eldest son, who offers Cheng Yi a marriage of convenience so she can remain in the country legally.
It is a practical arrangement. It does not stay that way.
Over six years, Cheng Yi builds a life she did not plan: a career, a makeshift family, and a quiet dependency on Mingzhe that she refuses to examine too closely. Then grief breaks something open in her — and her therapist sends her back to China. Back to the city she fled. Back to the man who was the reason she left.
Silent Waiting is a novel about survival, depression, and the slow, difficult work of learning to accept love that has been waiting — steadily, without pressure — all along. Originally written and serialised in Chinese, it attracted a dedicated readership before being developed into a full English-language manuscript.
Choosing By Heart
At a luggage carousel in Hong Kong, Si Chen sends the same message to two men and waits to see which answer decides her life. Ten years later, she wonders if she ever really chose at all.
Si Chen returns to T City after more than a year abroad to find her decade-long marriage exactly as she left it: in careful, unspoken suspension. She and Yu Hao built something real — a business, a home, a son who runs the household with cheerful efficiency and a ruthless talent for minding everyone else's business. Then, two years ago, one argument neither would walk back from. Since that night, they have existed in the same life without quite inhabiting it together.
Back in T City, Si Chen crosses paths with Su Kaiwen — her most vivid memory from an elite international school, the boy who was beside her for every scheme and misadventure, who disappeared abroad at the worst possible moment, and who has been quietly searching for her ever since. He is polished, restrained, and does not keep his feelings at a professional distance for long.
Su Kaiwen's reappearance does not destabilise Si Chen's marriage. Her marriage is already in suspension. What his presence does is surface a question she has never allowed herself to examine: not whether she chose the wrong man at that airport ten years ago, but whether, in making that choice, she was ever entirely present for it.
Set across T City and Hong Kong — flower markets before the new year, old iron bridges, the particular loneliness of returning to a city that has changed while you were not looking — Choosing by Heart is a novel about the difference between a life you built and a life you settled for, told with warmth and wit, and without a villain in sight.
Solitary
Some people choose solitude. Others arrive there without quite meaning to — and discover, in the quiet, what they had been carrying all along.
Some people choose solitude. Others arrive there without quite meaning to — and discover, in the quiet, what they had been carrying all along.
Solitary is May Chan's third novel, currently in progress. It continues her exploration of women navigating private reckonings — the kind that do not announce themselves, but remake a life nonetheless.
Updates on progress and publication news will be shared here and via the mailing list.
Books In progress — coming soon
Sisters / 姐妹
Two sisters, far from home. One just old enough to pretend she knows what she is doing. One not yet old enough to have to. A coming-of-age story set abroad — about the particular intimacy of siblings who have only each other, and what it costs to grow up in each other's company.
Dignity / 体面
Told through a younger sister's eyes, this is a novel about watching someone you love make a choice you cannot fully understand — and finding, in the watching, that you understand yourself a little better. A story about marriage, appearance, and the quiet gap between what a life looks like and what it feels like from the inside.
The Reckoning /
捞女的觉悟
Three generations of women. Three different eras. The same calculation: survival has always required a certain kind of compromise — and the women in this family have always known the cost. A multi-generational story about what it means to depend on someone, and what it takes to stop.
Creative Process
How I Write
“I write about women who stay quiet for too long — and what happens when they finally stop.