Unquiet Heart Soliloquy

A realist novel about dating apps and unrequited online love, set in fast-moving, modern Shanghai man travels to Shanghai to visit his online lover Luna, but she refuses to meet him and soon disappears without a trace.

He turns to a plethora of dating apps for comfort, but after many casual outings with other women he is unable to fill the void of intimacy and finds himself struggling with a sudden impotence. He finds work as a translator and settles into the streets of Xuhui, where he disconnects from obsessing over Luna by immersing himself in everyday Chinese life. He then travels to Hainan on a xungen trip with his mother, who tries to coax him back home to Malaysia. Summer changes to winter. Soon, he feels that he is neither like a mainland Chinese nor part of the greater overseas Chinese diaspora. He runs into a woman he'd previously met on Tinder, and falls in love upon getting to know the real person behind her dating profile.

But traces of Luna abruptly appear in his life again, and he must come to terms with her being this someone who will never reveal herself to him, if he is to find a way out of his unquiet predicament. See more