'I had just started my career as a lawyer in New York. One of my colleagues at the law firm was Chinese American and her parents owned a restaurant in Chinatown. We had a Chinese New Year meal there and I looked out of the window and saw exactly what I described in the story,' says the San Francisco-based Singaporean, 33, in an e-mail interview with Life!.

'It was both cheering and disorienting to see the familiar lion dance we have in Singapore being performed in the snow.'

Her story is one of eight short stories chosen for this year's Read! Singapore, the annual literacy campaign, which is now in its fourth year.

Indeed, Asians who bridge the East and the West are the focus of this year's campaign, as seen in the eight books and eight short stories announced by the National Library Board on Monday.

In the spirit of this year's theme, Home And Away, the two books and two short stories in each of the four official languages all deal with issues of immigration, globalisation or cross-cultural influences.

In the English category, the featured novels are Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress by France-based Chinese author Dai Sijie and The Namesake by Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri.

In Dai's 2000 novel, originally written in French, three young people seek escape from the grimness of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by reading forbidden Western novels, while Lahiri's 2003 novel tells the story of the American son of Bengali immigrants who finds himself trying to reconcile two worlds.

Coincidentally, the two English short stories both involve Asians braving the coldness of the North American winter: Indian author Anita Desai's Winterscape and Poon's Lions In Winter.

In the other language categories, chosen titles include Short Stories by You Jin, a Chinese Singaporean writer, Mail Mau Kawin (Mail Wants To Wed) by Malay Singaporean writer Muhammad Ariff Ahmad and Drift Wood by Indian author Nanjil Nadan.

Read the full story in Tuesday's edition of The Straits Times' Life!