The Girl Who Wears Two Watches
by National Arts Council award-winning author Lily Kong
 
10-year-old Yi undergoes the divorce of her parents and believes that by being perfect, her father will return for them to be a family once again. 
 
To keep her world from falling apart, she wears two watches—both tell the same time, one watch given by her mother, another by her father—in her quest to be the “perfect daughter”.
 
To break Yi’s obsession with perfection, her mother sends her to Beijing, China on a 3-month exchange programme to experience for herself the bigger world…where one must adapt, be flexible and take life as it comes.
 
Will she learn the lessons of understanding, empathy, kindness in this new world?
 
Told from Yi’s perspective through a series of diary entries, emails, text messages, the young girl shares her secrets, prejudices, friends and life lessons…forging a new sort of relationship with her Mother.
 
About the Author
 
Lily Kong is an author and winner of the National Arts Council’s Beyond Words competition in 2013.
 
Her English-language children books were nominated for the US Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Crystal Kite Awards and has been translated into Mandarin by a China publisher.
 
Lily was an Esso Scholar with a B.A. in Economics and English Literature, NUS. She is an accredited teacher in early childhood education and holds multiple Diplomas in education, speech and drama teaching awarded by London Montessori Centre,  UK, and London College of Music, Thames Valley University, UK.
 
As former principal and founder of a private school, her encouragement for students to pursue the arts has contributed to the success of notable Asian artists.
 
Bringing up her two daughters, she wrote stories for them. This book is partly based on her personal experiences as a single mother raising two young daughters. She hopes this will help other parents and young people in similar situations to engage with their emotions in a creative manner.