The effect is reminiscent of those awful grainy blue movies that spotty adolescents gleefully lend one another.

A practising gynaecologist, it comes as no surprise that Ng is at pains to display her firm grasp on the mechanics of getting down to a good time.

Sadly, for all the helpful - at times tiresome - pointers she gives on which buttons to press, the lights will fail to come on for all but the most sexually repressed.

Part of the problem is the quaint terminology. The words used for parts of the anatomy such as 'Chinese sausage' come across as particularly contrived.

The subject of the story is Syn, a mainland Chinese who arrives in Australia to study.

But when the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre occurs she realises she will be unable to return to Shanghai.

Forced to give up her education, she takes a job at a butcher's in Sydney's Chinatown where the lusty Zhu Zhiyee cannot wait to get his chubby, grubby paws on her.

At first she doesn't like him but over time, opposition gives way to growing feelings of tenderness.

Before we know it, he's booked them into a motel on Cronulla Beach for a sexual encounter.

It's a shame he forces her to let him stuff her mouth full of pearls until she all but chokes.

Ng writes: 'Syn had the distinct feeling of distension, an urge to use the toilet, to defecate, and she couldn't help straining.

'Push hard, take a deep breath and strain, bear down as though you're very constipated,' Zhu ordered.' Charming.

Zhu has a wife who doesn't understand him - how original - and a battleaxe of a mother who desperately wants a grandson. So can Syn fill the breach? The other thread to the story is Syn's recurring dream of being drowned in a pig's basket in a river near Shanghai.

A soothsayer tells her this has a bearing on her destiny.

But, frankly, by the time the final pieces start falling into place, you'll be past caring . . . and wondering whether sex will ever be quite the same again.