IT'S safe to say that Wena Poon has made it good in the United States. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, the 33-year-old is a senior associate with the San Francisco office of an international law firm, and is married to Bailey Korell, an American lawyer.

Yet, when she gets home and embarks on her favourite hobby - writing fiction - it is her birthplace of Singapore and its people which take centre stage.

"When you are abroad in the US, you have this whole barrage of American influences. Then you meet fellow Singaporeans and discover that every Singaporean living abroad has taken a very different path," says the author to LifeStyle at the Raffles Hotel.

A petite woman whose air of warmth and self-assurance suggests that she would be formidable in the boardroom, Poon was in town last month to promote Lions In Winter, her debut collection of short stories.

Its cast of globe-trotting Singaporean characters include a retired schoolteacher daunted by ATMs in Canada and a shampoo girl trying to make her way in sophisticated New York.

Such stories are distinct, says Poon, from the typical Chinese immigrant in the US tale, which she describes as "making dumplings in the kitchen and owning a teak chest full of your greatgreat-grandmother's cheongsams".

She says with a chuckle: "Singaporeans are just much more mixed in terms of influences. I don't think anyone in Singapore makes dumplings."

An alumna of Raffles Girls' School - she was classmates with theatre actress and director Beatrice Chia-Richmond - Poon started writing as a teenager, and has previously been published in local and South-east Asian short story anthologies.

Malaysian publisher MPH approached her last year about putting together a collection at the recommendation of Sharon Bakar, a British writer and teacher based in Petaling Jaya who had enjoyed Poon's previously published work.

The daughter of an import-export businessman and a retired school teacher, she has not lived in Singapore since she was 18, when she left for univeristy in the US.

However, she is quick to describe herself as "pretty Singaporean", noting that she can speak Mandarin, Cantonese and Teochew.

"That really helps people to accept me as a Singaporean. It would have been harder if I had left as a baby because I wouldn't have learnt all those languages," she says.

Her Singaporean upbringing has also helped in her work as a corporate lawyer, especially when her clients do business in Asia. "I have been in deals where there are Singaporeans on the other side, and they are giving the Americans a lot of problems," she says with a grin.

"So I take my US guys aside and say, 'Look, the Singaporean part of me says they are being reasonable and here is why.' I try to be the cultural referee because I can see both sides."

She is also still a Singapore citizen, and is in fact the only member of her family to carry a Singapore passport - her parents and two younger brothers immigrated to Canada shortly after she left for university, due to business reasons.

However, her grandparents and other relatives still live in Singapore, and she tries to visit every year.

She says: "I don't profess to be intimately in touch with current Singaporean attitudes. That is why my fiction is really more about Singaporeans living abroad who come back once in a while, and their feelings about coming and going."

She adds that she hopes her stories will offer a fresh look at what it means to be a Singaporean on the global stage. "We tend to think of Singapore as a closed community, but once you see the diaspora, if you embrace the fact that we are everywhere in the world and that many Singaporeans are in really good jobs and influential positions, it is just really amazing," she says.

"It adds to our national identity in some inchoate way, that Singapore is not just this little island."

Lions In Winter ($19.80 with GST) is available at major bookstores.

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"I think growing up I only wanted to be a writer, but I was very conscious of the fact that, historically, most of the writers we studied were male British writers who were at least 100 years dead in the grave"
- On why she went to law school

"My brothers don't speak Chinese, so it is a bit harder for them to identify with Singapore, and they know that. They are like, "Oh my God, our sister is always going on about Singapore"
- On her brothers, who immigrated to Canada as children

"Americans tend to like fiction about Americans, about their childhood memories, parental problems and family feuds. Then you can go the Asian writer route and do Joy Luck Club-type stories, which I can't do as I wasn't making dumplings in the kitchen - I was playing Nintendo with my brothers"
- On why she isn't looking to get published in the United States