Publishing feels like a mysterious castle floating above the clouds, especially when you’re not white, you don’t live in New York, don’t have an MFA—or like me, all of the above, plus I don’t even live anywhere near America. An agent feels like an express shuttle who will whisk you past the grand gates of publishing.
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Political protest is an act of personal expression. It says: this is me, this is who I am and what I stand for, and you can’t take it away from me.
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How do we live when the sound of dying is everywhere around us? Social media creates the illusion that we are all connected, but our ongoing social isolation makes us feel more disconnected from friends and family than ever before.
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2019, was for me, that year of change. It took me several more months to do something about it, but once I did it was as if a door had opened in my heart and the pieces began to fall into place. I realised I had gotten it all wrong. I was afraid to call myself a writer because for years I had struggled to get anything published, only to realise I was trying to put the cart before the horse.
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Crash Landing on You is probably the first South Korean drama ever where:
1)North Korea isn’t the bogeyman
2)North Koreans feature prominently, the roles acted by top South Korean actors
3)North Koreans have rich emotional lives
(me, left, and my older sister)
Growing up, I never thought of myself as ‘pretty’. Pretty was my older sister, who got stopped on the street by modeling scouts and asked out by Eric Cantona when Manchester United visited Singapore. I was the awkward, bookish sister, who wore pink plastic glasses and could hang with the boys, but was never seen as a ‘girl’.
She died alone at night. One by one she had watched the lights go out around her, including her husband Tony a few years earlier. At home, she had always found something or other about him annoying, but in their final years at the old folks home, his presence became a surprising source of comfort.
I will say this off the bat: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me is the most powerful book I’ve read all year. And everyone should read it.
Between the World and Me is an electric force. And yet his words are never complex or bombastic, but slow and quiet. His words have a life of their own so that they are not just words, but an energy that leaps off the page. To read Coates is to burn; to come so close to fire something in you ignites. To read Coates, for me, is to realise the gap between the writer I am right now and the writer I want to be.
One or two years into my new job at a large Singaporean organisation, I found out that my senior from high school had been appointed to shadow a prominent minister. Over lunch, I asked him what he had learnt.