Posts tagged "singapore"
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Memories of Home
Every overseas Singaporean has the same fear: that when we return, we will not know our way home. Our city builds and tears down much quicker than most other places. Nothing is safe. The price of progress: everyone's memories. No time for nostalgia, or poetry, when we can have... growth. When I move between worlds, my…
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Tan Boon Chye
When I came home (to Singapore) a couple of days ago, I instructed the taxi driver to go to the Caltex station at East Coast. Most cabbies know this place, but he didn't. He's 74 years old, so he only knew this spot as "Tan Boon Chye & Co" (brain GPS never update firmware). Tan Boon Chye & Co was the…
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Paths
12 years ago this time I was deciding where I should go, what I should study, at university. I was also four months away from deciding I would try to be happy in spite of my newfound queerness. 11 years ago this time I was in Kolkata, volunteering with an organization, not knowing I would go on to do that in the…
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The Manual of Intimacy
First, meet a girl for the first time on the lawn in front of her house. Sit very closely by each other. Say hello, I'm a poet. What do you do? When she replies, I'm an entrepreneur. But I also run a charity. Laugh, and give her whisky, the same one that you've been nursing. She comes and she gives you a cigarette, and…
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Split Language Disorders
It is a well-documented fact: multi-lingual people have multiple personalities. I am no different, though I was only recently cognizant of that. Of how my languages affect the way I perceive myself, present myself to the world. How I trade, make contracts; how I fall in love. For as long as I can remember, 'foreign…
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Swatow
When my people speak of who we are and where we come from We do not say, China. When my relatives reclaim our collective past, Those words—China—dance on our lips, foreign. We do not say China. We do not say China at all. Instead, we are the people of the coast. We are the subjects of the Tang Dynasty. We are the…
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Singapore's So-Called Moral Majority
Call it what you will - if there are some among us in Singapore who fashion ourselves the conservative majority, the silent majority, the moral majority - that line, and its consequent political implementation, is bound to fail. It is not enough to view what we are currently witnessing as a 'culture war', as 'us vs…
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The Freedom to Love
Ten years ago the Internet was a different place. Singapore was a different place. While it wasn't exactly the sort of pitchfork-wielding, gay-vilifying environment you would imagine, you certainly did not feel like people understood. You felt, at that time, at odds with large swathes of society, as though it would…
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What I Learned
Two years ago I found out I have an autoimmune disease. I will always have it. It changed everything about my life from what I do for money to where I live. It prompted a reinvention of myself which was at turns painful, but ultimately necessary. This is what I learned. Never forego sleep. "You'll sleep more over…
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Culture Kitchen 2: Little Myanmar
If you are anything like me, you've walked by Peninsula Plaza all the time and perhaps even entered it when you've needed to buy cameras and stuff. You've probably also wondered about all the wondrous things there. What is the paste they are mixing, what is this delicious-looking food and how can I have some of it, if…
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The Geography of Hope
At 18 I certainly believed I knew everything. I did not know just how much it'd hurt this boy's heart if I told him the inevitable: that I was in love with someone he could never be-a woman. We went to our favourite bar and sat glumly while he tried to drink away his pain and anger. At that time it felt as though life…
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Rebuilding
Almost exactly two years ago I was, too, on a flight to India.Only then I did not know exactly how drastic a turn my life would take on when I returned. More and more of my friends are getting diagnosed with diseases similar to mine. Autoimmune diseases are the new black.Across all of these experiences the one we've…
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I Follow Cities
When I think of the 1980s, I think of the news. In English and Mandarin, both brought to you by Raymond Weil. When I think of the 1990s, I think of Michael Stipe's sonic-drenched wailing about his religion, or his lack thereof. And about the one sorry period of global history when everyone wondered too much about…
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Why I'm Hosting Culture Kitchen
This is a project which has been on my mind for some time now. We've been planning it for a while. A part of this is a response to a worrying trend of anti-foreigner sentiment (c.f. the responses to a drive to raise funds for victims of last year's Downtown Line accident: here and here). The other part — which I…
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74 Weeks Later
Once or twice in your life, something, or someone, gets under your skin and stays there. Most of the time it's because you have let them. It does not need to be tragic; it can even be, at times, up-lifting. All of the time it changes your life in some big, unalterable way. Then you learn to deal.Seventy four weeks ago…
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Over and Over
Some days ago, a boy I used to date as a wee teenager (yes, a boy!) reached out to me on Facebook. It's funny where we are now: he's now a hotshot international banker, I'm now an international vagrant (I don't really know how else to describe myself), instead of the awkward, school-uniformed boy and girl we once were.…
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The One About Having It All
Also available on Medium. If you were to meet me on the streets of Singapore, you probably would not peg me for ‘gay’. Apparently, ‘gay woman’ or ‘lesbian’ has to be one or several of the following: short-haired, oddball, butch-like; a flaming dyke. You would expect me to show up in a flannel shirt and in Birkenstock…
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Love, Singapore
I wrote a small piece for Elle Singapore (Sept 2013) about what it's like to be lesbian in Singapore. Available on the newsstands now, page 147. Mention to someone in passing that you're lesbian and one or all of the following are bound to happen: intrigue ("tell me more"), surprise ("You don't look…
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Before & After The Fire
1961. Rain falling on zinc roofs. Neighbours having sex Hoping they won't be suay again. They have no money. The news coming from the sole television set. Children peeping for a glimpse of world affairs. Condensed milk cans filled with coffee. Ah Ba will have to go to the office. The office is also a shed. He carries…
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Sitrep
Frak yes: my Battlestar Galactica tattoo. I got a Battlestar Galactica tattoo I'm pretty pleased about that It's one half of the pair of wings and Caprica constellation that Starbuck gets when she marries Anders Within a couple of hours of getting it, a random stranger proposed to me — saying she would get the other…
51 posts tagged "singapore"