Posts tagged "writingelsewhere"

My article on Indonesia in Brink, last month

I've started writing articles for Brink, a new media publication by the same people behind the Atlantic. My first piece is on Tech’s Role in Reaching Indonesia’s Rising Middle Class.

Videos Games & Political Consciousness

I wrote this piece some time ago about video games for Memory Insufficient, a games history ezine. This is it.

Click this link to download the PDF.

I’ve spent the last couple of nights binge-playing through the Mass Effect trilogy, which reminds me a little bit too much of the late nights I’ve pulled work- ing on political campaigns and social causes in the past. The setup is about the same: all of the above require a single-minded approach to The Goal. Total dedication is best. Showers can be skipped. So can sustenance. The Goal can be anything: win an election, stay out of trouble, vanquish aliens or make some connections. All other objectives, like rescuing civilians or being a decent person, are often secondary. The joy you feel from completing a mission on a planet feels as real as any real life political victory you’ve ever thrown your weight behind.

One day you’re editing a speech for a politician, the next you’re fighting a fire — in the hull of the ship, or on Twitter. It’s all interconnected. I’m an avid gamer, political otaku and all around nerd, so perhaps I feel that way because my favourite games are the ones that in- clude, even combine, some elements of all of the above. Just like history, games — and their plotlines and char- acters — are written by the victors: those who control the battlefield. Some gamers like to believe that the game worlds we so love are or should be free of the in- fluence of politics and ideology; that they exist as works of art alone in a vacuum and should be appreciated as such. Others have written volumes about identity poli- tics and video games (and indeed there are many prob- lematic aspects associated with being a female, Asian and gay gamer).

Political capital is often spent by the ones who don’t know they possess it. Games are often presented as being mere works of fiction. Some of them, like Assassin’s Creed, even tell you as much, by starting off with a disclaimer calling it a work of fiction inspired by historical events. Yet being the nerdy amateur writer and political historian that I am, I’m more keen to line up the story they don’t tell you — in-between the cutscenes, behind the sto- ryboard and everywhere except onscreen. When you make a decision to assume a character or interact with one, how much of it was already made for you?

Let’s start from the beginning.

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 simply led me into various unforeseen encounters, at turns dramatic and at others explosive, as if I were but a mere spectator. The woman I loved walked into the bar. I stole a glimpse. I could not look away. Even without saying anything at all, he knew it was her.

She met the man she was to marry that evening after I left.

There was a girl I noticed at the campus coffee shop.

I liked her pants. And her hair. It helped that I sat at that coffee shop every day nursing a cigarette because that's what I did when I was young and stupid. She would walk by, and I would try to find out who she was.

Every day we passed each other in that little corridor or at the coffee shop. I don't remember how, but she agreed to come on a date with me.

We went to a place I still go to, then on a 46-day backpacking trip to India. I bravely led the way. By the second week we were at the Taj Mahal. We had waited to see the sunset because I thought it might be good to attempt romantic gestures sometimes. As the sun set over Agra I reached for her hand. She pushed it away.

We broke up at the Taj Mahal, which was fitting because we had also fallen in love at the Angkor Wat. From one wonder to another, she still could not erase the shame she felt from being with a woman. Even in a country where no one knew her name.

The next 30 days were epic and vengeful, full of sadness and train schedules.

The woman I loved four years ago did not marry the man she met at the bar. I may or may not have had anything to do with it.

The truth was that the more I sunk into the sadness, the more I elevated our mythology. It was not the great love which never was. We were not star-crossed lovers. Not only had I not grown from that point, I had even regressed. Waking up with her every morning made me feel I would lose her any time now. I was a little bit older now but really I was still the awestruck girl in my school uniform and my tie, wanting to know how I could punch above my weight because I can, and God she's hot.

We were the cartographers of silence which began with a lie, later snowballing into a mountain of mythology and characters with their own CliffsNotes and paths strewn with sad poetry and despair and sadness.

When you throw yourself at a wall repeatedly, it's okay not to know when to stop, especially if you enjoy feeling sorry for yourself.

But I had adventures to go on and mythology was too heavy to come along for that ride. I threw it away.

I don't dream very much, but that year I had a vivid dream: I dreamed of a tall, slender woman with a soft voice who captivated me completely in that dream. I felt happy in that dream. I was a new person in that dream. I grew to be a better person with this figment of my dream, in my dream.

When I awoke from that dream I was with such a woman barrelling down the River Skrang in Borneo on a hare-brained plan to see tattoos and drink moonshine with the tribal elders of the tattoo artists we knew in the big city. We hit a rock and the river rushed around us as if it wanted to have us whole.

We went places without names on maps. Places without maps. We were apart a lot, but she drove 300 miles to meet me all the time and we travelled tens of thousands of miles together when we could. I ended up travelling tens of thousands of miles each time I needed to see her, which was all the time. We met in Istanbul. We made video postcards about the places we were in without each other, and we sent them to each other every other week.

Eventually we decided it was time to try to steer our way home.

I don't even remember what home means any more. I had wandered a few hundred thousand kilometres, some of it by foot. Mostly by bus, train or taxi. Even boat.

Home was where she was. Some days it was London. Others, it was Kuala Lumpur.

I found a little house I thought we could be happy in, got a dog, and perhaps for a time we were. It feels as faraway as all of my 18-year-old memories.

I don't remember when I stopped trying. I was back at the Taj Mahal again, and everything about that monument still fills me with despair. I'm never going back there ever again. I looked at her. I felt despair. I didn't know how to fix us. I just stopped trying. Or talking. I held her hand on a cold New Year's Eve in Jodhpur. I felt nothing. I kissed her. She did not want to kiss me back. I fell asleep with my back turned, full of anger and secret tears. It had been that way for a while now.

A few months earlier I asked her to marry me. I was met with nervous laughter and panic. In hindsight, it was a bad idea. Everyone knew she would say no.

Except me. Ever the optimist.

The computer says no.

Everybody knows it. But I didn't get the memo. It was always no.

--

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a lesbian in this society, and it all comes down to this: other people. It's that I have to automatically assume that all of the following are bonuses, not expectations: having my love recognized for the purposes of property, tax and inheritance; attending a partner's family functions without unnecessary outcry and suspicion; knowing that if I were to be in a medical emergency, my life partner would be legally allowed to make decisions on my behalf. In other words, to even hope for my future life partner to be perceived as anything other than a complete stranger, is going to have to be taken on other people's good faith.

As outsiders, that's all we have to go on: the goodwill of other people. The readiness of other people to stop thinking of us as criminals, sexual deviants and perverts. If I hold hands with a woman I love, I am rubbing it in a conservative society's face and being too declarative about my sexual orientation; if I walk side by side with one, the man who catcalls and makes lewd comments at us bordering on sexual harassment, is just, after all, being a man and is entitled to his opinions about my body and hers.

As for someone who generally feels like there is nothing in the world I cannot do, all I can do is to keep on doing what I do best-live my life as best as I know how, be kind to old people and animals, donate to charity sometimes, avoid premature death-and dream about the day I hope to see in my lifetime: when our lovers will be our equals, and our love as deserving.

A Drinkable History of My Family

The following piece is an original piece written specially for Ceriph #3, published by Math Paper Press. It's on sale at my favourite bookstore, BooksActually, and also at Kinokuniya..

Fish Sauce

We are Teochew, people of the coast.

Fish sauce, more than hot food, opera, more than even yam paste desserts - is what defines us as a people. It is what we live for, what fuels us; there is no life without it. We live for the very hot, and the very salty.

My grandfather was a sturdy, if a little tiny, Teochew man who was much shorter than his wife. Like many patriarchs of his generation, if he even had a name, you would have never known. You simply thought of him as ah gong. On his birthdays when we sang birthday songs to him we did so in Mandarin, Teochew, and then in English. Every time we got to his name we were usually stumped. He did not like us saying his name anyway - it sounded too much like "turtle", he said - so we clapped, said "happy birthday ah gong tee hee hee", laughed at the incongruence, and stuffed our faces with cake.

Ah gong introduced me to fish sauce. He must have. We were close for a Chinese grandparent-grandchild duo of the eighties - we played Chinese chess, and snakes and ladders, in near silence most afternoons - but he was at his most animated when we ate porridge with preserved vegetables and steamed fish. Which was every afternoon.

If you hold your chopsticks that way you are going to move very far from home.

Kopi-C Siew Dai

Utter silence punctuated by occasional outbursts of snark. That hum of snarky silence dominated our lives, or at least mine. On hot Singapore afternoons in our tiny three-room flat, I never noticed the silence. Those damned SBC afternoon dramas masked the silence. The plod of Grandma's food processor distracted me from the silence. The jingle of the Raymond Weil sponsored news programmes were so loud I could not hear the silence. But the snark always jumped straight through the roof.

Next to fish sauce, we liked coffee most. It was any kind of caffeine really, but coffee was king. More than that, it was the promise of a decently made local coffee, the sock kopi, with two fingers' worth with condensed milk and a very loud kopitiam server shouting in Hokkien, that we liked best. Those damned Hokkien people can't talk softly.

We went to the kopitiam together in the mornings, on the mornings when I could wake up anyway. Ah gong liked routine, so much so that I have never seen him in anything other than a singlet and a pair of blue bermudas and brown, serious grandpa sandals. He had a wardrobe full of the same thing for different ages. He could dress you up exactly like him if you asked him to. This routine man's routine began before daybreak at the seaside.

He would walk by the seaside, smirking at the taichi parade, not understanding why anybody would submit themselves to the torture of wearing red shirts with white pants. He would walk by the streamers of the Chinese dance contingent fielded by the neighbourhood's grannies, not understanding why anybody would wave little pieces of cloth around to awful music at 7 in the morning.

He would understand, or at least try to, why the kopitiam could never get his order right ("because Ah Zoh got fired from his job and Ah Orh, who was hired to replace him, is a little slow in the brain"). He could fathom everything he needed to know in a second, but he could never understand why his coffee was never-quite-right everywhere he went.

Lou Swa Ga Hai

When the people of the coast speak of our motherland, we do not say China. We do not say we are zhong guo ren - when we speak of the zhong guo ren we are speaking of those people who look like us but who are really from someplace else. We say we are the people of the Tang Dynasty, we say we are the people from the coast. In our language there is no way of saying we are anything else. Even today we say our "home", this home most of us have never been to, is in the mountain, by the sea.

The zhong guo ren eat rice and vegetables. We eat real porridge, unlike the Cantonese who break their rice grains and pretend to make soup. If a single rice grain breaks we throw all our porridge away, and start again.

There is more water in our porridge than there is grain, but not too much. The grains should clump together, but not too much. The porridge should, like us, be of the mountain and of the sea. A bowl of porridge must physically resemble a mountain in a sea, swa ga hai. Mountain and sea.

If the Cantonese, who believe themselves to be the masters of Chinese cuisine, have perfected the roast, we are the kings of the braise.

A bowl of our porridge might taste of nothing unless you are one of us. If you were one of us, our gaginang, you would know how to eat it - with the amount of fish sauce, with a dozen side dishes. With a salted egg and with a big bowl of braised pork and eggs.

Eating the rest of the meal is simple, anyone can get that.

Every time ah gong ate his Teochew porridge, which was everyday at lunch, he would pour a large amount of braise sauce into his porridge, making it become the colour of dark earth.

Lou, ga swa ka hai. Braise, and seas and mountains, he would say.

Without a comma, and with one small shift in intonation, eating this meal with him everyday was about raising, not braising, seas and mountains each time he spoke at length with me.

Ah gong may have been a man of few words but we drank the sea and ate the mountains together everyday.

Bubble Tea

At the hospital he was in some pain. Not a lot, but you could tell no matter how naturally stoic he tried to remain, he was not going to make it. I had to go to see him from Europe, made it just barely in time, and I like to think he waited for me. Or for something.

In the year since I moved out of the country I had been back only for Chinese New Year, and I had missed his last moments where he had been confined in a wheelchair. He could no longer go on daily walks, nor could he go to the toilet unassisted, but he kept his mind steely by asking everyone endless questions about their lives. He kept his wits about by observing our neighbours and their daily lives from his vantage point, his wheelchair.

The telephone was not made for people like my ah gong. Skype was an invention he could tolerate a little better, and only for the joy of watching someone on the other side of the world appear on the screen. The moment your image was formed he was no longer interested in speaking in sentences to you. That whole year all we ever spoke about was about burqahs and bak chor mee. I was in the Middle East that whole year and he was convinced I led a bak chor mee – less existence inside a burqah. Which was only half true (the pork, not the fashion sense).

For someone like ah gong who led a relatively difficult life and who was not really a part of the modern world with all its trappings and assumptions, he did not get to - nor did he want to - experience anymore than what he already had, which was adoption, migration, war, poverty and distance.

He had few cravings other than for Teochew porridge and preserved olive leaves, steamed fish and fish sauce.

When we were by his side, teary, he could not speak much by that point. He had no teary goodbyes or pent-up messages for anyone. He had no epiphanies but silence.

But he asked for his daughter.

When she, crying as only she could, sidled up to him he gathered his breath and whispered, "Bring me bubble tea. Apparently it's delicious."

We searched everywhere for bubble tea, we really did, but did not search fast enough. He could not wait.

And then Michael Jackson died the next day and the whole world forgot about the man who had never had bubble tea.

Sometimes I wish could have been there when he finally gave up on life and on bubble tea. He would have ranted, in Teochew, that tea isn't meant to be this milky, and what the hell are these bloody balls?

Private Islands for Everyone

I've been spending a lot of time in the Philippines lately...

There comes a point in every traveller’s life when the experience of going to a foreign place no longer feels the same, nor as exciting as it used to be when she first began. Cities blur into similar skylines, restaurants and bars. Non-cities remain precisely that—good in small doses but rarely more. The magic of travel fades into a succession of airports, suited executives and boring business hotels, or a kaleidoscope of lobster-red package tourists and concrete bungalows on dirty beaches.

Even I could not avoid that fate.

Having travelled around many parts of the world on a student’s budget not too long ago, I used to skip perfectly affordable, mid-range hotels in favour of Rs100 rooms. I was used to travelling for three months or more at a time, and had a strict travel philosophy: “It’s got to be all or nothing. Either luxury on a private island scale, or whatever I can get for next to nothing.”

The Philippines, with its 7,107 islands, was especially appealing. Under-visited and often overlooked in favour of Thailand and Indonesia, the Philippines has a certain charm that sets on slowly, but lingers on long after you’ve left. It’s so large, with each region and group of islands distinct from each other, that it feels disjointed; and so disorganized and chaotic that it can be hard to pinpoint what exactly the Filipino experience is about. Is it about the colonial heritage of Intramuros in Old Manila, or the pine trees and mountain ranges around Baguio, where strawberries, ube (yam) jams and hot springs rule?

Why the Philippines is not overrun with tourists is the reason why it should be: It can be experienced in so many spectacularly different ways.

Download the PDF here

Read online

Southeast Asia for Lovers

I have a piece in the Valentine's Day issue of Mint, the Indian paper. Read it here. I have not written much since my cover story in Reader's Digest Asia in July 2010, so I'm feeling pretty good about my "comeback". I will be writing more regularly, here, as well as for a handful of publications.

Why I Am Still A Feminist

Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This is from 2006. It has also been republished in print in GASPP, A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose.

I am still a feminist because I am no longer ashamed of saying I am one. I have grown tired for apologizing for so many of the things I am: for being liberal, lesbian, anti-Bush and anti-war, a Christian that hates the fundamentalists. Anymore to apologize for, and I may have to apologize for being Chinese.

I was feminist before I was lesbian. I was feminist before I was liberal. I was feminist before I knew feminism had become synonymous with ‘bra burning’ and ‘aggressive’ (I like my bras too much, and I prefer to be passive-aggressive). I was feminist the moment I was acutely aware that being a girl meant there were many things I could not do, and so much more I was expected to.

The first feminist I knew was my father, who taught me I must never bow to the demands of any man, and must never let any man suppress my intellect or free will. He must have known I was a feminist from the time I was 4, when, I did not believe the distribution of potato chips was fair and equal, and demanded he demonstrate by bringing out actual weighing scales, that I had as much as my male brothers and cousins.

In primary school, I was an avid soccer player. About as good as the boys, the boys told me. I played every recess time and after school, every day. I was the midfielder with stamina, who was fast as well and was everywhere and anywhere on the pitch at all times. Good enough, that the boys thought nothing of inserting me into their ambitious tournament plans for the next few years: we were a team. I started the first match in the tournament with the brand new soccer boots I paid for myself. At half time, the referee — his name was Mr Azman — said I couldn’t play, ever again. Even though this was an informal tournament in school, with no rulebook or precedents, he said that’s just the way it is: no girls allowed.

By the time I was 18, I thought I already had a pretty good grip on the “girl” issue. During one class debate, a member of the opposition made a disparaging remark about how sometimes rape victims “were just asking for it”. Livid, I made a comment which led him to say: “Let’s go outside, I’ll show you how good it is to be raped.” This same person is on his way to becoming a lawyer, and I fear.

I’m turning 21 this year and while I don’t play soccer anymore, as a photographer I’m told “they want guys, because they look more like photographers”, as a Mac Evangelist in retail I’m told they “want to consult the guys”, even though I know as much. Guys still hit on my girlfriend in front of me because I evidently don’t count and I’m not the real thing; if I’m opinionated, I’m being either aggressive or emotional, and if I’m stoic, I’m heartless.

As a member of the majority race and male, you may not believe it when I say that sexism is alive and well, because you have never encountered it. You see female managers and female CEOs, females in positions above you, and you fear for your male superiority. What you don’t see is the sacrifice only women are made to make when they choose career, how they could be similarly qualified and similarly excellent or better leaders, yet climb slower and earn less, how if they are assertive they are aggressive female bosses, how if they are not then they are ineffectual leaders and submissive. What you don’t see is how she had to fight hard for most things that come easily to you.

As a member of the majority race and male, you sat next to me in school today at the library cafe, talking about how your girlfriend is not as loud as pornstars when you “fuck her”, wondering if that’s because “she doesn’t know how to express her pleasure”, then your friends all started talking about blowjobs and said in no unclear terms, that the world revolves around “your cocks”.

I will continue to be a feminist until the day my classmates are not seen as objects, whose pleasure is necessarily held up against porn industry ideals, until the day their pleasure is not dictated by the selfish dicks they date.

As a member of the majority race and male, you fathered one of my closest friends. When your daughter complained to you that she used to be touched inappropriately by your friend’s son, when your daughter discussed with you the topic of male infidelity, you laughed and said, “We’re men, we’re like that.”

I will continue to be a feminist until the day every father stands up for their daughter’s rights, the way my father does.

As a member of the majority race and male, everything you might be culpable for is “because she asked for it.” Can’t have children? She must be infertile. Want to use condoms? Only if she pays for it. She doesn’t seem to like sex with you? There must be something wrong with her. Pregnant? She sleeps around. Sex video spreads on the internet? It’s her morals. Lesbian? They haven’t met the right man, and you just might be the one.

I will continue to be a feminist until the day my friends’ fathers stop explaining away their affairs based upon what their wives supposedly lack.

So when you say, those feminists, in the same breath as those nazis, those communists, those crazy bra burning women, you need to know that the object of our hatred is never men — it is what some men do to us.

I will continue to be a feminist until the day my uncle in the flesh and blood stops being an asshole, and his immigrant wife is not afraid to divorce him and press charges.

I will continue to be a feminist until it is realized that while it is best for every child to have his mother and father, if the father is a dangerous man he has to be kept away from her beautiful young children before he does any permanent damage.

I will continue to be a feminist until it is realized the existence of many good men does not mean it is irrelevant to be a feminist. They are our fathers, our boyfriends and husbands, our sons. All it takes is just one man, that isn’t good, to destroy the lives of too many women around the world, and among us now.

This is why I will remain a feminist, I’m not apologetic for it, I won’t burn my bra, I don’t hate you, and no, you can’t watch either.