The rhythm of writing a monthly blog post often means that I skip over important events in my life. Last month, I wrote my post before departing on my mini book tour to launch the second edition of my short story collection Heaven Has Eyes. I thought that I’d write about it this month, but as I begin now the trip already seems firmly in the past. We dodged a snowstorm
Fog In Winter
February 2, 2026
At some time each winter, fog descends on Vancouver. In the West End, you walk out to blue sky and only a wisp of cloud, only for the mist to catch up with you on the street before you reach English Bay. Burrard Inlet shimmers with a patch of sunlight. Kitsilano and Point Grey loom out of the mist, only their trees visible, the suburbs seeming to have shed their
Exhibitions and the Stories they Tell
January 1, 2026
I’m preparing for the last of the transitions that have marked this year for me. I’m beginning writing this post in the early morning in our Bukit Gombak HDB flat. It’s not yet light, and the housing estate is just beginning to stir into life. The MRT has started up, and lights are beginning to come on in the flats across the playground from us. By the time that I
Reading, Rewriting and Rediscovery
December 1, 2025
I’m back in Singapore again in this peripatetic year in which residency requirements have sent me back and forth across the Pacific. After a few weeks, as always, it seems as though I’ve never been away. Our HDB estate has gone through repainting, and our block has been transformed from a palette of greys, creams and browns to a bolder series of blues. Beyond that, little has changed: the hill
The Lives of Objects
November 1, 2025
In the last few years I’ve found myself reading biographies and memoirs, filling in lives of philosophers, activists, historians, theoreticians and literary scholars whose work I read early in my career. Part of this interest results from a certain weariness of complexity for complexity’s sake in academic writing — as my powers of concentration seem to decline, I’ve become much more interested in historical rather than theoretical work, and I
Climate Anxiety
October 1, 2025
Days are getting shorter now, and mornings colder. As I write this, the temperature is still warm in the afternoon, the air clear, with just the hint of Fall. The leaves on the trees in the West End are beginning to turn. The linden on Nelson Street outside our balcony always starts early, with the leaves of a few branches turning yellow and then gold, while the others still remain
Jet Lag and the Dreams that Follow
September 1, 2025
The challenges of maintaining Singapore permanent resident status have meant that I’ve made more intercontinental flights than usual in the last year. Travelling from Singapore to Vancouver or back, you spend fourteen to sixteen hours on the one direct flight, and longer if you change planes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan. Adding the fifteen-hour time difference to this results in a strange anomaly. Fly from Vancouver to Singapore, and
In those early moments
August 1, 2025
There’s a strangeness to the first few days after landing in another country, even one that you are familiar with and that you consider home. It’s perhaps best described as a form of defamilarization, of the type Russian Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky write about. In everyday life, through habituation, what we see and our interpretation of it are run together, so that we instantly and unknowingly no longer see
In Summer, A Winter’s Night
July 1, 2025
Over the last month I’ve been drafting a short story, progressing, as I tend to do these days, very slowly. Most days I return have to force myself back to the coal face of writing. When I’m there I look around. I read back through the story, editing it. And then I get into flow, and add a paragraph or two, a few hundred words at most. At some point,
In Japan, Walking
June 1, 2025
In Vancouver now, the leaves are very full in the West End. The weather’s been cool, with some rain, but on sunny days there’s that familiar intense play of light and shade, especially when you cycle on Haro or on Cardero in and out of the shade of horse chestnut and oak trees, and have to be very careful that car drivers see you at junctions. In the park, azaleas