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Kite
Watching an eagle soar across the hilltop circle of Bukit Dumbar Reservoir Park, and then be ambushed from seven o’clock by a Brahminy kite with its cotton-white head and red-rust body, and seeing a large snake writhe in the eagle’s claws as the two birds fly off into the distance still squabbling, with the little…
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As in a mirror, dimly
(crossposted from Facebook/added links/might expand on my thoughts later) Someone on a Malaysian expats group shared that they were trying to learn Chinese so other people started sharing their experiences, I wrote a very cheong hei comment so I thought I’d repost it to my own timeline if anybody cares.I grew up in an anglophone…
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Oh Leila
Half an hour to curfew. The streets are already silent. People often ask me if I’m afraid to be out at night. To cycle at night. To walk at night, a woman alone in Durban. It seems foolhardy but in six years no harm has come to me on two wheels. I have had my…
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What is the taste
Recently, I like to heave open the half-jammed balcony door and take my food or coffee outside. The unspoken, superficial excuse is the piece of paper on the door of the lunchroom printed “Maximum 3 persons in this room”; I pretend to be considerate and yielding. I nod at my colleages before shutting the door…
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The labyrinth
(crossposted to Facebook) In my dreams there is a labyrinth that comprises the world. Every landmark building in my earlier life has dissolved into this amalgam. The first time I went to a hospital. The first shopping mall I saw. The stairs of Chowrasta Market. Every church my father has preached in. My schools, primary…
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The Transformer
(As with many other dreams, this takes place in a large building, which is the labyrinth that contains everything in the world.) I was in a room with white plastic tables and MDF bookshelves, perhaps a meeting room in a library or goverment office. There were several cages filled with shredded paper on some of…
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Packing the rain
One of my local colleagues, a regulatory affairs specialist who favours maxi skirts with interesting patterns, was complaining the other day about how much it had rained this year. “I’m getting so sick of it…ugh, I just want it to stop.” I didn’t have the face to tell her that the soggy lawns and flooded…
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Here
The first time I got a student visa, terrorists brought down the World Trade Center five days before I started university. I immigrated on an IR1 (spouse of a US citizen) visa on Monday and the federal government promptly shut down. …the way it’s going, if I took up citizenship, probably an asteroid would hit…
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Really terrible original jokes
These are some bad puns I made up. (not saying nobody else could have come up with them independently so don’t get mad at me if you heard them from a friend) Why is gambling addiction such a serious social problem in Singapore? Because it was founded by Raffles. (a friend who’s a curator at…