Too Many Thoughts

Singapore wonders: can you dissent, and discuss dissent, while still loving your nation?

2019-10-13T17:24:00.000-04:00

As with my post on the (all-too-recent!) brownface saga, this is a summary of links on the Singapore government- and establishment-led inaccurate characterising of dissent as traitorous behaviour, and thus of activists, artists and independent journalists and scholars who express dissent as traitors to Singapore.

If I've missed anything meaty, please let me know. The information here was last updated on 14 October 2019.

This series of events began when news broke that a Yale-NUS enrichment programme, "Dissent And Resistance In Singapore", to be taught by playwright Alfian Sa'at, had been cancelled two weeks before it was scheduled to begin (Seow Bei Yi, "Yale-NUS cancels programme to introduce students to 'modes of dissent and resistance in Singapore'", The Straits Times, 14 September 2019).

Initial statements on the cancellation of the course:

Alfian Sa'at. Excerpt: "For me, the idea of dissent is a simple one. It is the art of saying no. Not just saying no to the state but also to certain ideologies, practices, ways of thinking and doing. If we cannot make space and listen to the person that says no, then democracy dies." (14 September 2019)
Yale University, stating that it would undertake a fact-finding report (14 September 2019).
Kirsten Han. Excerpt: "Funnily enough, this cancellation teaches us all more about the state of dialogue and dissent in Singapore than if the Week 7 LAB had actually proceeded." (14 September 2019)
Meanwhile, Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan-Jin wondered on Facebook, "Is this [the cancelled Yale-NUS programme] the liberal education that we need to get us into the future?" (14 September 2019) (Seriously, Mr Tan?!)

As online discussion intensified over the next week:

Alfian made public his proposed programme for the course, while disputing comparisons with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong and highlighting the problems with how the terms dissent and dissident are framed in mainstream discourse in Singapore (16 September 2019).
An edited video of unknown provenance and making false claims about Han's presentation at a the forum on civil disobedience in 2016 was widely circulated online, even though she refuted its claims (16 September 2016).
Sidenote: you can watch for yourself a video recording of what Han actually said at the forum on 26 November 2016, which I attended (and was invigorated by!). That video has been available on YouTube since two days after that event; a transcript is also available.
Alfian noted that "an online mob [was] attacking and spreading disinformation about Kirsten Han" in particular. Excerpt: "... if you have issues with the programme, or with dissent, please direct your hostility at me instead. Leave Kirsten alone. She’s a strong person but I think she can do without your character assassination and hysterical fearmongering. At some point, it’s just harassment and bullying. And I think some people have pointed out that perhaps she’s being attacked more ferociously than me because she’s a woman." (17 September 2019)
Yale-NUS student Shawn Hoo responded to Tan Chuan-Jin's abovementioned Facebook post and lucidly explained why "Dissent is not a bad word." ("We Who Differ In Sentiment – Rethinking 'Dissent'", The Octant, 18 October 2019)
Grace Yeoh highlighted the role of dissent, as articulated by Lee Kuan Yew before he became prime minister ("We Forget That Singapore Was Built From Dissent and Resistance", Rice Media). The article includes a correction, highlighted by PJ Thum, on Lee's role in the Fajar trial (21 September 2019).
The Straits Times ran an English translation of a commentary by Goh Choon Kang, "Singapore does not need a 'colour revolution'" (21 September 2019). The piece first appeared in Singapore's Chinese-language broadsheet Lianhe Zaobao on 18 September 2019; it's archived and roughly translated here in Kirsten Han's Facebook post. Goh's commentary implied that the "people organising courses on protests locally" wanted to start a 'colour revolution' as in Hong Kong---despite Han's categorical statements to the contrary in the Hong Kong Free Press (16 September 2019) and on Facebook (21 September 2019).

On 25 September 2019, the minister for home affairs K. Shanmugam described independent Singapore news websites The Online Citizen and New Naratif as being used "to advance foreign interests" (Kenneth Cheng, "Shanmugam questions funding sources behind TOC, reiterates need for laws to curb foreign interference", TODAY, 25 September 2019). Shanmugam's speech included inaccurate descriptions of New Naratif co-founder Kirsten Han's political positions (see her refutations below).

Han's email to the TODAY journalist Kenneth Cheng addressed Shanmugam's inaccurate accusations (25 September 2019). In response, TODAY edited their online story, but did not mark the changes as corrections (which would have been the ethical and industry-standard way to do it, as Rice Media did in the abovementioned post).
Teo Soh Lung's Facebook post, "Foreign interference?", highlighted the parallels between the latest government accusations against activists and the Internal Security operations Coldstore and Spectrum in 1963 and 1987 respectively (27 September 2019). Background: Teo was detained during Operation Spectrum and imprisoned without trial for two and a half years; her memoir Beyond the Blue Gates (2010) is a chilling account of this experience.
Kirsten Han, in "On accusations and gaslighting" explained her political and editorial positions, in the face of inaccurate characterisations by anonymous sources on Facebook and the minister for law K. Shanmugam. "This sort of rhetoric is playing with fire, turning Singaporeans against their fellow citizens by painting them as dangerous threats to the nation (especially in a country where the militarism, nationalism, and the siege mentality are all fairly widespread). It reminds me of the increasingly shrill rhetoric that’s been whipped up by populist politicians elsewhere, such as Donald Trump in the US or the Brexiters in the UK. The conspiracy theories, the turning of people against one another, the whipping up of fear and hate has been horrifying to watch unfold. It’s scary and disappointing to see parallels in my own home country. Such baseless accusations also lower the rationality and quality of public discourse, spreading misinformation/disinformation and distorted claims rather than encouraging actual engagement with the question of foreign interference, a complex issue that spans economic, social, and national spheres." (26 September 2019)
Han's responses were reported in Grace Ho, "New Naratif co-founder Kirsten Han responds to Shanmugam's remarks on foreign interference", The Straits Times (27 October 2019).
Which Cherian George analysed to show how the Straits Times article unethically supports "the Singapore government's attacks on independent journalists" (27 September 2019).
The news was covered in the Washington Post: Shibani Mahtani, "At Yale’s venture in Singapore, a canceled course on dissent prompts censorship claims" (27 September 2019).
Meanwhile, Alfian Sa'at gave a first-hand account of participating in a democracy classroom organised by New Naratif (27 September 2019).
Nabil Khairul Anwar on the problem with how Singapore's PAP-led government inconsistently characterises what constitutes "foreign interference" (28 September 2019).
Also meanwhile, during on an official trip to Canada, the minister for health Khaw Boon Wan participated in a climate rally march (28 September 2019). (Sidenote: Kirsten Han's brief take on it.)
A view from the outside: Bhavan Jaipragas, "As Singapore gears up to fight foreign interference, could political critics be caught in the cross hairs?", South China Morning Post (29 September 2019).

On 29 September 2019, Yale University released a statement and its fact-finding report, contending that "the decision to cancel the module was made internally and without government interference in the academic independence of the College." Its fact-finding report by Prof Pericles Lewis additionally asserted that Yale-NUS had been concerned with "legal risk" and with the "inadequacy of the materials" submitted by Alfian Sa'at.

Alfian responded with an accounts of his experiences with Yale-NUS: "I don't like to be scapegoated" (1 October 2019), followed by more extensive statements recounting his experience (3-5 October 2019). The latter series of statements were originally published by Alfian on Facebook; they have been compiled at Academia.SG, with links to the original Facebook posts.
The news was covered by US-based Inside Higher Ed: Elizabeth Redden, "Canceled Course Renews Academic Freedom Concerns" (1 October 2019).
Singapore's ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh, in a speech at the Singapore Bicentennial Conference organised by the Institute of Policy Studies, said, "The contestation of ideas is a necessary part of democracy. We should therefore not blacklist intellectuals, artists, writers because they criticise the Government or hold dissenting views." He name-checked Tan Pin Pin, Sonny Liew and Jeremy Tiang as artists whose works the Singapore government should not have withdrawn funding from---which might be the first time someone in the government has stated as much plainly (as reported in the Straits Times [Linette Lai, "Tommy Koh hopes 4G leaders' priorities include upholding racial harmony, a more equal society"]; the speech isn't otherwise available). (1 October 2019)
Donald Low noted that the issue is about academic leadership in Singapore universities and "the sad state of public and political discourse in Singapore." (5 October 2019).
Poet and founder of Singapore Unbound, Koh Jee Leong, wrote to the president of Yale University regarding Alfian's refutations of the fact-finding report (6 October 2019).
Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh Nehal discussed "justifiable doubts as to the correctness of the report’s conclusion that Yale-NUS had 'legitimate academic and legal reasons to cancel the module'." ("Safeguarding the spirit of academic freedom and open inquiry in Singapore: Concerns raised by Yale-NUS’ cancellation of the module on ‘Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore’ proposed by Mr Alfian Sa’at", Academia.SG (13 October 2019).

On 7 October 2019, minister for education Ong Ye Kung stated in Parliament that the cancellation of Alfian Sa'at's proposed programme was because "MOE's stand is we cannot have such activity in our schools or institutes of higher learning. Political conscientisation is not the taxpayer's idea of what education means". Ong also read a few lines of Alfian's poem "Singapore You Are Not My Country" to throw doubt on his loyalty to Singapore (see also Rei Kurohi, "Yale-NUS saga: Academic freedom can't be carte blanche for misusing academic institutions for political advocacy, says Ong Ye Kung", The Straits Times).

Alfian's rejoinders to Ong Ye Kung's parliamentary statement, rebutting a number of Ong's accusations, and in particular contending with Ong's characterisation of Alfian's poem, "Singapore You Are Not My Country" (7 October 2019; the full poem can be read here).
Sonny Liew responded to Ong Ye Kung's parliamentary statement with a political cartoon on the "lesser spotted dissident-receiving-significant-foreign-funding", while Kirsten Han pointed out the problem with Ong's characterisation of "political conscientisation" (7 October 2019).
Nominated Member of Parliament Anthea Ong made a parliamentary statement on youth activism: "The narrative must move beyond “activists as troublemakers". (7 October 2019)
Singapore's ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh responded to Ong Ye Kung's statement, saying "We should not demonise Alfian Sa'at." (7 October 2019)
Former Straits Times journalist Berthan Henson opined "I blame Yale-NUS" and wished the government had not addressed this issue in Parliament, leaving Singaporeans to "think for ourselves" (Yahoo! News, 7 October 2019)---to which Yale-NUS student Faris Joraimi made several astute rejoinders (8 October 2019).
As Andrew Loh noted, the methods adopted by the two Cabinet ministers in the above statements are related: "In both instances, the words were taken out of context, misrepresented, to fit a certain narrative." (8 October 2019)
The Online Citizen provided a round-up of responses to date (Danisha Hakeem, "Playwright Alfian Sa’at “a loving critic” of S’pore, freedom of speech includes right to disagree with govt: Veteran diplomat Tommy Koh", 8 October 2019).
Poet Amanda Chong published on Facebook her reading of Alfian's poem, which she had given at the Singapore Perspectives Conference in 2017 (8 October 2019).
Other supportive responses from Singaporean writers and artists were reported by Olivia Ho, "Artists rally around Alfian Sa'at after Ong Ye Kung cites his poem during Yale-NUS debate", The Straits Times; Tessa Oh and Ng Jun Sen, "Yale-NUS dissent module: Tommy Koh, arts figures back playwright Alfian Sa’at after Ong Ye Kung criticism", TODAY; and Bhavan Jaipragas, "Singapore poets have a few choice words as minister Ong Ye Kung criticises Alfian Sa’at", South China Morning Post (8 October 2019). Nabilah Said further highlighted "5 Singapore poems not to quote out of context" (Arts Equator, 13 October 2019).
Pan Jie wrote "Dear Ministers, Stop Accusing Singaporeans Of Disloyalty" (Rice Media, 9 October 2019).
The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development issued a statement, "Singapore: End state-sanctioned disinformation campaign against Kirsten Han" (10 October 2019).
New Naratif co-founder and independent historian PJ Thum responded to Ong Ye Kung on why it is not traitorous to suggest celebrating Malaysia Day: "It is a day that should be celebrated as a milestone of our nation’s progress, as we emerged from the oppression of British colonialism. It is ludicrous that we have a government which commemorates the bicentennial of our colonisation by the British, but then not only refuses to celebrate the day of our independence from the colonisers but also accuses those who do celebrate it of treason." (10 October 2019)
Andrew Loh brought up the matter of People's Action Party (PAP) running PAP Community Foundation kindergartens. Loh wrote, "In short, a political party sets up a pre-school educational chain of kindergartens, has its political emblem or logo incorporated in the chain's logo which is used in the kindergartens, and the chain gets grants from the govt. Now, I'm honestly trying to understand if all this is ok, given what Ong Ye Kung---the Education Minister himself---said above [in Parliament]." (11 October 2019)
Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, in "The day Singapore’s education minister lost some credibility", took issue with Ong Ye Kung's parliamentary speech for misrepresenting Alfian's poem and his proposed Yale-NUS course, and the "unthinking, nuclear option" PAP ministers tend to use when making "dramatic simplicities to hammer their opponents." Worth reading just for Sudhir's excellent and entertaining demonstration of why Ong's "selective quoting" of Alfian's poem is flawed, using works by Shelley, Ginsberg and 2Pac (14 October 2019).

A new blog, POFMA Watch, started on 7 August 2019, "monitoring Singapore’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019". Its stated objective" "to create an accessible record of POFMA-related affairs — legislative updates, use of government powers, etc — that advances our understanding of the Act and its effect on society."
Sociologist and author of This Is What Inequality Looks Like Teo You Yenn published "Speaking out of turn", pertinent to the above series of events, though written earlier (8 October 2019).
Alfian Sa'at's play, Merdeka, premiered on 10 October 2019. Relevant to the matter of dissent and traitorousness is this interview with Alfian and director Glen Goei before the play's opening (Dennis Chen, "Forget Raffles. It’s the West We Need to Break Up With", Rice Media, 3 October 2019), and reactions from PJ Thum and Singapore Writers Festival director Pooja Nansi (12 October 2019).
For background, here's the episode from New Naratif podcast's Political Agenda (with transcript) on "“Fake News”, Foreign Interference, and Freedom of Expression" (18 March 2019).

Singapore wonders: is brownface racist?

2019-08-02T12:39:00.001-04:00

I've had a crazy-busy-unstoppable week that involved the fantastic Sewanee Writers Conference, a little downtime in Nashville, then coming back to Boston to move apartments---in the midst of which, every morning I woke up to find that my phone had exploded with the latest (and increasingly ridiculous) developments in what I'm going to call the brownface saga in Singapore.

As the title of this blog post states, Singapore wonders: is brownface racist?

The longer version: In 2019, in the midst of its (neocolonial) bicentennial year and in the lead-up to its 54th (postcolonial) National Day, Singapore---ostensibly a democratic, modern, urban and multiracial society---is still trying to figure if brownface is racist.

More agile minds than mine have provided excellent commentaries on the brownface saga as it unfolded, so I'm just going to summarise the links (last updated 13 October 2019).

First, some handy primers on the meaning and implications of brownface in the Singapore context (it's tragic that these are still needed in 2019!):

Rachel Pang, "What is brownface and how is it racist?" (29 July 2019)
AWARE provides "a handy flowchart for anyone considering doing brownface" (2 August 2019)

A brief recap of what went down:

Faris Joraimi documented the appearance of a NETS advertisement for epaysg.com using brownface (26 July 2019)
As Visakan Veerasamy and Yogesh Tulsi have pointed out, this is at least the sixth brownface incident in the last seven years.
The creative agencies involved in making the ad, but not the client NETS, apologised "for any hurt that was unintentionally caused." (28 July 2019)
Singapore YouTube artists Preetipls and Subhas made a rap video, "K. Muthusamy", responding to the brownface advertisement (29 July 2019)
Someone promptly made a police report about the video. As Kirsten Han observed, "‪A government initiative can employ a Chinese actor to put on brownface and just get away with a half-assed apology, but a satirical rap video by actual brown people in response gets investigated for allegedly containing offensive content?!"
This comic at A Good Citizen also captures the preposterousness of the situation.
Or as Ruby Thiagarajan observes, "the backlash against calling out racism turned out to be worse than the backlash against racism".

The backlash continued, focusing almost exclusively (as of 4 August 2019) on the rap video, not on the original brownface advertisement:

IMDA sent notices to Facebook users to remove their links to the video (31 July 2019). Jolovan Wham provided screenshots instead.
"Rapper Subhas Nair removed from CNA musical documentary over 'offensive' rap video", TODAY (31 July 2019).
Aqil Haziq Mahmud, "Videos that 'attack another race' cross the line, says Shanmugam on rap video by Preetipls", Channel NewsAsia (30 July 2019)
"NETS apologises for 'any hurt' caused by controversial E-Pay ad", Channel NewsAsia (1 August 2019)
Preetipls and Subhas's apology, posted on Facebook and Instagram (2 August 2019)
"Preetipls, Subhas Nair's statement 'a mock, insincere apology': MHA", Channel NewsAsia (2 August 2019). MHA, apparently, decides what reality is in Singapore. Talk about gaslighting.
A joint statement from Preetipls and Subhas Nair (3 August 2019)
Jalelah Abu Baker, "Preetipls video: Racism 'a basic fact' in Singapore, but situation much better, improving, says Shanmugam", Channel NewsAsia (4 August 2019)

Some excellent commentaries on the situation:

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh on "a story of Shanmugam attacking the (hilarious) Indian whistle blowers rather than addressing Singapore’s Chinese-majority racism" (31 July 2019)
Alfian Sa'at on feeling penatlah, the deep fatigue faced by minorities in Singapore, because "when we say that your amusement is the cause of our pain, we get told that your amusement is more important than our pain" (31 July 2019)
Crystal Abidin, "Minority influencers, satire, and subversive frivolity" (31 July 2019)
Ng Yi-Sheng draws a parallel to the Josef Ng performance art piece, Brother Cane, in 1994 (31 July 2019)
Kirsten Han, "Brownface, rap videos, and race riots" (1 August 2019)
Ruby Thiagarajan, "Brownface and racism in Singapore", New Naratif (1 August 2019)
Lakshmi Ganapathi on how Singapore's minorities inhabit what W.E.B. Du Bois called "double consciousness": "... that's how we learn to inhabit the spaces and ways of the majority. Our silence or laughter has never meant that it [racist humor] was ok." (2 August 2019)
Lim Sun Sun, "Why depicting 'brownface' characters is no joke", Straits Times (paywalled, 3 August 2019)
Ruby Thiagarajan on how Chinese people can "step up and demonstrate that a Singapore without racism is one that will benefit all of us, not just the minorities" (3 August 2019)
Faris Joraimi observes, responding to Home Affairs Minister Shanmugam's comments, that "we cannot respond to these tensions the same way we did 20, 30 or even 10 years ago. People are angry and exhausted, and will not stand for the same kind of respectable discourse that fundamentally invalidates and trivialises the hurt of minorities. ... the State still believes we are stuck in the 1960s and acts as if we will riot without its high-handed intervention." (4 August 2019)
CAPE (Community for Advocacy & Political Education) "presents a primer of 6 infographics reflecting on racism as more than just some 'western SJW thing'" (4 August 2019)
Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh soundly rejects the argument of those like Margaret Chan (summarised here by Sonny Liew) who try to dismiss the brownface saga as an importation of Western norms. As Vadeketh writes, this "ridiculous line of argument" "seeks to present 'Western-influenced' Singaporeans as uncritical sponges of Western norms" "whenever Singaporean conservatives and chauvinists feel threatened" (7 August 2019)
Edoardo Liotta, "Two Singaporean Siblings Published A Viral Video Questioning Chinese Privilege. They Were Investigated By Police", VICE (26 September 2019). From the subhead: "In their first-ever interview since the controversy, YouTuber Preetipls and rapper Subhas talk to VICE about their controversial music video that led to a national conversation on race."

Unrelated to the brownface saga, I happened to read two other commentaries on black-white race relations in the US that transpose somewhat if you substitute "Singaporean Chinese men" for "white men":

Ijeoma Oluo, "The anger of the white male lie",
Chris Boeskool, "'‘When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’", Huffpost (14 March 2016)

I'll keep updating this post as things develop. I'd like to think the situation is winding down, or at least people will refocus on the original brownface advertisement instead---but knowing Singapore in 2019, I'm not optimistic.

Last story in

2019-04-18T11:58:00.000-04:00

(Picture from January 2019.)
Today, I handed in the last piece of new fiction I'll write as part of my MFA programme. My first hand-in was on September 9 last year. In the seven months in between, I've written eight short stories from scratch and 50 first-draft pages of my novel. One of my stories won the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize, for which I still feel very lucky. Another story is out on submission, and there are a few more I'll revise over the summer.

Other achievements of this period:

Surviving a dry-but-still-very-cold Boston winter with the aid of solid winter boots (thank you, Wirecutter reviews) and all manner of Uniqlo Heat Tech garments.
Managing several winter hikes (snow, ice and all), thanks to the abovementioned winter boots. I wish I'd squeezed in a few more before the snow all melted.
Learning not to overthink (still learning; my website domain name still stands).
Coping with the unexpected volleys life throws at you.
Making friends in the MFA classroom---and in unexpected places beyond.
Mastering the comma before the independent clause.

Meanwhile, the magnolias are flowering, and the daffodils are coming up, whether in flower beds or as part of the Marathon Daffodils project. It's like a switch flipped in the ground after the spring equinox. I have to start paying attention to flowers and learning the different species again (I was doing it in the fall, until there were no more leaves to help me make identifications on Pl@ntNet).

I still have plenty of writing to do over the summer. The MFA creative thesis requires 90 pages of revised fiction from my last seven months, plus there are a couple of short story ideas that I didn't have the time or wherewithal to pursue during term-time. Plus I need to finish my novel manuscript.

Tonight, though, I'm thinking about the last few lines of the story I just submitted:

"Well, since we’re all the way out here in this strange corner of Singapore, where can we go next?"
"Aren’t you tired?"
"I can walk a little more—if you’re up for it."
Sharlene removed her hat and sunglasses. "Well, what do you want to see?"

Not here, not there

2018-08-28T23:43:00.000-04:00

I've been in Boston for two weeks and in my apartment for one. It's been a little unreal, living between identities: no more in work-writing mode, not quite in tourist/traveller mode, not yet an MFA student proper; away from Singapore, yet not familiar enough with Boston to avoid mixing up Beacon, Brookline and Boylston Streets. Living in interstitial spaces: a comfortable but soulless Airbnb room for a week (add that to your list of non-places, Marc Augé), then a small apartment that I spent the last week pulling together--diligently, deliberately making it over into a place where I can live and write.

How to ease entry into Boston when moving on one's own:

Move a couple of weeks before the annual hellish moving extravaganza (because the vast majority of Boston apartments turn over on September 1)---before the Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond stores are overrun with anxious parents and their antagonistic freshman-offspring, before the internet installation services are all booked out, before the banks and mobile phone service shops are tied up with international students needing new accounts.
Walk everywhere. If nothing else, one soon figures out which road is which and which road leads to where (I quite like the fact that Boston isn't on a perfect grid).
Have a helpful property manager who has a stockpile of Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons and other handy neighbourhood tips.
Price things by going to shops and taking notes---which confirmed, for instance, that when it comes to Asian groceries, H Mart is indeed more expensive than Super 88, which is more expensive than C Mart (which also sells refrigerated ma lai gou that one can re-steam at home, be still my beating heart!).
Have a friend who's lived in Boston for years, and is helpful with money-saving/dollar-stretching tips and adept at karang guni'ing stuff.
Also have a friend-of-a-friend who generously handed down a kitchen's worth of barely used household items even though we've never met.
Trawl Facebook Marketplace obsessively every few hours for apartment stuff. Buy only what one needs, not all the cute/unusual/quirky/amazing stuff that's out there.

Unexpectedly, what I've often thought of as the Singapore-honed skill of spotting where the shade is and sticking to it has come in handy in Boston. It's been fiercely sunny almost every day, and this week it's been 30ºC and up, with a heat index of 37ºC to 40ºC, according to the National Weather Service. I even had to buy sunscreen.

I know it won't last, the weather, this limbo. University stuff starts on Thursday, classes start on Monday, I have to write a complete short story for one class by next Thursday. But tonight I watched the moon climb above the horizon outside my window, and I wondered how high it would go.

Wake me up

2018-07-12T09:48:00.000-04:00

Dusting this off to say: I’m moving to Boston. Next month. To work on an MFA in creative writing. At Boston University. For a year and a bit. During which I hope to finish my novel as well.

Obviously, I don't remember how to blog anymore.

I haven’t touched my novel since Xmas because of work and I miss it dreadfully, as I’ve been saying to anyone who asks. Don’t ask me when it’ll be published, I need to finish the manuscript first.

Other things that excite me about Boston: the Boston Public Library, indie bookstores and cinemas, free astronomy nights at the campus observatory, all the modernist architecture on the MIT campus, rereading Robert Lowell and The Peregrine (because peregrines at BU!), hiking, and, um, living five minutes from a Trader Joe’s.

Residency routine

2017-09-19T22:32:00.000-04:00

At Vermont Studio Center, they feed us three times a day: 7:30-9:00 am, 12:00-12:45 pm and 6:00-6:45 pm. At home I usually wake up at 8 am, but here I try to be at breakfast by 7:45 am and try not to linger beyond 8:30. I figure since the dining hall is a one-minute walk from my residence (two minutes in the morning if I have to wait at the T-junction for the elementary school buses to pass), and since the residency has freed me from the time I would spend cooking or thinking about what to eat or ordering food, I should make the most of what they're providing and get up earlier to extend my work day.

After breakfast, I pop a slice of lemon and bag of Earl Grey tea into the forest green coffee mug they gave us on the first day ("write your name in permanent marker on the bottom, or you'll get them all mixed up"), top it up with boiling water, then fill my black Zojirushi flask with boiling water, so that I can make more tea in my studio later, and I'm ready to go write. In my second-storey studio, my desk is about a meter wide, bisected by the dictionaries on which I place my laptop (I prefer to keep the laptop screen at eye level, while typing on a Bluetooth keyboard on the desk). To the left of my laptop are my sprawled, handwritten notes, folders and a desk lamp that gives off a warm yellow light; together with the dark wood of the desk, it makes the place feel cosy and writerly (I am captive to Western, Romantic images of what it means to write, I know). To the right of my laptop is an even messier hodgepodge of teabags (Earl Grey, genmaicha, camomile), snacks (nuts, cheese, fruit, Reese's peanut butter cups) and personal items like headphones, lip balm, tissues and a microfibre cloth for cleaning my glasses. I keep nothing in the desk drawers because I'm afraid of forgetting them when I leave at the end of the residency.

The first week I was here, it rained every day, almost all day, and I kept looking out of my window (to the left of my desk) to listen to the rushing water in the Gihon River. From the second week, it has been sunny every day and the water levels have fallen significantly. I could go wading in the river, I suppose, and feel the curve of its rounded, cool stones under my feet. But the river seems to be the domain of the ducks, who show up every mid-morning and every evening around 5 pm and honk to each other, dive underwater to feed or perch on a rock to groom their feathers if the sun is out (there is a rock directly in the middle of the river, that is also directly at the centre of my window view). Often one or two ducks swoop dramatically down from the sky like divebombers. The loud splash with which they land---which is what usually snaps my gaze to the window, I have not yet witnessed the actual dives---belies their panache as they surface, paddle nonchalantly and greet their friends (or maybe rivals, sometimes there is truculent honking and an uncertain fluttering of wings).

I tried to look up what kind of ducks they are on Whatbird.com, which suggests that they might be garganeys (they don't have the white stripe above the eye, although it could be that my ducks are female, or that my vision just isn't good enough to discern the stripe) or greater scaups. After further observation and listening to the bird calls on that website, I think they might be the latter. I might just refer to them generically as ducks, since I don't actually know any better. At any rate, the majority of them don't seem to have colourful plumage, so they are mostly females.

Last Friday morning, there were two female ducks sunning themselves on the rock in the middle of the river. A male who had been chased by them earlier was loitering around, and eventually dislodged one from the rock. She complained and paddled around the rock to see if there was another spot for her, but there wasn't any space so she was reduced to sulking nearby (she stood on a smaller rock in the water, so she that she could get some sun but her feet stayed wet).

It's noon, I have to go eat.

I'm back from lunch. It's not that I have to eat during the stipulated mealtimes. I could eat at a cafe in town (um, the only cafe in town) or buy something at the supermarket. But the Studio Center provides good food, great company, and after two weeks it's still so nice to be among people to whom you can say, excuse me, I'm going to go work in my studio now, and they say, uh-huh, yeah, okay, because if they wanted to do the same, they would too.

As I walked across the river to get to the dining room, I thought about the last river I was in: Pa'Lungan, in the Bario highlands in Sarawak. I was in that river because we took a boat during the dry season and when the water level was too low for the boat to pass, we had to get out so that our boatmen could push and carry the boat over the rocks and then we got back in again. This usually meant standing up to our knees in the river---although memorably, my colleague jumped out at an unexpectedly deep spot and sank up to her chest.

In Singapore, you don't hear the river. There is too much traffic noise and also too much concrete on its banks, which I'm sure that affects the sound of the water. If anything, you may hear the otters in the river---or, more likely, humans squealing at the sight of otters in the river.

After lunch, I write for the rest of the afternoon, and sometimes if I've had a big breakfast and a big lunch (like today), I skip dinner and keep writing. There is little else to report. Once or twice a week, there is a slide presentation by artists or a reading by writers, which is a great way to visit the imaginations of fellow residents; I always come away with my mind feeling very full. On Sundays, I have gone for hikes (so far, one short, one long). I took all of last weekend off, in fact, because I'd been writing for nine days straight and needed to rest that part of my brain. But I suspect I will write through this weekend because next Friday this sojourn comes to its stipulated end (of course we all wish we could just stay a bit longer ...).

In the late morning today, about eight ducks were in the water, then suddenly they did the thing where they propel themselves to take off, and for a few seconds they were both flapping their wings and using their feet to kick powerfully on the surface of the water, and for those instants they were fantastically both in the air and in the water at once---and I, the city dweller, was amazed.

Ten more days of this. Go!

The plan for 2017

2017-01-02T10:32:00.000-05:00

I'm not one for writing obligatory New Year's posts, but I told myself this morning that I would tack something here for posterity, so here it is.

I'm going to spend the year being a "writer" writer. By which I mean I'm going to work on my novel and take on very little commercial freelance work. To that end, I'm very lucky that I've been accepted as writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) for six months (commencing tomorrow!), as well as at a couple other foreign residencies in the latter half of the year.

Objectives for the year: finish a decent draft of the Dakota Project, which I didn't have the time or headspace to properly get into for much of last year, and be very, very prudent about money. Step one of the latter is probably not to go crazy buying all the Chinese New Year goodies that are already flooding the shops.

Actually, my first order of business is to put together the syllabus for the undergraduate creative writing class I'll be teaching as part of the NTU residency. I've taught writing workshops over the past few years, but this'll be my first time back in a formal classroom in over a decade. I'm both excited and prepared to be astonished.

As I alluded to on Twitter earlier today, I'm really lucky to be paid for six months to read books about writing, teach writing and also write. So I'm pretty tingly about 2017, despite the spectre of Trump.

Oh, and if you haven't read it already, check out Kirsten Han's piece, "Lessons From Singapore On Trump’s Authoritarian America".

"I've always hated watching you leave"

2016-12-27T22:22:00.002-05:00

I woke up to the news that Carrie Fisher had passed away, and a thousand voices crying out online about it. Inside my head I keep hearing the solitary, soulful notes of "Luke's Theme" from the soundtrack of the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope (the music piece officially known as"Binary Sunset" and later, as "The Force Theme"). In my mind's eye, I see the scene from last year's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when General Leia Organa (played by Fisher) walks slowly towards Rey and they hug, in a moment of mourning for the recently killed Han Solo.

I first encountered Fisher-as-Princess-Leia in 1983, when I was nine and saw my first Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi. Despite the execrable slave-girl costume that launched a thousand sexual fantasies, the movie turned me into a fan of a contemporary mythology for the first time. Before it became cool among my peers to like Star Wars or anything else that would qualify as a geek pursuit today, I was devouring Star Wars books and hoarding videotapes of precious, taped-off-TV airings of the films from the original trilogy. Princess Leia became part of my personal pantheon of women in science fiction/fantasy who kicked ass, alongside Commander (eventually Admiral) Lisa Hayes of Robotech (the books, not so much the cartoon series), FBI special agent Dana Scully of The X-Files and and Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, not the movie).

Seeing Fisher-as-General-Leia last year felt like witnessing a small miracle: a post-1980s Star Wars movie that did not entirely suck, a once sexualised character allowed to age realistically – and also exist as a convincing military commander and mother and estranged lover all at once. In contrast, seeing the CGI version of Fisher-as-princess in this year's Rogue One was a disturbing jolt – Fisher immortalised with the earmuff hair buns and impractical flowing white dress from A New Hope.

Funny enough, the one Star Wars action figure I ever owned was of that particular version of Princess Leia, except that the action figure – because of the mechanics of construction – had the princess wearing what was effectively a white pantsuit, with a removable white robe around it. She also had a blaster. All the better to kick ass with, I used to think when I was playing with the figure, sans robe, against my cousins' multitude of (male) action figures.

Fisher was not only the princess, of course. She was a sharp writer, a brave advocate, a memorable actress (When Harry Met Sally is another of my old favourites) and an unabashed personality who perhaps best fit the description of the Rogue One droid K-2S0: "He tends to say whatever comes into his circuits."

Most of us, women and men, don't have to contend with being a symbol in addition to being a person. Fisher couldn't help the fact that she became larger as a symbol than as a person, no matter how much she contended with that symbolism and accomplished in her own right. As someone far, far away from her galaxy, all I can say is that the symbol mattered too and mattered greatly – both the princess, and the fiercely honest, fully alive person Fisher seems to have been.

15 October 2016

2016-10-15T10:01:00.001-04:00

On vacation in Japan. Spent the day at Arashimaya, thinking about the past, the present, and future pasts and presents.

And kept running into ojisan (grandfather) types ...

Or maybe it was just me.

Thinking out loud about #NDP2016's "The Legend of Badang"

2016-08-06T03:16:00.003-04:00

It's National Day next week, so naturally the government propaganda machines are working at full tilt, drumming up interest in the annual National Day Parade. When I saw some posters at bus stops and other public areas recently, I was surprised to see that this year's parade storyline seems to be focused on Badang, a figure from Malay folklore who was renowned for having extraordinary physical strength.

Okay, maybe not that surprised, now I think about it. In the last decade or so, official government narratives have given more attention to the figure of Sang Nila Utama aka Parameswara aka Sri Tri Buana, the mytho-historical 'founder' of a 14th-century settlement in Singapore. As I mentioned in a talk on Singapore history last night, it's good that pre-colonial, pre-modern history is being more publicly acknowledged than before; on the other hand, it still falls into the orthodox 'great men' approach to history by enshrining yet another king/ruler/founder figure in the narrative.

I guess the parade organisers this year decided they had to look for another indigenous figure to excavate from the past. Badang is an easy choice: he's physically strong, a loyal warrior for his ruler, and doesn't endanger concepts of patriarchal masculinity. There's no Delilah figure or embarrassing episode where he loses his strength, and by various accounts he even seems to have had a peaceful death (no political intrigue, no violent denouements).

But of course, the parade organisers had to tinker with the myth some more, in the official National Day Parade video about the legend of Badang.

First off, let's be clear that this is quite an enjoyable, energetic film – certainly sexier and slicker than most retellings of Malay folklore that I've seen. Which is fine. It's entertainment. I get it.

But the film neatly elides folklore and fact in a way that is, in my opinion, unnecessary and reductive of the richness of myth and the intricate ways in which pre-colonial Singapore culture and history is embedded with that of our neighbouring islands and countries. Not to mention the fact that it completely misses the point of the Singapore Stone.

The video begins with the voice-over narration: "This is the folklore behind the Singapore Stone." It goes on to explain how Badang got his fantastic strength and how he used it to serve his people and his ruler, before the climactic moment of him hurling an impossibly large boulder from the top of a hill. We see the boulder smash into a bazillion small pieces, then we are told (at about 3:20 in) that the rock – and inexplicably, we now see the original, large, unsmashed rock – landed at the mouth of the Singapore River.

Suddenly the film shifts to Singapore today, Marina Bay Sands skyline and all. The voice-over continues: "This rock was blown to pieces by the British in 1843 and a fragment known as the Singapore Stone now sits in the National Museum of Singapore." That is the last spoken line of the film.

I found it disconcerting, the way the story shifts from acknowledged folklore (the film is, after all, called The Legend of Badang) to empirical fact (when the stone was blown up, where the fragment remains) – as if both are equivalent realities. But that is a matter of storytelling finesse that perhaps the parade organisers felt that they could safely ignore. When the mytho-historical figure of Sang Nila Utama is trotted out in textbooks and at national events, it doesn't matter if he existed; the important thing is that Singapore today is real, and to evoke a sense of pride today in some concept of ancient Singapore. In the same way, it doesn't matter if Badang existed and if the stone he threw (if he threw one at all) was what we now know as the Singapore Stone; the important thing is that the Stone is with us (at least a fragment of it).

Source: Yuli Chua
But the story of the Stone, and of Badang, just seems so small in this account. There is no mention that one of the main sources of the story of Badang is the Sejarah Melayu (The Malay Annals) – a text that comes out of the Melakan tradition, and which is thus a shared story of Melaka, Johor and Singapore, among others. Specifically the story of Badang (as translated from the Sejarah Melayu and reprinted in an English magazine in 1822) describes him as living in Saluang in Sumatra when he acquires his strength (not in Singapore, which is what the National Day Parade video states at 0:06).

My point is that Badang is very much a story about a hero of the region, not a man from exclusively Singapore, and this was in keeping with how indigenous people in pre-colonial times (and perhaps, some people today) view their identity and culture as being regional and interconnected, not isolated to one island. From the pragmatic, 21st-century, nation-building, rah-rah-National Day Parade perspective, I understand why the parade organisers have cut Badang down to being a hero of Singapore. But that is a small, small way of looking at Singaporean identity and history, and one that does us a disservice in the long run. It encourages us to see ourselves, often falsely, as a case of Singaporean exceptionalism, rather than as a Singapore that still is, and should still be, intertwined with the region.

As for the Singapore Stone, it appears for less than 10 seconds in the 3 minute, 45 second-long film. We are told that a fragment is at the National Museum, and that's it. We never see a photograph of the actual stone (although there is one on the National Day Parade webpage "Badang and the Singapore Stone"). There is no description of what the stone, empirically, is: an artefact of sandstone, inscribed with a faded, obscured script that has never been conclusively identified, although it bears similarities to other ancient scripts on stones that have been found in the region, from Kedah to Karimun to Kalimantan.

I confess my own bias here: I have a deep love for the unknowability of the Singapore Stone. It is inexplicable to me that we have this magic (and I do not use that word casually) object in our museum, in our midst, and we do not acknowledge it, in everyday discourse, as an emblem, perhaps even a synecdoche, of Singapore history. It is essentially unknowable, a cipher for all time (barring the invention of a time-travel machine to go back and meet the people who inscribed it). It survived at least five centuries (perhaps up to ten), exposed to the ravages of tropical weather, before it encountered men who were more intent on removing it than on understanding it, and then it was desecrated and almost entirely destroyed. Yet one tiny, tantalising fragment is still with us today (a miracle also, given that things are often lost, if only by neglect, when museum collections are transferred from colonial to postcolonial administrations).

It is silent, it is indecipherable, and yet it says so much: about a people who carved words on stone in a time when such things were extremely difficult and painstaking, about a people who had language, and had things to say that were worth carving into the permanence of stone. We do not have the means or wherewithal to access what they said, but that is our burden, not theirs.

Of course, to be in a state of unknowing, or merely to acknowledge that sometimes access to the past is cut off by impatient successor states that have no interest in that past, is not the sort of message that a Singapore National Day Parade would want to deal with. Far eaiser to cherry-pick the useful characteristics of a regional legend – make Badang 'Singaporean', make all his exploits take place here, imply his realness by casually equating the Singapore Stone with Badang's stone – and merge them into an insular new myth, rather than to posit that Singapore could find itself by looking outwards or by embracing uncertainty.

I know, I know – it's just a National Day Parade video. It will be forgotten by the end of the month. I honestly don't remember anything about last year's parade, or the ones before that. It's a spectacle, short-lived but loud and declamatory. It is everything the Singapore Stone is not.

But the parade is still a claim to identity, and a claim to what being Singaporean means, and for all that it has adopted the posture of elevating a figure from Malay folklore (and all that implies in our majority-Chinese society), it really isn't saying anything new or advancing a more open, progressive, hopeful or imaginative vision of Singaporean-ness.

There are many myths and fictions we tell ourselves. I just wish we would start choosing better ones.

Mid-year report

2016-06-26T11:32:00.001-04:00

When I woke up this morning to see sunlight slanting off the blinds of my bedroom window, I was the happiest I'd been all week. All week I'd been plagued by interrupted sleep: like clockwork, around 5 a.m., I'd wake up for no explicable reason, and instead of drifting back into peaceful slumber as usual, I would lie sleepless and restless for an hour or more, till dawn crept up and the first buses and traffic of the day became audible, then I would finally snatch another hour or two of sleep before having to properly get up for the day. Several days of this left me cranky and listless and unable to do anything creative; I have no idea how parents of young children deal with this for years on end, and once again take my hat off to all my family and friends who have kids.

After a few nights of these 5 a.m. stirrings, several of my friends were beginning to think that something otherworldly might be going on, but I truly never felt anything except wide awake, alert and eventually irritated with being awake. Also, except for the summer solstice on Monday, I can't think of anything else that might've thrown the week off whack.

So I was relieved this morning to find that I had, indeed, completed a full night's sleep, and I'm hoping for another undisturbed one tonight. It was also fortuitous because I had to help a close friend with a little unexpected home emergency today. I'm sure I could've helped her with inadequate sleep, but since it involved a fair bit of driving, it's just as well my brain wasn't zombieified by poor sleep.

I'm pretty sure this isn't related to my sleep issues, but also in the last week or so, I've run into people who either didn't know me before this year and know my blog as a place of sporadic updates, or who've known me since the early days of blogging (circa the early 2000s) and remember its furious, frequent and – for some, at least – entertaining entries. The latter group asks why I don't write much anymore, which is something I've been struggling with here, off and on (ergo the sporadic updates), for the last couple of years.

The short answer is: no time and headspace. A more expanded answer is that I haven't figured out a rhythm of regular updates that works, creatively and logistically. Also, I've realised that with the increasing volume of feckless behaviour one encounters in the news and on the internets these days, my immediate response tends to plateau as rage-filled argy-bargy, and I often lack the patience or composure to rationally unravel or reveal the fecklessness as such. Mostly I just want to thwap people on the back of their heads and yell, "Seriously?!"

(Yes, I watch Grey's Anatomy.)

Other things people often say to me, if I haven't seen them in a while:

"Hey, you're back in Singapore!" (Yes, I've been back since December.)
"What are you working on now?" (Revamp of the Memories at Old Ford Factory museum for the National Archives of Singapore; later this year, some editing for the Singapore Biennale; some miscellaneous writing and editing in between all that.)
"How's your novel going?" (Haven't had the time to work on it since my paid work [see previous answer] took off in March; I'll probably come back to it towards the end of year; yes, I really, really want to write it, but I also need to pay my mortgage and my bills.)

I find it difficult to work on a novel when I can't set aside a big block of time for it. That said, these few months, I've been beavering away on some essays and short stories. The first to go to print was the essay, "The sounds of nature", for the Straits Times. I'll update again when the others appear.

Yes! I'll update again when they appear. That's one way to blog a little more frequently.

Just talking about wanting to blog more makes me feel old-school and distant from the Snapchat generation.

The Dakota Project

2016-01-13T01:02:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend, I decided that I'm going to refer to my new novel as the Dakota Project. That's not going to be the title of the novel – definitely not – but it'll do as shorthand so that when I need to, I can refer specifically to what I'm working on.

Dakota is the name of the protagonist, of that I'm absolutely certain; I'm still working on almost everything else. The thing about working on a novel is that a lot of time is spent thinking and researching and sketching and planning and then thinking some more --- not writing per se, but essential steps without which the very first stabs at writing would not happen. So when people ask me what I'm doing, I feel like a fraud to say that I'm writing, because I'm not, not yet, for this novel. But I am working on it. So from now on I'm going to say I'm working on the Dakota Project.

My esteemed friend and fellow author, Jeremy Tiang, said in a recent interview:

I’m working on a novel of my own, but I don’t want to say what it’s about. I hate talking about my work until it’s done. Sometimes not even then.

Not even then, people.

So yeah: the Dakota Project.

Walking the Rail Corridor

2016-01-09T23:08:00.001-05:00

One piece of Singapore news that broke towards the end of my US sojourn was that the Urban Redevelopment Authority had announced a concept plan to refurbish the Rail Corridor, the 24-km former Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) railway line that runs from Tanjong Pagar in the south, whips west towards Alexandra and Holland, and finally zips up north to Woodlands. My immediate reaction to the news was: Damn! I better go walk the line before all the "improvements" ruin it.

After making plans with a friend, I dug up my copy of the Nature Society and Singapore Heritage Society's Green Rail Corridor guide map, and tried to pull together some additional online information. Maybe my Google-fu isn't what it used to be, but I couldn't find any webpages that would give me the nuts and bolts of exactly how one could access the former railway line from the southern end (since its former terminus, Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, is closed) or how long walking the whole line would take.

So here are my notes from Thursday's walk. You can take me away from travel writing, but you can't take the travel writer impulse out of me.

1. The start of the line at the southern end (Tanjong Pagar/Silat Walk)

Although the abovementioned Green Rail Corridor guide map was printed only last year and is an excellent resource, the rapidity with which things change in Singapore means that it's already out of date in at least one respect: the southern access point to the former railway line. The map states that there is an entry point "behind block 30" at Silat Walk. Alas, block 30 has been demolished. Look for block 23 instead and follow the slope down to the Rail Corridor (pictured above, looking north).

If you really want to be pedantic about it and walk the full distance of the former railway line, then this is where you go left (south) towards a hut and the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station in the distance, and start your walk there. I didn't bother.

2. Silat Walk to Masjid Hang Jebat (Portsdown area)

This stretch takes about 45 minutes. It can be frightfully noisy because you're walking right beside the Ayer Rajah Expressway, but generally it's quite green and not very muddy, and if you listen carefully, you'll still hear birdsong and insect chorus. You have to go under several flyovers, some with graffiti (Singapore has such adorable graffiti), and you can wave at the vehicles speeding by and console yourself that at least you're not stuck having to go to the CBD.

On your right will be the light industrial buildings of Bukit Merah and Alexandra. Much nicer to look at the trees. At Masjid Hang Jebat, there are vending machines where you can get a cold drink.

3. Masjid Hang Jebat (Portsdown area) to Bukit Timah Railway Station

This stretch takes about 1 hour 15 minutes. The railway line runs beside the old HDB housing estate at Commonwealth Drive and Tanglin Halt. Tanglin Halt Market in block 48A is a good place to stop for a bite without having to venture too far off. Alternatively, you can pop out a bit farther along at Ghim Moh.

If you're a former Raffles Junior College/Dunman High/Henry Park/Eunoia Junior College student ("Eunoia" – heh heh), you might get a kick out of seeing your former Mt Sinai school campus from this side of the tracks. I was both a student and a teacher at that campus, and the big shock to me on Thursday was that a number of the HDB flats west of Ghim Moh Road have been demolished, and some bulldozers were working on the former container blocks of the Mt Sinai campus (near what used to be the back gate to Ghim Moh).

About an hour from Masjid Hang Jebat, in the vicinity of Old Holland Road, you'll run into a construction site.

Not kidding. You can keep going straight, more or less, and the route will skirt what looks like a giant drainage project that involves gouging a large section out of the ground. Then you pick up the old railway line again.

The Old Holland Road bit is really lush and beautiful; the construction, not so much. This entire stretch (from Portsdown onwards) also has some muddy sections because it's one of the better tree-shaded sections. I wouldn't want to be slip-sliding around here after a downpour, unless I was wearing Phua Chu Kang-style big yellow construction work boots.

Another 20 minutes from the Old Holland Road area construction area will bring you to the conserved Bukit Timah Railway Station.

4. Bukit Timah Railway Station to Rail Mall

This section takes about 45 minutes, assuming you don't dilly-dally at the over-photographed Bukit Timah Railway Station (above) and Bukit Timah Railway Bridge. It's a pretty hot stretch. There's a lot of concrete in the railway station area, and then of course the railway bridge is made out of black metal.

There are a few more bridges farther up, over Hindhede Road and beyond as the line edges around Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Some are a little dilapidated and rusty, and more charming, in my opinion. We saw signs of NEA work going on here, like workmen on bicycles and a blue tent planted in the middle of the Rail Corridor (understandably, as shade for the workers, but it did look very odd).

If, like us, you're heading north along the Rail Corridor, the Rail Mall at the end of this stretch is a great place to stop for a break because you can console yourself that you've completed more than half the distance (woo!) and also stock up on water or other supplies at Cold Storage.

5. Rail Mall to Junction 10

Very Singaporean, I know, to use the names of shopping malls to demarcate this section, and this bit takes only about half an hour to walk. But the reason I'm hiving it off as a discrete section is that it's the part that's extremely exposed (no shade!) and runs parallel to Upper Bukit Timah Road, and as you're walking along on a hot day, you feel like you must be the only crazy people to do so because anyone else would take the bus up the road or at least stick to the shop-houses to get some shade.

The shop-houses, viewed at a distance to the right, are charming. It's old Singapore, a little bit of which was described in Kelvin Tong's short film Grandma Positioning System (in the anthology film 7 Letters), and they're still largely functioning as shop-houses with working-class businesses, not hipster coffee joints and atas bicycle shops. One of my friends swears by the food at Karu's Indian Banana Leaf Restaurant at 808 Upper Bukit Timah Road.

At Gombak, to the left is the Ministry of Defence and its ziggurat-like concrete structure. I have no idea what that structure is for (ammo dump, my friend guessed) and naturally I can't find a photograph of it online, even though it's pretty damn visible from the road and the Rail Corridor.

6. Junction 10 to Sungei Kadut

This takes another half an hour. You have to make a diversion at Junction 10 (at the intersection of Choa Chu Kang and Woodlands Roads) because while the former railway line ploughs straight north, the authorities have removed the bridge that crosses a huge longkang (drain) just north of Choa Chu Kang Road. So your best bet is to walk behind Junction 10, cross the longkang, go past the construction site (sigh) beside the mall, then cut through the car park for heavy vehicles at Senja Way to find your way back to the Rail Corridor.

Bright side: once you're back on the corridor, it's pretty lush and green.
Down side: about 20 minutes after Junction 10, you'll hit another construction site right beside the Rail Corridor.

This is also the stretch that runs parallel to the Pang Sua Park Connector (to your left, across the longkang)(forgive me, I cannot type "Pang Sua" without giggling because of the word "pang", yes, I'm a five-year-old at heart). Some people like to admire the HDB flats to the left; I was too busy trudging on that day.

7. Sungei Kadut to Mandai River

This takes one hour. It's very green in parts and potentially quiet (if you ignore the heavy vehicles along Sungei Kadut Avenue, which you have to scamper across, and the traffic noise along Woodlands Road to your right). It also has some charming little dilapidated spots, like the former KTM huts (now marked "State property" and "Reserved for future development") and a concrete bridge close to the Kranji Road end that the Rail Corridor runs under. The latter is wonderfully overgrown; I haven't been able to identify it yet.

There's another construction site at the junction of Mandai Road and Woodlands Road – it looks like they're doing something that might affect the Sungei Kadut waterway. And finally the green idyll ends where the Rail Corridor spits you out at Kranji Road: there's a heritage marker and, surprise, surprise, a massive construction site. You have to skirt the construction area, pray for a break in the traffic so that you can cross Kranji Road, and pick up the Rail Corridor behind Kranji Water Reclamation Plant and Kranji Lodge (a dormitory for migrant workers). This short stretch is pretty uninteresting.

Behind Kranji Lodge, the Rail Corridor ends at Mandai River.

8. Mandai River to Woodlands Centre

If you go to the right of the fence (pictured above), you'll come to a brightly painted bridge that crosses the small river. After the bridge, if you want to leave, go right and follow Woodlands Road towards Woodlands Avenue 3, where Kranji MRT station is.

Or if like us, you want to find your way back to the former railway line, you follow the footpath to the left, which brings you to a car park beside Woodlands Road. Just up the road on your left is an Esso petrol station (handy for for a drink stop).

Go behind the petrol station. Here it's no longer the the Rail Corridor, since the government doesn't really want you mucking along this stretch so close to the actual Woodlands Railway Station and the Causeway. But you can still follow the former railway line by wandering northeast over weed-covered empty land parallel to the stern metal fences and regularly-planted "State land" signs that warn against trespassing.

Unlike the Rail Corridor, where the grass is obviously cut on a regular basis, here there are weeds of different heights and sprawl all over the place. Push on, push on northeast, keeping the fence to your left, and eventually you reach the real end where, once more, true to the spirit of post-independent PAP Singapore, a construction site bars your way.

At this point, on your right, you have a great view of heavy vehicles lining up along Woodlands Road to cross the Causeway to Malaysia. Follow Woodlands Road for another ten minutes and you'll be at Woodlands Centre. From there it's about a 15- to 20-minute walk to Marsiling MRT station, depending on how tired you are by now.

Total time taken: 3 hours (Silat Walk to Rail Mall), 2 hours (Rail Mall to Mandai River), ½ hour (Mandai River to the start of Woodlands Crossing)
Total number of construction sites encountered: 5 (including the Woodlands one)
Total number of mosquito bites: 1 (in the southern stretch when I wearing insect repellent), 1 (in the northern stretch when I hadn't reapplied the repellent)
Total amount of water drunk: 1½ litres during the walk, 2 cans of Coke during lunch
Total number of toilet breaks: 1, during lunch
Average walking speed: 5 km/h and we didn't take any extended breaks except for lunch (I'm moderately fit; my friend has longer legs, is much fitter and recently did a multi-day desert trek in the Middle East).
Good guide maps: The abovementioned Nature Society and Singapore Heritage Society's Green Rail Corridor guide map. Users of Foursquare/Swarm should add this tip-top list of Rail Corridor waypoints, created by one of my friends (this is the sort of thing that Foursquare/Swarm can really be good for, in terms of wayfinding and travel). Don't bother with the outdated Urban Redevelopment Authority's map, unless you're interested only in the Bukit Timah Railway Station to Rail Mall section of the corridor.
I have a few more pictures and some commentary in my Flickr album.

Verdict:
If you like walking in a (fairly) straight line and and on (fairly) level ground, and don't mind doing it in tropical heat, this is for you. Be prepared to sweat like crazy, bring a hat/umbrella and sunblock, and lots of water. I can't speak to the flora and fauna, because I'm crap at recognising anything, but there seems to be healthy insect and bird chatter most of the way, as well as the odd rustle in the undergrowth. Reptile-wise, we saw only one monitor lizard.

It was certainly nice to see some of Singapore from "this" side of the railway tracks, and I'm glad I walked it before the government gives it the inevitable makeover. I totally understand why they're park-ifying it: it's not going to become a super-popular "destination" with muddy tracks, unmarked access points and no street lights. I wouldn't walk there at night, and by day, I'm not sure that I would do it alone (except for the well-trafficked stretches near HDB estates).

On the other hand, the new concept plan calls for 122 access points (that averages out to one every 200 metres!), with structures added for rock climbing, urban farming, exercise and "community spaces". Instead of letting people explore the place intuitively and discover for themselves what they find interesting about it, the objective of the concept plan (and much of government thinking about urban planning these days, it seems) is about bombarding people with lots of stuff to do and be entertained, so that they'll have a reason to go there even if they're not at all interested in long walks, railway history or overgrown secondary tropical rainforest.

In other words, the concept plan caters to the idea of an urban population that needs to be entertained and coddled, rather than the philosophy of providing basic necessities like street lights, regular grass-cutting and perhaps a few paved sections, and signs for the nearest shelter (in the event of emergencies or inclement weather) – and leaving people to find their own fun.

Oh Singapore.

Mashable has reported (albeit a tad dramatically) that the government's plans won't result in Singapore's version of the High Line, which is fine, because I think the High Line is a little too chi-chi and spruced-up. But it works well as a pedestrian connector between Gansevoort Street and 34th Street, and it works well in a city where people walk a lot anyway. Ditto the Promenade Plantée in Paris, which I think has found a sweet spot that between the functional (pedestrian flow) and the aesthetic (tasteful landscaping, but not too much).

In Singapore, the weather makes it difficult for the Rail Corridor to serve as a pedestrian connector, unless the authorities allow shade-giving trees to grow unfettered around it. But like its foreign precedents, it would be a good alternative to walking along the main road, and it would be a way of seeing beyond roads. The nicest stretches of the Rail Corridor today are, unsurprisingly, the areas where it traverses through neighbourhoods along a route that a car couldn't follow: from Portsdown Road up to Old Holland Road area and then Bukit Timah Railway Station, and later from Sungei Kadut up to Kranji. It's a reminder that there can be meaningful connections between urban spaces other than roads, and yes, it's ironic that it's the remnants of a railway – that fixture of industrial modernity – that remind us of this.

I don't think the Urban Redevelopment Authority has announced when they'll be closing parts of the Rail Corridor in order to start the makeover. If you're interested in walking the full stretch, though, I'd say get to it now.

The pen matters

2016-01-06T00:20:00.001-05:00

The pen that I write with matters. This morning, resuming work on my second novel, I went rooting around in my handbags until I found the best free ballpoint pen I've ever had, a somewhat stubby specimen from the University of Iowa Libraries that writes in black ink oh-so-smoothly, oh-so-silkily – so unlikely for an institutional freebie. It's the pen with which I started making notes on this novel, and so I want to continue with it, even though I have only one such pen and soon enough the ink will run out long before the novel is anywhere near completed, and then I'm not sure what I'll do. Ask friends who are still at the university to get me more, perhaps.

It's not superstition, it's tactile satisfaction. The ease of hand-writing with the "right" pen is too readily overlooked in an age when the computer or smartphone keyboard is ubiquitous. Since I started doing morning pages last month, I've found the process just that bit smoother now that I've found a pen that lets me scribble freely while still producing (reasonably) legible words – a Pilot Acroball with blue ink. In school I was always a fan of the Pilot V5 Hi-Tecpoint rollerball pen and I'm glad it's finally available in a retractable version, making it that much handier. My go-to ballpoint pen these days is the Pilot Better Retractable Ballpoint Pen – it's cheap enough that I'm not too put out if I lose one, yet it writes well despite being cheap.

The funny thing about coming to rely on the University of Iowa Libraries pen is that I've never liked American ballpoint pens. The Bic is so stiff and uncomfortable, and also expensive (at least in the US) for what it is. When I was an undergraduate there, I used to bring my own pens from Singapore to last me through the school year, and during my recent Iowa sojourn, I made sure to bring a good selection of ballpoint and rollerball pens with me. (I still don't understand why stationery choices in the US are so poor, for a culture that's so obsessed with individualism and personalisation.)

Don't get me wrong, I can hand-write with any old pen or pencil (or those old keyboards that are so noisy, heavy and clunky by today's standards). But having the "right" pen in hand just makes the entire experience of writing or note-taking feel that much more natural, an effortless extension of the mind onto the page, from amorphous idea to word-specific form. So many things impede our thoughts and prevent them from materialising "accurately" or truthfully; the bodily, tactile experience of hand-writing certainly doesn't have to.

One last post for the year

2015-12-31T09:55:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to write this post all day, some kind of last-day-of-the-year what-kind-of-year-has-it-been reflective-reflexive whatever something lah. And all I've got is this:

I've been back in Singapore for almost a month. This week I cleared my home office, which meant getting rid of two years' accumulation of crap, and now my desk finally is usable again. At dinner tonight I showed the above photo to my mum. She asked, "And how long do you think you can keep it that way?" My mother knows me too well.

So yeah. Happy new year, everybody!

We're not in Iowa anymore, Toto

2015-11-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

The International Writing Program wrapped up just over a week ago, so I'm on my own again, in the sense of not being surrounded by writers from 30-plus other countries. It's a bit strange to slip so easily back into my own life and my own friends, but now there are also WhatsApp chat groups that light up my phone screen at odd hours of the day, sending photos of living rooms and cats and faraway city streets.

I'll reciprocate with Singapore scenes when I get back. For now I'm loitering in New York to visit with friends, overdose on museums and soak up the chilly weather. Iowa City was great, don't get me wrong, and a lovely place to spend a couple of months – but I'm a city girl at heart, and it felt like coming home to be in a place where there's the constant chatter of many non-English languages on the streets and subway, and where lots of restaurants routinely stay open after 9 p.m.

This week I made a side-trip down to Houston to visit the Space Center, because when else was I going to get myself there. On top of all the space geekery I expected (and let me tell you right now, if you're a space geek like me, the Level 9 Tour is totally worth springing for), I also had a rather unexpected encounter with what a friend has termed the "technological sublime": seeing the Faith 7 spacecraft, the last of the Mercury programme spacecraft to take a human being into space, and then the Apollo 17 command module, which was the last spacecraft to transport humans to the moon and back.

This tops off the Apollo 11 command module I saw at the National Air and Space Museum a couple of weeks ago, and the Gemini 12 capsule at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, way back in August. I didn't have a laundry list of NASA spacecraft that I wanted to see at the beginning of this trip, but things accidentally (perhaps, serendipitously) worked out that way. The same friend describes it as a "back to the future" encounter: each one of them a spacecraft, seemingly from the future, in terms of what it represents, but in fact an artefact of the past, something already consigned to the history books. Past and future at once in the present, not to mention the fact that its materials have been exposed to a literally alien and off-world environment, yet here it is with us today. The word "sacred" keeps inching into my mind, even though I don't like to use it.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm writing this blog post in Houston's William P. Hobby Airport, where my return flight to New York has been delayed for five hours and might be delayed further, depending on weather conditions in New York. I'm grateful for the device charging points and free wifi here – this is way better than being bounced around in turbulence or rerouted to some other regional airport – but never does an airport feel like more of a non-place (in Marc Augé's sense of the word) than when its passengers are in an indefinite, incalculable limbo.

The seasons, they are a-changing

2015-10-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

After being in Iowa City for almost two months, on Thursday I finally figured out (with the help of another writer) how to get the bus to the nearby mall, so I could watch The Martian in the cinema before it ends its run. It's for research, but also for fun; at heart I'm a big science fiction geek, as you know. I've already made plans to check out Riverside, Iowa (the future birthplace of Captain Kirk) before I leave Iowa in November.

Also in the works: a visit to a nearby vineyard and whisky distillery, dinner with Singaporeans (there are Singaporeans in Iowa!! who've been here for almost 20 years!!), a presentation to a literature class on why I write what I write, and as much research, planning of the new novel, rewriting of the old novel and other writing as I can squeeze in before we have to pack our bags and vacate our rooms. We're down to our last two weeks in Iowa City proper, just as we were getting used to the routine of readings and panels and having time to read and write and laugh and drink over multilingual/multicultural conversations. People are getting homesick, people are also realising this will end all too soon. It's a funny emotional and psychological space to inhabit.

I think it was a bit surreal for much of the programme because it's been an unseasonably warm autumn. As of last week, there were still days when I could wander around comfortably in a T-shirt, skirt and slip-on shoes, and one evening we even dined al fresco without any heaters in the vicinity. We made a hiking trip to Effigy Mounds National Monument last Saturday and many of the leaves on the trees were still green, which didn't seem to be what the locals expected. It's feel like summer's still holding on, when of course it's almost Halloween already.

Wish I could send some of these blue skies (literal and metaphorical) over to Singapore.

Halfway point

2015-09-22T19:08:00.000-04:00

As several writers and residency staff have noted, today marks exactly one month since the International Writing Program started. We've had a month to unpack, set up bank accounts, attend readings and panels, prepare for readings and panels, meet students, meet other writers, buy books, watch films, explore the library and the river and the town, drink wine, drink beer, play pool, befriend the wine guy, dance to a jukebox, go to music gigs, attend a barn party, drink apple cider at an orchard, go rambling in the woods, celebrate Grito de Dolores (Mexican independence day), and soak up lots and lots of sunshine.

Oh, and write. Lots of that too, truly. My own writing is proceeding at a snail's pace, as usual, but I can't say I don't have the time to sit down and think and read and write.

I tweeted quite early on that being in this programme "is like being at a really great writers festival everyday." Which it still is. It's rare to be in a social group where everyone intuitively understands what everyone else does, even though we all do it in different genres and languages and styles, and in such varied and contrasting social situations. If nothing else, these are all fascinating people whom otherwise I would have never had the chance to meet. And the nice thing about it being such a long residency, in addition to giving us time to write and develop ideas, is that there's also time to sit and chat and develop conversations and friendships, in ways that are simply impossible at regular literary festivals when people are always dashing from one event to another.

Tomorrow we're off to Chicago on a mid-residency trip. I've heard that they insert this trip so that people don't go stir crazy from being in Iowa City for ten weeks straight.

Passion, near and far

2015-09-02T01:51:00.003-04:00

Tonight, I saw what is, as far as I can remember, the first Mongolian film I've ever seen : Passion (2010), by fellow International Writing Program participant Byamba Sakhya. It was at once about Mongolia and about art in the world, and also about politics and archives and history and why creative types of people do the things they do.

As you watch the film, you sink into what I imagine (though I might be mistaken) is a state of mind that is nurtured by the sway of the steppes and the lull of the big sky (and despite having seen Nebraska as part of the programme last week, I did not truly think of the sky being so impossibly big until I saw Passion tonight). What I mean is: time slows, breathing eases, the story rolls on but at its own unhurried pace, one that is far from frenzied modernity and the madding crowd.

I said to another writer afterwards that the Mongolia of the film --- which Byamba said looks very "natural" to him, the landscape he's known all his life --- looks very alien to me (and then I had to whip out Darren Soh's photographs on my phone, to show her the Singapore landscape I've known all my life). But in a good way. You sink into it, and also the story it tells, and it feels like it could keep going for eternity, just like the Mongolian horizon seems to.

The film trailer is on YouTube, but you really have to see movie on some kind of big screen to appreciate the scale --- great and small --- of its story.

I really want to drive across Mongolia now.

Acclimatising

2015-08-27T17:19:00.001-04:00

Things I have had to remind myself how to do again, since I'll be in the US for the next few months: convert temperature in Fahrenheit to Celsius, not just say "Hi" in greeting but chirp "Hi, how are you?", save quarters for laundry, leave a tip, read Greek letters (for fraternity and sorority symbols, I'm not studying ancient Greek), write the date in the order MM-DD-YY, look left first when crossing the road, clear one's own cups and dishes at cafes and casual eateries, bemoan the dearth of instant noodle options at local supermarkets, walk more slowly.

It's been almost 20 years since I spent an extended amount of time on a college campus, and American guys still love their baseball caps.

Iowa

2015-08-23T00:17:00.000-04:00

I drove four hours straight from Chicago to get to Iowa City yesterday, and I swear I got a tan on my arms because the sun was out in full glory and the temperature was almost as hot as it gets in Singapore. This last gasp of summer that I've caught in Chicago and Iowa City has been quite splendid indeed. While reading in an al fresco area of a cafe today, I kept getting distracted by the insects that were flitting in and out of the planter box beside me.

That said, there was a massive thunderstorm in Chicago a few nights ago when I was there, not to mention tornado warnings. So I've downloaded Weather Bug on my phone and recalibrated my brain to understand Fahrenheit again.

I don't know why I'm talking about the weather so much, except that maybe during the four years I spent in Chicago, I remember it being mostly grey and cold (which wasn't necessarily a bad thing), and all this sunshine and warmth is such a revelation. Also, as I told everyone before I left Singapore last weekend, it'll be such a novelty not to perspire for a few months.

Tomorrow, the International Writers Program that I'm here for kicks off proper. Our first activity is a walking tour, so I hope the weather holds. Here goes!

I flunked the written

2015-07-25T22:35:00.000-04:00

The past six months haven't been very productive for me in terms of fiction writing, but there are three non-fiction pieces I've written that I'm pretty pleased with.

It started in March when Juria Toramae asked if I would write a short foreword for the catalogue for her art exhibition, "Points of Departure" at the National Library. The foreword's not available online, but you can borrow the catalogue from the library.

After that, my friend Ernest Goh was staging a solo art photography exhibition, "Breakfast at 8 Jungle at 9" at Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Filmmaking, and he asked if I would write some kind of introduction or commentary on his work. The result: I wrote an essay [PDF] about the three photography series he presented at the show, in which I managed to weave in a couple of my own recent obsessions with ancient humans and the Holocene, alongside a reading of Ernest's work.

That was in May. In June I whipped out another piece for the upcoming TwentyFifteen.sg photography exhibition at the Esplanade. I've been the project's resident text editor since it started in August 2013, working with an excellent (all-volunteer) team, and it was nice to kick back (metaphorically speaking) and reflect on the project as a whole. The exhibition opens only on 6 August, but my essay "Points of View" is already online.

Justin Zhuang's essay for the same exhibition, "Picturing Home, Wherever We May Be", is also online and it is just beautiful. So read that, even if you don't read mine.

I must thank Juria, Ernest, and my old friends Tay Kay Chin and Darren Soh of TwentyFifteen.sg for having faith in me and letting me build words around their images and artworks. I don't think I could've dived into this mode of writing and found my groove so quickly without their encouragement and openness in discussing their work with me.

I'm planning to switch gears back to fiction writing for the rest of the year, but there's one more exhibition essay I'm stewing on. Also, watching 7 Letters at the newly-restored Capitol Theatre on Friday night got my brain humming about some things.

And hey, it looks like #sgelection is on the cards.

A good weekend

2015-07-19T11:17:00.000-04:00

I just bought an annual multi-trip travel insurance plan for the first time ever, which is pretty much a commitment to what I want to do in the next 12 months. The insurance kicks in next month when I leave for the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa, and sets me up for some other travel plans I'm hatching for November and part of 2016.

Now all I have to do, theoretically, is find the money and willpower to make those plans happen.

I blame all this firmly on Adri, by the way. We had drinks on Tuesday night and while she didn't say anything directly, something about hanging out with her must've nudged my brain cells in a certain direction, which is how I ended up saying out loud, "Maybe I should go to Cuba."

Buying the travel insurance, mundane as it sounds, caps off a pretty unexpectedly top-notch holiday weekend. Nothing earth-shatteringly special, but the simple pleasures of spending time with family, friends and an indulgent amount of Lana cake.

Other achievements unlocked during this weekend:

Went for a morning run for the first time in over a decade --- admittedly, only because I was already awake to got visit Sungei Buloh, and then the friends who'd organised the outing had to bail because one of them was sick. But hey: I went for a 2.6 km run anyway.
Spoke for about an hour about the social history of Capitol Theatre to an almost full-house audience, who'd turned up for my talk at the right place and the right time (the Urban Redevelopment Authority function room at 10 a.m.), even though I'd cheekily titled the talk "Meet at Capitol Lobby, 6 p.m.". I might've used the word atas too many times in the talk without explaining it for the benefit of non-Singlish speakers, though (it's Malay for "upper", used to connote "high-class" or "snobbish").
Learned about Schera's Algerian-American Restaurant in Elkader, Iowa, which so far sounds like the most interesting place to stop for lunch on my way to Iowa City.

I seem to be tweeting a lot more lately, so follow me there while I still try to figure out what this blog might be good for.

Checking in

2015-06-20T11:47:00.000-04:00

I'm nowhere as hardworking as the esteemed Mr Wallace, but here's what I've been doing for the last four and a half months since I posted a blog entry:

Written a foreword and two exhibition essays for three photography exhibitions: "Points of Departure" by Juria Toramae in collaboration with Jerome Lim; "Breakfast at 8 Jungle at 9" by Ernest Goh; and another one happening later this year that I'll mention in due course.
Written, edited, rewritten and re-edited a mountain of text for the revamped Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum of Singapore (opening in a couple of months' time, hold your horses).
Put the finishing touches on the manuscript for In Transit: Writing from Singapore about Airports and Air Travel (okay, maybe we need a pithier subtitle). We have a wonderful range of short stories, poems and non-fiction pieces by Singaporean writers --- publication details to come later this year.
Been accepted for the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa --- following in the footsteps of amazing Singapore writers like Yeow Kai Chai, Amanda Lee Koe, Stephanie Ye, Jeremy Tiang and Alvin Pang, among others. I'm supposed to start my second novel while I'm there later this year. Don't ask me about the first one, I'm still whittling away at it.

Unrelated to work, I have also been:

Running at the splendid Bishan Park.
Drinking an awful lot of tasty cocktails and whiskey.
Taking short vacations in the region (in fact, I'm off again tomorrow).
Watching movies in the cinema (Mad Max: Fury Road on the big screen --- oh yes).
Dealing with various personal things, as you do.

If you want more timely updates, I'm mostly on Twitter and Instagram these days. Also, I don't necessarily write in bullet points.

Fiddling

2015-02-09T10:32:00.000-05:00

I was going to blog properly tonight while waiting for my hair to dry, but then I got distracted by emails for some of the things I'm juggling in addition to the day job:

Follow-up queries on my co-edited volume Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia.
Revisions and edits for my co-edited literary anthology work-in-progress In Transit: An Anthology of Writing from Singapore about Airports and Air Travel (yes, we need a pithier subtitle).
Revisions and edits for a commissioned history of Singapore's Capitol Theatre, which should hit the shelves later this year.
Pro bono editing for webpages for an NGO.

The day job, for those of you keeping score at home, is working [freelance] on the revamp of the Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum. Today that meant looking at some World War Two artefacts. It's quite harrowing, when you think about it, to be looking close-up at something that was worn by someone on the frontline. Suddenly every scrape and stain on the object seems laden with meaning.

Edited to add (10 February, 8:50 a.m.):
I inserted "[freelance]" in the last paragraph. I'm not a full-time museum employee and it should be clear that I'm not writing in that capacity.