Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Holding a one-person protest for just enough time to take a photograph gets you into trouble in Singapore. This, labor and rights activist Jolovan Wham learned, when he did just that . His action was undertaken in support of two young climate activists who are being investigated by the police, and it landed him in a police station too. The Public Order and Safety (Special Powers) Act, which took effect in 2018, is the draconian legislation that authorizes such anti-democratic measures against peaceful protests. To show support for Jolovan Wham, a few friends posted on social media photographs of themselves holding up the same smiley face as he had done. The posts have since started a movement of sorts, with posters not only hashtagging themselves #smileinsolidarity but also expressing their thoughts on why freedom of speech and assembly are so vital to a true democracy. Jolovan is compiling these photograp...

More kinds words for CONNOR & SEAL, these from H.L. Hix: "Its architecture is dynamic, and then poem by poem it is elegant and vivid. I especially love "Hi Harlem" and "I Don't Believe in the Long Arc of Justice" and "Strongman from Qinshi Huangdi's Tomb" in the first section, and then the way "form" and "content" (that artificial distinction!) work together in the second section to draw me in and draw me forward is magical."—H.L. Hix Free shipping anywhere if you buy from my indie publishers ! Praise “What are the routes, routines, and disruptions for eros in an all too recognizable dystopia? I feel burnt and humbled by entering the near future hotly projected in this book. Jee Leong Koh’s Audenesque gift for tilting and tipping rhyme and meter creates a craquelure of lines upon these poems’ fine and strong shapes. The fierce sun of his intelligence intervenes to vivify neighbourhood and lovers’ voices in o...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Once upon a time, bubbles—especially social media ones—had negative connotations of wilful self-isolation, inbred ideas, and easy complacency. Bubbles produce only echo chambers, it was charged, mixed-metaphorically. The students at my New York private school, in discussions about the world, would remind each other that they lived in a New York bubble, a private-school bubble. The point was to burst the bubble, not to live inside one. The pandemic, which has changed so many things, has changed our language too. In addition to giving us new expressions such as "social distancing" and "flattening the curve," it has changed the meanings of old standbys. Now that the rate of infection is going down in some places, people are talking cautiously of getting together in "social bubbles," with extended family or close friends who could be trusted to keep themselves and others...

Not sure why but the book's mannered style distanced me from the plot and the protagonist, orphan Marina, instead of breaking molds, or creating a new reality, as Edmund White's afterword has it. There are certain advantages in rendering the other orphans girls as a collective "we," but so much else is lost. Individuality, for a start. The matter—childhood psychosis—is too slight and extreme to be treated as an ancient Greek Tragedy. It feels, instead, like a sleight of hand to avoid the difficulty of rendering individual lives. As any parent will know, kids have personalities as young as one year old. Structurally, wouldn't it have been more interesting and dynamic to weave Marina's recollection of the road accident into the narrative about the orphanage? As it stands now, the road accident at the start of the novel feels like a long prologue, and not Part One of of the tripartite organization.

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Can migrant workers in Singapore, most of whom work in the construction and shipping industries, be considered "subalterns"? The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci first coined the term to identify social groups marginalized and excluded from the socio-economic institutions of society in order to deny their political voice. Then the term "subaltern" entered postcolonial theory to denote a colonized people, who are regarded by their colonizers as essentially different from themselves, and thus, inferior. To think about migrant workers in Singapore as "subalterns" is to consider not only how they have been proleterianized by their work in Singapore, despite the high educational levels of many of these workers, but also how they have been made over into an image of the Other, the Lesser. Conversely, it is also to think of Singapore not only as a capitalist but also as a neo...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . A sociologist, a political scientist, a media studies professor, and two economists meet in a webinar to talk about Singapore beyond the pandemic. The sociologist emphasizes the social inequities surfaced by the pandemic. The political scientist urges a mindset change from profit calculation to moral reasoning in the formulation of public policy. The media studies professor warns of the dangers of fanning nationalistic rhetoric. One of the two economists argues that efficiency pursued to the detriment of social justice actually becomes inefficient. The other economist wants Singapore to change its input-based development model because it has not been working for the country for years before the present crisis. Although the webinar is not about hawker food or getting ahead in school, it attracts scores of people, partly because the speakers have strong social-media followings, and partly because it is so refr...

The wolf-man is a simplistic reduction of our myriad selves. "Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands." Reading this passage helped me discover the meaning of the oscillating gun in my fiction manuscript SNOW AT 5 PM. The truth of multiplicity comes home to Harry Haller at the climax of the Magic Theater, with all its doors leading to different versions of himself. The chess player in one room is surely a predecessor of the Magister Ludi of the glass bead game. All past, present, and future selves available to one. Not for nothing is Hesse a disciple of Nietzsche, and his eternal recurrence. For me, Hesse will always be the most miraculous and unexpected connector.  After reading Safranski's biography of Goethe, I find Goethe appearing to Harry Haller in a dream. The accusation of ...