Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In downtown Santa Fe Plaza, surrounded by trees draped with Christmas lights, a plain woooden box squat oddly in the center. Here for the first time, on a short vacation, I found out from a local resident only two days ago what the box had replaced: an obelisk honoring Union soldiers, "heroes," according to the plaque, who died in battle with "savage Indians."  In October 2020, after many peaceful protests and much foot-dragging by the mayor, Native activists and their allies took things into their hands and dragged down the obelisk with ropes and chains. Photo credit: Luis Sanchez Saturno / New Mexican file photo  KRQE I was familiar with the image of the American Civil War as the war to end slavery. I was ignorant of the fact that Union forces consolidated Northern control over New Mexico by massacring its Native peoples and dispossessing them of their homelands. "When is an obelisk no...

Singapore Unbound  is launching a  new literary journal   next year, featuring the future voices of Asia, and you can help in two important ways.   We want to expand SP Blog into a full-fledged journal. We will publish a  new story, essay, or poems every week  for your reading pleasure. There will be  exciting themed months : “Archipelago Dreaming” for works exploring the virtues of flow and circulation; and “New Religions” for works examining new spiritual relationships between us and our environments. And we will continue to hold our popular  poetry and flash-fiction contests  and draw your attention to the most interesting books published through our  book reviews .  We are confident of doing so because: We are already publishing some of the finest emerging Asian voices. Read for yourself the penetrating story  “The Return” by Faraaz Mahomed , a clinical psychologist and human rights lawyer originally from South Africa and n...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . For the second year running, Singapore Unbound, a NYC-based literary non-profit, will be giving out  three awards of USD250.00   each  for the best three undergraduate critical essays on topics in Singapore and other literatures. The purpose of these awards is to encourage the teaching and study of Singapore literature at college level and the cultivation of general appreciation for the character and achievements of Singapore literature. Generously funded again by Professor Koh Tai Ann (NTU, Singapore), three awards will be given to written works of literary criticism that illuminate their chosen topics for the general reader. The award-winning essays will be published on Singapore Unbound’s SP Blog and, possibly, in a professional journal. For the purpose of these awards, Singapore literature is defined as literature written in English from 1965 onwards by a Singaporean citizen, permanent re...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   I have no words for you today but to ask you to save Nagaenthran.  Whether you're Singaporean or not, would you consider  signing the petition  to President Halimah Yacob to pardon an intellectually disabled man, who has been sentenced to death for a non-violent crime? In the words of the petition organized by local activist group Transformative Justice Collective: "Nagaenthran a/l K Dharmalingam, a Malaysian man with borderline intellectual functioning, was arrested for drug trafficking at the age of 21. The following year, he was convicted and sentenced to death. During his forensic psychiatric evaluation, Nagaenthran was assessed to have an IQ of 69 - a level internationally recognised as an intellectual disability; impaired executive functioning; and ADHD. Having been on death row for over a decade, he faces imminent execution on 10 November 2021. "While on trial, Nagaenth...

  Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In the Cherokee tale of the first fire, which my sixth-graders read as part of a unit on creation narratives from different faith traditions, a river divided the freezing animals from the burning sycamore tree. How to fetch fire back? The big and strong raven couldn't do it, and he was burned black when he tried. None of the owls could do it, earning red eyes and white eye rings in their attempts. The snakes tried, but the fire sent them swimming home. It was up to the unlikellest heroine, the water spider. Not only did she skip across the water, but she also spun her threads into a basket, into which she deposited a burning coal.  At Singapore Unbound, we wish to imitate the little water spider. Internal discussions on labor equity are landing on the need to pay all team members, including interns, a monthly volunteer's stipend, not just after a year of service, but from the ...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I'm buried, overloaded, drowning in work, but how could I turn down an invitation by a fellow Singaporean to try some cheap and good Chinese food in a place that I knew nothing about?  Spicy Village  is an unassuming establishment on Forsyth Street, in Manhattan's Chinatown, whose claim to fame is its da pan ji, or "spicy big tray chicken," a dish from Xinjiang. I did not do my research beforehand, so I did not know about the chef's specialty. Instead, I had soup dumplings (delicious but small), spicy beef brisket hui mei, or handpulled wide noodle (chewy good), and fish balls stuffed with pork (yummy), as my friend and I chatted about the various business scandals that had broken out in Singapore, about  FICA , about Singaporeans in NYC doing this and that, and about the trials of New York real estate. As the evening went on, I was feeling strangely revived in that tiny, five-table restau...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . If you are partnered parents with two school-going children, you will need a minimum of $6,426 per month to live with dignity in Singapore. If you are a single parent with one child, you will need $3,218 per month. And if you are a single elderly person, you will need $1,421 per month. These are the findings in the recent report released by a team of Singaporean researchers. Using a consensus-based methodology known as Minimum Income Standards (MIS), which is sensitive to local contexts, the researchers have determined the household budgets necessary to meet basic needs. They also suggest that "a reasonable starting point for a living wage in Singapore is $2,906 per month ." Although the median work income among all workers in 2020 exceeded this amount by 56%, the median work income for cleaners, laborers, and related workers were less than half of what is needed. The median earner in s...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In tropical Singapore we used to joke that we had four seasons, just like any temperate country, except that our seasons were hot, hotter, hottest, and shopping, which was all-year round. Underneath the joke is a tragic truth: the rapid economic development of Singapore, together with its urban transformation of the island, has desensitized us to the trade winds and the monsoons of the region. More, it has desensitized us to the dismantling of our basic human rights, free speech, free assembly, free and fair elections. Climate change in Singapore—not just rises in temperature but also more frequent flooding—has also been social and political. Jolene Tan, whose compelling essay "Out of the Well," kicks off our month-long series of writings on the theme of climate change, puts it this way: "... on this island, we enact routines especially distant from any self-sustaining equilibrium,...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   We are very excited to announce the results of Singapore Unbound’s 1st Flash Fiction Contest. Held in conjunction with our Gaudy Boy launch of Victor Fernando R. Ocampo’s The Infinite Library and Other Stories in the US, the contest had the title of this thrilling collection of speculative fiction for its theme. Every entry must be between 90-100 words. Open to everyone, the contest was judged by the novelist Monique Truong. Winners received a cash prize, publication, and a copy of The Infinite Library if they lived in the US. We received a total of 221 entries. They came from 22 countries around the world. Singapore leads with 76 entries, followed by the US 48, the Philippines 19, India 17, Canada 9, Indonesia 9, Malaysia 5, the UK 4, Argentina 3, Australia 2, Austria 2, Belgium 2, Nigeria 2, Pakistan 2, Brazil 1, Denmark 1, Finland 1, Israel 1, Italy 1, Kenya 1, South Africa 1, and Sri Lanka 1. Bec...

Singapore Unbound released our public statement on BooksActually this morning. Below are my own personal reflections on the revelations that emerged last weekend. Like many of us, I'm still processing the news. My heart goes out to the women who had to endure the ill treatment and have now so bravely told their stories. I believe them, and I wish for them justice and healing, however difficult it seems right now. I have a professional, not personal, relationship with Kenny Leck, the owner of BooksActually. He published two of my early books, and I have done readings in the past at the Tiong Bahru bookstore. I have only spoken with Renee, his ex-wife, at the bookstore when she worked there. I have heard from a writer closer to him about Kenny's divorce due to his philandering ways, but I had not known how young and vulnerable were the women that he hit on. Thinking back now, I should have been more alert to the unequal power dynamics at the store, which I visited often on my tr...

  Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . On Tuesday, we announced the first annual Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures. The awards aim to encourage the teaching and study of Singapore literature at college level and the cultivation of general appreciation for the character and achievements of Singapore literature. Three awards of USD250.00 each are given to written works of literary criticism that illuminate their chosen topics for the general reader. Essay topics may include studies of a single author or a single work. The topics may also be of a comparative nature, that is, the essays may compare an author/work with another author/work. The second author/work may be non-Singaporean. Because of the ...

 I'm a fan of Martina Evans, and this latest collection gives many different pleasures. The shorter lyrics offer a wealth of local and personal detail that seduce a reader with the childhood world of Cork and the adult one of London. Even when she is writing about her job in radiography, she is not so much writing about the work as the people: their fears, their waywardness, their idiosyncracies. The poetic sequences, whether they are about shoes or cats, offer the delights of variations on a theme. The long narrative "Mountainy Men" is yet another triumph of narrative skill. It reminds me of Flannery O'Connor, not her religious intensity, but her deep ambivalence towards Gothic grotesquerie. Evans is enraptured not by transcendence, but by the here and now, the there and then. 

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Singapore will soon take another step towards becoming a totalitarian state with the introduction of the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Bill, or FICA, in Parliament last Monday. Independent Singaporean journalist Kirsten Han analyzes the problems with the bill effectively here . As she summarizes, "The official narrative is that this law will protect Singapore from foreign meddling in our domestic affairs and governance. We’re told that it’s about safeguarding our political sovereignty. FICA, like the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), will take on hostile information campaigns, so that Singaporeans can decide on Singaporean issues without the sneaky intervention or sabotage of outsiders. The reality, though, is that FICA is yet another vaguely worded piece of legislation, designed to give the authorities maximum discretion to cast a wide net over all so...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Dale Peck, the author of Hatchet Jobs , strikes again. And again. At the gay Republican journo and pundit Andrew Sullivan, whose self-hating screeds supporting the traditional family, compassionate conservatism, and other such mythical beasts deserve buckets of vitriol but receives at Peck's hand the scalpel of savage, and very funny, wit. Here's how the review of Sullivan's Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021 (Simon & Schuster) begins: "Andrew Sullivan first showed up on my radar in 1991, an innocuous blip that gave no indication of the full-frontal assault about to be launched on the American left. I was working for OutWeek at the time, and I’d been tasked with proofing an interview between a seraphically beautiful young journalist named Maer Roshan and the recently appointed editor in chief of The New Republic (who, if I’m being completely honest, wasn’t so bad-looking...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The situation of women in this country in the news is horrific. Women are subjected regularly to physical terror, not just on the streets but also in their own homes. 1 in 3 women have experienced some form of physical violence by their intimate partner, and 1 in 7 of women have been injured by that abuse. 1 in 2 female murder victims are killed by their intimate partners, often with a gun. The threat of sexual assault is real and constant. In the course of their lives, 1 in 5 women have been raped. From 2016 through 2018, the number of rape/sexual assault victims increased 146%. Women are prevented from full and equal participation in the economy. Victims of intimate partner violence lose a total of 8,000,000 days of paid work each year, the equivalent of 32,000 full-time jobs. Between 21-60% of victims of intimate partner violence lose their jobs due to reasons stemming from the abuse. When ...

 Read three novels during our one-week vacation in Maine. A very believable romance lies at the heart of Martha Cooley's new novel Buy Me Love , but in the depths lurks the tangled bond between brothers and sisters, and into the air rises an aria of love to Brooklyn. As for Alan Lightman's Reunion , the minor style cannot save a slight plot and slighter characters. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a literary masterpiece. The floating point of view is a tremendously flexible and exciting device. The imagination at full stretch, whether revising the crucifixion narrative, inventing the Devil's ball, or describing the feeling of flying just above Moscow. Simultaneously profound philosophical and ethical questions are posed, such as cowardice and compromise while living under a totalitarian regime.

    Singapore Unbound received a total of 9 entries for our 1st Awards for the Best Undergrad Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures. All 9 essays focused on Singaporean texts; none took a comparative lit perspective. The Singaporean texts are diverse in periods, genres, and author backgrounds. The essays will now be read by Professor Koh Tai Ann, who will decide on three awards, each worth USD250. The awards will be announced in September 2021. The essay titles, listed below in no particular order, are so exciting in themselves: -Stateless Citizens: Apathy as Defence Mechanism in Amanda Lee Koe's MINISTRY OF MORAL PANIC -The Modern Malay Woman’s Reclaimed (Home)land: Syncretisation as a Strategy of Resistance in Singapore Theatre (Zizi Azah, Alfian Sa'at, Nabilah Said, Haresh Sharma) -Readerly Desire in PONTI: Beyond Eros, Eurocentrism, and Closure (Sharlene Teo) -“This is Home, Truly?”: A Cross-Generational Comparative Study of the Changing Attitudes ...

Three sonnets from "Ungovernable Bodies" have just gone live on the beautifully curated website The Abandoned Playground . The first two sonnets are written "after Yeow Kai Chai," whose work is always a challenge and an inspiration. Thanks, Daniele Pantano, for publishing them. It's a real honor to be included in your marvelous selection of writings and art. Everyone should check out the website.

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . A 16-year-old student has been charged for the murder of a 13-year-old in their school in Singapore. The tragedy has shocked the country, which has very low rates of violent crimes. A chronological account of the incident was given by the Education Minister in Parliament. The 16-year-old was assessed at the Institute for Mental Health in 2019 after he attempted to commit suicide at the age of 14. This new revelation has prompted even more calls for a review of counseling services in Singapore schools. Especially perceptive and eloquent was the call for greater mental health resources and support for schools issued by President Halimah Yacob . In Singapore, those found guilty of murder may receive the death penalty. A minor below the age of 18 will not get the death sentence, but may be imprisoned for life instead. It is no surprise that at least one social-media comment has called for the 16-year-o...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last Sunday, I attended a Meeting Point organized under the aegis of Mekong Cultural Hub , a global organization that aims to empower diverse cultural practitioners to bring their visions for an inclusive, sustainable Mekong Region to life. The Meeting Point was organized by Singaporean Grace Hong in her home in Astoria, Queens, and in that relaxed setting it introduced to one another a group of 7 people—an art critic, two administrators, two film editors, a poet (me), and a friend. Grace herself writes on art and manages public communications for a gallery in the city. Between all of us, we had ties to Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Singapore, and the US. I had visited Cambodia and Vietnam as a tourist not so long ago, but knew little about the contemporary arts around the Mekong, so the 4 short films shown to us were revelatory. In their different ways and locations, the artists in the films depl...