Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Psalm 118 is an abecedarian, as is Geoffrey Chaucer's translation of a French prayer, "An ABC." The abecedarian is an ancient poetic form that follows an alphabetical order. Psalm 118 consists of twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In Chaucer's poem, the twenty-three stanzas go from A to Z (skipping J, U, and W). The modern abecedarian is now more of a mnemonic device, but the tone of prayerful petition lingers. Secular prayer and sacred memorial, Devi S. Laskar's "Elegy Abecedarian" calls us to remember the eight people murdered in Acworth and Atlanta just last month. Six of the eight people killed by a white suspect were women of Asian descent. Among the six was Suncha Kim...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . This spring I started teaching Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun to my VII's (the equivalent of Singapore's Secondary One) with some trepidation. The play, about a Black family living in the segregated Southside of Chicago, required careful contextualization, much of which was new to me. I had to prepare my students to read aloud with accuracy and respect the African American Vernacular English spoken by the Younger family. Throughout the study, I had to be mindful not to make the one Black student in my mainly white class feel either invisible or hypervisible. After reading just the first twenty pages, the students have fallen in love with the play. They identify with young Travis who is about their age. When Travis has to ask for an extra 50 cents for school, they understand why his mother said no, constrained as the family is by financial precarity. They also understand why h...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . After last year's hullabaloo about the rising COVID infection rate among Singapore's low-wage migrant workers, what has now become of them? These workers come mainly from South Asia to work in the dangerous industries of construction and shipping. They number more than 300,000, and almost half of them contracted the virus because they live in crowded dormitories. Though most of those infected displayed mild or no symptoms, several continue to experience the long-term effects of the sickness , such as debilitating pain and fatigue, months after testing positive. The authorities responded by ordering the private dormitory operators to control and restrict the workers' movement. The workers were not allowed to use communal facilities or gather in the hallways; they had to keep to their bunk rooms, which accommodated as many as ten of them. When the COVID situation in Singapore stabilized, ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Brandon Elliot, 38, was arrested yesterday for brutally assaulting 65-year-old Filipina American Vilma Kari in midtown Manhattan on Monday. Elliot is to be charged with assault as a hate crime, among other charges. News reports of his arrest highlight the fact that Elliot was out on parole for stabbing his mother to death. Easily lost in the sensationalist reporting is the indictment of NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea of the city's treatment of parolees . “When you’re releasing people from prison and you’re putting them in homeless shelters, you’re asking for trouble,” Shea said on TV. “There’s got to be a safety net and there’s got to be resources for them. It just never should’ve happened.” Before the assault in Hell's Kitchen, Elliot was staying at a nearby hotel, which has been converted by the city into a homeless shelter because of the pandemic. Elliot had been incarcerated since he was...