Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last Friday, Taiwan's parliament voted to legalize same-sex marriage, a first for Asia. In doing so, it met the deadline imposed by the constitutional court, which struck down the Civil Code's definition of marriage as exclusively between a man and woman in 2017. Singapore Unbound salutes all the Taiwanese LGBTQ activists and allies, and rejoices with all Taiwanese, both LGBTQ and not. The change is not just for a sexual minority but for everyone, because it enhances democratic ideas, freedoms, and rights for all. Over in Singapore, the annual LGBTQ rally called Pink Dot announced its campaign theme for this year, its eleventh. It urges all Singaporeans to take a stand #AgainstDiscrimination. To inform the general public of the real harm inflicted on LGBTQ people in school, at home, and at the workplace, members of the LGBTQ community are asked to take to social media to share their experiences of being discrimi...

Brian Bernards' Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature is an exciting study of the archipelagic trope and the activity of creolization in the context of postcolonial literature in Southeast Asia. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Edouard Glissant, Bernards distinguishes the archipelagic imagination from the continental one, as the former prioritizes "contact, exchange, heterogeneity, and creolization instead of racial, ethnic, or linguistic uniformity and singularity." Drawing on Benedict Anderson, Thomas Eriksen, and the Cuban poet Nancy Morejon, Bernards distinguishes creolization from both hybridity and multiculturalism. Creolization "recognizes culture as an ongoing process that cannot be reduced to a singular outcome, offering neither a finished product (hybridity) nor a composite portrait of separate, immutable entities (multiculturalism)." Chapter 1 looks at "Modern Chinese Impr...

When I roomed with Neil Aiken at the Kundiman poetry retreat in 2005, I recognized in him another migratory spirit. Neil was born in Vancouver, but grew up in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and various parts of western Canada and the United States. When we met, he was doing his creative writing MFA at the University of California, Riverside, and two years later his first book won the 2007 Philip Levine prize. A road runs through The Lost Country of Sight . A road that observes intently the country it enters, and leaves, and then re-enters. Individually keen, the observations do not, however, describe external realities so much as internal states. The poetry is essentially introspective. This is its strength, but also its danger. It risks making one country very much like another. Love, loss, longing--these psychological states are distinctly evoked in poem after poem, whereas Taipei, Hsin Chu, Kaohsiung, Saskatoon, Astoria (in Oregon), Los Angeles, they are really interchangeable in this poet...