Selected Essays
Notes on travel, culture & life
A Family Under Occupation
(Mekong Review, #36)
A review of Vanessa Chan’s debut novel, The Storm We Made.
Part spy novel, part historical novel, part anti-colonial novel, part doomed romance, part family drama, Chan’s novel feels like it’s trying to encompass too many things, and can feel uneven and underdeveloped in parts. Cecily, the main character, also sometimes feels inadequately fleshed out in terms of her motivations and shifts in perspectives. However, although the different character trajectories can feel at first like a kind of dispersal, it soon becomes clear that they are all animated by the strange intimacies of human relationships, however surprisingly forged—including the one between Fujiwara and Lina, the ex-wife of a dead Chinese kapitan, and between Lina and Cecily. As the novel approaches its denouement, Chan knits all the characters’ lives together in a way that culminates forcefully in what Cecily expresses as “the circularity of a narrative so perfect as to be absurd”.
Peering Around Riverbends
(Mekong Review #32) - pdf
A reflection on the river journeys I've taken, past and present.
It wasn’t until I took up a project to walk the two rivers, to better understand their physical and social histories, that I began to see them differently. I walked inside the hulking hollows of their concrete canals just to find out how it felt to be inside them. When it rained and the tide rose, I watched, helpless, as the homeless abandoned their makeshift shelters in the shadows of the flyovers along the river. I followed the rivers to the outer reaches of the city, where they took on their natural features again around clusters of kampungs—and delighted, once, in bumping into a man in traditional dress walking his free-roaming geese. I will never forget that view of the city from the vicinity of Kampung Puah, off the trunk road of Jalan Gombak: the river flanked by grassy green banks so dense they call to mind that Triassic jungle of Ballardian fantasy, tapering finally into a point on the horizon capped by the Petronas Twin Towers.
Ways of Writing
(Mekong Review #24) - pdf
On Tim Hannigan’s Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre
In Hannigan’s consideration of journalism’s role in travel writing, there seems a missed opportunity in not considering the blurred boundaries between the latter and ‘foreign’ correspondence, which occupies a place that has similarly come under scrutiny. There is an important distinction in travel writing that is central to its survival as a separate genre: travel writers have the licence to be more imaginative, which does not include making things up. To paraphrase an essay of Thomas Swick’s, they can be interpreters of landscape: two writers can observe the same set of facts but come to completely different conclusions. That’s where the magic of travel writing lies. And that’s why it’s so important that travel writers come from diverse backgrounds. [Samanth] Subramaniam hopes that, one day, we’ll have more travellers from the ‘third world’ writing about the ‘first world’, not just the other way around.
Echo in Sahara
(Mekong Review #20) - pdf
On San Mao’s Stories of the Sahara, translated by Mike Fu.
In his translator’s note, Mike Fu described his difficulty in squaring Sanmao’s ‘profound empathy’ with the few instances where her judgment of Sahrawis may come off as ‘insensitive at best, derogatory or racist at worst’. One might read this in the way she describes their hygiene and traditions, their apparent mendacity in so freely borrowing her things, the voyeurism with which she sometimes expressed her curiosity, and the paternalism she assumed in taking it upon herself to divest them of their ignorance or superstitions. At the same time, one can risk being too much of a relativist while travelling to places that practise vastly different cultures, and her reactions to customs like child marriage and slavery at least feel honest. Seen in a different light, not hiding her distaste may come across as less condescending. And she doesn’t expect anyone to be unimpeachably ‘good’ in order to befriend them, complicated as the friendship might be.
Homing Pigeon
(Mekong Review #15) - pdf
I know a friend who visits McDonald’s in every country he travels to. In doing so, he hopes that some nuance about each place will reveal itself, some nuance that lies in the difference between a McDonald’s that serves Nasi Lemak Burger and a McDonald’s that serves McAloo Tikki Burger. It’s the differences in the pedestrian, rather than the extraordinary, that’s more telling, right?
I get it. I have a similar ritual: I go to Chinatown.
Ten Days in a Flooded Jungle by Dugout Canoe
(The Lily newsletter/Washington Post)
A mini-essay on travelling alone as a woman in the Peruvian Amazon.
I had seen enough movies to imagine the Amazon’s possible horrors, and the fact that there would be zero means of communication after the third day weighed on my mind—even as I texted my human ports-of-call and told them not to worry unless they didn’t hear from me by the eleventh day. Still, Miguel had talked about Cocha Pasto in terms eminently doable, with a safe return seemingly taken for granted. I dared myself to go ahead, but, erring on the side of caution, asked if he knew a female guide—and was surprised when he said yes. The next morning, I found out that he had simply asked the guide to bring his wife. "Two for the price of one," Miguel said cheerfully. You can imagine how it looked: like I was being chaperoned. With some hilarity, I thought, That’s not the kind of traveler I want to appear to be! And yet, as a woman traveling alone, you feel obligated to take all the precautions you can.
Killer Fish for Breakfast
(Roads & Kingdoms)
Dining on piranha in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, Peru.
On the makeshift grill of our hut on stilts, half swallowed up by the swollen river this rainy season, my guide, Santiago, and his wife, Maritza, made quick work of the red- and yellow-bellied creatures. But even grilled to a crisp and served on porcelain plates with boiled plantains and potatoes, they still looked menacing. Everyone expects the taste of piranha to live up to its fearsome reputation, but it tastes like the fish we commonly eat and is surprisingly tender. It just has bigger teeth, which give it that pugnacious underbite, and which we admired before tucking in.
The Aunties of Chinatown, Guatemala City
(Wanderlust blog by Geographic Expeditions)
They hovered around me, spinning out a succession of homemade dishes onto a round table: won ton soup, cabbage fried with oyster sauce, braised pork cuts sandwiched in steaming white buns. The smell of garlic and onions clung to my clothes, and for a moment I imagined I was home in Malaysia, and that my mother, my grandmother, and my aunts were telling me to eat, Eat, girl, pausing only to puff with feigned modesty when I said, with my mouth full, “This is good.” It’s the way the Chinese show their hospitality. It’s the way they show love.
Then, amid the women’s Cantonese chatter, I heard the sound of Spanish rolling off practiced tongues. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was in a dining room on the second storey of a nondescript block of shoplots in Chinatown, Guatemala City. At least, I think it was Chinatown. In my memory, the street was strangely, refreshingly, free of the forced authenticity of red lanterns and curled pagoda roofs.