Category Personal Life
Pondering the Possibility of Being Forever Other
This moment imprinted on me the sense of Malacca as my home, a sense I have never been able to recover anywhere else in the world. To have felt the familiar once is always to feel its absence after. The town through whose streets I mourned publicly, dressed in black, sack, and straw, weeping with […]
On the Book of Kells and What Endures
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland, 30 April 2014, 2.15 pm I’m hanging out at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. There’s a slight drizzle falling from the grey Irish clouds outside and this little stone bench in the Lady’s Chapel in the cathedral is, for want of any better word, cozy. I’m resisting the urge to […]
Down the Rabbit Hole Again with His Dark Materials
Something happens when I buy books that I’ve been looking forward to reading but have been holding off on buying for whatever reason — a TBR pile growing dangerously long, an awareness that once I fall down the rabbit hole of a truly absorbing book I tend to walk around the real world with a […]
We Must Stand Against Each and Every One, or Who Are We?
“The boy must die,” Bernard insisted. “Or the world dies with him. In horror beyond earthly imaginings. What is one boy against that?” “Everything,” Erin said. “Murdering a boy is an evil deed. Every evil act matters. Every single one. We must stand against each and every one, or who are we?” – Innocent Blood […]
Rejection and My Love/Hate Read of Ender’s Game
I received my first rejection letter from a grad school today and the deep waters of my soul are troubled. It’s useless for friends to say rejection is a part of life — of course I know that. It still stings anyway. It still makes you feel like your insides are thunderstorming. My insides have […]
Goodbye to All That and More
It might seem overly simplistic to say that I bought Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York because I was leaving Beijing and could not find an anthology of elegiac essays bidding farewell to this grimy city instead of its more famous counterpart across the Pacific Ocean, but it would be true […]
So This Is 2014
Happy New Year, dear void! It’s the sixth day of 2014 and I’m really supposed to be working on my applications, but if everyone did things when they were supposed to, what a god-awful boring world it would be. The last day of the old year and the first day of the new were quiet […]
This Is How The Entire Course Of A Life Can Be Changed
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience — if only he had had them both at once — would surely have seen them both through. And then what unborn children might have had their […]
Lunchtime LM Montgomery: Jane of Lantern Hill
My favorite children’s book is Anne of Green Gables, hand’s down. I can’t remember when I first read it or how I came to possess the book. Presumably my mother bought it for me — I don’t think my pocket money stretched to books when I was under ten. Perhaps she bought it for me […]
Buried Beneath All The Lies 