​AUDREY CHIN 

I’m drunk with words. My nephew, the artist and poet, is visiting with his family. We’ve been indulging in artsy-fartsy conversation, talk that makes me feel drunk with stars. Poetry is … A word picture, my nephew said. Or a frame of words with room for interpretation, I replied. We tossed the definitions back and forth: – an echo of the world – words that call to each reader’s memory – spaces between that resonate with the holes in each reader’s own story … In the end we agr

On the 7th day HE rested. I need a rest. So does my kid. It’s been a little too much – the travels, the back-to-back meetings the week after, all those posts I just had to get out about the trip, the extra coaching I’ve had to give Youngest (who didn’t learn about words till he was 4 and has a precarious hold on grammar, vocabulary and meaning) .. I kept thinking, all I’ve got to do is keep it all balanced. First things first in the morning, second things later in the afterno

Every 16th day of the Lunar New Year, Heart Guy and I travel to his family home in the Mekong Delta to commemorate his mother’s death and celebrate her 96 years of life. This year, he’ll be going on his own as I’ll be at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Mandalay talking about As the Heart Bones Break, my novel about 60 years in the life of a Vietnamese man.It’s just this year, Heart Guy and I said to the family. Anyway, the book, in its own way, also celebrates my mother-in

Believing in magic, we’d hide these found treasures between the pages of our text books, sprinkling bread crumbs over them to feed them. If we loved them enough, we used to believe, the feathers would sprout fluff at the bottoms of their shafts and eventually (very very eventually) grow into the birds themselves. I suspect the fluff that appeared was probably mould. And of course, the feathers always fell out of the books and disappeared before they had time to turn into swan

I’m stepping out of the box. The last three nights I’ve had nightmares. They were all related to one of my two WIPS’s – the one about a detective solving a series of ritual cannibal murders. I needed saving from my own imagination! Youngest was the rescuing hero. Digging around the store-room under the staircase yesterday he discovered my old leather art-portfolio. Stuffed in it were some illustrations I did for the two older children. They were meant to accompany a series of

February 10th – it’s New Year again! Popiah wrapping fronted by lettuce, filling, and everything else This is the New Year my family really celebrates. And for our traditional New Year’s Eve re-union dinner, we make a special popiah. Something everyone always clamors to be invited for. (An aside for those not in the know – Popiah is a mixture of braised julienned vegetables and meat wrapped in a soft rice flour roll with lots of ‘sides’…) The popiah at our house is a combinat

Monique Truong – An award winning American writer and you’re discovering something new about how an American woman of Vietnamese descent might be perceived in this Little Red Dot you’re visiting for the first time. In the first of this series on Vietnamese Artists in Singapore I interview Monique Truong, the award-winning author of The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth who was in Singapore for the 2012 Singapore Writers Festival. The Book of Salt has been nominated for the

We don’t eat turkey … PHoto Credit: http://www.chubbyhubby.net Not because we’re vegetarians unfortunately. Unfortunately just because I can’t cook it well and our oven’s too small for the gigantic bird we’d need for all our guests.  Anyway for us, it’s the gathering of people that matterFirst things first – the people who’ll be there By and large boat people… We’ve got a bunch of nationalities: German Vietnamese, English Vietnamese, French Vietnamese, Australian Vietnamese,

Some say this with disdain. But what’s not to love about buses and train systems that more or less work, even if they’re  stuffed to the gills; water that comes out of the faucet drinkable; drains that drain 360 out of 365 days a year. In November the rains begin In Los Angeles, it came in dribbles. Here 1o 15’  from the equator it falls in torrents. I’m grateful for the sound of the rain waking me, the cool of the rainy mornings. Selfishly, I’m also grateful I no longer have

We went to Alaska for the summer. It’s beautiful country. For someone from Singapore, too big to grasp. We had time, so much time. And space. In the space/time between one national park and another, as the snow capped mountains and the midget pine trees rolled past our glass domed train, this story surfaced. It’s fiction except for the bit about Anchorage being the significant other’s first landing place in America. But there’s a truth in the story about how a new country is

Photocredit: dogsintouch.com My father has decided to say Grace after 50 years of not doing so.  The reason he’s started again is a video someone sent him of dogs putting their paws together before chowing down. If dogs can do it, so can he! Everyone knows that  dogs can be motivated to do almost anything for a good meal.  It’s a Pavlovian reflex and nothing to do with God.  Still, God works in mysterious ways to answer the hunger of our hearts.  If a video of Pavlov’s dogs c