​AUDREY CHIN 

Be careful what you wish for. Nothing is a perfect circle. That’s life. How we wished for rain the week before! A deluge of blessed beautiful water would put out the f The air was grey in Vietnam too. Not from haze, but just the general smoke and carbon from the motorbikes and humidity. When we got to the Delta, we breathed a little easier. But still the air was muggy. At the open-air restaurant where lunched with the countryside kids we give scholarships to, our sweaty cloth

Have I prayed in vain? Wai’s funeral was yesterday, Ish’s more than a year ago now. Kwan is in a deep coma. There’s very little chance he’ll wake. No. Despite the fact that Wai and Ish died, that Kwan isn’t likely to wake up from his hospital bed, prayer helped. It comforted, it left a legacy… I first began to circling the park with my rosary beads because of eighteen year old Ish. I didn’t know Ish but her mother was part of my women’s prayer group. When she was diagnosed wi

This week Pope Benedict 16th steps down, the first papal resignation in nearly 600 years. At the University of Tubingen in Germany, the theologian Hans Kung, author of the forthcoming “Can the Church Still Be Saved?” hopes for a new spring for a fading church. But in the Mekong Delta, in my husband’s family, life flows on uninterrupted like the river. Every Spring, my husband and his Saigon siblings make an annual pilgrimage to the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho to celebrate my

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

I had a nightmare about pacmen shooting at me; they were shouting – Resistance is futile! resistance is futile.   Clearly the product of a fevered brain that’s spent too much time trying to write both the fall of Vietnam and September 11th into the same chapter!  I needed a break. This is what came out – Resistance IS futile.  Made worse if one is resisting because of unquestioning patriotism, absolute loyalty. Made worse in the creative process by being too attached to one p

It’s taken me almost a lifetime to learn to sit and be with myself, to be aware of my now and to let go. Animals, they do it naturally...

With each birthday, death becomes more forward.  Good face days become fewer and farther apart. Death begins to make her presence felt...