​AUDREY CHIN 

How do I keep faith when faced with the children of wartime rape?

I live in Singapore,  7,800 kilometres away from Syria and 15,400 kilometres from New York City. I’m black haired and under five feet tall. I don’t have an American accent or a navy blue passport, so its unlikely I’ll be shoved overboard a ship or thrown off a plane in the event of a hijacking.  I won’t, now, lose any men in war. My husband is way past the age of the draft. My older son isn’t inclined to volunteer to fight  and my younger son, who’s deaf, won’t get past the m

It’s a boat person’s festival that’s why… When we lived in the US, it was a public holiday, an opportunity for far flung too busy friends and relatives to get together. With memories of the war and of hunger still stalking them, my husband’s people commemorated this American migrant feast with the solemnity of ancestral anniversary days.  To have enough food to eat in a land of plenty, it was something to give thanks for. We don’t owe our livelihoods to that land of plenty no

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

In Xinjiang, the water tables are buried deep.  The winters are cold, the summers burning – a  geography perfect for forcing fragrant grapes, tiny heady perfumed roses, and the saffron yielding crocii that carpet the mountains during the brief snow-fed springs. Yes, even then during that summer, political unrest was already brewing.  Our Uighur tour guide, for example, had rejected a government job to do something “more meaningful” he said. He insisted on using local time, no