Bloke & Kids, Lombok

"So we lunched at Lau Pa Sat and talked through the surface of our lives. I told her my glorious pretensions and she smiled back with a charming reticence. I asked her what she was doing working for Mr Tan? Surely she could find something better? She said it’s just a job and she was biding her time while readying her heart and soul for the Universe. I told her I could relate to that. We talked about the dreariness of everyday life, how most things were old cabbage and wet socks. I told her I was getting out, moving to London where I could lose myself. I lectured her on the courage to move away from one’s comfort zone. She smiled at me and suggested Lombok rather than London."

Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011). 

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:

• is about a young lawyer, coasting along in privilege, who is challenged to get wet to prove his love 
• examines unconscious assumptions, and how a sense of entitlement and the shallowness of one's gaze obscures self awareness, intimacy and growth
• shows the effect of this on relations with others
• contains passing references to small law firms in shophouses in Tanjong Pagar, Prada suits, Raoul cuff links, Lloyds shoes, Louboutin heels, silver charm bracelets, Benny Hill flirting with Emily Dickinson, Halal eating houses, a HDB flat in Clementi, a Hokkien Sponge Bob Square Pants, Lau Pa Sat, Billy Wilder films, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres, Amitabh Bachchan and Maggie Q, Kong Hee and Lawrence Khong, Ai Weiwei, Miroslav Tichý, Henry Darger and Beatrix Potter, Justin Bieber and Taufik Batisah, the planet Zog, and the song 无条件为你. 
• Why so many names dropped? I wanted to show the pretentious superficiality of the narrator and how this obstructs his ability to achieve deeper relations with others.
• He is bewildered by the things life end up throwing at him, and so he should be.

Rashid at the Sail

"He remembered when he was a child, maybe about nine years old, massaging his mother’s feet. Pressing his little thumbs into her rough, calloused flesh as hard as he could. Feeling the warmth and softness beneath the dry, crackled skin and trying to smooth out all her tension and worry. When did the quiet comfort in each other’s company disappear? He loved his mother. Very much. It was just that she loved his brother more."

Excerpt from Rashid at The Sail, a story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly

In this story a young man, kicked out of home by his mother, retreats to his brother’s luxury condominium at The Sail to work out what to do with his life.

The story was written in 2014 and 2015 and was inspired by:

• my personal trainer, Rizam. The basic plot and characters were developed with Rizam while i worked out in the gym. Rizam was my first ‘non-work’ friend in Singapore back in 2002.
• a Tessa Hadley story in The New Yorker, Experience

Rashid at the Sail:

• is set at The Sail in the heart of the modern corporate core of SGP, Marina Bay, where you can literally walk 70 steps to work. When I worked at One Raffles Quay I used to eat pasta once a week from Da Paola at the foot of The Sail
• is about family, loneliness giving birth to exploration, breach and consequence, with an unethical act leading to a new place, and ultimately reconciliation
• Other themes include yearning for something more, taking responsibility, looking to escape ordinariness, trying to find purpose, how to live - not just go through the motions, being envious of a brother & wanting to break out to be your own person
• “He didn’t even glance at the Merlion.”

In some ways this is an anti-Merlion story. The Merlion (that consumer staple of Sing Lit) means nothing to our protagonist whose inspiration is gained from another SingLit icon: a kite, representing the independence and agency of individuals rather than a contrived, 'marketing driven solution'. See Dave Chua's, The Beating & Other Stories, for a story with a Kite in it.

• “He fell hard for this vision of himself, built on the shifting sands of selective nostalgia.”
  
  Rashid finds purpose in idealising a relationship from the past. This gives him a new role for the future: to mean something to his brother's son.

There are also references in this story to: 

• TV studios at Caldecott Hill. I went there several times during the first season of Singapore Idol in 2004 to watch Jeassea, Rizam’s ex wife sing
• The Biggest Loser - Asia. I’ve never seen it, never wanted to see it. Pass me another beer please.
• Hibiscus Royal Slings, are a cocktail at Lantern, the chill out bar on the top of the Fullerton Bay Hotel. This is where an FX Trader lost his life jumping from the roof after a few too many drinks.
• Expat Life is a typo - it should be Expat Living
• A plastic diorama of the Petronas Towers - representing a connection with Malaysia
• Those infamous on line sites: The Online Citizen, The Real Singapore & SammyBoy
• A magician in Bradford - famous for Cleo the girl in a goldfish bowl - and a wrestler from Atlanta, Georgia who share the same name as your favourite author
• Another lunch time eating place, Lau pa sat
• Bromsgrove. My mother taught there. We lived nearby until I was 11 when we emigrated to Australia. Bromsgrove houses the National Telephone Kiosk Collection and is close to the Lickey Hills.
• tapas at Duxton Hill Road, KopiO at Everton Park, Milo Godzillas beside the infinity pool at Ku De Ta, poetry readings at BooksActually, live music at Haji Lane. 
• the presents, designer underwear and a fountain pen, are a reference to gifts from a student to her law lecturer

Rashid at The Sail

"He remembered when he was a child, maybe about nine years old, massaging his mother’s feet. Pressing his little thumbs into her rough, calloused flesh as hard as he could. Feeling the warmth and softness beneath the dry, crackled skin and trying to smooth out all her tension and worry. When did the quiet comfort in each other’s company disappear? He loved his mother. Very much. It was just that she loved his brother more."

Excerpt from Rashid at The Sail, a story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

My Writing Process - The Ideal

I thought it might be useful to set out the 'ideal' writing process I sought to apply in writing the stories in We Rose Up Slowly. Setting it out this way suggests I took a highly disciplined and organised approach. This is in fact a lie and does not do justice to my messy, chaotic and doubt ridden reality. I don't write in a linear fashion - I have ideas and sentences flying all over the place at various stages of development and quality - so I need an 'ideal' process to aspire to. Even if I never achieve the 'ideal', a little process and structure to my writing process helps. 

What's your approach? I'd love to share notes.

My Writing Process

A. Capture

A1. In Notebook by hand: 
1) Capture ideas, thoughts, scenes, events, conflicts, characters, observations, outline of stories. Dreams. Snippets. Passing conversations. Lines from movies. Bus trips. Get everything down. Don't judge or self censor.

A2. Digital capture:
2) Dictate thoughts & make notes on iPhone Notepad
3) Have an Ideas text file on iPhone to dump links, news articles, quotes, ideas etc - I tried to use Evernote but it was just to slow in syncing

A3. Filter Captured Notes into a workable form
4) Transcribe/dictate into Scrivener or iPhone notepad the handwritten notes & ideas I want to work on further. Highlight sentences, characters, quotes that stand out from the dross. Think about links, connections, common themes, interesting juxtapositions, contrasts, light and shade. Order & reorder.

B. Build the story

I use Scrivener a lot during this stage to work out what I want to say in a story & how to say it.

B1. First Draft
1) Using the outcome of A: write a quick first draft focussing on mood & tone. Do not worry about plot holes, logical contradictions, spelling, grammar or if sentences are correct. Use placeholders where you know there are gaps. Don't edit, judge or self censor.
DO NOT WORRY IF IT IS HORRIBLE - MOST OF IT WILL BE CRAP AT THIS STAGE (& PROBABLY, FOR A LOT LONGER)
2) Summarise what happens in each scene in the story in one or two lines. 

B2. Research
3) Read & research key factual aspects of the story e.g. profession, setting, events, type of person, history etc
4) Put links, quotes, articles etc in Scrivener Research section

B3: Discover the Story
5) Does the plot make sense? What's the key conflict & how is this addressed & resolved in the story? Is another scene, event or character missing? Who wants/yearns for what? How are they challenged? What happens in the end? Look for connections & common concerns & themes. Don't worry if you don't have complete answers to these 'story' questions: Use placeholders where questions remain open.
6) Rearrange, build & develop scenes to make a story, conflicts & character in Scrivener
7) Rewrite, revise, edit - like waves over sand & onto rock - keep going, read, revise and reread the text again
8) Use Plaintext with Scrivener to facilitate writing, revising & editing on mobile & iPad

B4. Discover the Characters
9) Imagine what its like to be each of your main characters. Write their POV.
10) Ask what  are their desires/wants/yearning? How do they change & why do they change over the course of the story? Is their narrative momentum? Does the writing make you want to find out what happens next?
11) Keep asking questions about the characters, yearnings & challenges, the conflict, the structure, the dialogue, what works, whats irrelevant, who grows & why, epiphany etc etc
12) Is POV consistent? 
13) Do physically logistics make sense within the rules of the story?
14) Is there too much or too little of any of the characters?

B5. Beginning & Ending
15) Does the story start with a compelling scene which cuts to the core of the story?
16) How are key conflicts resolved at the end? Where do the characters end up? Have they changed? What questions are left open at the ending?
17) What questions does the text raise? How are these answered, or not answered, in the text?
18) Is their unity of theme, effect & purpose in the writing?

C. Let the story sit for a week or more

D. Further Revisions

D1. Initial Revisions
1) Are there extra words, sentences that are clunky or don't make sense? 
2) Cut out 10-20% of words to distil the essence of the story to a concentrated unity. Does every scene, sentence, description, observation help progress the story? If not, delete.
3) Is story and character clear? Are any ambiguous parts of the story distracting? Which parts need more clarity & focus - which parts are best left ambiguous & blurred?
4) Dictate the latest draft of the story onto your iPhone & listen to what it sounds like. Check rhythm, pace, dialogue etc - revise further
5) Run spell check & grammar check. Look for nearby duplicate words, bad grammar & typos. Delete "-ly" words & remove unnecessary adverbs.
6) Cut and paste from Scrivener into word.  
7) Print it out & review the physical printed word on the page
8) Finish a draft - this is a reasonable working draft but still may require major surgery

D2. Later Revisions
9) Send to a few friends who read my stuff. Ask them which bits they like & which bits they don't, where they lost interest, what is unclear, doesn't make sense. Get their feedback in writing, don't get defensive, incorporate their written input into the draft after thinking it through objectively.
Yu-Mei Balasinghamchow close read a draft of We Rose Up Slowly which was invaluable.
10) Put the story in a drawer for at least 2 months - then reread as though it were someone elses work & revise again either in Word, or cut & past back into Scrivener if deeper work is needed. 
11) Don't be afraid to go back to B3. and rework your story and characters again.

D3. Use a Professional Editor
12) Get the input of a professional editor for story advice more than grammar - Stephanie Ye was a wonderful editor on We Rose Up Slowly : Full of wisdom, common sense & experience. I highly recommend her as an editor.
13) Revise, polish & finish

Why writing a book is not like having a baby.

We Rose Up Slowly

"She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.

She said, your father stepped from the veranda to recover the recalcitrant chook, only to find the soles of his feet missing the ground, landing on thin air, and the chook drifting higher. 

He couldn’t let the chook go, but with each step he found the chook rose higher. And of course he had to follow. She told you it was like watching him walk a stairway to heaven. Your mother said, he did not appear to be flying, more like floating, like someone rising from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the sea.

Your mother watched from below until your father and the chook became flecks in the sky. She rushed inside and grabbed the brass navy telescope. She saw him and the chook slowly ascending. She saw him wheeze and hold his chest. She could just see his head turning from one side to the other in wonder, marvelling at the view. He appeared to turn towards her. He was white and he coughed violently. But he did manage to stiffly turn around and, ever so slowly, raise his arm in a wave. And she believed she saw the chook, rising up slowly beside him, its neck outstretched and its scrawny beak open in a silent chicken scream. She squinted through the telescope and thought she saw the frost fur crystallising about his eyebrows and his false teeth chattering so hard the blood ran from his gums to warm his mouth. His arm stopped moving and she knew he was hard as a block of ice."

Excerpt from the title story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

Between 1998 and 2010 I did not write a single story. I was to busy pursuing my career and trying to fall in love. My enthusiasm for writing was rekindled in 2010 when I walked into Books Actually, then at Club Street, and saw a copy of Ceriph Issue Zero. I decided to submit a story written in Sydney in 1997 called We Rose Up Slowly. Much to my surprise, the story was accepted for Ceriph Issue One (Math Paper Press, 2010). This story leads my debut collection, We Rose Up Slowly.

In this story:

• As gravity leaks away, a young couple need to decide whether or not to follow her parents and rise up slowly
• The mood is sombre and elegaic
• The protagonist tries to remain grounded as the world falls apart around him.
• Everything is in a state of flux. This is the end of an era - perceptions, assumptions, core beliefs, the consensus are all up for grabs.
• Time spent with each other is precious, memories are slipping away.
• Secrets remain unspoken. What is in the silver locket? What does the silver locket represent? Note: I was thinking of the hidden secret self in Lady with the Lapdog but from a female perspective
• Do the characters change? Is there an epiphany? In the end there is only the relationships you have with the one you love - even if they don't love you as much as you love them
• There are passing references to Spam, Two Fat Ladies, goitres, a Jona Lewie song, another 80's pop song, the Roy Lichtenstein painting.

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea

"She said, “You need to be shocked into seeing things as they are. I think what you need is a long bicycle ride into the sea.”

I looked at her, puzzled. What was she on about?

“It’s like an extreme cold shower. But you do it fully clothed. The resistance. The pressure. Your trousers balloon, fill up with air, and you try to trundle onwards. But your wheels sink in the sand, the water rises around your waist and your balls shrink to the size of peas. And then you end up falling sideways, plopping into the sea.”

I sat there thinking, what kind of a challenge is this?"

Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011). 

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:

• is about a young lawyer, coasting along in privilege, who is challenged to get wet to prove his love 
• examines unconscious assumptions, and how a sense of entitlement and the shallowness of one's gaze obscures self awareness, intimacy and growth
• shows the effect of this on relations with others
• contains passing references to small law firms in shophouses in Tanjong Pagar, Prada suits, Raoul cuff links, Lloyds shoes, Louboutin heels, silver charm bracelets, Benny Hill flirting with Emily Dickinson, Halal eating houses, a HDB flat in Clementi, a Hokkien Sponge Bob Square Pants, Lau Pa Sat, Billy Wilder films, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres, Amitabh Bachchan and Maggie Q, Kong Hee and Lawrence Khong, Ai Weiwei, Miroslav Tichý, Henry Darger and Beatrix Potter, Justin Bieber and Taufik Batisah, the planet Zog, and the song 无条件为你. 
• Why so many names dropped? I wanted to show the pretentious superficiality of the narrator and how this obstructs his ability to achieve deeper relations with others.

A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night

'“There’s this roti prata place on Kampong Bahru Road opposite SGH. It’s always open. We can go there.” Ling knows the place well. She’s been there many times and taken her murtabak beside the girls and their punters from the karaoke lounges, and eaten with the taxi drivers, police and nurses, relaxing after their shifts at the end of night.' 

From A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore)

I wrote this story during the latter half of 2014.

I started by ‘splurging’ all I felt, and knew, about the factual event at the foundation of this story - this event is well known to people living in Singapore in mid 2012. I wrote in a fast, haphazard, chaotic manner. I focussed on emotion and the action. I did not concern myself with grammar, spelling or proper sentence construction. I just wrote.

I developed the story by writing a detailed imagined backstory for fictional participants. I explored their motivation, their history and the conflicts between characters. I tried to articulate my understanding of their dreams, how these drove their actions, and how these actions changed them.

I wrote several different versions. An initial draft was written in first person POV - in a pale imitation of Rashomon. Then I decided on a third person POV. I changed the protagonist and wrote several alternate endings.

I submitted the story to a few literary magazines in early 2015 without success. 

In A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night:

• There is tension between the romantic dreamer and practical realists limited by their desire for wealth and social acceptance through conformity.
• The heroine/protagonist yearns to find an unconditional, passionate, deep, instinctual love. She refuses to accept practical realities and longs for something more.
• The tension between non Singaporeans and Singaporeans is also touched on, including PRC mainlanders who work in Singapore, and their awareness of how they are perceived by ‘the locals’. 
• The collision of different world views is played out with tragic consequences. The ‘final event’ represents a form of judgment, the intrusion of chaos and coincidence. 
• Ultimately, the romantic soul is the only one who survives: The dreamer survives reality.
• I chose the name Jia Bayou for the Lamborghini driver initially. Stephanie Ye, my brilliant editor, pointed out this was like calling a character Hamlet - a burden to heavy for any character to bear. So we tossed around Yang Liu or Liu Wenhui, and ultimately ended up with Lang Zheng based on a chinese footballer who plays for Beijing Guoan FC.
• There are passing references to Zouk, a jelly girl, Hyperdub, roti prata, a black Lamborghini Aventador, the National Museum, baozi, Boey Kim Cheng's ‘lost in the swaying sense of things’, Bai mu, a Jimmy Choo shoe, rambutan, voles, SGH, murtabak, Kent Ridge park, Tanjong Pagar Railway Station marshalling yards, the Police Cantonment Complex.
• The story is dedicated to all those who have tragically lost there life on Singapore’s roads.

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea

"She talked about the ways in which everything is connected to everything; that the lungs are an extension of the air in which you live and move around. She said no person is an island. So I asked, “What are we then? Continents? Planets? Solar systems?” Later, she told me we were car parks, where the self is just a little bit of grey concrete marked out by painted white lines and we define ourselves by who we let drive in and how long they stay."

Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

This artwork was created by Jonathan Leong for the Synaesthesia exhibition organised by Ceriph and The Substation in April 2011. Synaesthesia was a group show featuring 16 pairs of writers and visual artists, with the visual artist interpreting and creating a typographic piece out of a Singaporean writer’s poetry or microfiction, encouraging dialogue between the two mediums of expression.

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011). 

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:

• is about a young lawyer, coasting along in privilege, who is challenged to get wet to prove his love 
• examines unconscious assumptions, and how a sense of entitlement and the shallowness of one's gaze obscures self awareness, intimacy and growth
• shows the effect of this on relations with others
• contains passing references to small law firms in shophouses in Tanjong Pagar, Prada suits, Raoul cuff links, Lloyds shoes, Louboutin heels, silver charm bracelets, Benny Hill flirting with Emily Dickinson, Halal eating houses, a HDB flat in Clementi, a Hokkien Sponge Bob Square Pants, Lau Pa Sat, Billy Wilder films, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres, Amitabh Bachchan and Maggie Q, Kong Hee and Lawrence Khong, Ai Weiwei, Miroslav Tichý, Henry Darger and Beatrix Potter, Justin Bieber and Taufik Batisah, the planet Zog, and the song 无条件为你. 
• Why so many names dropped? I wanted to show the pretentious superficiality of the narrator and how this obstructs his ability to achieve deeper relations with others.

A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang

"The café-bar-restaurant on Jalan Kemang Raya rests like an elegant fish tank above the bookstore. It has large windows through which you can look down on lounging tukang parkir as they laugh and suck on their clove cigarettes. If you sit on the retro living room ensemble in the right place at the right time and look beyond the car park, you can watch all of Kemang creep by in one long neverending traffic jam. This is the story of the origin of that traffic jam; at a time in the distant past when the traffic used to roam free and a trip from Blok M to Jalan Kemang Selatan used to take ten minutes at most."

Excerpt from A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Available online with free shipping in Singapore

A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang is a story from my book,  We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2012 and published in Eastern Heathens (Ethos Books, 2013, edited by Ng Yi Sheng & Amanda Lee Koe). 

A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang:

• is based on the Javanese legend of Sangkuriang
• retells this tale in a contemporary setting based on the cafe above the bookshop, Casa Kemang, in Jakarta that my wife and I try to visit whenever we are in Jakarta
• is about a young man who serves a lady in a cafe in Kemang, they touch, and she flees. A connection is made and they find out a lot about each other in a Kijang in the cafe car park.
• Laramy Lee sees a critique of 'female entrapment in society' and an exploration of sexual taboos in his reading of the story in this wonderful review of Eastern Heathens in QLRS
• is also about suppressed memory, the hidden secret self and the perils of traffic
• includes passing references to tukang parkir, clove cigarettes, an Elektra coffee machine, bengkoang masks, Marjinal, anak punks, Akira, Anthony Burgess, pengamen, Iwan fals singing “Kamu Sudah Gila”, and Pekalongan batik.

The Finger

'“Now put your finger in the hole. Which one are you willing to lose?”

Julia paused and thought about all the poking and scratching she did, all the finger licking, wagging and waving of small goodbyes. The picking of the nose, the dragging of her fingers through her hair, giving Peter the bird, holding him tight in her hands and squeezing and pumping it up and down. She remembered drawing a house on Teddy’s back and asking him to guess what it was. These things would never be the same again. She imagined life without an index, trigger or ring finger. Julia checked herself, laughed and thought: it’s only a trick, there is no risk.

Julia took the guillotine from him. Her fingers felt like sausages and she didn’t seem to be able to work the pegs.

He saw her hesitate and she let his hands guide her.

“It’s just a trick, isn’t it? Nobody has ever lost a finger... have they?”'

Excerpt from The Finger, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Available online with free shipping in Singapore

The Finger is a story from my book, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2014 and explores themes of privilege. expatriate family life and the treatment of domestic workers amidst a marital crisis.

In The Finger:

• The protagonist, Julia, is grieving for her lost relationships and is very lonely.
• There is a need for Julia to cut things off, to separate, to see things as they are if she is to achieve real change
   
• (*** Spoiler alert ***) 

My intention was to build sympathy for Julia in her conflict with her husband while keeping her domestic worker, Maria, in the background always as a tool, a slave, an object, easily manipulated because of class & money differences. Then at the end after Julia has bested her husband, to jolt the reader and have Maria reject Julia to show she is just as shallow as her husband in the way she regards Maria. 

• That is, despite making a significant decision to achieve freedom and end her relationship with her husband, she remains alone at the end of the story because she needs to move beyond self pity and privileged, self centredness. 
• She needs to cut off from her materialism and privilege not just the male in her life.
• There are passing references to one of my favourite meals: chicken and broccoli lasagna, Michael Jackson, a magic shop in Peninsular Shopping Centre, Paddington party small talk from the late 1980s, the VIX-CBOE Volatility Index, Diane Arbus’s photograph child with toy hand grenade, Billie Holliday etc.

A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang

"One day when her son was twelve years old, all three of them piled onto the family scooter to visit relatives in Bandung. But her son was difficult, laughing at passing truck drivers, squirming about, distracting her husband who was concentrating on the traffic. In hindsight, she wonders whether she should have asked her husband to stop at the side of the road while she disciplined their son. As they rode up the steep hill to Bandung, her husband suddenly swerved to avoid a bus. They were not travelling very fast but he still lost control and they all toppled from the scooter. The next thing she remembered, she was next to her son at the edge of the road, with passing motorists taking care of them. They had only minor grazes and bruises. Her husband wasn’t beside them. At first, she did not see him. Then she saw him lying on his side in the middle of the road. He was still moving a little, slowly beckoning with a loose arm in her direction. She watched several cars manage to miss him but then a large truck didn’t see him until it was too late."

Excerpt from A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Buy We Rose Up Slowly online here (free shipping in Singapore)

This story was previously published in Eastern Heathens by Ethos Books in 2013. Thanks to Amanda Lee Koe and Ng Yi Sheng for publishing this anthology of subverted Asian folklore.

Walking Backwards Up Bukit Timah Hill

"On that particular Sunday, Henry had decided they should walk backwards up the hill at Bukit Timah nature reserve. He wanted to walk up Bukit Timah hill for health reasons on the advice of his doctor, and because he liked to imagine being there in February 1942 as one of the last tigers on the island, taking refuge in the undergrowth while Japanese soldiers surged through the jungle sweeping towards victory over the colonial power. Henry’s doctor advised him to walk up the hill backwards because this would result in less strain on the knees."

"Margaret didn’t want to go up Bukit Timah hill either forwards or backwards. She wanted to visit Bukit Brown cemetery instead, because large parts of it weren’t going to be there very much longer and it looked the way she felt: old, green and tangled- up inside. As always, Henry had his way and Margaret would have to explore Bukit Brown another day."

Excerpt from Walking Backwards Up Bukit Timah Hill, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Buy We Rose Up Slowly online here (free shipping in Singapore)