Here is a list of my other work so far:
Fiction and Poetry
- Short story, “Baby+ With A Car Like Wolverine’s Claws,” (The Sengkang Sci-Fi Quarterly, August 2024).
It was entirely logical that the first Baby+ was born in Kuala Lumpur, a car-centric city where there was simply no way of getting around without a car, where pedestrians had to risk their lives crossing multi-lane highways. Pedestrians were like pesky cockroaches: tolerated at best, squashed when necessary.
- Presentation and anthology, “Imagining Landscapes of the Past” (link opens to a Youtube reading), (Geopoetry 2020 conference), which has now been published into an anthology as Earth Lines
In this brand-new world our feet pad by
the skeletons of beach umbrellas,
ragged, curling in the hot sand.
Melting plastic permeates
the linings of our noses.
- Short story, “All Lonely Roads Lead to Old Sembahnang,” (Sinking City Lit Mag, November 2019).
Nominated for the Puschart Prize 2020
Everything in Old Sembahnang had revolved around the green glass factory.
Before the flood, the green glass factory had produced some of the world’s finest glassware. They made everything from goblets to pitchers to vases to art glass to chalices, all in monochromatic gradations of green: pistachio, jade, lime, forest, olive, emerald, avocado, Lincoln, Nile, sea—and no other colour.
Essays and Non-Fiction
- Essay, revisiting my research trip to Pantai Remis, a fishing village in Malaysia (Movable Worlds, August 2021).
In the summer of 2007, my mother and I spent two weeks in a small fishing town along the west coast of Malaysia called Pantai Remis. We were there—or rather, I should say, I was there—to learn about what life is like in a fishing village, as part of a research trip for my undergraduate fiction writing project. My mother was my chaperone. And, as it turned out: translator, facilitator, and interviewer.
- Essay, “On Naming Malaysian Chinese Characters,” (Asian Books Blog, July 2021), republished as “How Colonialism And Cultural Loss Inspired Me To Pen My First Novel“(Eksentrika, August 2021)
I write stories set in Malaysia, or about Malaysia, and one of my biggest problems is that I struggle to find good names for my characters. Unlike every other self-respecting novelist, I can’t just search for baby names on Google; Chinese names are not traditionally chosen on a ‘what-sounds-nice’ basis. When choosing a name for a newborn, conscientious Chinese parents would consult with a fortune teller or a temple elder, who would then consider the baby’s disposition, their birth date, the number of strokes in the character to check if the name is auspicious or not.
