Commemoration
Drive into any village in France and you will find a Great War memorial, usually larger than the WWII memorial, simply because, when WWII came around, there were fewer men left to die.
Midwinter
I loved the trappings of the holiday as perhaps only a child growing up in the tropics can love them: the snowy landscapes of greeting cards; the fireplaces and twinkly yellow lights glowing in the December dark of favourite books and films; the carols on my family’s Bing Crosby and Jim Reeves records; the Christmas pudding and fruit cake my Aunty Edith made; the whole comforting Englishness of it, at once familiar and exotic, reliable and exciting.
Separation
I am at the tiny police base in my parents’ neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. I’ve come to report the loss of my Identity Card, a document Malaysians must carry at all times.
Now We Know They Do
“The blonde angel,” the Greek media christened her: this little girl “discovered” during a drug-and-weapons raid in the Roma settlement near Farsala in central Greece. Within days, the story broke in every major European newspaper.
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All The World Is You And Me*
I want to write a blog post about Everything. The blog post to end all blog posts, the blog post that will unify all the properties of blog posts. It seems, at a time like now, not only necessary but unavoidable, or at least the attempt seems unavoidable.
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World-wide Welcome
In December, on my way back to France from Malaysia, I stopped in Paris to get a visitor’s visa at the Canadian Embassy.
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Blue
My daughter has her father’s white skin, her grandfather’s dark curls, but nobody is sure how she got her blue eyes.
In Malaysia
I am writing from the country of my childhood and adolescence, the place that inspires everything I write, the place that invigorates and exhausts and devastates me like no other place on earth.
Festival of Lights
Before I became a mother, I thought I’d take my child(ren) back to Malaysia for Deepavali every year. For various reasons, I haven’t made that particular trip with my daughter since she was born in 2009, although we’ve been to Malaysia three times as a family.
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That Foreign Country
For the past two weeks, I’ve been immersed in the commemorative supplements of a Malaysian newspaper celebrating its fortieth anniversary this month.
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