reproduce repeat-repeat, embodied along stormy directions, coded in cloud mouth ...... the conversation dies, or peters
RAMBUTAN LITERARY Issue One
journal for Southeast Asian literature and art cover photo: Koggelavani Muniandy
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TABLE OF CONTENTS MASTHEAD RECOMMENDED PUBLICATIONS FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ROOTS Artwork Poetry Fiction Nonfiction
BRANCHES Artwork Poetry Fiction Nonfiction
CONTRIBUTORS 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS: ROOTS ARTWORK & PHOTOGRAPHY Koggelavani Muniandy
THREE PHOTOGRAPHS
Nasir Nadzir
THREE DRAWINGS
Danna Peña
FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
Arif Utama
TWO PHOTOGRAPHS
Robyn Angeli Saquin
ONE PAINTING
POETRY Nica Bengzon
ORIGIN STORIES SCATTERING
Khairani Barokka
TSUNAMI PILGRIMS
Leon Wing
BLUE FUNK
Kari Astillero
HOUSE OF SPIDERS AND THEIR COBWEB PRAYERS
Madina Malahayati
MUSLIMS ARE NOT REAL PEOPLE 3
Drima Chakraborty
STEVENS
Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.
BUS
Meerabella Jesuthasan
THE IMPERATORS
Ben Aguilar
THE MANSION
FICTION Dyasanti Vidya Saputri
AN EXERCISE IN SCARRING
Eve Shi
A DIFFERENT MISTAKE
Andrea Macalino
SWIMMINGLY
Carl Lorenz Cervantes
WHILE THEY REMAIN WITH US
Marc de Faoite
SEED
NONFICTION Madina Malahayati
GIRLS YOUR AGE
Jan Angelique Dalisay
THE SYMPATHY FLOWERS
Teh Su Ching
SENIOR’S DISCOUNT
Cristina Maria Chiorean
YANGON
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: BRANCHES ARTWORK & PHOTOGRAPHY Jemima Yong
THREE PHOTOGRAPHS
Aster V. Delgado
TWO DRAWINGS, ONE PAINTING
Kei Franklin
THREE PHOTOGRAPHS
POETRY Ally Ang
FAITH HEALER MEMORY
Bobby Sun
NOT YET MY COUNTRY
Mary Alinney Villacastin
WET DIARY OF SOUVENIRS INCOMPLETS
Alanda Kariza
OUT OF TIME THE CHANCES WE TOOK
Patricia Policarpio
MONKISH SAMPAGUITA THIS ISN'T IT 5
Cassandra Hsiao
ODE TO THE NIGHTMARKET
Benedicta J. Foo
TONIGHT'S BLANKET IS FRIED BATTERED FISH
Linh Le
WHAT MAKES ME VIETNAMESE?
FICTION Sumitra Selvaraj
THE STARLIGHT STUDIO
Rania Putri
A BRIEF RESPITE
Cassandra Hsiao
TANGKAK
NONFICTION Cassandra Hsiao
PASAR MALAM
Yen-Rong Wong
QUESTIONS OF TASTE, QUESTIONS OF HOME
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MASTHEAD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF DO NGUYEN MAI United States
ROOTS POETRY EDITOR STEFANI TRAN Philippines
FICTION EDITOR KWAN ANN TAN Malaysia
NONFICTION EDITOR SAQUINA GUIAM Philippines
BRANCHES POETRY EDITOR CHRISTINE NGUYEN Canada
FICTION EDITOR PALOMA VELAQUEZ United States
NONFICTION EDITOR ANGEL CRUZ Canada
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RECOMMENDED PUBLICATIONS LONTAR JOURNAL is the world’s only biannual literary journal focusing on Southeast Asian speculative fiction.
DAGMAY is the literary journal of the Davao Writers Guild.
LANTERN REVIEW is a journal of Asian American poetry.
CHA: AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL is dedicated to publishing quality poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, reviews and photography & art, with a strong focus on Asian-themed creative work and work done by Asian writers and artists.
EASTLIT is a journal and website focused on creative writing, English literature and art specifically from or connected to East and Southeast Asia.
THE INSIGNIA SERIES is a blog & anthology series promoting Asian Fantasy books and writers. 8
POLYCHROME INK is a literary magazine devoted to celebrating diversity in literature.
DEAD KING MAG aims to prioritise writers who continue to survive precariousness.
THE FEM LIT MAG publishes diverse, inclusive, feminist literature, interviews, art, and blog posts.
THE ASWANG PROJECT is an online publication of Filipino mythology and folklore.
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FROM THE EDITOR-INCHIEF The lack of Asian literature and art in general has always felt othering to me — however, in an already undiverse creative scene, the lack of prominent Southeast Asian creatives within the Asian literary community struck me as a reflection of not only the alienation of Southeast Asians from dominant Western society, but also the alienation of Southeast Asians from an Asian community so influenced by East Asian culture. With the creation of Rambutan Literary, I hoped to help fill the gaps previously disallowed Southeast Asian creatives. Rambutan as a name for this journal seemed so quintessentially Southeast Asian, as the rambutan fruit is not only grown all throughout both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, but also is a fruit less commonly affiliated with East Asia. At first glance, the rambutan seems inedible, a daunting task just to open with its vibrant red color and many spikes, but the rambutan flesh inside is a lovely off-white, and is soft, slightly tangy, and sweet. Just as the rambutan fruit is strange and formidable, the region, too, seems to those unknowing a place rough and is a place often grouped together with the rest of the continent. But Southeast Asia is 10
not East Asia, nor is it South Asia, though both have influenced the region. Many Southeast Asian peoples have had a strong tradition of storytelling - through verse, through song, through dance, through life itself. It would only be fitting to create a space to showcase Southeast Asian literature, especially with how diverse and expressive mainland, maritime, and diaspora communities are. I sincerely hope that Rambutan Literary will become a place for Southeast Asian literature to flourish just as Southeast Asian people have managed to survive and prosper despite perpetual conflict and suppression. I do wish for Rambutan Literary to become a home for Southeast Asian literature and its writers, a place where branches and roots may meet uninterrupted, and thrive. This is a dream coming into fulfilment—the hope that both branches and roots can be reunited in harmony. Do Nguyen Mai Editor-in-Chief
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ROOTS Homelands of Mainland & Maritime Southeast Asia
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Koggelavani Muniandy
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Koggelavani Muniandy
Koggelavani Muniandy is a freelance photographer whose forte is capturing portraits. Her photos were featured in an international arts event by Kakiseni in 2012 and her portraits have also been featured in Parenthood Magazine. She is working on a book of short stories accompanied by her photographs. She is also the co-founder of GoodKids, a social enterprise. Koggelavani has six years of photography experience, developed through her global travels. She enjoys capturing portraits of common folk going through their daily lives, which is usually regarded as mundane. She believes that there is a story behind each of these individuals and aims to deliver these stories through her lens for the rest of the world to see. Her work can be viewed at koggelavani.com
Koggelavani Muniandy
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ORIGIN STORIES Nica Bengzon 1. Noun. The cessation of all bodily functions necessary to sustain life. Causes include biological aging, predation, malnutrition, disease, homicide, starvation, dehydration, accidents, trauma, terminal injury. Bodies of living organisms begin to decompose shortly after. Commonly considered a sad, unpleasant or fearful occasion. 2. Stoppage of heartbeat, pulse and breathing. Most organs—the eye, the kidney—remain alive, and can be used for transplantation.
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3. The degeneration of tissues in the brain, followed by the failure of most organs. These cannot be used for transplantation. Rigor has set in. 4. And the Lord said unto Moses, Tell your people to mark the blood of a lamb above their doors, and I seeing the blood will pass over you, and not suffer the destroyer to enter. 5. Death came airborne into the world when lightning first cracked open the egg of the sky, spilling an oily black rain of snakes. 6. The end of the world is hidden in a triangle of ocean, into which entire cities have disappeared. 16
7. No one knows the name of the fruit anymore, but rarely someone will have dreams of its sweetness, of the garden and the swords of angels. 8. In some mythologies, the first thing to die is a man with an infant son in his arms dancing backward into the sea, is a king’s beautiful daughter, is the youngest and most beloved of the ancient gods. 9. A boy in striped pajamas. A robed skeleton on horseback who speaks in capitals, drinks tea, adopts daughter, names a son-in-law, gives his manservant Sundays off. A smiling girl with a black umbrella. Brad Pitt. David Bowie. Your boyfriend. Anyone who wears a human face, goes by a nickname, speaks.
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10. The Lord said, I have already saved the good, all those who never truly belonged down here. What will we do now? It will come to us. 11. In the oldest days of the world Bathala could chase Death down to the point of a spear. Bathala could drive it into the body of an animal—wild hen, or dog, or boar—blood beating in a thing of living flesh. 12. The truth is that it was a jar, not a box. The truth is it was beguiling as the woman, sloping like a pair of hips, sapphire and rose quartz and jasper like so many eyes shining out of the lid. Gathered at the bottom 18
we find hope pooling under the dark. 13. We bury our loves dreaming one day, a century hence, they will return as trees.
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Nasir Nadzir
Nasir Nadzir 20
Nasir Nadzir is 27 years old and is from Kepala Batas, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. Nasir Nadzir has been making artwork based on endangered wildlife in Malaysia and aimed at advocating for wildlife conservation. It started as experimental drawing, but throughout the subject studies, learned what happened to most of the endangered animals. Even if they survived extreme deforestation, a lot of them were mutilated and killed by locals. Nasir Nadzir believes in change and really hopes their artwork can help raise awareness on the severity of this issue.
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Nasir Nadzir
SCATTERING Nica Bengzon My brother is made of light. I have known this since he was big enough to run, since I was old enough to fear for what I’d find beneath his skin should he fall and scrape a knee. My brother looks to his older sister for a knowledge that stands against all his questions. He is young enough driven by nothing heavier than a hunger for the world. Why are the sea and the sky blue are there more colors than the human eye refracts back to us, how light are birds that the tides of air can lift them how did the universe begin. It doesn’t matter that I can’t get the science straight, only that I speak 22
with a certainty he can measure. Light is so delicate it hits the air and scatters into all its component colors. A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter more blue light from the sun than red. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange because the blue light has scattered out and away from the line of sight. But I don’t how old my brother is when he discovers what he is made of. It slips out of him a confession, one night in the living room, over a bowl of chips a video game we fight together on. His fingers tap square, square, triangle. The Chinese princess onscreen aims a kick, legs like willow branches roundhousing down a line of footsoldiers. They are computer-generated identical. They dissolve bloodlessly against the ground too digital to stain her shoes. She wears a purple silk sheath dress and a golden phoenix in her hair 23
and it is half-crown and half-statue and the dust of battle does not settle on it. We cannot sleep. At 3 AM, these virtual bodies feel more solid than the ones we sit in, crunching away at potato chips trying to make sound happen. My brother asks me why must I inhabit this body. Why am I not a winged creature, rising hollow-boned into the scattering blue and am I so hollow the air will scatter me. I do not tell him it cannot be verified that I have no way to logic him out of his body and into the princess, to overwrite his long arms with wings. I do not tell him we aren’t digital anymore. This isn’t the China of our video games where winning wars is a matter of hand-eye coordination, depth perception, precise little pushes of buttons—where we can stand an army of one against a thousand generics, where phoenixes nest in our hair. I do not tell him I have no knowledge to armor you with, no quicksilver insight into how we might learn to own ourselves. 24
What I have for you are measurements—mass and density, figures to mark the human form as too heavy for the sky. You would need oceans of it to break against. You would need wings for miles.
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Danna Peña is a constant traveler from the Philippines. She regularly steps out of her boundaries and immerses herself in everything that gives her inspiration, may it be in the form of reaching the peaks of mountains or simply by perusing thoughtprovoking books. Roots (2016) Taken in Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar, a heritage resort that showcases the history and craftsmanship of 18th-century Philippines.
Danna Peña
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Danna Peña
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TSUNAMI PILGRIMS Khairani Barokka We seek out pain in lurid glimpses— Bent palm, shell from Lhok Nga, Where waves hit the treetops And deluged the cement plant. Near the leftward curve of the bay, A marooned ship’s chemical bullion Leaching out into the Indian. Thinking – I must want to sell these things in little jars. Hone memories tongue-wrapped for relatives, repasts, Parsed words and round vowels, Tasting like rawness and saltwater. We wrap in plastic an oblong Displayed for the vendors Of foible as goodness, And follow others’ nightmares here, To the sea. 28
Danna Peña
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Moonrise Kingdom (2016) Shot on a boat ride at dusk, traveling back to Maripipi Island from Sambawan Island. Heaven State (2015) The peaceful waters of Nagsasa Cove, located in Zambales, Philippines. Cul-de-Sac (2014) Mountains that were affected by the lava of Mount Pinatubo’s infamous eruption in 1991.
Danna Peña
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BLUE FUNK Leon Wing Blue, the lighter shade of night, It rips apart when the birds arrow to reach light. Its sludge pulls me Apart, as Vishnu me anew.
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Taken December 2015 in a deforested land in Latinangor. The people deforested a forest to create a farm for their family. Which is important, feeding your family or saving nature?
Arif Utama
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Arif Utama
A moth who loves the light just like a mother loves her child. They could suffer, but they'd endure suffering because it has a meaning. To bring happiness to each other.
Arif Utama is from Bandung, and is writer, a thinker, a graphic designer, photographer, a videographer, and public relations student. 33
HOUSE OF SPIDERS AND THEIR COBWEB PRAYERS Kari Astillero ‘See, the house, mother said, once was lived by spiders. Do not cross the street.’ Like lightning, my eyes opened. I was dreaming.
It’s 6:37 in the morning I think it is going to rain here. The window’s open as if an open book— your mama’s arms inviting you— come, read me. Something formless enters my room. A dead or wind. Or perhaps, they are alike. 34
The flapping of curtains begins the way pages are stirred by a sudden brush of air. Somewhere, they are always lost.
Across the road is a house the color of wheat field, your grandma’s face, unquenched mouth. Every day, its paint pales away— the dying of light. Sometimes at night I hear sounds like of a sewing machine. Or spiders talking incessantly. Threads & threads like men chanting for abundance of rain and sun— more, more, more. A language the opposite 35
of another language.
I sit on my bed and watch the overcast heavens mourn again as if a lover in a graveyard. Today, let rain and wind dance, woman, a deep-ocean colored dress waves the way surges do during storm—
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MUSLIMS ARE NOT REAL PEOPLE Madina Malahayati after the trending of #StopIslam in twitter never knew that my religion was a disadvantage. my mouth, an imprint of fifteen years spent at morning lebaran feasts forehead a mountain carved out from thousands of sujuds and palms worn out from silahturahmis. choking on soda after thirty moon-roundabouts of hunger. not bloodshed. alright, i know muslims are bad people. with so many heads decapitated our allahu akbar roaring as red splits on dusty grounds, verses of The Big A telling us to fight in Their way, because it is our duty, our jihad how can normal muslims exist, right? muslims who are out here watching their life slip through their fingers, muslims with a stack of unread books, ballpoint ink-stained fingers, paint smeared on cheeks 37
muslims who are only themselves with a can of beer and twelve stubs of cigarettes down whose prayer mats thrown to the back of their closet; muslims that only remember al-fatihah and only that, never doing salat for two months because they can never bother, mouth rotten with the duas they never say muslims, muslims like humans, don't exist in your head, i think. YOU SAY: So if that's the case, where is all the Muslim outcry? I SAY: WE ARE LOUD, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, my voice is hoarse and my throat is dry and i feel like i'm guzzling down acid repeating this like a broken record player saying, saying that we the majority are sorry for our hideous minority, we're sorry, we're sorry, why does this feel so repetitive all of a sudden i am not supposed to apologize for something i didn't do i'm sorry i'm sorry– but then, the reality is here: that i get to log out of this all and this flesh made out of blood and clay is real. in another land i am killed.
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STEVENS Drima Chakraborty Four years ago, there was no train station here. No ripping bus stops straight out of the ground, no fencing up the street, no tunnel boring machinery, just the unabating, unashamed chatter of schoolgirls. The McDonald’s, however, was there already. Four years ago, there was no train station here, but there was always a girl. The one with her hair tied in a ponytail, the one whose eyes shone brown and amber, jade and gold in the light. The one whose beauty the hideous blue dress managed not to sully (just this once). She was reading a book so intently, and of course, of course it had to be your favourite book: your heart was weak and life was cruel that way. And when she looked up and smiled at you, you knew, there was always a girl.
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Four years ago, there was no traffic jam on this side of the road. Praying to reach school before the bell rang, failing and being given demerit points, getting off two bus stops early and still getting there before the bus did, was reserved for the side with the rich kids lined up in their flashy cars. The journey that took you an hour four years ago, could be completed in half the time, but four years ago, there was no train station here. Four years ago, there were boys here. Smelly, sweaty boys, trying their luck in the McDonald’s. Girls casually moving to another table when the boys got too rowdy. But there was still a girl. Your girl. The kind with the short hair, the backwards snapback, the diamond smile. With better luck than all the boys combined. The anonymous confessions, the teachers worried about the rampant lesbianism of the cohort but still giving an award for the best-dressed girl in pants (Miss Smarty Pants? Really?) at prom. In that tuxedo, or maybe in a ball gown, there was always a girl. Four years ago, there was no train station here. “Take the Stevens Road exit please, thank you.” Four years ago, there was still the school on Dunearn Road. Forty years ago, there was the school on Emerald Hill, 40
And heaven knows where it was a hundred and twenty years ago. Four years ago, there was the amazing mee pok, the swings in the courtyard, and the uniform inspections. And there was always, always a girl who had your heart on 190 Dunearn Road.
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Robyn Angeli Saquin is a Filipino visual artist currently pursuing a degree in Information Design in the Ateneo de Manila University. She has previously been published in Heights Vol. LXII no.3 and Vol. LXIII no. 1. “Peek is a painting separated in three parts, depicting the sun setting over Las Piñas City. It was painted when I was living in Xi'an, China, during my high school years. There, the sky would often be grey and cloudy, and the towering skyscrapers and apartment buildings would be obstructive anyway, making it difficult to watch the sunset. The times the sky did clear and the sun stood out in its full glory were magnificent, but it was hard to compare it to the Philippines. The painting is based on a photograph I took during a summer I stayed in the Philippines. I sought to bring my country's sky to China and to share it with those around me, even if we could only peek at it from afar and through photos.”
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Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr. Hours after father was cremated, I boarded a bus bound for the capital, about half a day away with brief stopovers in open-air restaurants that reeked of urine, galvanized roofs corroding in patches. It was high summer, the vista that whizzed by the window bone-dry, washed by the glare of equatorial light. Rows of squat buildings, abuzz with people holding plastic bags, soon to become detritus of a small town. Houses whose concrete fences had been spiked with the glint of broken bottles. Then the land presented itself, single-minded in its breadth. Fields tilled with corn and sugarcane, crops on the verge of harvest. In the far distance, brushstroke outlines of the Sierra Madre, as though the eye can only capture the faintest hint of—what to call it: the divine? Ineffable 43
force of which we are only an echo? The mind galloping across the landscape as the asphalt road ribboned out ahead and beyond. And after the trickle of hours, the gloaming. Factories shutting down, headlights flickering from the approach of vehicles. The errant city encroaching like cancer, composing and decomposing. What goes on gives way, the sky passing through gradients of blue to black. I wanted to say that I’ve reached my destination but the window kept shifting from one scenery to the next. The bus hurtled towards the terminal, my face a mask floating on the neon-streaked glass.
THE IMPERATORS Meerabelle Jesuthasan italicize me like one of your malaysian marxists 44
quixotic on your tongue roll me out like roti under palm. appropriate and recreate me sit straight, and breathe my bindi in. decolonize my cartilage, gentrify my collar bones, deny me a cemetery and let’s really squabble about it. take me truly to asia, and let me be reviled in it. cry me a rebellion prosecute me weep well over my spilling milk. fave me add me adore me, please pour out my granola and torch me with disdain.
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THE MANSION Excerpts from the As-Yet Unfinished Poetic Sequence Into the Earth
Ben Aguilar Count the Steps
Oro: Ten from the path up to the front porch, and another twelve leading to the second floor Plata: lost in the fire. The attic is now nonexistent except in the pictures. Mata: Find me here.
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What Do You Know Of Stories The Don had this mansion made for his wife and thirteen children, but this fountain was not here when the Japanese came. You ask me how I know: were you there when this mansion was burning? I say nothing— I read it on a sign somewhere here. We sit on the Carnegie belvedere. I watch you watch the water arc over the sun now balanced on the tip of a stalk of sugar cane, the weight of all the light in this field on a shaft that a bolo has just now felled. You run your hands over the etchings on the pillar beside you without thought. They say the Don had to mix thousands of raw eggs’ whites into the cement to make these walls smooth. I would tell you what I think but I know what you would say. Now the farmhands gather the sugar cane to load into the back of a truck, and the fountain rustles on, the water runs the sun through,
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splashing light on your dress, splashing water on everything else. Let me tell you what I think: I think tourists smoothed these walls, running their hands over them over and over looking for something they couldn’t find in the rest of the house: another fault, another story, maybe more signs. Someone I don’t know somewhere shuts the fountain down. The truck passes; the crunching gravel is new here, and how would I know except if I’d been here before, you asked me how I knew. Now the fountain spits out a last jet, and the water now rises and falls in slow motion, the sun now resting on nothing, hanging in the sky, pulling everything up with its rays; except the canes, still fallen, and the farmhands, still bowing to pick up what another struck down, I know what you’ll say— but lie down right there. Don’t mind the dust. Look at how these etchings 48
become M’s facing each other, the initials of the Don and his wife, forming two roofs of houses turned on their sides. Perhaps if you keep feeling their edges like that then someday their names will be smoothed as well.
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Similes As when the Japanese, who heard stories of a mansion made of stone and hard wood in the middle of a cane field, a mansion so vast that it could house four hundred strong if they slept side-by-side, with one entrance and enough space for munitions, supplies, and the war flag; and upon finding the building completely incinerated and roofless, except for the pillars of stone; so my grandfather, telling that story, recounting with fervor how as a boy, listening in from the field, and himself knowing a bit of that foreign tongue, heard the lieutenant let out a cry of disbelief and vexation so poignant— 50
and now, in his age, forgetting the words that were in that scream, is himself frustrated to no end— and which one of us children, was it, listening at his feet, who whispered to the ghosts in between, so.
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What Do You Know of Stories
__________________________ 1 In 1935 President Quezon conferred upon General Douglas MacArthur: a gold baton and a state dinner. 2 Weapons of the Philippine arsenal. 52
__________________________ 3 Most Filipino dressmakers could copy dresses from just a picture without surrendering their sense of propriety. The Filipinos were so good at this that one tribe learned to weave their dreams; this was how General MacArthur’s new uniform was pieced together from talisay leaves. 4 This was how the Philippine flag was made. 5 Observe how this in turn is green-less. 53
__________________________ 6
God, how many of ‘em do you reckon there are?
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__________________________ 7 You were right. 8 The more reasonable complaints that reached the Peninsula were answered 9 like this. 10 But you cannot do away with the apparel of sacristy, 11 in much the same way that the crowd of the Tagalog masses witnessed the death of three priests, 12 with only two-thirds of them martyred, statistically speaking.
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__________________________ 13 in effect, sacrilege is a question of consensus.
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__________________________ 14 All title and claim of title, which you may have had at the time of the conclusion of this article to any and all islands in memory lying outside the lines of
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__________________________ 15 this poem, is ceded to history. 16 It is said that Corregidor was the last.
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__________________________ 17 Elpidio Quirino once gave a speech. “There is something young men do not know. To tear a monkey from a tree you must lull it to sleep. Blow into its face gently. 18 and as its eyes close pry its fingers from the branch.” 19 A boy is old enough, but tonight it is his shift, there is cash at the gas station. 20 He is listening.
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__________________________ 21 It is currently disputed, but some sources say he still is. Stories How could I forget. The tree was in the tower. Somehow the tree grew itself inside. As a spine. It watched the proceedings from this vantage point. But first a sapling at the window. Before that a seed shat from a bird. Now as a sapling 60
watching the gardener wake up just before sunrise to trim the hedgerows. The bicycle vendor rides past. Runs his hands along the wrought-iron fence. Passes something to the gardener. The gardener passes something back. What this is cannot be seen at this point from this point. Perhaps an amulet or a stone travesty. A bullet. Something the size of a fist unfolds. An origami rose riddled with ink at the foot of the tower. A few branches later and the mansion is on fire. The townspeople watch from empty coffins stacked on roofs of square houses. One of them says a flood is coming. Swift and weightless. He takes a swig of brandy and throws the bottle at a bird’s nest. The bird rocking back and forth like a refinery of needs. A forest god sheds a tree for a tear somewhere. The disaster itself takes some time to get here. Paced by the speed of dull sound, the bird speaks. Tells you from the branch it is sitting on the true history of this tower. This history fits in a single speech. And this entire speech has been your birthright.
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AN EXERCISE IN SCARRING Dyasanti Vidya Saputri When he says I will never leave you, is it a promise or a confession? You see, people often mistake one for the other. It's supposedly in the tone. On average it's most likely a promise, but soft enough with the perfect tender staredown, fingers brushing lightly across your temple and his lashes dancing in the wind—it becomes an earnest plea of guilt, similar to how your third grade dentist told you No, dear, it’s not going to hurt but deep down you knew he was lying because Father was awkwardly cringing at the side and the assistant had cradled a box of candies and left it by the desk. You cried, two front teeth gone, the air current attacking the roof of your mouth and instead of pain you felt iciness between your canines. Your second heartbreak was your the greatest pain. You were together for a little over 3 years before the bathroom mirror bulbs went out and he stopped coming through the front door. Instead of numbing your lips the chill bore right through your skull and bones this time, leaving cold bites that felt more like small bursts of flames than ice prickling at your skin—more 62
anger compared to ache. A few months later you learned that when the promise breaks, the illusion dies with it. And the first? You don’t remember much about the first; it wasn’t worth it. So what would you do if someone takes you by the hand only to scrape their nails against your palms; blood and scars as their heart goes fonder? All options can be narrowed down to two: let go, or let them. Neither would get you to the winning side. Mother always did remind you about losing gracefully.
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A DIFFERENT MISTAKE Eve Shi One morning my husband would wake up to find me gone, along with my wings. Already I could hear him calling my name, the empty bedroom swallowing his voice. Then, galvanized, he would fling the wardrobe doors open. His hand reached for the caramel-colored gift box behind his socks, where he'd kept the iridescent shawl. Have you known all along it is there, Wulan? Dropping the box to the floor, he straightened up. His gaze strayed to the bedhead, as if he expected to see the shawl draped over it. Why do you have to leave? Have I been unkind to you? And yet it had never been about him. It was all about soaring to the sky, the shawl a gossamer weight across my shoulders. The air was murkier now than it was a hundred years ago, but I would always take joy in flight. My sisters and I loved nothing more than the wind in our hair, the kiss of water on our warm skin. Once, a human stole my shawl, forcing me to stay on earth with him. During those years, I dreamed of treetops, of flying in the midst of sunshowers. As soon as I discovered 64
where he hid my shawl, I flew back to my sisters. Since then, centuries had passed, tinged with our memories of clear lakes, the soft, bobbing shapes of sampans at twilight. Recently, out of curiosity, I searched for the shawl thief's descendants. One of them worked at the Jakarta Stock Exchange. Like his ancestor, he was persuasive, a smooth talker. And, unlike him, startlingly handsome—never believe fairy tales when they tell you all the characters are goodlooking. The first time I walked into the man's life, I was a neighbor in his apartment building. We chatted, went to cafes together, and gradually met more often. His eyes disappeared into lines when he laughed, which I found most charming. My head fitted snugly into his shoulder, and he never dismissed my shopping trips as girly or money-draining. Five months after we met, he proposed to me. Only one of my sisters came to the wedding reception, claiming to be my sole living relative. My other sisters refused to—their exact words—play along with my antics. They believed I was about to hurt an innocent person. Are you familiar with the names Jaka Tarub and Nawangwulan? I asked the man a day later. 65
He shrugged. Outside, it was another humid Jakarta night, with the promise of rain hovering behind dark clouds. Soon enough the humidity would give way to thunderstorms and seasonal floods. They're people from a legend, he said. Well, I said, congratulations, you've just married a legend. My shawl wrapped around my arms, I smiled at him and floated above the floor. His face went ashy, and for a moment I thought he would bolt. As I explained, his color improved, but not by much. It took him three full days to recover. On the first day he skipped work, pleading high fever. I sat next to him as we watched TV, until he no longer stiffened when I leaned against him. Neither of us ever mentioned who I was again. A month into our marriage, my shawl went missing. I wasn't too bothered; it had a scent I could easily track down. What did concern me was the fact that my husband felt any need to hide it. Of course he does, huffed Nawangsari, my sister who came to the wedding. You can literally fly away from him! Any human would be worried! 66
Contrary to what you girls think, I replied, I'm not toying with his feelings. I'm giving him a new perspective. The relationships he'll have after I'm gone will be much more meaningful, because he'd work hard to make them last. And he'd make sure the other person is not another immortal. Nawangsari rapped her knuckles against her forehead. Wulan, you are unbelievably dense! He's more likely to become sad and blame himself. Even if he wouldn't, you've no right to do this. What's the reason, anyway? Revenge? Later, sipping chilled tea from the fridge, I mulled over the word. The shawl thief had lived so long ago that, in my mind, his face had thawed into a haze. His thievery no longer irritated me; I had no intention to hurt anyone he was related to. But perhaps my sisters were right, and I was doing exactly that. I agreed to marry my husband because he was wonderful company. I enjoyed having him to share meals and sing at the karaoke with. Still, even if he were no longer here, I'd be able to go on. But what if it was me who went away? Would he be devastated—or enraged and take refuge in his rage, call me names and forget the good times we had? Both possibilities were unsavory, so I left before his feelings could take root. Or, Nawangsari said, before he 67
decides you're dangerous. Then he may do something foolish, like tell someone else or call an exorcist. We don't want that, Wulan. Let humans think that women like us are extinct. It was all right; he would do just fine. He was too strong to get crushed by my departure. And he shouldn't suffer for long from my attraction to him—which wouldn't have existed had it not been for his ancestor. But, just to be on the safe side, some nights I'd hover outside his window; if only to check that he was content, safe, and hopefully had found a new love.
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SWIMMINGLY Andrea Macalino Many years later when they left the office people didn’t know what to do with all the fish. Their manager had been to an international office once1, where all along one wall ran an aquarium, bluer than any sky, with rarefaction so brilliant that the water seemed a creature itself, the fish mere ornaments in its hair. When he came back from the conference the manager2 did what he could; their numbers were falling and 1
They knew that he knew—everyone knew it was just a matter of time before they closed the Manila branch down—before people in the international office, even, started letting people go all around the globe, because globalization meant fewer people, and they needed only so many eyes to stare lustfully at their fish; but for the meanwhile the bigger bosses with their white beards and tired eyes chatted with this man about the good old days, and while they did, they almost felt a pang of pity not for him, but for the cruelty of their younger selves. 2
As a child he had been scolded by his mother on the projects he fell madly in love with. One summer he had wanted to cover an entire wall of his bedroom with glowing sticky stars, but when they fell off without wishes and he stuck them back on with masking tape and they fell back off they left marks on the plaster that, she complained, she had lovingly picked in mint-green for her only child; and six months after he had developed a knack for rock climbing and begged his father for all the gear that slowly ate up his room, until a sprained wrist made him lazy and he settled for comic books, which, on the year he moved into a boarding house to attend college his mother sold to a newspaperslash-junkshop for which, aged 18, he wept for late at night in his lowly cot on the third floor while his roommates smoked up.
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morale was going down with it. Outside, the Manila-envelope spirit of their office was becoming less and less visible. A corner office with Doric columns could easily stun a child, but in his last few years alive the manager realized he was experiencing again that feeling, of coming to a playground and seeing papier-mâché instead of sturdy see-saws and giant slides. Every day he went to the office, and every day he shook the feeling off, the one that said a giant fist was about to tear through the office windows, dirty with encrusted pollution and mildew. Buying one small aquarium, he believed, bought him just one more day. He was putting on a brave face. He asked his secretary to research into which kinds of fish thrived in bowls, which variety wouldn’t be able to stand another even in a larger aquarium. Which brands of fish flakes were the best. Then when most of his questions had been answered he went about the office scattering bowls and aquariums everywhere. Teetering over a crumbling lounge countertop. Too near the soap dispenser at the common sink outside the lavatories. On Janice’s already crowded desk. On the row of shelves with old magazines and company flyers when they were still relevant to the business. It took him several rearrangements to find whatever suited his internal, aquatic feng shui. He wondered why the dream in his mind always looked cerulean, and the one in the office always pathetic. 70
Come one Monday morning, Janice’s desk became flanked by two bowls with betta fish, blue-black and violetyellow, both wielding sword-faces, more suspicious and snobbish than ever Janice3 herself was. And if the sheet on her desktop said the man in a drab jacket who looked as though he had come straight from 1997 or the woman with the bad perm from a Koreanovela had an appointment with her boss4, she simply had them sign the logbook and left them much to their own devices with the following instruction: “Knock on the door and if he says come in, go on in, and if he doesn’t answer, do it again. If he says he’s busy, sit back down and try again in a few more minutes. I’ve got lots of deliverables today and as long as you’ve logged yourself in I can’t help you much, so there you have it. Truly sorry.” And instead of hitting 3
She was sleeping with the manager’s twenty-one year-old son, because she had just turned thirty and what the hell, she’d always been curious about that movie starring a young, blonde Maggie Smith where she proclaimed to her girls and her colleagues that she was at her prime, and though Janice didn’t have a bevy of schoolgirls to whom she could preach about the evils of Fascism, she settled for madness with a man she considered a boy. 4
One day soon, they would be gone. They would stop coming to this dilapidated box of an office and find what they thought may be better companies, both people and institutions; he dreamed of polo-barongs and glass elevators, and she dreamed of throwing around words like “catching up” and “brunch,” never again part-time saleslady, never again errand girl, never again eyeing Janice and wondering where she bought her steel-blue pumps and how she had treated the saleslady who had had to bow down and fit them on her feet.
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“Like” on the face of her ex-boyfriend’s new baby like her other self wanted her to, she started working on the liquidation sheet that had been due last week, steadily working for ten minutes before she once again rewarded herself with the torture of looking at the child’s rosy cheeks and small, curled fingers, thinking that such an individual could just as easily have quickened in her womb5. She never bothered anymore to knock on his door on behalf of the waiting appointees. They never got what they wanted anyway, or if they did, they always realized that the gimmicks they wanted were lacking in imagination to begin with. That what they had initially imagined as brilliant really had the same charm as handwritten signs on electric poles (WANTED LABANDERA, WEDNESDAYS AND SATURDAYS. URGENT HIRING!), the kind suspiciously written in black permanent marker and wedged in beside whatever scrap of wall was not currently demanding lady bedspacers or offering Wi-Fi and bunk beds. The manager, after the initial wave of his fish craze, had donned a considerable, five-to-seven-hour-a-day passion for new clients, 5
She liked the betta fish. She liked that they gave her less space than she needed to transcribe her notes, so scribbling minutes down took on a particular urgency: Against this crowded desk and inside this dilapidated building my hand must fly across the page and take down what Mr. Mercado said about finances and why the senior graphic artist wants to resign and why he just doesn’t care anymore.
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whether walk-in or hopelessly trusted ones, so that eventually he could build an entire aquarium for a wall. But whenever he laid his eyes on a flimsy memorandum of agreement or price quotations next to the office bills and employee memos he had to sign or pay, he realized he wanted out of the whole goddamn mess. All of a sudden he longed not for a slightly better office but for the long walls of an endless aquarium inside the comfort of an office that wanted to be a hotel that wanted to be a home that wanted to be a mental prison, but sometimes he had a recurring dream where he would drown his perfectly hardboiled head, Murakami-style, into the rectangular aquarium behind his desk where four large bubble eye goldfish bobbled frantically. Once a month he would have that dream, and on those nights he would get up for glass of water to find that his son had bought him another small bag of those colorful plastic stones for the bottom of an aquarium or fish bowl; it would be 4AM and the young man would have just gotten home from his job at the call center. He would peer out of his room and nod to his dad and say, “I’m having another round of insomnia, Pa,” as though it were a drink he was paying for, and then: “Let me drive you to work.” And this old man, this manager, who thought of disappearing among forgotten brown folders or driving all the way to the provincial home of his fathers, there to finish the rest of his days fishing for food on 73
a gray-sanded beach, would rest his eyes on his son and worship the strong lad, light of his life, fruit of his loins, who would triumph after him and his old bones, this seed grown who would never have to covet another man’s fish in the future.
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WHILE THEY REMAIN WITH US Carl Lorenz Cervantes We are driving down the road. It is night time now, and my sister is asleep. My mother, yawning constantly, makes conversation with my father, who is driving, just so the hypnotic stretch of road does not make him fall asleep. The music on the radio is soft and melodic, but I can’t make out the words. I watch the blur of movement outside–there is nothing else but darkness. I am five–maybe seven–years old. I’m not sure where we came from, but I know we’re going home. Did we come from Baguio? Isabela? Somewhere north, I’m sure. I’m too young to care and too sleepy to remember. The sound of tires on the road is like white noise, and the vibration on the seat is pleasant. My eyes are heavy. I close my eyes, and an image appears of an April shower’s tree in full bloom, its leaves swaying in the warm summer air. The color of the flowers are heightened, so is the color of the grass and the blue sky. I’m seated on top of a rusty white metal slide, my sister is waiting for me to slide down so she could 75
slide down too. I imagine that I’m in the airplane, up in the clouds. I miss riding the plane. I’m not sure why, but as far as I remember, I’ve always loved airplanes. There’s something about being away from everything, but knowing that wherever you’re going, you’re going home. I would fight with my sister about the window seat, and my mother would tell us that one of us can sit beside the window going to, and the other would sit on beside the window going back. I’d weigh my options. If I sit now, I won’t be able to sit later. That would be my last chance. The feeling of being lifted up is my favorite. The most exciting part of taking flight is when the airplane heads up. I brace myself, and we fly away. I’ve always enjoyed flying. Like when my dad would carry me and throw me up in the air. I wouldn’t be afraid because I know that he would catch me. He does every time. After me, my sister, and after her, me, until papa’s arms are tired. He smiles at us, playfully telling us that that’s enough for today. Aww, we say. Papa is always part of our games on the street. He would always play the monster, and he would chase us. We like being chased, I don’t know why. Children are like that. It’s not that we want to run away. We just want to know that somebody is chasing us, who is just going to tickle us. Laughter in the streets. The laughter of children is contagious. I see the adults laughing along. 76
Mama nudges me. I notice that the vibration of the tires have stopped. We’re home. I’m too tired. Papa carries me to my room. I see mama carrying my sister, who is hugging her neck, her mouth open, drooling on mama’s shoulder. I want to laugh, but I’m too tired. Papa lays me down on my bed and takes my shoes off. Mama looks from the doorway. Is he asleep? She enters, walks over to me. I can smell her perfume. I’ve always liked her perfume. She gives me a warm kiss on the forehead. Her lips are warm and soft. Her hand strokes my hair, and I pretend to be asleep, but I know what’s happening. They close the door, and I am left in the dark, the peaceful dark. I dream of myself, older, tired, alone. Why do I look sad? Maybe, when my body stretched, my heart did too. Why do I look like that? My older self is looking at something like a box, a long rectangle box. There is a picture frame on top of it, and flowers. Why am I crying about flowers? Who is in the box? A woman walks up beside my older self. She is crying too. She looks like my sister. They hug. I don’t think I would hug my sister. They fade away, far away, far away, into the darkness, and I feel myself being pulled out from the dream. I wake up, a child again.
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SEED Marc de Faoite Weeks of currents, aquatic and magnetic, brought Penyu here again. She surfed the moonlit high-tide waves front fins tucked and glided up onto the beach. The soft sand made her progress slow and inelegant. She began to dig. Soft-shelled eggs slowly filled the nest, fertilized by the seed of several fathers, nature hedging bets that the strongest and fittest will continue the race. Still working in the dark she covered the glistening eggs with sand, then, as generations had done before her, for more than 100 million years, returned into the sea. He shivered. The sea of stars had shifted. The waves still washed up on the shore, but now there was a band of smooth wet sand where the water had receded. Had Penyu been and gone, or was she yet to come? He had waited almost a year for her return, or any of her sisters or aunts and their precious cargo. Eleven months spent craving something other than rice and fish and tapioca. He stretched and waited until the stars began to fade. He walked the length of the beach looking for tracks until he found Penyu’s nest. He crouched, then slowly excavated the 78
soft-shelled eggs, piling them onto the batik sarong he had brought with him. There were almost two-hundred eggs though he couldn’t count that high. Like most islanders he had little use for numbers any greater than half-a-dozen. He thought he heard voices behind the hiss and wash of the waves breathing in and out upon the shore. They were faint at first, perhaps imagination, but when he looked around he saw the boat. It was bigger than any vessel on the island and had more than a dozen men aboard. He raked his fingers through the sand, searching for any remaining eggs, then bundled up the laden sarong and withdrew into the shelter of the trees and undergrowth that marked the edge of the forest. The boat drew closer. The men spoke an unfamiliar dialect, but he could understand most of what they said. Anchoring the boat beyond the breaking waves they half-swam halfwaded ashore. Some carried their clothes in bundles held over their heads. Others brought baskets of firm-bodied gleaming fish. He watched them dress and gather firewood and soon the smell of cooking fish reminded him that he had not eaten in many hours. He hid the bundle of eggs in the undergrowth then ventured forth onto the sand, but from far enough away that the men could see him coming. Far enough away that he could escape into the forest if they seemed hostile. * 79
He walked slowly back from the village, along the trail beside the rice paddies, carrying Penyu’s eggs and a small package made of folded banana leaves. His reluctant steps stirred the dust that coated his bare feet and clung to the hem of his threadbare sarong. Wrapped inside the leaves were four silvery fish. A stranger had given them to him. He didn’t know how to act around strangers. He didn’t know how to refuse. Their lidless eyes had been clear, the sheen of their scales reflected the afternoon light, they smelled of the vast ocean beyond the island. He took the fish, thinking they would make a welcome change to the muddy taste of catfish from the paddy fields. Ahead in the distance he recognized the silhouette of Pak Wan’s boy sitting in his usual place beneath the mango tree, his knees pulled up towards his chin, his skinny arms wrapped around his legs, staring out over the luminous green fields of rice. Sometimes the boy would rock back and forth and make low moaning sounds, but today he was silent and unmoving. Almost every family in the village had a child that was an outcast, or who was hidden like a shameful burden, kept in a back room, or sometimes outside in a pen, like an animal, living, eating and sleeping in its own waste. Some said it was part of the curse upon the island, but he knew that it was much simpler than that. 80
Last week he found the boy crouched on his hands and knees beside the calf in the lean-to behind his house, sucking on one of the buffalo’s spare teats. It surprised him that the boy managed to compete with the greedy calf, who always wanted more, butting its mother’s udder with its head. A few months earlier he had walked halfway across the island with the buffalo to have her sired. It took him two whole days, one there and one back, and cost him a month’s worth of rice, but it was either that or risk another still-birth. It was an investment in the future. He watched the suckling boy for a moment, then quietly stepped away. Let the boy drink what he could. There was hunger in the village. Those who contributed the least were the last to be fed. The boy contributed nothing. Nothing except heart-ache. It was almost a year since the boy ambushed a girl on her way back from the fields. She lost the baby, whether naturally, or by an infusion of herbs gathered in the forest, no one knew. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was talked about. The girl’s father came to see him. He talked about the rice harvest, and then about the lack of rain, working up his courage towards what he really wanted to say. You have a 81
daughter of your own, surely you must understand. He nodded. He understood. Some of the villagers wanted to kill the boy, he was a risk to their daughters too, but he spoke against it. The boy wasn’t right to begin with, he argued. He had less sense than a billygoat. Besides, if they had to kill all those in the village who weren’t right … He left the sentence unfinished, but still he was there that night they stuffed the rag into the boy’s frightened mouth. When the girl’s father lowered the heated knife he wanted to put his hands over his ears to block out the stifled screams, but instead he gritted his teeth and pushed the boy’s shoulders down into the ground. “I got some fish and lots of eggs.” His wife looked up. She and their daughter were in the small plot behind the sun-bleached wooden house, bent over the bed of new rice-seedling green. She stood up, placed her hands on her hips and arched back groaning, rubbing her lower back and pounding it with the sides of her fists. He stood watching his daughter, the way her hips shifted as she worked. Though she kept its innocence, she had lost the awkward jerkiness of childhood. Now there was a smooth assuredness in her movements and a confident stillness in her 82
eyes. He was proud of her. She was smart and obedient and she was a good worker. He wanted to say something about the sown seeds being the seeds of the future, but he couldn’t work out the right words in his head. Instead he said nothing. His wife watched him watching the girl. He turned his gaze towards her and then towards his feet. “A shipful of sailors landed today,” he said. “Their boat needs some repairs. They’ll be on the island for a few days.” Husband and wife stood shoulder to shoulder looking out towards the hills on the horizon while upper teeth worried lower lips. “Need to get the far field ploughed if we’re to get these seedlings in,” she said. “I was planning on doing it now.” He untethered the buffalo and rope-led her towards the fields. She looked back with a whining grunt, reassuring her calf that she would return he guessed. The calf was getting stronger every day. By next year it would be bigger than its mother and would take over the role of pulling the plough. He bundled his sarong up around his waist, revealing his thin sinewy legs. He stepped into the sun-heated water in the paddy field. The warm mud beneath it oozed up between his 83
toes and around his ankles. The ploughshare slid through the fermenting viscous muck, releasing bubbles of gas that smelled of childhood memories of when his father ploughed this field as well. He had made the ploughshare himself, from a piece of hardwood from the forest. Shaping it had blunted his parang several times. He worked back and forth across the field with the buffalo until the sun was low. He was tired, but the field was ready. Tomorrow the planting could begin. * The daughter walked in front of her parents. She was the only one left now. Their future depended entirely on her. They had lost three other children. All daughters. Two never made it beyond the first month of confinement, but it took nearly three years to understand that there was something wrong with the third, something wrong that could never be made right. She died in her sleep. She hardly even struggled. The family worked side by side, sweating in the humid heat, pressing the slender seedlings into the warm nourishing mud. With luck and rain their work would ensure their survival for another season. They finished before the hottest part of day. They washed and ate and rested in the shade. * 84
His wife stayed behind at the home. Standing in the protective shade of the mango tree she watched them leave, her fingers knotting and unknotting. She followed them with her eyes along the trail that led towards the river until they were out of sight. He saw that there were other fathers with their daughters at the river too, and some men with their wives. He recognized them all, but none would meet his eye, ignoring him, but without hostility, their eyes turned inwards, absorbed in their own thoughts. After some brief haggling over the price they all boarded the wooden sampan that would carry them downstream to the sea. He watched the boatman position himself, standing on a raised platform at the back of the little wooden boat. He pushed the bamboo pole against the riverbed, but the seaward current did most of the hard work. It was the return journey that would be harder. For everyone. The surface of the river rippled as the boat glided forward, and each time the tip of the pole splashed free of the water he saw sunlight transform the shining droplets into molten silvery jewels. Unlike their fathers, the girls did not behave as strangers to one another. As children they had played together, but now that they were budding women they rarely had the chance to meet. They were kept busy with cooking and laundry and hard 85
work in the gardens and the fields. Most of them were cousins. Their youthful features looked so alike that a stranger might mistake them all for sisters. They were excited. Even though the walk from the village to ocean was only half a day they seldom had occasion to visit the island’s coast. Their carefree laughter and chatter filled the late afternoon, echoing across the water and through the trees as the boat smoothly slipped downstream. * The girls walked out onto the fine white sand, mesmerized by the sunlight twinkling on the vast ocean. The waves made a hushing sound, like whispered secrets that they could not understand. At the edge of the forest the sailors had slung hammocks in the shade. Smells of wood-smoke and cooking drifted from a fire set upon the sand. Some of the men played music, twanging on homemade stringed instruments, beating goatskin drums, or whistling on little flutes. Others were busy cutting meat, a rare delicacy for men so used to eating fish. He counted almost twenty of them. They were a mixed bunch. No two looked alike. Even without hearing their strange accents any islander would know that they were outsiders. 86
He spotted the man who had given him the fish and nodded. The sailor stepped out from behind the veil of smoke that rose above the cooking fire. He called his daughter. She came and stood by his side. He felt hatred towards this brute of a man, the man who had given him four shining fish. He couldn’t face seeing his daughter eat them in the end, so he had given them to Pak Wan’s hungry boy instead. He lightly placed his hand in the curve of his daughter’s lower back, realizing with a sudden sharp intensity that he had never loved the girl as intensely as he did right now. He asked himself how it was possible to feel so much anger and so much love at the same time. He held his hand on the girl’s back for a moment longer, then with the gentlest touch he nudged her forward. The sailor roughly took her hand. The look of confusion on her face changed to horrified understanding. She resisted at first, but her father nodded, while he clenched teeth and fists. His daughter’s expression would be branded on his mind forever. He tasted the sour saltiness of blood inside his mouth. He had bitten through his lip. It occurred to him that he was standing almost on the exact spot where he had gathered Penyu’s eggs. 87
He swallowed the metallic taste, and watched the stranger lead his daughter away towards the trees.
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GIRLS YOUR AGE Madina Malahayati Picture this: hushed giggles on the school hallway, fingers looped around sport-shoe laces and dirt caked under nails. Everyone's legs are blistered with mosquito scabs – dull red like astronomically correct constellations; skin honeyed by the equatorial sun that never seems to relent. I thought school was supposed to be savage. Savage, like crushing depression / common jock fistfights / bloodied t-shirts frayed with time and halfhearted forgiveness – not like voices complaining of heat and of our Rupiah being worth so little. I read once that popular girls were supposed to choke their fingernails with nail polish and stuff their mouth with bloodred lipstick, and I believed it. I dreaded middle school with all its whimsical promises of vengeance and glory, but all we get here is tall skinny girls with a dull gleam inside their eyes and a tendency to hover around as they please – trying to find some pairs of ears that could hear their voice without being nosy and spilling words through Skype. But of course, they never get 89
what they wish for. This is middle school. This is where gossips are traded around like currency and a heart being broken you only roll your eyes at. There is no Adonis here, no chiseled muscles that the girls circle around like Jibril’s halo. No instant heartthrobs that the new ones immediately fawn and trip over – only giggled whispers in the cafeteria of who smokes, they drink? – ah, that’s so obvious. Did you see their snap? Can’t believe they’d be so stupid. So stupid. Every hand is equipped with mostly iPhones – they were supposed to gleam in the sunlight, but when three hundred teenagers equip it like a gun it just funnels together into one blinding light that screams extreme wealth gap alert and something like cracked screens worth more than a beggar’s salary is something commonplace in our grounds. And I do not belong there.
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Of course I’d never belong. That is why I notice how unbelievably easy they talk of London and Amsterdam, we came home that day and suddenly we had two Macbooks for year six, Blackberry phones thrown to the air and rocketing back to the gravity it’s ruled by only as a source of amusement and non-concerned shrieking. Alienated by tales of childhood trips to Melbourne and Boston; God I hope next year’s trip is to Japan / Well, you know, it is expensive / And my god it’s worth it. And when I question if they know how privileged they are to be here, Kalian semua tau kan kita harus kaya buat sekolah disini, all they respond with are bashful cheeks and strangely comfy laughter of Oh no, what are you even saying. And my insides burn silent with dull envy – envious, of how finely ignorance coats their lips. But I guess the chapstick made out of the opportunities I have is applied pretty thick, too. ---
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(You all know, right, how high up we must in this hierarchy to even be here.)
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THE SYMPATHY FLOWERS Jan Angelique Dalisay I love flowers. I often buy the lot on Saturdays, taking the long route to the Freedom Park to see them in different colors, conditions, height, and prices. It’s uncanny how only I had an affinity for these beauties. My sister loves blue roses but she’s deathly afraid of caterpillars. Hence, she can never bring herself to touch them. I couldn’t rely on her to cut the end diagonally and change the water to keep the flowers “alive” for a week! Caterpillars don’t scare me though. I love their varied green-lime hues. They’re chubby, too, that sometimes I want to take a leaf, rub it against their “skin,” and roll them until they get dizzy. Or, if my Asian Forest scorpling was still around, I could put the caterpillar in his glass case, and let its impatient pincers pierce through its hairy skin. I love flowers and I like nothing more but to give a stem or bouquet to my friends for special occasions. When a colleague I was fond of decided to leave for the greener grass, I gave her a bouquet of assorted mums—the white and greenish kind. It was wrapped in pink paper. My pretty present made her 93
gush. Then Valentine’s Day came; my two girl-friends happened to be “single.” To poke fun at their single status, I gave them each a single long-stemmed rose. Each was wrapped in some transparent material. The rose made them giggle but what made it all the merrier was how all three of us looked. Since both held a rose and I, the giver, was emptyhanded, I almost looked pitiful! And there was you. It was supposed to be a mundane Friday afternoon. I went out of the office for a brisk walk when my phone beeped. A colleague and close friend of mine inquired if I knew that you were “gone.” I thought by “gone” she meant that you’re no longer working at the IT office. I’m not that dense; I could sense something was wrong. This was probably what the internet people call “in denial.” So, she went on to explain how they found your body after three days. Three days! My disbelief was growing. And yet, it couldn’t change a thing. More details were exchanged between texts. Suddenly, it felt weird: to exist, while you’re ... no, I couldn’t use the word, not yet. A Saturday morning. I needed to see you as soon as I can— even for the last time. You came from a different island; as soon as your brother was able, he brought your body back to your hometown. I stopped at a flower shop. I wanted to bring you something. You knew me as someone who loves flowers. 94
My work desk stood close to yours that every time you go to your desk, you’d pass beside mine. And I knew how a delightful sight my desk was. Like some of our other colleagues, you liked walking a bit slow to let your eyes see the flowers—a bunch of gladioli, the fragrant sampaguita, or bright chrysanthemums—with the occasional miniature toy, and all my mini-menagerie of odd things beside the computer monitor. I didn’t know if that still mattered but I just couldn’t come empty-handed. So, on that Saturday morning, I’ve decided to bring you flowers. I’ve entered the flower shop only to find myself clueless. Good thing the storekeeper knew how to keep things running. She began asking me questions: do you want the ones in the basket or those standing flowers? What would you like to write in the little card? A message? I didn’t know, so she showed me some sample messages. I’ve picked a one-liner that said something about expressing sympathy to those you’ve left behind. But didn’t that include me? I was puzzled more than ever. So, while the florist busied his hands for the floral arrangement, I sat down. Slowly, I had let my eyes censor the surrounding. There were lilies of colors I haven’t seen before, familiar flowers whose names I just couldn’t remember. And there were the prized hydrangeas! I was surrounded by flowers. On a typical day, that sight would have made everything special for me. But that was not a typical day. I wasn’t taking the jeepney ride to see the floral 95
merchandise of Freedom Park, no. I was inside a white taxi, seated next to my basket of sympathy flowers. It had white stargazers, white anthuriums, and an odd-looking grey-white plant, too. And as the taxi braved its way against the building current of morning traffic, as the silence of that morning lingered, something struck me: it was my first time to buy sympathy flowers. It was my first time to pick flowers for someone who won’t be able to see them. Hell, when I get there, you won’t be able to sit and crouch just to smell them. It was absurd! I tightened my grip on the basket’s handle. The road was a bit rough; it had slightly shaken the vehicle, the flowers. I didn’t want the trip to ruin the arrangement of your sympathy flowers. I knew you would have loved them.
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YANGON: THE FASCINATION OF AN OLD DOWNTOWN CRISTINA MARIA CHIOREAN The old downtown of Yangon is the place to soak up the authentic atmosphere of the city with its long, narrow and perpendicular streets loosing yourself in the constant buzz, deliberate chaos, various smells, a multitude of colours, strange noises and a mixture of architecture. The old downtown I describe here is not made up only of the big boulevards like the Pansodan road or the Strand avenue, and for me experiencing the area does not mean to circle the Independence square or to walk from the Bogyoke market to the Sule pagoda. My 'downtown' is made up of the long, narrow perpendicular and numerically numbered streets with a well organised structure that is easy to remember, reminiscent of the old colonial past, which unfolds to the south of Bogyoke market until the Strand road. It is not enough to just take a brief glance of downtown if you 97
call yourself a temporary inhabitant of the city. Even as a tourist, it would not qualify as sufficient, especially when you have more than one day set aside to visit the city. You have enough time. The downtown wakes up early and goes to sleep, at least on some streets, quite late. Soak in the atmosphere for at least half a day. The impressions, believe me, will be strong and will stay with you forever. I strolled through these streets numerous times for long hours. With each new walk I discovered another eye-catching building, a different shop, an interesting craft on display on the sidewalk, or a local curiosity. I met all kinds of people. These daily encounters of people and things pleasantly surprised or suddenly saddened me but I learned to appreciate each of them as events which I only live and see once. Every day is different and special in downtown Yangon. In the early morning, when traffic is absent, if you find yourself on a street from the lower block you can see all the way to the upper block. The buildings seem connected by the thick network of wires which supply the households with electricity. Birds are flying low, attracted by the street market below. Around this time of the year the visibility is blurry. We are in the middle of the dry season and the hot air is full of dust and exhaust. 98
Sometimes I would take a look in between two rows of buildings. People store things or dry clothes in the available space, on and in between garbage. You wonder whether the tenants are throwing the garbage directly from their window? A few young men store huge bottles of water for distribution in the area. You wonder whether any rats' excrements remain on the bottles no matter how much you clean them before use? One day I witnessed a fight between a fat rat and a lady. The animal seemed dizzy, maybe from the heat, and did not manage to escape the hits from the expertly handled broomstick. The smells follow you all the time and for the most part they are not pleasant. An advice for the sensitive visitor is to bring a perfumed scarf and keep it handy when passing, for example, open sewers which are usually covered by slabs of concrete which serve as the sidewalk for pedestrians. However due to the often unstable and loose slabs, pedestrians usually prefer to walk on the street. The road thus becomes the crowded place where you squeeze in between cars, tea shops, trishaws, dogs and all kind of objects stored randomly and waiting to be transported. Some of the downtown's buildings serve as warehouses for the multitude of goods shipped in the port of Yangon. Like in old times, the Chinese and Indian locals are the merchants of the 99
city with shops opened on the ground floor of virtually every house. You will be surprised by the vast array of wares that are sold from fabrics to plastic toys, from sailing ropes to gold jewelleries offered by the Chinese merchants, from tons of glassware to all kinds of tools on display on improvised tables on the streets. The colours of these streets are vibrant because of the many markets which sell fruits, vegetables and flowers in skilful arrangements, tea shops with trays of food that makes your mouth water, colourful longyis worn by local ladies, and if you remember to look up, the long string of clothes put out to dry hanging from most windows. But, truth be told, it so happens that the tourist will most of the time forget to look up being also distracted by the candid smiles of the locals and the calls they shout to catch your attention to the wares they are selling. This is unfortunate because they miss out on the beautiful old colonial buildings which are made out of wood or bricks, building materials which show the passage of time. Some were built at the beginning of the 20th century by the British settlers or the Indian merchants. In some streets, like the 18th street, lower part, you can witness an entire row of wooden houses with panels stretching from the floor to the ceiling which 100
protect the interior from the sun. What a strange feeling if you arrive early enough to be almost alone in the middle of these structures that are waiting to be admired on both sides of the street! It is like going back in time or being part of a movie which is set in the old colonial times with houses of wealthy Indian traders selling timber, their lodgings close enough to their teak warehouses located on the Yangon river waiting for the ships to trade the precious wood in countries far away from Burma. For me the heart of the downtown is represented by the locals. The people try to get along day by day, determined and with a positive attitude. They always have a smile ready for you. Still they work hard, rush along, sell and buy groceries, repair things you would never think exist anymore, cook on charcoal cook stoves, sip tea at the tea shops, read the newspaper, gaze around bored or curious, and take a nap in the shadow. I am fascinated by the number of locals that read the newspapers. Everywhere, every time. I tend to forget I am in a country which recently opened itself to democracy and this is a feature of the transition. There are dozens of different newspapers and these are sold at every corner. People are thirsty for information especially now when the nomination of Myanmar's new President is so imminent. One taxi driver told me recently that they (the NLD supporters) are quiet, they 101
read and listen to the news, but do not express themselves loudly. They need to be silent, not to bother anybody to allow the political negotiations to proceed smoothly. So they continue reading, especially the "Democracy" newspaper. I like it when I see people reading on the streets. I keep a wide collection of photographs on this topic. People seem optimistic and the least fortunate take it in a positive way. I am aware that the city is developing in a way which is very characteristic for Southeast Asia. I refer to the many stories about Myanmar's fast economic development that receive a lot of coverage in today's local and international media. If some would argue that you are already coming too late to witness a city frozen in time I would argue that now is actually the best time to experience the fast change while also learning about the unique traditions which are still preserved by the communities. The mobile phone market has confirmed its huge popularity and affordability for all the social classes of the population. Everybody is connected and everybody checks his smart phone every few seconds. The other day I noticed a tourist, an old lady, watching two little children playing on a couple of mobile phones. She looked amazed, probably she would have expected to find them playing hide and seek around their 102
parents' teashop in downtown but she was indeed a year or so too late for that already. People start to dress smartly or to develop their own fashion style. Boys have funky hairstyles. Young people are eager to learn and try everything new. Relatively new housing projects, a kitsch of tiles and glass with an array of ornaments, squeeze in between old buildings. These are still modest and date back to a few years ago. However new ones are popping up like mushrooms after the rain in this new economic boom. I was taken aback by the way these huge apartment buildings change the landscape of downtown. It is still sad to notice children working on construction sites. During my walks, I also realised how many children are left playing alone on the streets and thus are not attending school. I will not mention the many ones helping to serve customers in tea shops. A walk in downtown Yangon will take you emotionally through the whole range of feelings one can experience. For me this neighbourhood remains my favourite part of the city, a place full of colours and contrasts, where I love to wander, to discover and to interact with the kind locals. The community embraces everybody. They even have patience with me and my camera. Hello! Mingalabar! I hear often, Where are you 103
from? I am asked sometimes. I smile. I feel like in a big family when in downtown.
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SENIOR’S DISCOUNT Teh Su Ching Ten days after Ah Kong died, I found his Guardian Pharmacy Gold Seniors discount card in my red wallet. Ah Ma had handed me the card while Pops was in Washington and Mum in San Francisco, so that I'd get a discount on adult diapers, food thickener, and glucolin. But I always forgot to flash the card for a discount. I always paid the full price. A month ago, on a Sunday afternoon, undertakers from Singapore Casket put Ah Kong's body on a stretcher and carried him out the front door. Pops finally cried, and Ah Ma gave my aunt and her husband Ah Kong's Cetaphil body lotion. I helped myself to his green Smith-Corona typewriter. Ah Kong had been losing weight for a month. Saturday, the day before he died, a nurse had come to the house to put a tube into his mouth so that we could tube-feed him his meals. He couldn't swallow anymore, and had started to spit food out. He had been diagnosed with Stage Four lung cancer last year, and given twelve months to live. Thirteen months passed. My husband has fond memories of his grandma. He remembers conversations he had with her, time spent together, jokes cracked. I have few to no such memories of Ah Kong. I 105
have memories of things he did that I found adorable, but not whole chats I'm grateful for having had. There were no concerted efforts to take Ah Kong and Ah Ma on outings. They rejected our attempts to. Ah Ma preferred to stay at home and watch the TV serials she found more engaging than real life, while Ah Kong enjoyed going out on public transport alone, and meeting strangers who would coo over and admire his chutzpah. Taking care of Ah Kong and Ah Ma was a duty my parents bore. Sometimes they saw it as a burden, never as a source of pride. That Sunday morning, I decided to bring my laptop to the living room and work there. Before beginning work, I checked on Ah Kong in his room. He was wheezing, his mouth agape. His eyes darted all over the wall behind me, as if he could see things I couldn't, or perhaps they just could not stay focused. There was a gurgling sound coming from the back of his throat. He had lost the strength to swallow a few days before. A handout the hospice workers gave us said this was normal. It told us not to panic, and not to think that sound meant Ah Kong was having difficulty breathing. Ah Ma wept quietly on her bed, alternating her gaze between Ah Kong and their ceiling. I left the room and continued to work in the living room. It was a sunny morning. A light breeze rustled the leaves on the trees outside. 106
Five pages into my screenplay, Mum called to me. There was an edge in her voice. When I got to the room, Nyah, the more mild-mannered of our two maids, Pops, and Mum stood by Ah Kong's bed. Ah Ma continued crying on hers. To prevent bedsores, Nyah had been helping Mum turn Ah Kong over when the gurgling stopped. Mum said Ah Kong had stopped breathing. His eyes were still half-open, his mouth still agape. Mum and Pops handed me a stethoscope. I had never used one before. I tried to remember how a doctor I had visited in Hong Kong listened to my heartbeat. There were two discs at the base of the rubber tube - one bigger, one smaller. I unbuttoned Ah Kong's shirt and held his cold, limp hand. I placed the bigger disc against his chest, when Mum said, "no, it's the other way around." "Are you sure?" "Yes." I placed the small disc against his chest and tried to listen for sounds. But I wasn't sure what I was listening for. I thought I heard beats, but they were so sporadic and soft. I wasn't sure if what I was hearing was my own pulse. Nyah began to cry. Pops, Mum, and I didn't know if he was dead, or if he had simply stopped breathing for a minute or two. The handout we got from the hospice had also warned us this could happen. How long would we have to wait before he began breathing again? Would he start blinking again, then, too? 107
We called the neighbour, a dermatologist, for help. She shone a light into his eyes and placed the bigger disc of her stethoscope against his bare, bony chest. She was grave. "It doesn't look good," she apologised. I began to cry. I sobbed in the kitchen while we waited for the death certificate doctor to come. Mum handed me a tissue and said, "the Buddhists believe crying traps the soul on earth." I told her, "I don't." The nurse who had visited the day before had told us to lie his body flat on the bed. We stretched him out from his half-fetal position, and placed his hands on his sunken stomach, one above the other. I tried to close his eyes repeatedly, but they kept half-open. His mouth stayed open too. My big brother's mother-in-law brought a small blue transistor with a miniature white Buddha figurine on it. Mummy plugged it in. The transistor played a recording of a droning Buddhist chant, with no beginning and no end, next to the body. When my big brother came back from San Francisco a few days later, he spoke to me about how he felt Ah Kong's last weeks affirmed Buddhism's focus on suffering. "If this experience has taught me anything," he began his reflective monologue. I nodded and listened and sucked on a MINT PLUS strawberry-flavoured sweet, one of the hundreds Singapore Casket had included in its family mourning package. 108
In Ah Kong's final weeks, he lost his capacity for speech, or rather, he realised he had stopped forming words we could understand, and given up trying to communicate. Ah Ma believes when he moved and smacked his lips, the way he did every time I showed him photographs of my baby nephew, his first great grandson, he was trying to smile. Pops believes Ah Kong waited till Mum got back from San Francisco, before dying the next day. Mum believes Ah Kong is better off dead. I don't know what to believe. In Ah Kong's cupboard sits a pile of store-brand adult diapers and underpads, a can of Thick 'n' Easy that gave his blended food the consistency of yoghurt, and a powder blue tin of grape-flavored glucolin we mixed with water to make his energy drink. His Gold Seniors discount card expires next March.
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BRANCHES Southeast Asian Diaspora, Migration, & Beyond
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Jemima Yong, born 1990, is a Sarawakian photographer and performance maker based in Singapore and London. She is interested in developing the role of the photographer in live performance and studying the relationship between live culture and visual literacy. She has exhibited in Singapore, all over the UK and has been published in The Times, The Guardian, Swazi Observer, Straits Times and Sydney Morning Herald. She is also photographer in residence at Exeunt Magazine.
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Jemima Yong
Jemima Yong
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Jemima Yong
This trilogy of photographs is part of a chapter called The Will to Live, the central character being Yong’s grandfather Joseph Yong. The Will to Live is part of a larger project of analogue photography called Performance | Life | Archive.
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FAITH HEALER Ally Ang When I arrived on these shores the first thing I learned was that a brown body is always queer an immigrant body is always fractured and I, an immigrant daughter have inherited this as my gift. Uprooted, I have tried to grow on foreign soil but I am always too alien an invasive species. I’m not supposed to be beautiful. At best, I am exotic at worst, undesirable. Unloveable. Unfuckable. What they don’t tell you is how exhilarating it is to love someone who looks like you who is also brown, queer, immigrant daughter 114
also an alien body on foreign soil: all the things about yourself that you were taught to hate. Her love disarms me leaves me vulnerable and tender. She channels god through her fingertips reaching inside me to chase my demons away. She is electric. Cautiously, I have begun to build a home with her, two bodies becoming mountains amidst a burning city. Our roots grow slow and boundless and we are expansive.
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MEMORY Ally Ang The ocean remembers what generations forget: my father, not yet ten years old his mother’s arms wrapped around him praying away the guns and the blood and the crying. he survives, but others are not as lucky. Thirty years later and an ocean away a child is born laughing with a head full of thick black hair. This is where I come from: a long line of survivors whose stories remain trapped on the other side of the language barrier. But the ocean remembers. Let me do what I came here to do: I am still laughing 116
and dancing and loving even as my country burns behind me. The ocean remembers. I am tired of running to avoid becoming ash. I am done letting others name me & lay claim to me in their harsh and unfamiliar tongues. My body is a pillar of salt and I’m not looking back.
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NOT YET MY COUNTRY Bobby Sun i. malaysia kl, ’69. my father learns he is a troublemaker; he is ten years old with a gun to his head and a soldier in his house. they tell him stay out. he stays on and ten years later he is the token, the only chinese paid by the state that year to graduate, among the thirty-odd percent of places they have in the day. he leaves; we still visit. there is a concrete-ringed house in johor we rent out for eight hundred a month. there is family, sown up and down the peninsula still, we must remember; this will not always be ours. this is not yet my country. 118
ii. singapore jurong, ’97. my mother lifts her hands from my eyes; I smell paint and leather. we pay twice as much for one-quarter the house, but it doesn’t need a fence; father tells me up north there was trouble in ’69, there is trouble now, there will be trouble but we will make it here. in school, ’09. my friends and I get a card. everyone’s is pink but mine is blue and says, “not yet”. I stay on and four years later with the sons of ‘94 I cross the border from blue to green. my heart is too weak for a gun so they give me 119
a desk and time instead. this is not yet my country, but for two years, I am its.
iii. china ’14, in camp. I read the news; our prime minister says that in borneo, twenty thousand chinese found democracy before america. a letter to the editor that day complains our nation is dying, from the foreign bodies lodged in its heartlands that look just like ours. my father speaks the chinese his colleague brings to work. I learned mine in ten years from a history five thousand old; it creaks when I open the hinges. I cannot speak my mother tongue. this is not yet my country. I have forgotten the chinese for 120
“help, I’m lost”. here I cannot find my way much less myself.
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WET DIARY OF SOUVENIRS INCOMPLETS A Series of Poems
Mary Alinney Villacastin Fragment Footnotes of Once-Upon-a-Time Footprints Running Barefoot in the ______ 1. beginningless conditions: (under) solar heat, its presence & absence radiating ,,, refracting , , , a feedback furnace, clouding smoke shadows, creeping, echoing a cry, reverberating back-to-back walls bellow howls bliss blows out paradise --(a human home without a dome eats its insides out, primordial imprisonment 122
keeps its outsides in, until the bullet shell explodes.) 2. pioneer transcendent directions: plant wild islands of meteoric rock matter bloom algae blue-green seaweed grass float fireboats between water worlds fly, fly, fly, like ancient bird’s feather buried in fossil fuels like sister snakes’ scales weathered age in climate change like an extinct species speck dust in sunken sand dunes like an island’s edge resisting end in elemental skies its demise: escape physics, escape hell first fall, stand up again & against sail across ocean’s distance voyage void of sirens manifest destiny spiritmaterialize residensity machinize propensity vortex speeeeeeed until magical equation reads [breathe] (human habituation = cosmological cardinal direction or, ‘we worship we worship we worship we worship we worship we...’) 3. this is a [portmanteau] story, re-told: this is a story about you. / 123
this is a story about me. / this is a story about love. / this is a story about journeys. / this is a story about journeys to the other side. / this is a story about journeys to the other. / this is a story about rebirth. / this is a story about samsara. / this is a story about life on planet earth. / this is a story about life in the underworld. / (This is a story about human life in synthetic seashell, growing its (a)symmetrical limbs in spirals, grounding sub-dirt’s grid in I's prosthetic extension, polar contours of calcified, plastic contradictions. This here became that there and that there became this here (ribs to limbs: am I repeating another genesis?), back & forth & forward, like media’s me-mirror miming/mining carbon (.com)motion, wheel-ward spinning ‘truth’ in fool’s merry-go-round loop notion of now news, webbing world’s war waves w/ blind surf rider’s smile, forgetful of shoreline limits... xXx [[[as live primetime memory suddenly record stops coming storms’ fresh riptides, flesh-skin shield morphs home, (de)code suspends composed hurricane center]]] xXx Only until multiple punctures immunize post-tempest trauma, tearwater filling/filtering fluid of mind eye’s, can shiny visions of sandy voyages, beyond blur of half/horizon's structural-logical geometry, open up, as a pearl, to gloss glimmer sur-face/subvert compositional 124
flux(us) from imperfect curves. Not until this life seeizes the light in circular /diffraction/ does our story end, to begin, again, anew (we).)
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Pilgrim’s Pathological Passages/To Sea Center of Earth A Typed Prayer of Topographic Texture, Thought at Time of Wanderer’s Written Witness: [To the Land of Wirikuta, to those humans who protect all sacred space-time points oriented to holy plant spirits, A-men.] The desert, once under the ocean, escaped earthquake’s tectonic tempest, decided dirt’s disguise before ridge demise. Once, this desert is an ocean . . . . . . When we step on spines of spikes, we grow like seaweeds or saguaros, taking prick of tick-tock-ticking, phytonutrient passing passage of we-me-moments, minute-by-minute action into algae growth acceleration, surviving by slipping into skins, thick by water’s war storms; Callous from a cactus is foot’s souvenir of sovereignty, like a flag of victory fluid in the sky. Once, this desert is an ocean .............. When we voice cosmos untamed hourglass vacuum, we hear our echoes stir cries lost on other side underworld, screaming mirrors of madness spit sinking primal slime in pirate pilgrim ships; 126
I try to speak silent to spirits but they’re too many or too loud, like gushing rivers whispering for a tiny swish of attention as a colony of fish waves sea/scales with sailor swords. Shiny jewels of wet clouds slash coastline’s chest like stolen treasure’s descent into coral reefs; What more to matter than to submerge alone & alive in divided dimensions above destiny. Once, this desert is an ocean .. .. .. When we pride in Singular Present Tense Divine, we pray to the Capital(ist) Logics of Conditional Statements, like Humanity’s Limitlessness: That the shared Tree of Life sings in our staged Theater of War, of Bodydrama’s Battle Reel, That which is as forgotten as Atlantic Slave Trade or forgiven as Colonization’s Sins, now forges a self’s (s)kin, X (oxygen hole) rippled & inhaled like a lung puncture Politics to Prana, like a So-Realist Play of Gendered Toybox Trauma, like a Distant Pacific Vortex of Plastic Trash, like a Disneyland Ride into Dread’s Paid Dreamtime, like Penelope’s Odyssean Desires of a boat’s crash on the coast on the course to change herstory. You wonder yonder, but the story is the same: You swim; you drown. You float, you flourish. You pick your poisons & they prick you. Once, this desert is an ocean ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Sip Sleepy-Time Folktale Tea For Survival 127
Over the dinner table, a mother tells her daughter a story: Over the ocean on northern continental bedrock, a widowed grandmother and her daughter-in-law meet beside once again to nibble-giggle whisper diaspora’s distant pacific island goodnight gossip “A daughter of a neighbor and a relative by less than six.666 degrees of separation became sick with stomach pains for six months. And do you know what they did to cure her conditions?” “Well, will I believe if I knew trouble’s truth?” “Before last summer’s tempest of radioactive torment, she got a full pipe pull of incense puff smoke blown down her belly by a she-sha/man healer from the flip side of the old sea-boat bog...” "Yawa Pahawa!" "Yawa Pahawa!" [“Devil, get out!”] [“Devil, get out!”] [or more accurately, “That evil thing doing tricks, get out of here!”] [or more arguably, “That dirty-devil’s thing doing tricks inside, get outta here!”] 128
An exorcism? A laugh (& a half). “And not too long later, the young girl went into labor; her baby died soon after, so did she...” A 15-year-old third-year high-schooler, child of XY in relative to Z, kid giving birth to kin, by swamp witch’s wish-whip of words, by swapped spit’s lust-spun DNA spell, by some dull & dumb gang member no-gooder neighbor boy, by some curse conjured alive from secret sorceresses of inherited misery given birth by some sperm from her no-good-doin’ adulteratin’ adulterer fisherman father, by that karma-comes-back-as-bad-luck kisses of his many bitter child-bearing mistresses, scattered like ass biting fire crabs slave laboring family love on far islands across heavy eye’s horizon sea - - - subsurface wounds truth:telling* *(As if tropical sun’s story ever ceases at liquid edges of seashore lips: homesick heartbeats pitter-pattern matter on re-union ritualreproduce repeat-repeat, embodied along stormy directions, coded in cloud mouth messages; life lingers on in hole’s loop) The morale?: ‘A spirit is born, killed, and re-risen’ Like night’s shadow, or today’s tomorrow, 129
lurking below the bedsheets: a tucked monster under water blanket of daydream’s sleep
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Replay xXx-Minor Notes to Tune Off/On Future Fear: or, Learn to Swim from Sinking Islands Once upon a pleasure’s time, bathtub of ocean gap traps 2 islands, [like tako dako ug tako gamay (big ‘tako’ and little ‘tako’)] through wide-eyed distance this divide desire glistens, [“let’s go beyond borders of order, swim further off shoreline of fear’s edge, off end of lolo’s seawall backyard fence!”] lust daydreams of floating flesh like mermaid fish, [spinnin’ star system’s grip, kin family’s hips, dna trippin’ trauma’s drip, alien heart’s tight lip; creep creatures of belly’s deep] like we 3 witchy women who glide high tides hollerin’ wildness, [hollow plastic water gallons grippin’ our thighs afloat, locomotive body masses buoy like masted sailboats, spine serpents slivering moon’s rising liquid, face-space perception swells self-picture lizard vivid; bit by daredevil’s goddess guts of glory] 131
below us, slowness of sea muscle-suspended like leisure bicycle ride, [in echo’s listening distance, your cousin repeat screams for your return. to swim to that visible island beyond & back, dis believable whim. no one’s ever done this before, wide wade swim. to swim into that invisible void back & beyond, sans shark attack. no one’s ever gone there before, tugging their behinds on wastebasket water jugs. ‘do you KNOW (not) what death-by-drown be in that beyonder???’] paddlers peddle compass wheel to weave collective destination, [underneath weightless knees kicking air gravity, feet feathering fluid’s light waves, smell of heated seaweed salt, sweet skin’s fruit shell prune prickly lines, clear signs sense crystallize colonized contradiction bloom colors sea-saw filtering mobile limb’s glimmer: blue-purple / plum purple / sky violet / violet-blue / violent bruise-blue / tropical-true-blue / skylight blue / plastic pen ink blue / bloodfusion-blue / flash flood blue / plundered-paradise-postcard blue / betweengreen-blue / hidden hues radiate transparent blue’s muse-eum] 132
‘til finally, multitude body momentum pendulum portals other alien planets of possibility, [fear is unknown’s underwater flash of fate, spit/swap’s splash in face of surreal idealism; fear is lost myth of mind’s friction/fiction, first idea bridged by mind’s eye, imagination; fear is what stops writing stage screenplay, chills reel to press pause/play like dead film; fear is a pilot program of chaos control, if corrupted captive; free unconscious fins (endings)]* “sink your fears, float like a feather”** -from future word play & past passage pleasure**** /// *This is a true-tale auto-flashback of prior storm stored memory from a seasonal stay on the Visayan island of my family’s Philippine origins, hit by the eye of Typhoon Haiyan [Yolanda] in November 2013, at written time, the strongest tempest to strike land in modern recorded human history. **This is an afternoon where we tres amigas spent swimming to a nearby island from my grandfather’s house along boat coast, on the whim of midsummer wind, self-buoyed with plastic jugs between our legs.
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***This text is a tribute to an island’s survival, when the people and waters rise together.
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Aster V. Delgado is a Filipina lesbian artist based in Hamburg. She started to paint in 1996 while she was still working at the Women's Crisis Center in Manila. From the beginning, her art has consciously dealt with the situation of women/lesbians. An additional theme is animal life and nature. Her often colorful and clear images reflect her political visions, her fantasies, dreams and passions. Aster has exhibited her work in the Philippines, in Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic.
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Aster V. Delgado
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OUT OF TIME Alanda Kariza ’You know, perhaps it's time to go.' This is the millionth time the line has been uttered by my mouth, that you usually, passionately kiss, as if there is no tomorrow for there might never be. Perhaps it’s time to go for me, so you can stop wondering what could have been had I said yes, to other bigger things, than when you ask to undress me and kiss what’s bare tenderly. Perhaps it’s time to go for you, so I can stop pretending that I could give you everything you ask, 137
for undressing is easy unlike other things such as unloving. Perhaps it’s time to go without letting you know. So the ghosts of me can live inside you, and that way, you can keep me alive. Without reason. And most of all: Without explanation.
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THE CHANCES WE TOOK Alanda Kariza The chances we took have many flavours, served in different shapes. Accompanying us in different dizzy moments, in different cities too. 1. A Bacardi cola served unappealingly in a huge plastic cup. I kept holding onto it, before, until, and even after our eyes met. Not knowingly. A stranger to another. Not knowingly. I let every sip passed by. After all, it was simply the last available alcoholic beverage at the booth. 2. Grey Goose, and another Grey Goose, served in a similar plastic cup. This time, being friends with blasting sounds on the stereo. Our eyes did not meet. We both enjoyed the music in the room. Our lips did not meet. We both enjoyed the silence in our heads. Only afterwards, when the lights were gone, and the sun almost rose.
3. Local draft beers, served chilled in their bottles. I sat on the edge of the bed while everyone else were playing games. You came by just to change the music playlist.
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You said hi for a chat, awkwardly; I responded, in the same awkwardly vibe. You left the city first thing in the morning. You left me wondering. 4. Johnny Walker Black Label, on the rocks. Served in a fancy way: with a crystal clear glass, on a small round table. We were both wearing black. You, with a bit of grey; and I, with a bit of skin. The glasses clanged. You smiled, with fingers running through my back. I left with a smile. I left you wondering. 5. I don’t know what you ordered for me but it tasted good. I could taste a bit of Sambuca, and perhaps, plenty of other things. Served in an even fancier way: in tea cups, at The Back Room. We were both wearing sweaters. You could not stop drinking. The teacups clanged, and clanged again. For the chances we took. 6. “Here’s another one…” You gave another tall glass of gin and tonic. Rose wine. Champagne. Another gin and tonic. A hotel lobby turned bar, full of people, with dimmed lights, and
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electronic music. Until my head was full, of chances with these distinctive flavours. It was your last night in the city, but I could not stop drinking. The glasses clanged, and clanged again. For the chances we took. Chances are— chances were: It was the first and only chance we would have ever taken. “I got you a pen and a book, So you can write about us — and the chance we took.” You wrote, at the back of the greeting card, before you left. And this is what I wrote about them chances.
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MONKISH Patricia Policarpio The shaven monks clad in orange solemnly march through fogs of incense, which clouds their judgement, leaves them reeling. But the silence must remain. Behind the wooden grates, the tourists shuffle in place, discomfort settling on their toes; peering in, not quite sure what’s to see, but four bald men ambling about. Blinding light & the clicking sound echoes. The cherry blossoms hanging overhead suddenly become far more interesting. For the devoted, it’s bowed heads and mumbled prayers, hands clutched to their hearts, asking for impossible things. Praying for a reprieve, a divine intervention, a sign. Anything but this. The people watch as the monks kneel for hours; until the sunlight dwindles, extinguished like a flame Fading lights, a dim sight. Solitude. 142
Soon, the temple is empty: crickets bellowing into the quiet night, fireflies lining the railings. Finally, one, two blows to the gong Resounding – the universe vows to never forget the sound.
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SAMPAGUITA Patricia Policarpio the sampaguita pours out ivory liquid like rain spilling out an upturned umbrella; its lucid scent wafts through the air, lingering. the tips are branded with golden drops from the heavens white petals and yellow tips resting alone in the budding grass, it beckons for the myna bird that circles the gray skies above, seeking a refuge from the oncoming storm. the sampaguita fears solitude, doesn’t want to be alone when the time comes for it to be swept far away in foreign lands & vast seas.
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its beauty is ephemeral, a fleeting notion, easily forgotten. it weeps the loss of immortality as specks of brown decorate its once pure petals. one day, it shall fade and wilt, cease to live on this plane of existence, decay slowly, painfully, wither alone in a gutter with only the roaches as company. but today, it gleams. glows brighter than anything else, smells of innocence and youth, makes a young girl happy as she puts it in her hair and lays under the bright, morning sun.
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THIS ISN’T IT Patricia Policarpio i can feel my toes freeze one by one as i trudge the lonely journey home the horizon is no stranger; solitude sings to itself to keep me company i hum along to the rhythm of my pounding feet i think about the lost days, drowning in ignorance slipping into oblivion. i have found nothing in this forsaken land and it hurts to be left with nothing but a loss for words i drink the sacredness of a moment to keep me breathing; 146
i inhale the staleness of sleep to keep me from running the air is bitter and stings my eyes like loud, angry scorpions and i curse out to the gods: i ask them if they know how it feels like to look misery in the eye and strangle it for breakfast i fight the screaming half-moon, i give it pieces of my sun soul.
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ODE TO THE NIGHTMARKET Cassandra Hsiao you are the arch nemesis of silence armed with arguments over pricing twelve ringgits and mai yi, song yi. you lift pop-up canopy tents and listen to dialects as they wrap a twine necklace around your lips. your native tongue takes flight. every night, you hum an electric blue, an orange-peel moon in your dusky hair no stars tonight. you expand into spaces next to the display of Dragon Eyes fruits you could fit a child’s silhouette but not their shadow. someone takes refuge there now, to evade the smell of durians her father—your father—is selling. 148
he is engaged in a bargaining battle with a pair of fierce eyes and a sharp tongue. you never go to sleep. your irises reflect tinted light from paper lanterns that cast pink and blue hues on the woman selling chicken sizzling in a pot of oil, covered in flakes of gold. she switches between Bahasa Malay and broken English that you taught her. you hand out samples of fingernail-sized dried fish with invisible scales and crunchy skeletons. your forehead is sticky with sweat and pieces of sugar art, spider webbing lines of sucrose what once used to shape a panda on a stick. a young boy buys a secondhand small rug you knitted yourself. you threaded your favorite triangle-square pattern he runs his fingers through a forest of sunset red threads that cling to his blisters. 149
you are the yesterday with different faces, the tourists with army green fanny packs, orange four-legged stools, and slightly burnt satay. you are the streets in the day and the peddler at night grounds footprinted and black gum-stained. you are the bustling night that city life attempts to recreate.
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TONIGHT'S BLANKET IS FRIED BATTERED FISH Benedicta J. Foo the bar is in the oldest mall of this island, and the waitress probably has us painted by Picasso: eyes popped into mouth into nose into teeth into feet. the reality is an adventure time shirt, blue like a spy in one of those cool movies. i too was dressed for the role: rare black in my wardrobe, slapped to make an outfit paired with soot onto eyelids, powdered snowy ash with weapon of red lipstick. minor things reveal us as Indonesian: a blackberry phone; approval of tea brands; poetry slams a mere shadow of the kerusuhan our parents both faced on different sides. 151
my grandmother doesn't know i am in a quiet bar in the presence of protests, sheltered under a $2 umbrella that does nothing to conceal the storms collecting in my throat. the hakka word she uses for your people involves ghost; a slightly harsher term is meant for me, for girls who betray families and date ghosts. she waits for me to come home before dying and i wonder now if she would wait as long if she knows i am seeing someone from the wrong side of her history. i am afraid that your skin is never white enough, like the solid mass that engulfs us in slumber. i am afraid she will die another death when she sees the silver bands that do not brand our fourth fingers. i am afraid i cannot tell her that the five minutes you take to pray to God, i am praying to a different God. 152
i am afraid that resting flowers on dead bodies is actually a sin as grave as the tombstone that marks ours. * kerusuhan is the Indonesian word for riot.
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WHAT MAKES ME VIETNAMESE? Linh Le What makes me Vietnamese? I judge those who trek through Southeast Asia whose lineage does not lie in any of those countries Pfft stupid Americans I scoff Knowing full well that I am as American as they are How Vietnamese do I have to be to be Việt enough? Is it how I look? If so, then my mom is less Việt than me because she’s half white Is it my command of the language? If so then my mom is 100 times more Việt than I’ll ever be Is it how I am raised? Then what about those Vietnamese orphans brought over during the Amerasian Act and adopted into white families? Are they more or less Việt than I, they who carry more Việt blood than I do Yet their childhood holds no scent of incense or burning paper money for the dead Just American cartoons and pancakes and bacon 154
Do I have a right to “soul-search” in Vietnam like my nonVietnamese American peers who tell me “Oh my gosh I wanna backpack in Southeast Asia, like everybody does it. It’s so cool.” In my heart I do because if it weren’t for the war, my parents wouldn’t be here And by some fate, if they had met in Vietnam then I would have been born there And knowing that in a universe out there, where a man in a high castle controls the strings, I wouldn’t be VietnameseAmerican Just Việt. But then does that mean In that universe She is more Vietnamese than I am?
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THE STARLIGHT STUDIO Sumitra Selvaraj A large black and white family portrait has always hung on a narrow wall in my grandmother’s home. As a child I spent every weekend at that house, and as soon as I arrived, I would tear through the fruit tree laden garden with Ginger in howlygrowly pursuit, kick off my slippers at the porch and careen into the house, up the stairs, down the corridor that smelt of a heady mix of incense and Dettol, past the showcase with the glassy eyed china figurines and brake to a stop outside her bedroom door. The portrait was just outside that door and was positioned at adult eye level, but thanks to the fact that I physically took after my mother’s side of the family, this posed no problem at all. I would examine the photograph closely, trying to pick out a detail that I might have missed out the last 1000 times I had poured over the portrait. It was a typical Indian family photograph from the 1960’s; taken at a studio with the ubiquitous curtain and Grecian column as a backdrop. The mother, my grandmother, is 156
seated with a bewildered baby on her lap, while my grandfather stands proudly behind her with the rest of the brood clustered round in their Sunday best behaviour. My grandmother is likely wearing a colourful printed Saree, which has been reduced to monochromatic splodges. Her black walking sandals peek out rather sturdily from under the hem of her Saree, which may have been a calculated move on her part. She is also wearing too much jewellery, but I doubt my grandfather would have been able to talk her out of that. Chandra Athe, my eldest aunt also wears a prominent gold chain, because nothing says wealth like being able to dress your children up in finery. But it is an advantage reserved for the oldest child because anything more than that would have been flaunting it, which is really quite unnecessary my grandmother would have said. There is also a conspicuous absence of traditional outfits for the children; my aunts are all wearing knee length dresses while my uncles and father are all in shorts and t shirts. While it may have just looked like a simple family portrait to mark the passage of time, this was in fact their first ever family 157
photograph with all 7 children present. There was no doubt that a copy of the photograph would have been mailed to admiring relatives back in India, so there needed to be tangible evidence of Malayan success which of course included gold jewellery, Bata slippers and ‘modern dress’. My grandmother and Chandra Athe are the only 2 who are clearly smiling, my middle aunt stands bolt upright with her lips tightly pressed together, while my youngest aunt Rajes is looking into the camera like a musang caught in the headlights. Her right arm is raised and her fingers are outstretched behind her, I suppose she was searching for the comforting handhold of her older sisters. But don’t let Rajes Athe’s uncertain demeanour fool you, barely a year after the photograph was taken, the 6 year old Rajes dressed up in her older brother’s clothes, walked out of the house and boarded a bus from Gasing Road to Petaling Jaya Old Town. 3 hours of dramatic tension later, in an age without cell phones or even house phones for that matter, my aunt was reunited with my frantically furious grandmother at the Old Town bus depot where the station master was keeping her happy with orange juice and Jacob’s cream crackers. When asked why she absconded like that, Rajes Athe replied that as 158
a brave child she was entitled to do anything and go anywhere she pleased. She added that she was tired of wearing dresses and that from that point forward she would only wear shorts like her brothers. But back when the family portrait was taken, Rajes Athe’s willfulness had perhaps not yet materialised, except in trying unsuccessfully to remove the lopsided hair bow that my grandmother must have determinedly pinned to her unruly curls. My youngest uncle is the baby on my grandmother’s lap and he stares off to the side in the perpetually startled, chubby cheeked profile of portrait babies. My other uncle, Raja Chittappa, has my favourite expression of them all; he glowers at the camera in all of his 7 year old rage, which might have also had something to do with the impossibly high waistband of his shorts. To my grandfather’s left, is my father, who on account of being the oldest son, gets to occupy this prime position. Everyone’s hands are visible in the photograph, except for my father and grandfather’s which are hidden behind the shoulders of the younger children in the foreground. My father once found me 159
staring at the portrait on the wall and remarked that although the Photo Uncle had yelled at the children ‘ai yaaaa stand straight with arms by the side!’, he had slid his hands into his pockets in a jaunty act of rebellion. My grandfather had noticed this and calmly tried to stop him just as the photo was taken; and so unbeknownst to anyone my father and grandfather ended up holding hands in their first formal family portrait. When my grandmother died last year, I took the portrait down from outside her bedroom wall, having decided to make copies of the photograph for all of my uncles and aunts. The simple wooden frame was starting to crack in places, and I held it carefully to avoid being skewered by splinters. The metal tabs that held the wooden backing in place were rusted and so I put the frame down on the floor to search for a tool that would help me pry the photo free. I entered the door to my grandmother’s bedroom and headed straight for her desk drawer. It was as expected, a complete mess. My grandmother had an abhorrence for throwing anything away, and could have easily become the subject of a reality TV series had something like that existed in Malaysia. The drawer protested open and I rifled through random pages 160
ripped from old calendars, yellowing receipts with most of the information unreadable, ballpoint pens that had haemorrhaged their contents into crumpled handkerchiefs, hair and safety pins bent into submission, rolled up posters of beatific deities and stacks of old passport photographs for family members through the years. Deep in the recesses of the drawer, my fingers made contact with a cool, metal object and I drew out a small brass container with a lid. I opened it to find kungkumum inside, the scarlet powder shockingly vibrant amongst the decades of decay. A small amount of the kungkumum stained my fingers as I picked up the brass cover, its edge promisingly sharp as a pick. Back outside the room, I sat on the floor and slid my makeshift tool under the rusted metal tabs and lifted gently, but the tabs still snapped and broke, leaving small copper imprints on the 4 sides of the backing. The wooden backing, photo and glass all lifted cleanly away from the frame, but I realised I was going to have a problem as soon as I saw that the photograph didn’t slide away from the glass. I tried to peel back the top corner of the photograph and to my horror it tore in my hand, just a couple of millimetres, but enough for me to immediately halt my clumsy assault. So 161
there I sat on the floor with deconstructed photo frame in my lap, wondering how to tell my father, uncles and aunts that I had just desecrated a piece of family history, when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I quickly tried to assemble the glass fronted photo back into the frame and held it together the best I could. It was my Rajes Athe, who was nearly obscured by a mountain of sheets that had been used to drape over the furniture during the past 3 funereal days. She peered at the photograph in the lap and I caught her first smile in what felt like forever. ‘I remember that day when we all went to the Starlight Studio to have that picture taken,’ she beamed. ‘I wanted so badly to wear shorts and a shirt but Amma forced me to wear that silly dress and then Chandra Akka made it 10 times worse by cramming that stupid bow on my head. I was so angry with her that I tried to pinch her when Photo Uncle said smile so that she would have a funny face but I didn’t reach her in time,’ giggled my aunt. ‘The Starlight Studio, Athe? The one in Old Town, near the wet market?’ I asked. 162
‘That’s the one darling,’ said my aunt as she shuffled off into my grandmother’s bedroom. That afternoon I drove out to Section 1 in Petaling Jaya and found the Starlight Studio. After calling on my parking karma and scoring a marked bay just metres away from the shop, I made my way through the same doorway that my father’s family would have stepped through 50 years earlier. Inside the shop, the dimly uplit walls were plastered with family portraits, graduation pictures and wedding photos of generations of PJ folk. I showed the photograph to a twinkly eyed gentleman behind the counter who smiled knowingly. ‘Uncle, can you help me save this picture please?’ I pleaded. He asked me if I wanted a cup of Chinese tea and when I said yes, he turned to a steaming pot behind him and lifted the cover. He held the bottom left corner of the glass locked photograph over the rising steam with one hand and deftly poured me a cup with the other. He placed my tea before me on the glass countertop and slid a piece of paper between the glass and the photograph, and the photograph peeled away from the glass just enough to expose a handwritten scribble in faded blue ink. 163
‘15265-90. Now I know who you are,’ he said with a grin. Motioning me to drink my tea, he disappeared into a darkened room at the back of the shop and reappeared 10 minutes later holding a cardboard box. The box contained hundreds of negatives carefully preserved in little paper envelopes, all painstakingly labelled with the date the photograph was taken. It was all there, the family growing and evolving through the years. Family portraits, graduation pictures and wedding photos, caught in time as sepia tinted memories. And yes, in an envelope marked 15625-90 was the negative for that first family portrait. I asked him to make me 7 copies of the photograph and to encase each one in a simple wooden frame. He gently smoothed the original photograph back onto the glass and rummaged around his counter until he found a suitable sized frame. In a minute, the photograph had been restored to a wall worthy condition, and tucked safely into a paper bag. He wrote me up a bill for the 7 copies and their frames, and despite my protesting, he refused to charge me anything for mending the original photo I came in with. Instead he waved me out of the shop, reminding me to come back in a week’s 164
time to pick up the framed copies and not to forget the Starlight Studio if I needed a portrait taken of my own family. I asked him if he’d be able to accommodate a Basset Hound and Cocker Spaniel in his studio and he laughed and said ‘why not?’ Why not indeed, I asked myself as I stepped out into the sunshine. I caught sight of the Bata shoe store across the road, and next to it the bus depot teeming with people beginning and ending all manner of journeys. I would write him a thank you note, I decided, and turned to look back into the inky space of the Starlight Studio. I called out a hello and asked for his name, and heard in response, ‘Ai-yaaaa, just Photo Uncle will do.’
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A BRIEF RESPITE Rania Putri My laptop breaks down. When I look down at my hands I’m struck by the sudden realisation that I have nothing to do – that so much of my life depends on a collection of lights, just lights, programmed to blink and un-blink like an illusion meant for hypnotism. There exists a life before the illusion, projected on a lonely screen somewhere in the recess of my memories. There is nothing to do. There is nothing else to do but to remember. Take one. My very first memory is of sitting on a scorching piece of wood, baked under the unforgiving shine of the tropical sun. It must have been mid afternoon. What little shade my hat provided did not suffice to keep my feet from stinging, and I began to cry. 166
Someone whisked me away, and that was the end of that memory. Take two. I remember running through fields of dried grass, a sad patch of vacant land in front of our rented home – a small thing with too much foliage, but it was home all the same. Just before the sun dipped beyond the horizon the air would get lighter, and we would run outside into the arms of the warm, welcoming weather. I remember that in the sad patch of vacant land there lived a cluster of plants, wild and unruly, yet seemingly so content in their own realm all the same, embodying the entire world’s serenity within their intertwined roots and tangled stems. It was a haven for a child’s curiosity – to poke and prod at plants I knew not the names of until 14 years later. There were blades of grass that would give me itches, plants with little thorns that would find home between the threads of fabric, nestled between the white and pink seams of my pajama pants.
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Unanimously, though, we had a favourite – a plant that curled into itself upon the slightest touch, reminiscent of a prey weary of potential harm the outside world posed, and thus sought refuge within its own leaves. We spent hours traversing the expansive field, eyes trained to spot the tell-tale rows of skinny, jagged leaves on stubby shoots. We called them ‘shy princesses.’ Its name is Mimosa pudica, native to South America. Take three. I remember one of mother’s many friends visiting one day, apparently someone we had met before, but what was I to do with that information? It made no difference. To a child, every adult was interesting, each an enigmatic figure that possessed wisdom of otherworldly qualities – especially those that offered candy. Knowing charm was a surefire method to score some confectionery I cranked up my extra best smile, not wanting to lose out to my siblings. What I got in greeting was ‘oh dear, your skin has turned so dark. You used to be paler!’ No candy, only a look full of sympathy and condescension that felt like an anchor dragging across the bottom of an underwater reef. Unforeseeable, 168
terrifying, and irreversible. My smile dimmed. Detecting a threat, self-confidence packed up its things and headed for the exit, slowly escaping the room of my mind. An interlude, I loved swimming. I loved running. I was never great at football, but I enjoyed them all the same – perhaps out of childish naivety. Mainly due to inexplicable appeals. I didn’t realise the comment had found its way under my dark, sun-kissed skin, like a pre-planned machination, until I began to diverge – diversify – my interests to anything that would shield myself from the tantalising rays of light. And none of it was bad – reading, drawing, messing about in the kitchen. Opening up Paint to sabotage the colouring schemes of manually-drawn shapes, which then morphed into moving figures; videos that took five entire minutes to load but did not evoke complaints, because no one knew any better back then; unfinished word documents of nonsensical sentences with too much flair to make room for substance; statuses that made my world seem a lot more important, and 169
my actions validated. It earned a name later on; social media. They weren’t bad at all. So I let these fade into the background like unwanted elevator music: My first love, swimming, My reckless companion, running, My irrational attachment, football, they didn’t matter because they made my skin darker. So I shut the doors and stayed inside, drowning out the whispers with my head submerged in a stream of pixels. And later all they could talk was how much paler I had become. How much more beautiful I had become. I look away, because the compliments felt like spoils of war. Not an interlude. Take four. A river used to run behind the mosque near our house, shallow 170
enough for it to be safe but deep enough to get us screaming in delight. I still remember. We weren’t tenants there, merely visitors – the honour of hosting belonged to the myriad of water spiders flitting across the surface, leaving behind ripples like they had a story to tell. It belonged to the slugs by the banks, the leeches lurking under rocks and pebbles, and the dragonflies foraging for a friend between scraggly bushes that seemed to prefer isolation. We were guests who felt right at home – the hosts silent but accommodating; present but never in the way.
Fast forward a few years later and a new cluster of luxury homes on the hills just across the river banks stepped forward with bravado to introduce itself. We were excited. They seemed to be another inquisitive guest, ready to experience the hospitality of the river life and its solitude, so different from the incessant nagging of the world. But its uninvited friends interrupted our morning playtimes. Trucks stopped by the banks that heaved under its weight, did not knock on doors but stormed in like thieves, dredging up stones under which water spiders cower and tiny fish hide. They 171
were no longer guests but now a raider, an invader – claws pry away the soft beds of the river, waking up freshwater snails from their slumber and usurping frogs from their thrones. Introduction, obstruction and finally destruction. And we could do nothing but watch in horror from the captivity of our car. Soon, the stones disappeared, even the water buffalos on the nearby paddy fields fled. Farmers closed up shop with their rickety huts – under which they used to lie and seek momentary shelter from the sun – in tow. The paddy field was now just an expanse of cracked, brown land; the tenants had long since parted with their homes, with not even a goodbye fitted in edgewise. The river ran dry, and our laughter soon died out, along with the enchantment of a childhood avocation. Final take, last chance. They play in a loop – views unchanged, landscapes untouched, like memories unaltered by time and progress. I open my eyes. The screen is still antagonistically blank. Taunting. An unfamiliar view outside reminds me that I am no 172
longer at home. It is exhausting to remember. Maybe it’s best to turn around and look ahead, to let time prod me along the ages, ambling along a series of immortalised memories of the past interweaved by forgettable analogue, digital components of the present, inching slowly towards the end. But it is exhausting to think about the end, too.
Kei Franklin
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Kei Franklin
Kei Franklin likes creating. Whether in the realm of theatre, poetry, dance, cooking, humor or conversation, she believes that the best way to spend time is creating. For Kei, home is between New Mexico, Swaziland, and Singapore. Kei is a student at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where she studies Environmental Studies and Anthropology. She wants to learn more about the space where environmentalism and art intersect. How does a vernacular aesthetic change with the spread of neoliberal capitalism and hyper industrialization? How have we, as Southeast Asians, knowingly or unknowingly welcomed a commercial and capitalistic aesthetic into our landscapes, kitchens, wardrobes, and faces?
Kei Franklin
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TANGKAK Cassandra Hsiao You are too young to relish the way the dirt road village never changes, stagnant as cars chug by. Only trucks will stop here at the end of the week to pick up Tangkak’s greatest export, made of blood and sweat and aching backs. Before sunrise, you skip school to watch your cousins cleave tree trunks, breaking bark, spiraling slivers. Liquid latex drips into brown cups from the metal tap stabbing the tree. They collect the milky white substance in buckets, conduct a balancing act on motorcycles as they speed off to the factories. Sun and humidity coax beads of sweat. Your cousins measure and pour the white latex into square containers, coagulate with acid and feed the tofu sheets into a roller. The smell assaults your senses. Uncle lets you grip the rough handle. You have to throw all your weight forward to turn the rusty machine and flatten the layers of rubber. You drape the thin sheets on the fence outside. The smokehouses are next, and from a distance passerby mistake the yellow-brown slabs for leather. If today is pickup day, your cousins, elementary school dropouts, would package their livelihood and put on their best suits and greet the city men, but today is not pickup day, so the rubber hangs from wooden beams, flapping in the wind. Your cousins head 175
back home and fall asleep in their wrinkled, reeking clothes, the odor clotting their bloodstreams.
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PASAR MALAM Cassandra Hsiao I shake my head to wake up, as if the pasar malam with its blue tarps and packed crowds and smoke from slightly burnt satay is just a dream. People fill every corner of the night market, streaming through the narrow path carved by riverbanks of easy-ups lining the street. Vendors shout and yell and their voices spiral like a bakery’s sweet aroma, their tables and carts overflowing with food that tastes like home. Here, I blend in with my skin color, hair, eyes, language. No one would notice if I was swept away in this mosaic river of locals who brave this market rush hour everyday. My mom is surveying an assortment of crispy fish balls on sticks. My brother is next to her, sipping a grass jelly drink with boba. My dad is out of sight, lost in this ocean of people—he must be where the row of tents end, buying a bag of sweet rambutans. White vans are closely parked behind each vendor’s tent. One trunk is open. Inside, an unkempt array of crates staggers under the weight of more crates, and dirty clothes, and rags, and buckets. A little girl leaps out and dashes to help her 177
mother prop up coconuts on top of a crushed wooden box, ignoring splinters digging into calloused skin. Her cheeks are ruddy under thin streaks of ash. Her father rotates between flipping the food on the grill and barking at customers—timepressed and time-weary. From dusky sundown to moonlit-night, this street is a breathing torrent of bustling activity. It is all too easy to get carried away by the fluid motion of customers sauntering from vendor to vendor. I’m swerving through the flood of skin and hijabs when I notice up ahead the crowd parting as a rock divides the river. I move with the stream of people until I reach the rock I can’t see. That’s when I nearly step on him. He is sprawled on the floor, belly flat against the tar of the road. His skin is brown and sunbaked and wrinkled, like tree trunks. His arms are stretched in front of him, hands like twisting branches clinging onto a tin can half-filled with dollar bills and spare change. Where his legs are supposed to be is only the tail ends of his dirt-covered shirt concealing two stumps. People step around the legless, homeless beggar. Their eyes dart elsewhere—to the stand of socks, to the family buying 178
Chinese yoyo’s, to the girls selling cheap jewelry. They swerve out of his way as if he is Moses parting the Red Sea, only he has no staff to give him dignity. He is banging his head against the ground. Words have escaped this man. “Please,” he has learned, is not sufficient. The world has reduced him to the most primal form of begging because pity is not enough to halt people in their tracks and give him what they can. He has learned guilt is the best incentive of all. I take a step away from him, and another. My mind can’t shake the image of him, but I am, like everyone, a creature subject to the laws of inertia. It is hard to stop our movement as we propel through life, or crowds, and before I know it, I am tents away from him. I spot my dad, and the same inertia propels my hand to tug on his sleeve. He takes out his wallet and gives me what I asked. Turning around is much harder. Now I am the helpless one as I crouch in front of him and place the crumpled bill in the can. His eyes meet mine, and for a moment I think I may have stopped his vicious cycle of banging, but his head hits the ground again. And again. And tomorrow when the pasar 179
malam returns with its tarps and smoke and people pressed in close proximity, he will still be here, gravel embedded in the creases of his skin. I wish I could give him more than money and a prayer. I picture myself catching his forehead before it hits the ground, stopping his inertia, holding him close until he stops shaking. I want to give him everything I have. Instead, I stand up and push my way to my parents buying charred satay. I cling onto them tightly, wrapping my arms around them like a relentless tree branch as the crowd sweeps by.
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QUESTIONS OF TASTE, QUESTIONS OF HOME Yen-Rong Wong In Australia, Kuala Lumpur is often symbolic for the entirety of Malaysia – the Petronas Towers, endless lines of traffic, a city metropolis. But this is not the Malaysia I know. I know the reddybrown water of the Rajang River, the back streets of Bintangor, which I always thought amusing because it sounded like bing tang guo, ‘frozen sweets’, the quaint wooden house in Sarikei where an old lady charged my mother an extra ringgit to cut my hair because it was so long and thick. My Malaysia is dirt roads, free roaming chickens, the clearest of clear night skies, and perhaps most importantly, a unique cacophony of food. It is this food I carry around with me today, I my apartment in inner city Brisbane. My freezer is stuffed full of kong biang, though they taste best when fetched straight from the oven. We’re that weird family that buys several kilograms of it to take home, mainly because we don’t trust my sister not to have eaten most of it before we even get on a plane back to Australia. Kaya toast is almost a staple in my diet, and I prefer peanut butter and kaya on bread rather than peanut butter and jam. Pek tin 181
yok, or eight herb soup, was a staple during the colder winter months, when my sister and I still lived at home. My love for food from Sarawak is possibly my only true connection to my parents’ homes. Many of my earlier memories of Malaysia are tied to food. Ever a fruit fiend, I discovered starfruit and dragonfruit in stalls by the road. I devoured satay sticks by the dozen at a party in Penang, loved the simply prepared fern at my auntie’s house in Sarikei, and endured hours in a car that stank of durian. I drank sugar cane juice from a plastic bag, and had to fight my sister for that last pork bun. But food also taught me that Malaysia wasn’t really my home. I could try as hard as I liked, but I didn’t really belong – however much I loved the hustle and bustle of the markets, and the serenity of the countryside. It was a blow, softened only by my youth. I was seven, and my sister five. I think we may have been in Kuching. It was the first time I’d seen chickens wrapped in newspaper, the first time I’d smelled the saltiness of openly cured fish. It was the first time our mother had told us, “don’t speak when you get out of the car”, before we ventured into the markets. “Even though you can speak Mandarin, they will know you’re not from here”. Dutifully, we kept our mouths shut. 182
Here, in Australia, my otherness isn’t so apparent, but the reactions are there all the same. There are people who are surprised that I can speak English, and others who are surprised when I can speak Mandarin. After struggling through attempts to pronounce my name and the inevitable “so where are you really from?”, it often seems a great let down when my answer contains the word “Malaysia”. Many people in Australia, I have found, do not know very much about Malaysia at all, and then the conversation dies, or peters off into another, more accessible topic. If I am foreign in Malaysia, and foreign in Australia, then who am I, really? * I imagine I will be wrestling with this question for years to come, even though I know there will never be a concrete answer. For me, and other first generation Australian born Chinese, Malaysian or otherwise, the issues we face are not those of our parents’. Integration and assimilation are not at the forefront of our minds, but concepts of identity continue to be complicated. We have to learn to negotiate the expectations of two opposing cultures, and this becomes increasingly difficult with the onset of 183
puberty, and the perceived relaxation of rules where our friends are concerned. Stereotypes are used as schoolyard taunts, and it is no wonder many end up picking a ‘side’ in their early schooling years. Saturdays are filled with obligatory Chinese lessons, which at the time, seem like a waste of perfectly good Saturday mornings. But I can truly say I would be a different person if my parents hadn’t instilled Malaysian-Chinese culture into my life. I wouldn’t have done my grade two school project on orang-utans, and I don’t think I would be as enchanted by folk tales, myths, and legends. Learning to read and write Chinese is an exercise in etymology, and this has bled into my love for English. I have been told that my ability to live within the interstices of Western and Eastern cultures is a gift. This may be true, but the world has yet to move on from strict delineations of binaries. It is easier to distinguish between black and white than it is between shades of grey – and it was the world that told me I was different, that I didn’t quite fit. I never wanted pale skin or blue eyes or blonde hair, but I was never Asian enough for the Asians, and never Australian enough for the Australians. * 184
I didn’t realise the importance of food on my cultural identity until I moved out of home. The need to make my own breakfast, lunch, and dinner meant that I turned to easier, Western options. I’d need to make an hour and a half round trip to my parents’ in order to get that little taste of home. The relative dearth of Malaysian restaurants and eateries in Brisbane is upsetting, especially considering the number of Malaysian and Singaporean people I’ve met during my time in the retail and hospitality industries. Many traditionally Malaysian foods are lumped into the “Asian” category, and cannibalised in order to be more appealing to Western palates. Ironically, Australia claims to be a multicultural country, but it still (whether subconsciously or not) exoticises Asian foods. I remember goji berries making their emergence in health food stores as the “next superfood”, and being just slightly amused when I realised they were my favourite part of mum’s traditional chicken soup. There are particular foods and dishes I can only name in foochow, my parents’ native dialect, and this makes it difficult to find recipes to replicate. Even then, there is a slim chance it will taste the way I want it to taste – there is nothing quite like 185
freshly made noodles, and broth prepared in a small, humid stall complete with the to and fro of family banter. A tiny place near our family home that makes kampua, kolo mee, and dian mian ngu opened last year. My father has already made friends with the owner, and I’m pretty sure my parents would eat there every second day if they could. A small but important part of Sarawak has come to them, and they are able to share this with my sister and I without an eight-hour flight and a half hour car ride. I imagine they’re chasing a piece of home – a place where they can speak their native dialect and eat delicious food. There is not much more one could ask for, in a country that is not truly their own. * I live in a hybrid world. It is a world where I enjoy congee mixed with Vegemite, where I switch between Chinese and English without even thinking. It is a world that is ever developing, ever changing. I don’t know what might come next, because it is uncharted territory. I know it will be difficult, and I might never truly fit in, or resolve the two clashing cultures in which I have been raised. My idea of home is ever changing – at times, frighteningly so – and I have almost no control over where it will 186
take me next. My Australia might not be my friends’ Australia, but it is one I have built for myself. Until then, I will have those kong biang in my freezer – little hard baked circles of dough that will always remind me of family, regardless of the place they decide to call home.
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CONTRIBUTORS ALANDA KARIZA is a 20-something Indonesian writer. She has published nine books since the age of 14, including two memoirs called “DreamCatcher” and “Travel Young”, both of which were shortlisted in the Indonesian Readers Awards 2012 and 2014, respectively. Alanda has just released her first English novel, “Beats Apart”, and is currently based in Melbourne.
ALLY ANG is a queer person of color from New England with Chinese-Indonesian roots. Ally’s work has been published in Vagabond City Lit, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, and more. Their first chapbook, Monstrosity, is forthcoming from Damaged Goods Press in summer 2016.
ANDREA MACALINO graduated with honors from the Ateneo de Manila University. In 2011, she was a fellow for fiction at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 2012, she published her first collection of short stories under Boutique Books, for the 3rd Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX), a small press expo. She is currently working on her M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She also serves as editorial assistant for Kritika Kultura.
ARIF UTAMA is from Bandung, and is writer, a thinker, a graphic designer, photographer, a videographer, and public relations student. 188
ASTER V. DELGADO is a Filipina lesbian artist based in Hamburg. She started to paint in 1996 while she was still working at the Women's Crisis Center in Manila. From the beginning, her art has consciously dealt with the situation of women/lesbians. An additional theme is animal life and nature. Her often colorful and clear images reflect her political visions, her fantasies, dreams and passions. Aster has exhibited her work in the Philippines, in Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic.
BEN AGUILAR graduated with a degree in Health Sciences and a Minor in Creative Writing from the Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City. Currently taking up a degree in medicine at Xavier University – Jose P. Rizal School of Medicine, Cagayan de Oro City.
BENEDICTA J. FOO writes mostly about lonely people and lonely places, and is a part of Burn After Reading, a collective of young writers. Her work has been published in We Are A Website, Rollercoasters and Bedsheets: A Sex Anthology in Minutes, and won merit at the inaugural National Poetry Festival in Singapore.
BOBBY SUN is a Chinese-Malaysian writer and spoken word poet who grew up in Singapore and is studying in London. His work has previously been published in the inaugural Singapore Poetry Writing Month anthology (as Robert Bivouac) and Rosarium Publishing’s anthology of Southeast Asian steampunk, “The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia” (as Robert Liow).
CARL LORENZ CERVANTES has a blog at sloppydasein.wordpress.com. Carl likes spaghetti. 189
CASSANDRA HSIAO is a junior in the Creative Writing conservatory at the Orange County School of the Arts. She is an editor of her school’s award-winning art and literary magazine, Inkblot, and has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards as well as the National Student Poets Program. Her plays are currently being produced by theaters across the nation. Her poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, TeenReads, Jet Fuel Review, Feminine Inquiry, Aerie International, and more.
CRISTINA MARIA CHIOREAN has lived in Yangon since June 2014. She is an amateur photographer and owner of the blog Myanmar Life and Colours. She wrote a book about her first year in the country called Blended Feelings: My First Year in Myanmar.
DANNA PEÑA Danna Peña is a constant traveler from the Philippines. She regularly steps out of her boundaries and immerses herself in anything and everything that gives her inspiration, may it be in the form of reaching the peaks of tall mountains, diving in deep waters or simply by perusing thought-provoking books. As a digital native, she believes that great things can be achieved for society through combining technology and media. Her insatiable thirst for creating compelling and valuable content, writing and taking photographs led to the birth of her little nook on cyberspace found at www.dannapena.com.
DRIMA CHAKRABORTY is a genderfluid Indian living in Singapore. They are currently studying English Literature at the National University of Singapore and think they must be horribly 190
boring if work and play intermingles so frequently in the form of poetry for them. Nevertheless, they also like playing video games and political activism.
DYASANTI VIDYA SAPUTRI, in the wise words of Nick Miller, is "the worst breed of human." Often found with a lot of opinions and pent-up anger. A 20-year-old with a lot of figuring out to do.
EVE SHI is an Indonesian fangirl and writer. Her Indonesian YA novels are Aku Tahu Kamu Hantu (I know you're a ghost), Lost, Unforgiven, and Sparkle. Her short stories in English are published in Insignia: Southeast Asian Fantasy and Flesh: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology.
JAN ANGELIQUE DALISAY is a 27-year-old copywriter from the Philippines. She loves to take quiet walks, listen to K-pop songs, and write poems about life as a night-shifter in Metro Cebu. Her essays are constantly filed in her blogs, thegirlwhothinksanawfullot.wordpress.com and nobodyknowsjan.wordpress.com.
JEMIMA YONG, born 1990, is a Sarawakian photographer and performance maker based in Singapore and London. She is interested in developing the role of the photographer in live performance and studying the relationship between live culture and visual literacy. She has exhibited in Singapore, the UK, and has been published in The Times, The Guardian, Swazi Observer, Straits Times and Sydney Morning Herald. She is also photographer in residence at Exeunt Magazine. 191
KARI ASTILLERO is just a little girl working to live the dream and is a second year student majoring in Journalism. She lives in a city from Philippines with her family but wish to live alone and be independent – for now no. She loves to write and talk about nature, music and the universe. She hopes to have her own published poetry book someday and a cozy home surrounded by trees and flowers.
KEI FRANKLIN likes creating. Whether in the realm of theatre,
poetry, dance, cooking, humor or conversation, she believes that the best way to spend time is creating. For Kei, home is between New Mexico, Swaziland, and Singapore. Kei is a student at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where she studies Environmental Studies and Anthropology. She wants to learn more about the space where environmentalism and art intersect.
KHAIRANI BAROKKA is an Indonesian writer, poet, artist, and disability and arts (self-)advocate. Among her honors, she was an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow for her Masters, Emerging Writers Festival’s (AUS) Inaugural International Writer-In-Residence, Indonesia’s first Writer-In-Residence at Vermont Studio Center, and one of UNFPA’s Indonesian “Inspirational Young Leaders Driving Social Change”. Her accessible poetry-art book Indigenous Species is forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press in 2016, and she is the co-editor with Ng Yi-Sheng of HEAT, an anthology of Southeast Asian urban writing.
KOGGELAVANI MUNIANDY is a freelance photographer whose forte is capturing portraits. Her photos were featured in an international arts event by Kakiseni in 2012 and her portraits have also been featured in Parenthood Magazine. She is working on a 192
book of short stories accompanied by her photographs. She is also the co-founder of GoodKids, a social enterprise.
LEON WING lives in Malaysia. He used to work in technology, writing programs, and such. He sometimes takes poems apart and puts them back together on his poetry blog.
LINH LE is a Vietnamese-American woman born, raised, and currently living and working in the Bay Area. Linh recently had writing published on HelloGiggles, Femsplain, and Teen Vogue. Linh is particularly interested in exploring the dynamics of living on the hyphen and what straddling that line means as a 2nd Gen immigrant.
MADINA MALAHAYATI is a fifteen year-old girl that lives in a country that doesn’t automatically exist inside your head. Spends her time crying over the currency rates of rupiah to US dollars and angrily staring at the prices of books in her OpenTrolley want list.
MARC DE FAOITE was born in Dublin and lives in Malaysia. His short stories and essays have been published both in print and online in Malaysia, Singapore, France, India, and Ireland. Tropical Madness, a collection of his short stories, was longlisted for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize.
MARY ALINNEY VILLACASTIN is a Filipina-American cosmonaut swimming space-time sideways through decolonized dreams. A graduate of anthropology from Barnard College and endlessly enrolled student of Earth, M.A.V. experiments with autoethnographic records on the road (RealityEnRoute.blogspot.com). Last based in Oaxaca, Mexico and South Florida, xXx is currently 193
traveling, re-writing virtual versions of various voyages, composing past origins in present future tense. Zer fragment prose-poetry may be found in Local Nomad, Alien Mouth, Epigraph Magazine and Minor Literature[s].
MEERABELLA JESUTHASAN is in college studying History. She is from Malaysia and France and grew up in Singapore. She lives in the U.S., but only for now.
NASIR NADZIR is from Kepala Batas, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. Nasir has been making artwork based on endangered wildlife in Malaysia aimed at advocating for wildlife conservation.
NICA BENGZON graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University with a bachelor’s degree in Literature (English) and a minor degree in Creative Writing. She currently teaches composition and literature courses at the Ateneo while pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Her poems have appeared in Heights and The Philippines Graphic, and are forthcoming from Paper Monster Press’s Atlantis. She writes for her siblings, and for Isabel, Mirick, Kathleen, Paolo, Deirdre, Stefani, and Maria.
PATRICIA POLICARPIO is a poet who hails from the Philippines. If she's not experiencing yet another existential crisis, she's probably wondering what's for dinner. Her work has been published in COE Review, Hypertrophic Literary, East Coast Ink Magazine, Degenerates: Voices For Peace Anthology, The Wait Poetry Anthology, and other online literary platforms. 194
RANIA PUTRI owes much to Indonesian literature, artwork, pop culture and guilty-pleasure TV shows for helping her maintain ties with the motherland, having lived almost two-thirds of her life in Qatar. With a penchant for traveling and human interactions being her main muse, she hopes to one day traverse the many hidden alcoves of treasure all over the world – both in nature and in people. She dreams of becoming wise enough to inspire others just as much as the world has inspired her. For now, however, Rania is still battling high school in pursuit of her dream to study Economics – all the while carefully nurturing her passion for writing.
ROBYN ANGELI SAQUIN is a Filipino visual artist currently pursuing a degree in Information Design in the Ateneo de Manila University. She has previously been published in Heights Vol. LXII no.3 and Vol. LXIII no. 1.
RODRIGO DELA PEÑA, JR. is a Filipino writer based in Singapore. He is the author of Requiem, a chapbook. His poems have been published in Rattle, QLRS, Hayden’s Ferry Review, We are a Website, and other journals and anthologies. He is a recipient of the Palanca Award for Poetry in 2015.
SUMITRA SELVARAJ has spent the last 15 years immersed in Broadcasting and Public Relations in Malaysia. She is currently the Executive Producer of an English language television talk show on the ASTRO satellite network. Sumitra lives in Petaling Jaya with her husband, a cranky Basset Hound, and a hearing and sight impaired Cocker Spaniel. 195
TEH SU CHING writes poetry, plays, screenplays, and short stories. Her work has been screened, published, and performed in London, New York, Telluride, Glasgow, Shanghai, and Singapore. Sometimes, she works on the green typewriter she stole from her late grandpa’s room.
YEN-RONG WONG is a 21 year old student in Brisbane who is sick of people mispronouncing her name. She is currently attempting to write an Honours thesis, with a view to focus on Southeast Asian Australian female fiction in further academic study. She also has a keen interest in science communication, which will probably please her parents somewhat as they weren’t too pleased with her transition from ‘aspiring scientist’ to ‘aspiring English Literature academic’.
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