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“Having come to distrust the hastily adopted identity that both states offer him, he feels at home only on the border.”

I wonder if every newcomer to Berlin suffers, initially, from the same affliction: a tendency to attribute certain cultural characteristics to east and west Germany, even if they no longer exist as capitalised entities. It feels like the long shadows of the Cold War (1945-1991), immortalised in countless films and books—seemingly defining and so, inadvertently clichéd—still looms large over any visitor’s experience of the once divided city.

Reading the late Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper (1982) some five years after my first acquaintance with Berlin, so long after the fall of the Wall, which stood from 1961 to 1989, I recognised my younger self in this enamoured naïveté, and what Schneider’s protagonist describes as “the stupidity of first impressions”—and the cautionary mental reins that soon tense to hold it in check. When suppositions appear to come to readily, too neatly, a natural scepticism begins to creep in, casting a healthy dose of doubt on one’s powers of deductions.

The novel’s unnamed narrator is—like Schneider was—a journalist from West Germany. When we meet him he has been living in West Berlin for some two decades. He had moved there soon after the German Democratic Republic began building the Wall on 13 August 1961—in part because it was an opportunity to escape military service. The West Berlin authorities had waived the draft to attract people to live in its enclave: bounded by East Berlin on the right and in any case entirely surrounded by the enemy GDR. As Ian McEwan wrote in his excellent foreword to the book, this was why Nikita Khruschev had so vividly described the city as the “testicles of the West”: “When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”

When our curious narrator makes his forays into East Berlin, he is on a mission to write something about the Wall: he is looking for stories. Understandably then, he is highly attuned to every detail, trying to deduce what’s implicit in them, as writers and journalists can’t help but do. In one scene, while riding a taxi, he notices that the ‘VW’ insignia has been removed from every VW Golf he passes. His guess: “that they were taken off before delivery to eliminate free advertising for the West German company.” But immediately, he rejects his first guess, for he knows that he is not an unbiased observer: “I suspect motives where there are only material flaws, centralized command in a simple case of collectors’ mania.”

How many times have I gone through the same ritual upon landing in any country new to me or when beginning to report a story? This constant supposing and questioning to try to understand an unfamiliar place or subject, armed with only the most essential facts about a place but with the conceit that with enough noticing and listening and paying attention one will eventually figure out the real, underlying picture—or, at least, come as close to it as possible. In every detail we imagine to be telling, we grasp for an “impression that pushes for generalization”.

People, too, could be unwittingly subjected to the same blunt scrutiny. Once, while sitting in a cafe along the Kurfürstendamn, West Berlin (also a geographical area that no longer exists as a capitalised entity), the narrator and his East German friend Robert, an emigrant to West Berlin, have an argument about a street riot that breaks out on the boulevard, young people with handkerchiefs across their faces smashing shop windows. Robert remarks triumphantly that the protest must have been set up by the police so that they could use it as an excuse to cordon off the inner city, in order to prevent a real riot—to which the narrator, incredulous, accuses his friend of ascribing far too much omnipotence to the state. To Robert, the narrator thinks, “Everything that happens is preprogrammed, monitored, controlled by invisible hands”.

The quarrel begins when I take what I see at face value; Robert has been trained to read between the lines. Where I perceive merely an event maybe an accident, Robert perceives a plan he has to decipher. A friend who is in my view shy, in Robert’s view is only pretending to be shy. A colleague doesn’t just succeed; he has a formula for success. As Robert sees it, Western society is essentially a well-organized syndicate deliberately kept in a state of disorder by a few people in the know.

Our narrator’s presumptions infuriates Robert, who implores him not to label him too quickly. Our narrator observes: “Nothing else I say can make him quite so mad as the comment that something about him is typically DDR.”

The two political systems, which exist in opposition to each other, govern their lives and shape their psychologies, their interpretations of things: no less, how they see the world. Whenever a point of contention comes up, both sides proffer the same “canned language”, the same “state grammar”, the “lesson dutifully learned”—“true to the states whose influence we no longer recognise”. Robert, the narrator thinks, has a tendency to always lay the blame on something outside himself, “sheltered by a state that takes responsibility for everything”—in implicit contrast, he seems to mean, to West German society: where the assumption is that every every decision, every success, every failure, is one’s own. How well you do, or are seen to do, in life, then, very much depends on which system you live in, how faithfully you believe in their underlying philosophies. Impossible then, not to wonder, where the state ends and the self begins. Impossible not to wonder, “What would I have become, how would I think, how would I look, if?” One could adhere to the rules of one’s government, or one could rebel. But either way, they would be reacting to the state they live in, its architecture of politics and feeling.

It’s only human that we do this: read into contextual details to explain how people behave. The trouble, Schneider seems to say, is when we turn people into symbols, into “political phenomenons”, and treat them merely as such—as if they have no agency to direct their own fates, or that we have no agency to direct our own. It’s important to question not just the influences the ‘other’ lives by but also the influences we ourselves live by, so that we don’t perpetuate such divisions, or give them the air of a fait accompli. People can surprise us, systems can change, and change in one can lead to transformation in the other.

All this feels very relevant to the present day, where the world is so divided into polarised blocs across so many issues: pro-Israel vs. pro-Palestine, Left vs. Right, pro-Russia vs. anti-Russia, Global North vs. Global South. As our unnamed narrator muses, “It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.” It’s tempting, for the sake of community and strength in numbers, or one’s mere sanity, to cleave to the boundaries set by one side or the other. We’ve seen how such deep divisions cow most people into playing it safe with their opinions, their principles. At a time when history is so weaponised, so Instagrammed, leached of complexity and obscured from any larger context in order to win an argument, to align more cohesively with a ‘rightful’ perspective. For instance: at a time when the ‘Western’ powers have been shown to be wearing no clothes, one knee-jerk reaction has been to disavow them on every level, to hold up one’s own hitherto imperfect and corruptible small nation as yes, being imperfect, but at least authentic, more human in their imperfections. More often than not, it seems like:

What matters is whether people with whom you wouldn’t want to be identified might make the same observation, not whether it’s true.

Even for the proverbial wall jumpers, things are not straightforward. Though Robert may have chosen to live in West Berlin by its capitalist mores, he is often defensive when faced with criticism of East Germany, where he grew up. For West Germans, too, any sympathy felt for the other side can lead one to gesture wildly in overcompensation. While visiting Pommerer, an East German acquaintance in East Berlin, to better understand the divided metropolis, our narrator meets a fellow guest from the West who harbours “the sense of having come from the worst of all possible worlds”, who “tries to override any reference to limitations on life in the East by telling horror stories from the West”.

If the conversation turns to food shortages in the East, she cites figures on the unemployed back home, who see oranges in shop windows and can’t buy them. There may be more housing in the West, but no one can afford it. True, it can take as long as twelve years to receive delivery of a car in the East, but the cars you get so easily in the West clog traffic and pollute the cities. Granted that you can voice criticism in the West, but it has absolutely no effect.

The narrator describes this as a “conversational rite in which the progressive visitor from the West attempts to reconcile his Eastern friend to his situation by showing him that things are even worse in the West”, as a way of commiserating. Within this context, the narrator calls this the “disease of comparison”, where it becomes impossible to take each place on its own terms. Surely, one can’t simply “cure the madness of one state by referring to the madness of the other”?

In the end, it can feel like the only safe place to live is on the border—not so much ‘sitting on the fence’ so much as being your own person: really thinking about what you believe in and what you stand for, with no concern for which camp would try to claim you for your beliefs, even if you risk finding yourself in partial agreement with your apparent philosophical enemies. (Superimposing this onto our present world: I’m reminded of how some people can be leery of veganism, or variations of it, simply because it is also practised, or has been practised, by people they don’t agree with—say, Hindu nationalists, eco-fascists, maybe Hitler—when there are many sound reasons from an ethical animal-rights, environment, or public-health point of view for being vegan?)

But the border dwellers, too, are not spared the tendency to compare, to bristle when they bump up against criticism, lobbed by the other side, of the place they come from, no matter how imperfect they know it to be. Unable to fully embrace their new existence, and unable to fully abandon the familiarity of their old one, they will never feel the comfort of belonging to any tribe. But that’s a fair price to pay, I think, for being true to oneself. Because, if in order to avoid feeling at odds with the world, one decides it’s easier to throw in one’s lot with one side or another, one might end up—as our narrator does with his ex-lover Lena (who, like Robert, is an East German transplant to West Berlin; and whom the narrator seems to liken to the oppressive East German state)—losing one’s own compass, slowly absorbing their point of view, learning it “like a foreign language without comprehending its inner structure”.

So, to read?

Yes! For such a slip of a novel it is dense with detail and insights and memorable characters, and as a relative newcomer to Berlin I feel it helps to explain some of its aspects quite profoundly. Schneider brings a journalist’s roving eye and handle on the facts without ever resorting to historical exposition, and only just a few footnotes. The material and logistical realities on both sides of the Wall are folded seamlessly into the characters’ actions and lives, leaving enough ambiguity between what’s factual and what’s exaggerated for you to wonder and Google at what was real and not real. But equally, much of what was real sound sufficiently fantastic that one can’t help but think that the mythologised parts, which in the book often take on a charming allegorical tone, could well have been real too. Definitely one of the books to read to better understand Berlin.

p.s.

Some years ago, I wrote about another divided city—a still divided city—for the Virginia Quarterly Review: you can read the PDF here.

Below is a newsletter out-take from that trip to Belfast:

My 2026 book tally

*favourites

Current reads:

Peter Schneider’s 2014 book of essays, Berlin Now: The Rise of the City and the Fall of the Wall.

I also just got back from a week visiting friends in London, where I picked up London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (which grew out of this New Yorker story) by Patrick Radden Keefe, whose book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland I had loved, and which remains one of my favourite books of all time. It’s not at all an overstatement to say that he’s one of the best writers of narrative nonfiction today.

Last finished:

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room*, for the new Chapters bookshop’s Romantic & Ruinous Book Club. This was my first book club in Berlin! The last proper one I attended was years ago at a London pub, where some fifteen of us just sat around a cluster of tables and chattered. At Chapters (in Moabit), we were free to take our seats at one of several small tables. Then, we were prompted with questions: first discussing them in our small groups before loosely ‘presenting’ what we talked about collectively to the room. This format, held in the hush of a bookshop after dark, did feel somewhat classroom-like, but from what I gathered, the bookshop was trying out a new format that night; usually, everybody sits around joined tables and speaks whenever they want to? Either way, it felt very rewarding to discuss a book I loved—so slim, so much contained within it, those social scenes pulsating with so much life!—with other readers. Interesting, too, to see how people bring their selves to the material. I, for one, rather identified, with the ‘drifters’ in the book (who seem uncommitted even in their drifting), even as I found myself to be a little critical of them 😅

Other books read:

Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad, Eliza Filby (nonfiction)*

Basically, it’s about how, “If you’ve grown up in the 21st century, your opportunities are increasingly determined by your access to the Bank of Mum and Dad, rather than by what you earn or learn.” Read this introductory essay by the author for an introduction, cribbed from her book. She also talks about it at length with Trevor Noah.

The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg (essays)*

Really, a necessary manual for living. Found “Portrait of a Friend”, “Human Relationships”, and the concluding essay—from which the book is titled and which considers how we are taught about money from our childhood as a “little” virtue arising from instincts of defensiveness and self-preservation rather than a ‘great’ virtue, arising from courage?—particularly profound.

Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte (short fiction)

Loved a couple of the stories, others exhausted me. I’m sure they were meant to affect a reader so and consequently, I couldn’t read them in succession, I needed breaks between the stories. I laughed out loud many times, but it felt like most of the stories never edged beyond satire?

All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, Ruby Tandoh (nonfiction)

Interesting, funny read on how food trends came to be, asking how much our tastes are, in fact, our own? Rhetorical, of course: it’s always been from the people we know and look up to, and more recently, strangers on social media. But also: “So much of our food culture comes down to things like this—the movements of huge companies to create, and the aggressively enforce, a new agenda.”

Good and Evil and Other Stories, Samanta Schweblin (short fiction)*

I was first introduced to her story “A Fabulous Animal” in George Saunders’ newsletter. It really helped me think through a short story I’m writing, and she now has a spot on my ‘Favourite Writers’ list!

(My 2025 reads listed here.)

‘The Strange Books Club’?

Here’s an idea, just me testing the waters: I’ve been thinking that I would like to be part of a casual, probably irregular-timed, reading group: in-person in Berlin. We’ll discuss the book over a meal or drink, a picnic in warmer weather, maybe online when no other workaround is possible.

Since last year, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to books with dark, strange, uncanny hearts, books set in otherworlds just one remove from ours. Maybe this inclination took hold because of what’s happening in the world, and the darkness offers a sort of weird escapism? Or maybe some of them offer unexpected comfort: the possibility of darkness being overcome—if only in fiction, if only by a faint glimmer. I’m still trying to figure out why I’m drawn to such books at this particular time, but if this describes you too, let’s figure it out together?

I think many books could fall under this amorphous umbrella, so it wouldn’t be too prescriptive. Some recent-ish examples I’ve read: Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive My Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen.

As for titles we could start our reading with: Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, Yōko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story? Many others, too—I’ll have to consult my cobbled list.

If you’re keen on reading together, write me at movableworlds-AT-gmail.com. Let me know if you’re looking to meet in person, or online (if you’re not based in Berlin but this speaks to you very strongly). Feel free to suggest other titles, fiction or nonfiction, you would like to read or discuss too.

–Emily

Books I finished this year

* recommend!

Sister Snake, Amanda Lee Koe
A Sabbatical in Leipzig, Adrian Duncan
Knife, Salman Rushdie (nonfic)*
Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck
The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra (nonfic)
The South, Tash Aw
Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico*
Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Not a Novel, Jenny Erpenbeck (nonfic)
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk*
Audition, Katie Kitamura
Tremor, Teju Cole*
Coventry, Rachel Cusk (nonfic)
Poor Ghost!, Gabriel Flynn
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad (nonfic)*
The Anthropogists, Ayşegul Savaş*
Walking on the Ceiling, Ayşegul Savaş
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson*
The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman
Flesh, David Szalay*
Crudo, Olivia Laing
The Wall Jumper, Peter Schneider*
Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine, Omer Bartov (nonfic)
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (nonfic)*

“Don’t feel sorry for us. Feel sorry for yourselves, that you’re living in a country that is arming Israel, that is sending weapons overseas to kill children. Your bombs are killing children. If that bothers you, then don’t feel sorry for us. Feel sorry for yourself. That you don’t have enough say in your own country to stop it.”
—Noor Alsaqaa, communica…

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Increasingly, since I’ve made Berlin’s acquaintance in the summer-august of 2019, I’ve found myself more attuned to the everyday details of city life and how cities work, how its particular features determine its symbiotic relations with its human and animal inhabitants. I think it has something to do with how W.C. and I met, walking the city from dusk till dawn those first two weeks, and his appreciation of details as a artist that even I, a writer and obsessive (but patchy) documentarian, would miss. The onslaught of the pandemic soon after, with its lockdowns and proscriptions, also made me more appreciative of the world outside, of how walking allows for more spontaneous discovery and encounters, even in familiar urban settings.

On a trip to Hanoi last year, I made a list of notes on the various things I noticed. I’ve started doing that in Berlin too, though my broken foot hasn’t regained its full mobility yet. This has also made me think more about how our bodies—a vehicle, too—carry us through spaces, how that’s something we really can’t take for granted.

Sometimes I write these diaristic things (I’m not trying to sell you something or teach you something or influence you into something) and I wonder if people would want to read them—if, though written for myself, others would get something out of them too. The answer is, I’m sure, yes, in the same way I get something out of reading other people’s ‘diaries’ too, especially as it relates to their surroundings, how life is different where they are, how that shapes them in different ways. Still, I think that’s why I haven’t been emailing out recent letters, preferring to just publish them here, and whoever finds them, finds them. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the niggling question: “But what are you offering your newsletter subscribers?!” Even if I know better.

In all honesty, I write first for myself, just to get things out of my head so I can move on. I’m not speaking metaphorically here: it feels like writing things down actually clears my head, makes space for the possibility of new observations and memories. It also makes me feel more… material, somehow, as if bit by bit, by writing things, arranging them, organising them, making sense of them, I’m writing myself more and more into being. But that’s not all. Writing for me, for anyone, is also a way of expressing, in bits and pieces, what amounts to a sort of worldview—led by a curiosity, I suppose, to see how one’s worldview bumps up against those of others, as a way of learning more about the world: Have I missed anything? Am I mistaken? Etc etc. And so: the continued existence of this newsletter, or blog when I’m not sending it out. Thank you for continuing to read.

I arrived back in Berlin in late February, when sidewalks and street corners were still covered in snowfall from a few days’ prior. The weather was slightly warmer, sunnier, than I had expected. I hadn’t been back for more than a year, and I was curious to be here at the tail end of winter, since we usually visit W.C.’s country in the thick of the season, in time for Christmas. We returned to our building with its dilapidated facade, patchy where plaster had torn off, scrawled with graffiti, bricks chipped off windowsills. It was already dark when the taxi dropped us off, and entering the inner courtyard all I saw looking up were rectangles of yellow light, alternately sickly and warm.

The building could look grim on the outside, but we had made our apartment cosy. I was greeted with note cards W.C. (who had come back a few months ahead of me) had strung up spelling out WELCOME HOME ! above a tall bouquet of red and yellow flowers stuck in a vase. I unpacked while he cooked us a mushroom-and-veggie stew—it was too late to dine out—and I showed him what I had brought back with me from Malaysia to stave off the occasional pangs for home: packaged Mushroom Lah rendang and dried lion’s mane mushrooms, as well as my mum’s jar of garlicky red chilli paste, rolled up in kitchen tissues and a plastic bag, bound tight with thick rubber bands.

The next day, in the wan light of this in-between season, I saw that management—though that sounds much too corporate for our building, perhaps the Hausmeister?—had removed the vines that once snaked several floors up the walls of the inner courtyard, which I had come to regard as its most defining and charming feature, by which I could always observe how one season began to turn into another: from bare skeletons to trails of green leaves, then red leaves, then yellow leaves, then back to bare skeletons again. In their place now, there’s an absence: deep, thin bare lines like tributaries of a dried-up riverbed and more cracked plaster where they had been ripped out. Later, we realised that this was probably a prelude to the work now being done to the building’s facade—long overdue, one might think, but we have come to appreciate it’s lived-in character. It doesn’t look so different from the facade of Clarchens Ballhaus! we joke to ourselves. My cousin, when she visited us recently from London, remarked that our building looked “Berlin AF”. Turns out it might not remain so much longer, once the pockmarked walls are levelled and and cleaned up and painted over—like the adjoining apartment building right next door, which, for the longest time, stood as a stark contrast to ours. Right now, the central inner courtyard of our building is mapped right across with scaffolding, parts of the walls—together with the graffiti and the children’s chalked drawings of humans and animals—already scraped down to their the dusty-peach brick foundations. Whenever we step out into the courtyard we must first look up, or one of the workers will see us and holler up at his colleague to STOP! In our residents’ WhatsApp group, someone reported that they had already been hit by a rock—luckily, no real damage—as the workers work their way down the walls. Every day, as I hasten out, I dodge past the rubble and debris and hold my breath against the dust.

I had returned to Berlin in a orthopedic boot, or what I liked to call my ‘Roboboot’, with crutches for extra support. Two days after Christmas I had fallen down the stairs in my parents’ house—yes, clumsy me!—and broken the fifth metatarsal bone in one foot. Though I was managing quite well getting around, it was a different proposition with luggage or walking long distances with luggage, since I would need my hands for my crutches or at least have them free to better balance myself, so I requested wheelchair assistance from the airline —which meant I was fast-tracked through all the usual stops: it was the smoothest airport experience I’ve ever had. I hadn’t realised that the service is, rightly, free: you can request wheelchair assistance right up to your plane seat (they may use a portable lift to take you up), or simply to the foot of the boarding steps. I didn’t have to submit any formal documents, though I had requested a letter from my doctor just in case. On the day of my flight, an airline/airport employee pushing a wheelchair met me at the check-in counter. I could also have my boot and crutches with me on the flight without additional payment for weight: they didn’t factor into my hand-carry allowance.

Some sixteen hours later I landed in Berlin and was immediately greeted by an airline employee with a wheelchair and then transferred to an airport employee with a wheelchair. It had been the same during my layover: I suppose, airports being such sprawling spaces, it’s more efficient for staff to stay in their respective orbits, that you get passed along, mostly efficiently, via wheelchair or buggy, in a chain of service while they communicate over their walkie-talkies. Having taken the train in, W.C. was at arrivals to meet me, beaming after our four months apart, taking over my luggage while I walked myself on my boot and crutches to the taxi stand outside. With W.C., it’s become a ritual for us to see each other to the airport or to pick each other up, whether in Kuala Lumpur or Berlin, even if it might be more convenient to say our goodbyes or hellos at the nearest train station in the city. This was one of the things I liked about him when we first got to know each other, something that seemed a piece with the rest of his way towards people, strangers or friends. A long time ago, when we were still just friends, he mentioned that he had thought to take the train to pick me up from the airport on my second visit to Berlin: this was after I had already arrived and we were meeting at a cafe in the city. I believe I said, over coffee, Ah, of course not, don’t be silly! It’s not necessary. Why trouble yourself when we could just meet in the city? But secretly, I liked that he thought of it. Later, when we were no longer just friends, he confessed that he had only decided not to offer it at the time because he thought I might be the sort of person who might think the gesture ‘too much’. How many things do we refrain from doing for others, platonically or not, because we think it might be ‘too much’? Love, affection, or (not mere) consideration: in our present world, it’s never too much.

I love walking the city again, being able to walk the city again. I think it’s probably my favourite thing about being back here. Berlin is a lot easier to navigate on foot and has more extensive public transport links than Kuala Lumpur, which is built primarily for cars. Yet, I was still healing from my broken foot, so I had to ease slowly back into it. In the first couple of weeks, I walked around on my Roboboot around our neighbourhood, relied on Uber for less manageable distances. Some days, though, there was no choice but to rely on Uber and its alternatives, since there were several strikes by BVG staff demanding better wages, which: good to hear they got them.

By mid-March, I started to wean myself off my boot. I first had to look for a pair of sneakers that would feel comfortable—none of my old ones fit; they were too tight as my healing foot was still slightly swollen. I went to a sport-shoes store and tried on what felt like the entire women’s range of shoes available, and finally found one that felt comfortable: thick cushioning, relatively flat, with a heel drop of just 5mm. I had to go up a whole size and a half to accommodate my swollen foot, which meant it was a little roomier on my good foot, which meant I had to wear an extra pair of socks on it. I went around like this, my feet slightly mismatched for a while with a kind of secret glee. At the same time, I felt exposed without the hard shell of my boot and I was always careful to hold my bad foot close to my body at zebra crossings or on public transport for fear that someone would step onto my toe and undo whatever delicate progress had been made.

But it’s been a ritual pleasure to walk again. Carlos Moreno’s concept of the ‘15-minute city’, which imagines residents living within a 15-minute walk or cycle/train/tram/bus ride away from all the services they need—I guess for most, though, work is still likely to require travelling further—feels true here, at least in our neighbourhood, in the former East Berlin. Everything we need (and want) we can find in our vicinity: grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, bars, small parks, bookshops, tailors, hairdressers, print shops, stationery shops, outdoor gear shops, clothing boutiques, utility shops, flower shops, post offices, DHL/Hermes Paketshops, doctors, dentists, physiotherapists, fitness centres, board-game, jigsaw-puzzle and comic-book shops, even a Chinese foot-reflexology parlour! Anything else is an easy ride away, since we have U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations nearby, as well as several tram and bus lines criss-crossing our neighbourhood.

With a subscription Deutschland Ticket for 58 EUR per month, we can avail ourselves of all public and regional transport throughout Germany (not always practical depending where you want to go, but still)—excepting intercity (IC and ICExpress) trains. So it’s a matter of just hopping on and hopping off, which makes the whole experience of navigating the city feel quite seamless, like you’re moving through it on a kind of horizontal elevator—or, less romantically, a conveyor belt (excepting, also, delays and disruptions and peak times). BVG, Berlin’s public transport authority, also offers a subscription city-wide travel card, but it’s almost double the price of the Deutschland Ticket (federally administered by Deutsche Bahn) and doesn’t allow you to use public transport in other German cities.

All of which is to say: this makes walking and taking public transport in Berlin very easy. I just have to remind myself to always have my phone on me and to make sure it’s not dying so I can flash my digital pass on the DB app if I’m checked by the occasional plain-clothed officer—usually outfitted in a tracksuit, it feels like? The handful of times I’ve been checked anyway—making their rounds. Unlike in many other cities, there are no turnstiles regulating entry at train stations in Berlin and you don’t need to tap on and off when you’re on a tram or bus. I’m sure people take advantage of that; I don’t, simply because I have no stomach for stressing about whether I’ll be spot-checked—I like to leave my mind to just wander while on a train or a bus or a tram—and also because I think if you’re enjoying the utility of a service and you can afford to, pay for it.

Not long after returning to Berlin, I went to our local Bürgeramt and got myself formally registered to an address, proof of which is a requirement for various administrative setups in Germany: bank account, mobile plan, health insurance, etc. I’ve also started to deliver online purchases or have family and friends send me things in my own name rather than in the ‘c/o’ W.C. because in Germany—or at least in Berlin?—door bells and apartments are not affixed with numbers, but surnames. This system struck me as strange and nonsensical at first: I wondered about all the letters and packages that might fall through the cracks between tenancies, though I suppose tenancies here tend to last longer than in other cities—about 85 percent of Berliners are tenants. It also felt a lot less private to me to have one’s name on the door; I’ve always felt more comfortable in cities that encourage anonymity: the kind that allows more intimacy. But I’ve slowly come around to this naming system. I also appreciate how couriers will leave your package with one of your neighbours if you’re not home: you’ll get a card in your mailbox telling you which neighbour—you’re given their surname—to pick it up from. Soon, you remember that so-and-so with the curly-haired kid lives on the second floor, that so-and-so who plays the piano is on the fourth. And I don’t remember anymore which neighbour it was who started the residents’ WhatsApp group, but it’s been useful: when we’re missing a package and the courier evidently forgot to slip us a notification, when we needed to borrow a drill to put up wall shelves, when we had too much leftover cake from a party to finish ourselves. Bring your plates to our door, we said. We’ll fill it up!

Our flat is located in the hinterhaus of our apartment block, on the ground floor, where we don’t get too much daylight for too long. In the summer months, this also makes it colder indoors than it actually is outside, and whenever I pull aside the curtains and look up at the sun spreading its rays high up in the blue sky, I’ll feel the urge to step outside—which, great, what’s not to love being outside? Except: I often work best at my home desk, which is still more spacious than any cafe table, and where I can spread out my books and notepads and reference materials alongside my laptop. Besides, many cafes here impose a no-laptop policy, particularly on weekends—which I understand, though it seems counter-productive when the cafe isn’t full and it’s an hour to closing time.

Still, the loveliness outside can make one feel restless indoors, and being in this city, I realise: all I actually need, much of the time, is just a jaunt around the neighbourhood. I don’t necessarily need to stop in somewhere for coffee and linger, I’m happy just to walk for a bit in the—don’t tell me it’s not!—fresh-seeming air, feel the sun’s warmth on my face, sit on a park bench and read a book chapter or two, pop into a bookshop or florist’s to pick up a new title or a bunch of buttercups, matthiolas, peonies (now in season), chamomiles, or billy balls, and return home. Which reminds me of what a writer friend told me when she moved back to Kuala Lumpur from London last year: that after so long going without, she now needed a gym membership because she couldn’t walk the streets as easily or extensively anymore. Similarly, now that I’ve found my feet again and settled into a smoother gait, I’m walking some 30-40 minutes again every day and put my Classpass membership, which I relied on in Kuala Lumpur, on pause. I still need weight-training, but I’m waiting till I can flex my broken foot again to get back to it—unless lugging around a heavy backpack around town on foot counts?

The blankets, and then patches, of snow I returned to in late February lingered on the streets for a few days before melting into grey slush and evaporating. It was something like 10 to 12°C those first few days, before creeping up a fortnight later to 16 or 18°C. You could still see dogs shivering beside their owners at tram stops, even if they were bundled in jackets. But even then, as long as the sun made some kind of appearance, there were already people braving the cold, sitting on chairs and tables optimistically arranged outside. Berliners, it seems, will jump on the slightest excuse to sit outside, or on windowsills, even when it means facing a dug-up street bounded with white-orange striped construction plastic barriers. Then, came March: the trees still mostly bare, their branches brittle, stretching ineffectually for succour. Against this, the red of a neighbourhood church, or the orange of an old brewery, when touched by the sun, was a vibrant splash of colour. A baker, taking a custom cake order from us, told us that she couldn’t decorate our cake with fresh raspberries or blueberries as she makes it a point only to use fresh fruits when they are in season locally, so would a frozen compote do? In mid-March, heralding the coming of spring, a vegan Japanese cafe began serving matcha-and-fresh strawberry shortcakes and we went to try it. Everything has its season, I’m trying to remember.

On April 4—I remember the date exactly—the temperature edged past 20°C for the first time and we bounded to our neighbourhood park with a picnic blanket. While I guarded our things, W.C. went to buy some corn empanadas and coffee from a nearby cafe. We read, sketched, snoozed, played Azul Summer Pavilion Mini. Everyone—families, young people, children—co-existed with the homeless (I think?) who had set up camp against a line of bushes. Once, we saw a man walk away from the tent, yelling, “I would rather sleep once with somebody who really wanted me than be f**cked a thousand times!”—something along those lines: it was uttered in German, W.C. translated—before hurrying away, fidgety and disgruntled. Another day, we wandered onto the grounds of one of the red-bricked churches I mentioned, sat on top of one of its surrounding walls, and ate our leftover party cake from a tupperware, soaking in some Vitamin D. In the days after, the temperature dipped back down to 16-19°C, 12–13°C. The weather was unpredictable: from one day to the next, it could be 10°C warmer or colder.

Still, the days were visibly stretching, the sky brighter. It was in April too that I began to see pink and white cherry blossoms emerging here and there on the sidewalks, tentatively at first, then seemingly all at once, riotously—growing into downy proportions, like low-hanging clouds. A restaurant hung up a banner over its entrance announcing that it’s Spargelzeit! and rhubarb crumble began making an appearance on menus. Then, again: the temperature, for a very short spell, climbed up to 23°C, hot enough for me to pat on sunblock and wear a sunhat, occasionally slip on a pair of sunglasses I got a long time ago, the reflective lenses striking a vaguely obnoxious pose which I now feel self-conscious about. We began to see dogs sunbathing, their humans sunbathing.

Today, it’s 13°C again and it’s been raining all day.

E.

p.s. Want to say something but prefer voicemail? I’m trying out Speakpipe. You’re allowed 90 seconds per note (I’m using it for free), but feel free to send more than one. Record your note here! You don’t need an account.

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A note from my first trip to the city—autumn, 2019:

I’m remembering the way the light hits Berlin. Something Edward Hopper said about his own paintings (filched from that brilliant Leslie Jamison essay on the street photographs of Garry Winogrand, radiant cities, and splendid strangers) comes to mind: “What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.” I find it strange that I barely took any proper photos in Berlin. Just snapshots like these with my phone of fleeting, seemingly throwaway moments, hastily composed—the thing that is memorable about them always outside the frame, never in it. I found myself growing fond of this city as I eased into it, without quite knowing what I liked about it. And I don’t know why it took me this long to visit for the first time, considering the years I was in London and my working interest in World War Two history. I walked everywhere, found temporary perches in different neighbourhoods—Neukölln, Friedrichshain, Mitte—in hopes that I would see more and understand more, but I think I saw more and understood less. How do you capture a place in a way that goes beyond what looks beautiful, in a city that often disdains conventional beauty? I think I felt incapable of taking photos of the city in an intentional manner because it felt so unknowable. All cities are unknowable in some way, but there are cities that feel more uncontainable than others—strangely, more so if they’ve already been written about a lot. It feels like there are the things that almost sort of overly define Berlin, to the point of predictable kitsch; on the other hand, there’s everything that isn’t definable, that feels amorphous and contradictory, so you’re stuck in the between, constantly trying to figure it out. Which, I guess, isn’t a bad a place to be. There will always be a new way to look at the same thing.

& Yes, I’m back. More snapshots as I find my way around the city and the language. But first, I just wanted to remember my early impressions of it.

Also, an old letter published from that first trip to Berlin/Germany:

& My latest:

E.

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I’ve been quiet around here, mainly because some life and work transitions have been taking up my time and mental space. I’ve also been thinking again about how I want to use this space going forward—it feels like I’m doing this every so often, and I think it’s because I have compartmentalised my thinking and writing spaces, including offline in various notebooks and note apps on my laptop, thinking it’ll bring some order and a clearer mental state, when I only end up trying to categorise things and filtering what should end up here or there, or what is best kept private or for gestating work, to a point that can be paralysing. But I know I’d like to keep this newsletter going in some shape or form, though as you would have realised, I’ve stopped publishing guest essays, so I can feel less guilty about the ebb and flow of this newsletter according to the ebb and flow of my own life and moods, alternatively seclusion- and community-seeking. Thank you to all of you who continue to follow along here. Really, I’m grateful.

It’s fair to say that though I consume a lot of American media and culture, I follow U.S. politics only to the extent that it’s unavoidable, i.e. Instagram draws my attention to them. One day, I woke up, started my usual doomscrolling, and there it was: Trump had won his second attempt at the presidency, and there was his re-inauguration, playing out on my small screen.

The first thing I saw were two candid stories from a Washington Post reporter, which still live on X. In one of them she captured a staffer asking George W. Bush, “Are you going to behave?” and Obama sneaking up cheekily from behind, quipping, “Nope.” In a following video, picking up on the same thread, she asked Obama as he was walking past, “Did you behave, sir?” And he said, impishly, “Just barely.”

This made me think: Is this how we have to cover the news now, to feed attention to formal news reports, if it even does? No judgement, I follow Emily Davies because I really like how she uses Instagram to pull back the curtain a little on how journalism is done; and these Obama interactions were what made me continue, that morning, to scroll on so I could see more of the inauguration. I found these seemingly candid moments quite delicious and funny, sent them on to friends. At the same time, I do also have some misgivings about this sort of instant personality-driven coverage appearing more and more in mainstream journalism, I guess because it feels a little like gossip.

And yet, maybe this moment demands it? As the hypocrisies of those in power have been more clearly revealed to us, particularly through the lens of Israel and Palestine, we are hungry for a glimpse of what they are really like, what they actually do and say, and yes, what they joke about, beyond the official veneer we’re presented with. But to what extent can finding and highlighting these more informal moments, especially the funny ones, make light of dire events, make them something to sigh but still giggle about? At the same time, isn’t our knee-jerk response to absurdity simply to laugh? To be sure, the comedians were among the first I looked to for their take on Trump’s inauguration.

Later, I saw that Singapore’s national broadsheet The Straits Times had collected Davies’ videos in an Instagram reel titled “Things that made us go 👀 during Trump’s inauguration”, along with other videos—incorrectly crediting both videos to other people.

I’ve noticed more mainstream news media doing this on their Instagram accounts since Israel began their relentless, indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza—the reposting or repacking of clips with hardly any context given, nor any credit to the original sources of the footage so you can try to suss them out for veracity or reliability; and as we saw with The Straits Times reel, credit, even if given, could also be given erroneously. I think its smart, perhaps even necessary, for media organisations and journalists to pick up some of the tools from the digital content creator’s handbook—for one: why let someone else explain your article for you in a ‘hey, real talk’ reel if you can do it yourself (even if that doesn’t guarantee your audience will go on to read your article)—but this reposting without context is one thing I think they should try to refrain from.

Unless, perhaps, it feels really urgent, if it’ll do more good than bad, though even that can be a tough call to make. I do think that Gaza is perhaps an exception, because mainstream media coverage has been so one-sided and no foreign journalists have been allowed to enter Gaza—Palestinian journalists are indispensable, yes, but the prohibition of foreign journalists in Gaza is still inexcusable—so any information that circulates out of the cracks is all we can rely on, even if they are not easily or immediately verifiable, especially when they are reposted over and over and the trail to their original source is lost. There is still a need to show the genocidal crimes Israel—with the help of governments that arm it without reservation—is committing against the Palestinian people in order to put further pressure on the powers that be to call for a ceasefire. Even if certain incidents are not always verifiable, it’s impossible to deny the bigger picture, especially given the Israeli government has made its intentions explicit.

The most jarring thing I found about Trump’s inauguration ceremony was how his audience gave him a standing ovation when he said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and how they cheered when he signed a slew of executive orders—including: to withdraw from the Paris agreement and the World Health Organization, which will have consequences for the world.

The surreality of this forces you to seriously question: What if we are entering a world in which the majority—if not the majority of people then the majority of those who whole real power—thinks that it is right to preemptively kill children, to denigrate darker-skinned peoples, to champion certain groups simply because they are rich? Arguably, we’ve already entered that world, but what if laws explicitly bend that way too, when such things are considered right? What an upside-down world. Suddenly, you, with your compassion, your attempt to be humane, would be the one in the wrong, you would be the one acting illegally, when all you want to do is act with sympathy and kindness and justice: values that feel like common sense. The reactions of Trump and his posse to the bishop spouting mere kindness was instructive, calling her ‘extreme’ and ‘out of line’, as well as unprofessional and mentally ill (I remember reading this but I can’t find the source for it now). All this makes me thankful that here in Malaysia we still have some semblance of a shared reality, that though our society, too, has deep schisms they are not yet so impossible to negotiate (this is not optimism, but rather a case of how low the bar has fallen). But I do worry that what’s unfolding in the U.S. will give permission to those elsewhere who delight and gain in sowing division as well.

Speaking of which: Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. When I first saw it, I thought what Jon Stewart, jokingly, thought: Wait, maybe he was just doing that “dabbing” thing teenagers do? Because, hey, some of us still try to judge what others say and do in the best faith possible, while they don’t necessarily do the same for us. In this case, I wasn’t even trying to see his actions in good-faith terms, but more in practical terms. I was thinking: I know he’s rich and entitled, but doing a Nazi salute would surely be too tone-deaf, too risky? He might hold Nazi sentiments, but surely he won’t show it? There is still a difference between thinking and feeling something and actually doing it, right? But no, Musk performed the salute twice; he has lent his support to the AfD in Germany. He knows what he is doing. Yes, he is also awkward as hell, but you can be both awkward and corrupt.

I can’t help but feel that this tendency in the ‘reasonable’ among us to want to read people in good faith is, lamentably, in this present climate leading to a breakdown in communication. When Trump spoke of setting up an “External Revenue Board”, no one quite knew what he meant; he probably didn’t even know what he meant. But if you’re the media and you want to have any news to write about at all, you have to bend over backwards to try to read what he said in good faith—to assume that he maybe meant the next most logical thing he didn’t mean—in order to engage with it, to even have something to engage with. The New York Times here, for example, because otherwise it would have to dump down the conversation and do away with its measured tone entirely and then what would it be left with?

One of the things W.C. and I went back and forth on when we heard Trump won was how we would have voted if we were faced with a similar predicament, considering what’s still going on in Gaza.

I thought I would probably still have voted for Biden/Harris, if only to stave off a Trump victory, because a Trump victory would mean that conditions would deteriorate even further, and more quickly, for Palestinians, because Trump would have even fewer reservations than the Democrats in power. I thought that the fate of Palestinians under both presidencies would still lead to the same outcome, just that one would feel even less constrained by the appearance of humanitarian norms and so accelerate the killings of Palestinians. My thought was simply: a Biden/Harris win would at least buy Palestinians a little more time, compared to a Trump win. It’s a very pessimistic view of the world, to be sure, but I was trying to put myself in the shoes of a Palestinian in Gaza, living from moment to moment under Israeli bombardment. I thought I would just want to live a little longer, in whatever way I could. I thought it would be egotistical not to vote for Biden/Harris simply because one couldn’t stomach voting for them. It shouldn’t be about what you thought your vote would say about you, but how it would actually affect Palestinians.

W.C., on the other hand, said he would find it difficult to vote for the Biden/Harris administration after all it had done, or not done. What’s more, he thought that what Biden/Harris was already doing, or allowing Israel to do, to Palestinians was far from ‘a lesser evil’, and he did not want to be forever held hostage by the status quo, by thinking, Well, it could be worse. The hypocrisy of those in power is enraging, and maybe we need someone who looks and speaks like the villain they are—rather than one who acts like a villain but looks and speaks like a good guy—to ambush us out of our complacency. Maybe, without such a villain, we would simply submit to the appearance of order, and nothing would change. Maybe voters just need to vote with their hearts, even if that means voting for an independent candidate with no chance of winning an immediate election, because it takes years, decades, to build new alternative parties, and how will they ever have a chance if people never vote for them?

This hypocrisy exhibited by the Democrats in the U.S. is something Jon Stewart and AOC touched on in their postmortem chat together. (It’s worth a watch.) Stewart spoke about being struck by the “decorum” the Democrats clung to when Trump won, despite their earlier “apocalyptic messaging” about him being a fascist, which would make people think, was all that just marketing? Surely there must be some middle ground between storming the Capitol and “Would you like Oolong?” AOC chose to sat out Trump’s inauguration. Unlike the former U.S. presidents who seemed to be trying to give off the vibe that they were being forced to play nice by virtue of being former office holders, but hey, look, they aren’t taking this all that seriously—which, I think, might have the effect of suggesting to the rest of us that we shouldn’t, also, take this all that seriously, that the only recourse is to inhabit a resigned but jovial, winking cynicism. However, Stewart makes the point that in the face of a wrecking ball like Trump, this preservation of decorum just looks like submission. As they put it, this is what valuing order over valuing justice looks like.

Everyone in the world is growing more and more cynical about how power works, how the system is rigged so there is often no recourse to equality or justice, and as such, the clear hypocrisies of those who purport to be the good ones are a useful thing for bad actors to exploit. Trump at least, some might say, doesn’t pretend to be virtuous. AOC, herself a Democrat, seems clear-eyed about her own party’s failings in this regard (less so in Gaza, I think, to the extent that I’ve glimpsed on Instagram): how they also take big money but think that money only corrupts Republicans, how members of Congress engage in insider trading despite clear conflicts of interests. She takes pride in the fact that she doesn’t accept big money, that the average campaign donation she receives is USD21. She is under no pressure to meet with lobbyists, she states categorically, because everyday Americans support her.

Anyway, opportunistic ambitious posturing or not, all this made me think: more and more, it’s worth a leader, or aspiring leader, being very clear what principles they stand for, even if those principles are likely to alienate a significant group of people—rather than trying to sit well with as many groups of people as possible in the name of being more unifying by identifying with the lowest common denominator of values, to be as inoffensive to anyone as possible. In these times, when the world is so fragmented by different views of reality, it is perhaps by being particular about your affinities that you garner more supporters? Because that makes it easier for people to find you? You’re less interchangeable?

In an Insta live AOC did after Trump won, she offered something I found hopeful and actionable, and applicable to so many issues in this current moment when the world is on fire. To boost morale, she emphasised the importance of not giving up hope for a better world, of continuously asserting what we believe in, so that those who need it most don’t feel alone:

“Sometimes, what we are able to do is very limited. But even at times when our hands are tied, one of the most enormously powerful things we can do is keep the light on, keep the candle on. […]

It’s important that we continue to signal to one another what we believe, because if we get quiet, if we feel like we’re just going to sit back, then everyone around us is going to think that everyone has given up.”

No manner what kind of person you are, whether you’re more comfortable with a brasher or quieter approach, whether you’re an activist or a writer or not even any kind of public-facing person, signalling is doable in so many little ways—particularly on Gaza, which has become a litmus test for one’s basic humanity.

Yell or whisper, keep the light on 🕯️

E.

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I’ve been reading more books this year compared to previous years, and more intentionally—I guess in the spirit of wanting to learn something from them, in form and subject, to better build my thinking and imagining in hopes that it will all enter the metaphorical blender of my mind and churn out something interesting. I’m still skimming off the top of my bottomless pit of queued books, which, right now, tends to feature the books that have long been talked about but that I’ve never managed to get to, and I’m looking forward to when I start exploring more obscure and overlooked terrain.

How I read these days: sitting at my home desk or at a cafe table outside, with just a mechanical pencil—0.7 2B lead tip preferable, which feels like the right amount of sootiness for me, even if it sometimes leaves imprints on the opposite page—in hand for annotating. Occasionally, when I’m feeling tired and just want to lean against something, I’ll go curl up on a couch or in bed and just read without any pencilling at all, which is by far the cosier way to read and I definitely find myself to be more present on the page, more in the flow of the story. But then I’ll feel compelled later to go back to my desk to skim the text again and mark it where it’s called my attention. This double duty takes time, obviously, when there’s already so little time in the day, so whenever I can I opt to sit myself down straight-backed somewhere at a table. In this way, reading these days feels like doing homework, which I mean mostly in a good way: I love homework when I’m setting the homework myself! But I do also miss just giving myself over to a well-spun tale, the way I did when I was a much younger reader.

Back then, I read everywhere: in moving cars, at the dinner table, while tailing my mum in shopping malls. Unlike other kids who had, maybe, their video games confiscated, my mum had my books confiscated—usually when my school exams were coming around—which led to, I remember, some very frustrating moments for both of us when she forgot where she hid them, because she’d had to get more inventive as I got better at finding them, in varying arrangements, in her closet, obscured by her hanging clothes. In retrospect, of course, I recognise this as funny, endearing even. I mean, my mum thought I had a reading problem 😂

But, I suspect, because of the sheer amount of information I take in daily from reading, watching, or listening, I forget and overlook plenty of things, or I can’t immediately call something to mind when I need it—though, funnily, what I do selectively remember I seem to remember very intensely. So that’s why I document—try, anyway—well, pretty much everything, and started annotating the books I’ve read, because it’s happened before that I absolutely loved a book or a movie, could go on about how it made me feel and the general thrust of it, but somehow couldn’t tell you how it ended. Also, books help me think, and I don’t want to always have to re-read a book again to know where to look for a thought that felt generative, and that I knew I wanted to explore further. I want to be able to flip through the pages and have something jolt my mind.

Recently, I came across Brandon Taylor’s Substack note on this very subject. I found much to agree with in the responses, especially one by Emily Crossen:

I underline when moved to underline. I try not to overthink it; I want my subconscious involved. Sometimes, later, I see what I underlined and don’t know why but it’s interesting to try to reconstruct.

I had wanted to figure out a better ‘system’ to my haphazard annotating. But then I remember that, though I get immense satisfaction from it, the act of categorising and ‘filing’ things away for rediscovery—we already need to do enough admin in our personal lives!—really bogs me down and takes up the time I could spend on more productive things, like actually writing. I don’t need more tyranny of bureaucracy, no matter how self-imposed.

So, here’s the very simple way I’ve been annotating:

• For books, I use only a pencil, because it makes me feel more free: I try not to erase too much, even if it’s mainly brain vomit that comes out—but the possibility is there.

• Mainly, I underline: for all sorts of reasons, positive or negative, and I don’t distinguish between them. Maybe I like, or dislike, how a particular sentiment is expressed or just how a line is written, or I stumble on a word I don’t know or something I want to learn more about or a description that perfectly encapsulates someone I know. Sometimes I use a ruler to underline, but I’ve learnt to embrace the tremulous squigliness of my lines.

• Sometimes, I find myself underlining too many sentences—some books are that good or speak to me that much! Then I try to just draw a vertical line in the margins to mark out those sentences or paragraphs instead.

• Occasionally, I’ll write notes in the margins—sometimes it’s really just “Haha!”—though I try not to interrupt my reading too much. I tell myself that the underlines will jog the memory of my thoughts, but I’m probably overestimating myself here. I’ve definitely come across old books and wondered why something was marked 😅

• I’ll asterisk the parts where an idea stood out to me and I think it’s something I’ll want to come back to in the future—usually because it touches on a theme I’ve long been occupied with and want to expand on in my own work.

• I use triangles for sentiments or arguments in the book that seem like the book’s main building blocks.

• I use ‘Q’ with a circle around it for quotes I may want to use in the future.

• I use ‘R’ with a circle around it for things I want to look up.

• In addition, I put a coloured round sticker on the pages I find the most relevant and important, so I can quickly flip back to them.

• Sometimes, for books I particularly loved, I’ll take photos of the pages with markings on them and upload them onto a cloud drive for when I don’t have the book with me—say when I’m in Berlin, where I nicked a few shelves from D., and the rest of my books are in KL—and I think I might want to refer to it soon or write about it.

• Right now I’m giving Zotero, software that can also be used online, a trial run. It helps you keep track of your references so you can better cite them after, should you ever need to. It also lets you pull from the web with a handy browser plugin. I’m still trying to decide whether it’s worthwhile to subscribe to, as I would likely need to subscribe in perpetuity once I get dependent on it. Up till now, I’ve just been dumping everything into my iPhone’s Notes app, and I have a feeling that I’ll end up staying with it. I mean, it’s impossible to file everything properly, isn’t it? Perhaps the messiness can be freeing.

And that’s it, really. How do you read books?

Readings, etc.

# The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan—a good read that makes an important point: though tourism can seem like a frivolous activity, its economics are anything but, and it should be reported on and written about with the same gravitas as other industries, because it is no less rapacious. This booked provoked many thoughts on a theme I’ve been thinking about. A separate letter to follow.

# I enjoyed Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, as I had expected to—though I will say that its events unfolded predictably, if you’re already familiar with Rooney’s themes (which, by the way, I am all for). The point where it collapsed a little for me, felt almost farcical, was the part near the end where Peter Koubek’s two loves meet: not so much in terms of plot, but in terms of the execution of it—peals of laughter, eyes shining, Peter staring helplessly with happy confusion. In an earlier letter, I mentioned how much I enjoyed the short story excerpt that had been printed in The New Yorker before the book’s dissemination, about the connection that was beginning to bloom between Ivan, a twenty-something chess genius (Peter’s baby brother), and Margaret, a woman in her mid-thirties working at the arts club where he dispensed, easily, with a game. But actually, given more air in the book, this relationship felt less interesting to me in its depiction. In the tangle of relationships, the one I ultimately felt most interested in was the one between the two brothers, who have found it difficult to be close to each other in their adult lives, in part because of their clashing worldviews.

After reading this book, and thinking back on all of Rooney’s previous books, I texted a friend saying, “She seems very optimistic about what love, in whatever form, however imperfect, can do to people. It made me think she must have a great love in her life and I googled and I was right haha”:

She credits her husband, John, with making her writing possible, and not just by bringing her cups of tea and emptying the bins. “Having had this experience of falling in love when I was very young, with somebody who completely transformed my life, and transforms it every day, has allowed me to write stories about people whose lives are transformed by love,” she says. “Without that, I don’t think my work would be recognisable. Just his presence in my life made it possible for me to write everything that I’ve written.”

In this vein, here’s a thought-provoking take by Andrea Long Chu:

Over and over, Rooney’s characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status, and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism — but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product, one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence, and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover’s theory of Marxism.

# Watched the Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil of Trial, and it’s hard not to feel a sense that we are repeating history. The NYT’s review compares the lessons Hitler taught history in his desire to “make Germany great again” to what a Donald Trump presidency that wants to “make American great again” might set off—how no one took seriously Hitler’s proclamations, irrefutable verbally and in writing, and how one should be careful to take Donald Trump seriously despite everything that tells you, surely, you need not. But, perhaps because I am not an American, I found more echoes—if not necessarily parallels—in what Netanyahu’s administration is doing to Palestinians today. Worth watching if you didn’t grow up learning this history (in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, WWII was characterised more by the Japanese Occupation), and I liked how the narrative was framed with a foreign correspondent’s reporting and the Nuremberg trials, though I’m not sure about the character re-enactments, which felt too dramatic and repetitive.

Also read: Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli, Miranda July’s All Fours, Zen Cho’s The Friend-zone Experiment.

Joy is not a crumb

The always satisfying mala ramen at Towzen, a vegan Japanese restaurant in Kuala Lumpur—the first farflung outpost of the associated Kyoto establishment, founded twenty years ago 💚

And I leave you with

Some of the permanent residents of a community garden in my city, which was turned into a lively makeshift bar on a day I visited.

From KL,
E.

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What kinds of landscapes do we find aesthetically pleasing? I’ve often found myself captivated by more austere vistas: they seem more suggestive of otherworldly majesty. On one extreme, perhaps an arid desert; but even among verdant landscapes, such as the limestone karsts and freshwater wetlands of the Van Long Nature Reserve in Ninh Binh, Vietnam, one can appreciate a certain severity—as we did in May. It was in the craggy rock faces, weathered by rain and wind into flinty pockmarked patterns, but also in the wide swathes of green, as yet unbroken by the golden palette of the paddy harvest, which would only come later in the year, and the vibrant pink of lotuses, which apparently bloom riotously from November to April but which we only saw occasional floating patches of. As well, the shallow lagoon created by the dam built along the Đáy River in the 1960, with its waters so still, looked at times like a blank mirror, compounding the sense of an enveloping aloofness, an imperviousness—especially when we came up to the dam’s walls on our bamboo sampan.

It was almost eerily quiet. Often, we heard only the sound of our boatmaster’s oars slicing through the water. Though the reserve is a habitat for various wildlife, we did not see many besides a couple of bird species, including the Asian openbill stork. We did not see the Delacour’s langur, one of the rarest primate species on earth and critically endangered, numbering fewer than three hundred worldwide in the wild—a fact that bestows on Van Long some of its external importance: as home to more than half of the langur’s global population today.

In comparison to the Tràng An Landscape Complex not far away, which we also traversed by boat, Van Long felt more “pristine”, and I am quite astonished at how it’s still possible to feel such enchantment when, in our day and age, so much of nature bears the weight of our human hand, when so much of it is not, in fact, “remote”, but skirts and survives our industrial everything complex. There’s a cement factory near the reserve: a reminder that the limestone hills we had come to see would have, had they not been protected, been blasted and mined for cement. Other hills in neighbouring areas have been destroyed: reportedly, they used to connect to those in the Van Long Natural Reserve as a contiguous range. Which made me think that the gritty grey-ish film that seemed to coat Ninh Binh was perhaps not, as I had thought, something to do with the quality of light attending cloudy skies, but dust itself.

In an essay published in Granta’s Second Nature issue, Callum Roberts writes about “shifting baseline syndrome”, which he describes as “intergenerational changes in how we perceive our world”:

Each generation sets its mental benchmark of normality by how the world looked when first encountered, often in youth, and sees change relative to this. Younger generations accept as normal a world that seems tainted and degraded to oder people.

At first, this makes me feel blue and ineffectual. But it also makes me think of the resilience of nature, how much it still gives and thrives wherever it is allowed to remain, even when we’ve made so much of it disappear. That’s what Roberts describes as the “protective influence” of our collective baseline delusion, which may keep us from the depths of psychological despair but may also be “suppressing perceptions of harm and lowering ambition to reverse human impacts”. However, he also writes that this delusion cannot protect us from our flagrant recklessness today, which has reached such a tipping point as to soon bring about historic, outsized consequences we are ill-equipped to deal with—if we change nothing about how we live.

Whatever’s left, it’s always worth protecting.

Readings, etc.

1./ Recently finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke and I love it. Clarke’s doorstopper of a—debut?!—novel, which apparently took ten years to write, is funny and loopy and dark and it’s been described as fantasy (featuring “practical” vs. “theoretical” gentleman magicians in the nineteenth century) slash historical fiction slash comedy of manners à la Jane Austen, which is very apt. These magicians are not cut from the same cloth as Gandalf and Dumbledore; they’re really of a more bumbling variety and I laughed out loud at various times to repeat their foibles to W.C. The book is sprawling and immersive and I feel like I’ve just been to another world and back—I think the last time I felt like this was after reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I’m still trying to figure out what I think about how the myriad events culminated in the ending, and I think I’ll re-read at least the last volume of the book, if not the whole thing (this is definitely the kind of book that rewards repeat readings), to see what new discoveries I’ll chance upon—I’m sure to find some!—which may yet bring into sharper relief parts of the book’s tapestry for me. There are a lot of footnotes and I read every one; perhaps not every one of them was absolutely necessary…? But it’s such an ambitious and capacious book, a total pleasure to read, I’ll overlook anything!

2./ In nonfiction: I read Alicia Kennedy’s No Meat Required. It’s a slim volume that packs a lot—charting the cultural making of plant-based cooking in the U.S., built on both global and local influences, and highlighting its punk and feminist roots, including among black and indigenous communities. In doing so, she pushes back against how plant-based eating is popularly perceived today: as the province of the white and privileged. Kennedy, a vegetarian food writer based in Puerto Rico, argues for an unapologetic return to its roots of resistance—without losing sight of considerations of “culture, gastronomy, and taste” (yes!)—because a lot is wrong with this world and just developing more alternative or cultivated meat, though that can help us eat more sustainably and ethically, may not solve other injustices of the food system—such as the concentration of power by planet-guzzling corporations wielded against small farmers and local communities. She elucidates particularly well our cultural hang-ups about meat vs. veggies; she also shares anecdotes from her own life and doesn’t shy away from sharing the emotionally conflicting moments of her experience. In chronicling the countercultural history of vegetarianism and veganism, Kennedy also touches on the diversity of its associations, both positive (as resistance to unbridled capitalism) and negative (as perceived cultural “inauthenticity” or as questionable emphasis on “purity” in wellness marketing parlance). Which made me wonder, tangentially and more generally, if we are too often swayed—for or against something—by what a thing symbolises, the meanings we make of it (which are multiple and changeable), rather than the thing itself? In the case of meat, the “thing” itself is the animal: a living, heaving, sentient being—and our decided consumption, or not, of it must surely take this into account? Anyway, whether you eat animals or whatever shade of “plant-based” you are (it’s a term that has become amorphous in today’s marketing landscape), this book is a timely, thought-provoking read. You may agree or disagree with some things and it’ll help you clarify your own approach to eating with more awareness in these troubled times. Kennedy also writes a capacious newsletter about food and writing that I always look forward to reading.

3./ Caught Kuah Jen Han, a comedian friend, at his show, Noted with Thanks, last month—and it was quite the riot! He’s an engaging storyteller, moving seamlessly from one self-effacing, and hilariously exaggerated, personal anecdote to the next, all strung along to build a unified narrative. The last show of his I watched, Electric Butterflies, pre-pandemic, was about his encounters in Uzbekistan, including some will-it-happen, will-it-not intrigue with an Uzbekistani model. In Noted with Thanks, he spins a yarn about his struggles as a comedian during the pandemic, when live shows took a complete leave of absence, and he had to take on the first salaried job of his life as a creative director at an advertising agency at the tender middle age of thirty-four. The title of the show references the stilted email sign-off of corporate jargon, which he learned to parse and spout back. I like that his routines tend to eschew the usual cultural talking points, using the specificities of his own life—his relatable fumblings in becoming (whether with bits of fiction scattered in, is your guess)—to tell nevertheless universal stories.

Joy is not a crumb

Tucking into Hanoi’s street food, butts plonked onto those ubiquitous little red plastic chairs. This was at Tâm Khởi, where the plants-only bún riêu is red rice noodles in a hot broth made of tomatoes and jicama, served with pieces of firmly-textured beancurd wrapped in seaweed, beansprouts, and some other things I don’t remember now, topped with a good chunk of dill. I had not often associated dill with Asian cooking. They go so well together!

And I leave you with

A pair of village kids herding their buffaloes in Sapa, Vietnam.

From back in KL,
E.

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A glimpse of Tràng An

Some ninety kilometres south of Hanoi: Ninh Binh, a network of limestone karst mountains and caves covered in sultry rainforest—a deep green when seen up close, but leeched of colour when seen from a greater distance, especially on the overcast days we were there, the hazy grey veil broken just once by torrential rain. On the travel internet, Ninh Binh is often touted as the less crowded alternative to Halong Bay. But instead of rising from the sea, the limestone peaks emerge majestically from rivers, lagoons, green paddy fields (which won’t turn gold till the harvest season later in the year), spotted with serene old temples and pagodas. Or maybe they were just serene because we went exploring in the evening on creaky bicycles borrowed from our guesthouse, dodging day trippers from Hanoi. We took these photos while we were out on a rowboat, weaving in and around the Tràng An Landscape Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along the Sao Khe River. We were one of the last boats—just one of a rickety handful—pushing off shore that evening, which left us better able to appreciate the mystique of the landscape, its outlines softened by the coming dusk ✨

New letter:
Notes on Hanoi

A fragment:

Walking along Trang Thi street close to midnight, we segued into two long lines of teenagers flanking the street, hanging out on their parked motorcycles. People here seem to learn to ride motorcycles young, which gives them an element of freedom in a busy city, and I imagine their bikes serve as economical perches if they can’t yet afford to hang out too often in cafes and restaurants. I saw them sneaking glances at each other from across the street—Oh, that one’s cute, will they approach? An ice-cream shop nearby carried on a brisk business and a boy, bespectacled and dressed in a white t-shirt and shorts, a subtle swagger animating his shoulders, collected two ice creams and ambled across the road to a girl, also simply dressed, waiting with her friend on a bike. I turned to W.C., couldn’t help but smile. It all felt like something of a school dance!

The rest of the letter here.

From the archive:
From an old city by the sea #3

An excerpt:

The sea salt has curled our hair in places, misted our skin. We wear our straw hats slant across our faces and lie on our backs to dry off on towels spread across a concrete slab, paved between craggy rocks. We can hear the waves slapping against the shore, bright green Aleppo pines swaying overhead—and every so often, the breeze sends a rustling through the leaves, casting dancing shadows on our faces, shaking spiky brown filaments and pinecones down on us. Earlier, I had seen ants scurrying in their midst, and try to keep a childhood memory from intruding: sudden stabbing pains deep inside my ear, my parents driving me to the nearest clinic as I whimper in the backseat, the doctor tipping in an oily solution to wash out a pinprick of a creature that didn’t look like it could possibly have caused so much trouble.

Read the rest here.

Readings, etc.

1./ Listened to The List by Yomi Adegoke, a novel inspired by the real-life events of the “Shitty Media Men” list that leaked in 2018. I enjoyed it. The character studies and the surprises they still offer despite the topical proximity of the underlying subject to the current zeitgeist, though I felt that the material had perhaps been stretched too thin, drawn out too much in parts. At least, that was my experience listening to it; would I have felt differently if I’d read it instead, because I read so much faster? Also, I couldn’t help imagining the possibilities of other endings with this book, which could have been more unsettling, more interrogating. What if there were less certainty about whether Ola’s fiancee had indeed done what he was accused of in the list? What if there were just no way of proving, debunking, or knowing? How would she—or we, caught in the same situation—have chosen to go on? Would she have trusted the man she taught Michael was, or would the accusation, the mere fact of its existence, have made that completely impossible?

2./ I finally finished George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a short-story writing manual based on the work of the Russian masters—but also a life manual, honestly. I’ve been taking my time through it, trying to absorb its lessons more deeply. Funnily, while experimenting with changing points of view and adopting that of an inanimate object in a short piece I did as a writing exercise recently, I realised I’d adopted some of their influences: resulting in a pinch of fairytale-like whimsy with which I surprised myself. I want to add: if you’re looking for a short story to read: among the ones Saunders picked as teaching material for the book, “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol is my favourite 👀 Here’s an excerpt:

3./ I movie I found entertaining, though it got mixed press reviews: Wicked Little Letters, based on a true provincial scandal from the 1920s that went national, wherein a small English town is beset by the anonymous sending of hilariously vulgar letters to the townsfolk. First, the upstanding “spinster” of the community Edith Swan (played delightfully, as always, by Olivia Colman) gets whiplashed, then others of her conservative seaside community too. The insults run along the lines of “you foxy-arse old fucking mare”, “you great big fucking onion!”—which, honestly, we would consider twee compared to our day’s online trolling 😆 Edith points the finger at her neighbour, the potty-mouthed single mother Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley, who was the complete opposite in Women Talking), whose single-mother-ness and Irish-ness compounds her culpability in the townsfolk’s eyes. The film is a charming, eccentric little caper, with moments of chilling darkness and real emotion. Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction!

Joy is not a crumb

This, with a strong piccolo—or is it cortado? I honestly am not sure of the exact difference and should find out; I just know what I like, though different cafes seem to vary in how they make them anyway! But that’s besides the point here, which is: the bread. I’ve hardly ever liked rye bread but I love this rugbrød from a cafe in KL, glistening with olive oil, which might just pave the way to more liking of rye bread? I always marvel a little when that happens: when one iteration you like of a thing opens you up to try other iterations of the thing. I’ve learnt over and over that it’s always worth trying another take on something you didn’t like before, even when I forget this and have to learn it again 💚

From back in KL,
E.

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1./ That’s the gurgling of eighty or so water pumps in the courtyard of an old apartment building in the city’s French Quarter, where we stayed—with dense tangles of pipes snaking up the building, some five storeys high, to their respective apartments. The entrance gate is closed at midnight, and if you come back after you have to wake the guard—a wiry, crotchety uncle usually dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, who sleeps on a thin mattress lining a rigged wooden platform just inside the entrance gate—to be let in, though he seemed never to be expecting us despite the supposed agreement in place 😆 It seemed to be one of three Airbnbs in the building, from what I could make out from the arrow signs. It did make me think that, wherever affordable, I should cut back more on whole-apartment holiday rentals to refrain from taking up affordable permanent housing for locals, charming and “authentic”-feeling though this place was…

2./ The first time we left our apartment, we turned off our street and soon came upon the century-old Dien Hong park, bounded by busy roads. It was buzzing, so festive. People were playing badminton and cầu mây (we call it sepak takraw in Malaysia), sitting on mini plastic stools to chat over a snack, while pet dogs stared hungrily or took a leak. There’s a beautiful, very old, stone fountain originally built by the French (with just the right amount of patina, as W.C., an artist, would say) in the centre of the park: dragons weaving down slopes, toads spouting water—or they would be if the fountain hadn’t been left dry.

3./ Walking along Trang Thi street close to midnight, we segued into two long lines of teenagers flanking the street, hanging out on their parked motorcycles. People here seem to learn to ride motorcycles young, which gives them an element of freedom in a busy city, and I imagine their bikes serve as economical perches if they can’t yet afford to hang out too often in cafes and restaurants. I saw them sneaking glances at each other from across the street—Oh, that one’s cute, will they approach? An ice-cream shop nearby carried on a brisk business and a boy, bespectacled and dressed in a white t-shirt and shorts, a subtle swagger animating his shoulders, collected two ice creams and ambled across the road to a girl, also simply dressed, waiting with her friend on a bike. I turned to W.C., couldn’t help but smile. It all felt like something of a school dance!

4./ One of the things W.C. and I contend with while travelling, especially post-pandemic, is finding cafes that are open late but which remain in “cafe” mode rather than “bar” mode, so it’s bright enough that we can continue to read, write, draw after dinner. The accommodations we get don’t always have a desk, and even if they do, it’s nicer to be outside among the flow of people in a city. Our first night in Hanoi, before we had staked out a better spot, we went to a cafe-restaurant that was very dim to begin with, and then the power went out. A waitress opened the entrance door to allow the bright glow of the street lamp into the room, and at our illuminated corner table by the tall grilled window, W.C. and I continued to talk in the dark—probably about the act of travelling and its conceits and contradictions; having visited Bali recently, we have been talking about that quite a bit of late. When the lights didn’t come back on, the same waitress eventually brought us a fake candle, its “flame” dancing convincingly.

5./ Sitting in a restaurant in the Old Quarter northeast of Ho Hoan Kiem lake, looking out onto the street from our window perch, we saw two traffic policemen pull up three men who were huddled very cosily together on one motorbike. I couldn’t help but notice that the uniform of the traffic police in Hanoi is particularly pleasing: a light peachy tan, with masks in a matching colour even—which makes me think about how the tiniest detail of beauty can matter, add to the whole of something. (Many people still wore masks on the streets but I think it was more to protect themselves from air pollution than Covid?) The three men looked sheepish, like naughty schoolboys, as they dismounted the bike. The driver had to let one of the policemen commandeer it, before he climbed on obediently behind him. They sped off, leaving his two friends hanging back uncertainly. We continued to eat our meal, watching them eventually settle onto the stoop of a shopfront to wait.

6./ I very much liked the area we stayed in, some fifteen minutes walk southeast of Ho Hoan Kiem lake. It felt like a predominantly local neighbourhood, and carried a noticeably different vibe from the lake’s immediate vicinity, plied by trishaws who try to solicit you for a ride around town. Still, Hanoi in general didn’t feel too crowded by tourism and was very pleasant to visit. Many Vietnamese here, even those who work regularly with tourists, didn’t speak much English. It was unlike in the outskirts such as Ninh Binh or Sapa, where more people spoke English—perhaps because tourism is a more concentrated source of livelihood there in comparison to the city, where one can ply a greater variation of trades?—and when they didn’t, they resorted reflexively to Google speech translation. It surprised us how common that was, even among older people. They just whipped out their phones and started talking into it. Some things got lost in translation, of course, leading to some funny moments. Once I texted our accommodation ahead of time asking them if they could do something for us (I don’t remember what), and they replied, in English: “oh that’s too simple”.

7./ Since so many women here, too, ride bikes—as drivers and passengers, the humble helmet has been given a twist to better accommodate their ponytails and high buns, with an upside-down “U” carved out of its rear centre. Speaking of head gear, I also saw a few green pith-style helmets around town—if I remember correctly, on the heads of the rickshaw cyclists hailing tourists—which made me think of a couple of heritage hotels back in Malaysia and Singapore dating from the colonial era, where the security and concierge staff sport them to augment, I guess, the bygone vibes. Then, in Ninh Binh and Sapa, we saw some farmers wear them to stave off the sun’s blinding heat, which made me question my hitherto one-dimensional association of the hats as a colonial symbol…

8./ I liked walking about during the lunch hours and seeing working people in their glowing white shirts and black bottoms, hunkered over their low tables and little plastic chairs along the sidewalks. Perhaps it’s because I’m a freelancer and have no standard “lunch hours” to speak of, but I was also struck by their collective aesthetic. The uniformity of their work clothes made them look like students, or members of a political party…

9./ The last time I was in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh, I noticed that some things were smaller than usual: the plastic chairs spilling outside cafes on sidewalks, the toilet rolls—almost child-sized? Before this trip I wondered if I had simply imagined it, but I am happy to report: they are, in fact, smaller! The toilet rolls here are also sometimes missing that vertical hollow cardboard core, which makes unspooling a roll a little more difficult!

10./ Walking in downtown Hanoi is actually rather enjoyable, and less stressful than one might imagine, despite the challenges one faces in crossing the roads. We were lucky enough to have just missed early May’s heatwave; the buildings hanging over narrower streets in the central parts of town provide sufficient shade for us to walk without getting too flustered, and many streets have sidewalks. When they didn’t, the traffic at least moved slowly enough so that we could sidestep the cars and buses and motorcycles, even if that meant often having to hedge and look over our shoulders.

11./ Before coming to Hanoi, I read a very, very old Lonely Planet guidebook I had to Vietnam, just to know roughly which cities and regions I wanted to visit. Then I googled for its attractions and cafes and restaurants, which of course tends to bring up the same spots. Every list is derivative of other lists. I also looked up the hashtag #hanoi on Instagram to see what it would turn up, to find out what “the people” are doing, if there might be something that is still under the radar. In the end, I found this pottery shop-slash-cafe, a very calming space even though it faces a wide multi-lane road, and even though it was disproportionately populated by serious young influencers, local and foreign, making mini photoshoots and TikTok reels. I guess that’s what you get these days with hashtags. All of which made me think: perhaps, now, seeing the same recurring recommendations everywhere might push one to just exercise one’s own instincts? Walk around, see a place you like, check it out; and maybe you’ll have the satisfaction of having “discovered” for yourself something good?

12./ Looking at Booking.com reviews can be interesting for what it reveals about other people’s expectations and what they’re used to in their own country. On one hotel entry, people complained that the place was “dodgy” because it was down a narrow alley (the nondescript, not riotously snug kind), that it was a “scam” because the photos were not representative (true, it looked like a grand hotel rather than the rather more humble establishment it was, due to some sleight-of-hand wide-angle camerawork). We had booked this place for one night after returning from Ninh Binh, only belatedly read the reviews with some concern, and arrived in pouring rain, luckily, to realise it was neither dodgy nor a scam.

13./ Once, sitting inside Blackbird Coffee (the branch on Phố Đặng Dung) and looking out its large window overlooking the lively street, I saw a young woman sitting on the bench outside with her fringe rolled into a pink curler on her forehead. I thought it looked charming, though I suppose it could also hint at some sort of performed insouciance, in this day and age? We saw two other young women sporting the same during our week in Hanoi…

14./ Another night, past midnight, we came across a boy smashing something with a racquet against the wall of a building on a sidewalk. At first, we thought he was playing squash, and wondered what makes people here inhabit their city so constructively, despite the traffic, the way we Malaysians don’t quite do back in KL. Earlier that day, we had also seen a group of men drag a portable badminton net out onto the sidewalk to play on their lunch break. How much of this has to do with the way our city is designed, how much of it with ourselves? When we drew closer to the boy, we realised he wasn’t playing squash. He was actually hitting a shuttlecock 🤔—really, really hard—and filming a reel.

15./ For a place to break what was effectively our Airbnb’s midnight curfew, we found Xofa Cafe, which is open twenty-four hours, not far from the famous “train street”. It’s a bright, spacious place with big wooden tables, populated by many Vietnamese students banging over their laptops and workbooks while making jokes in between, seemingly burning the midnight oil. Remembering my younger self, I felt a lot of goodwill towards them, silently cheered them on.

Till next time, Hanoi ❤️
E.

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Since I last wrote: a day out at a waterfall in Pahang, Malaysia, for a friend’s birthday. Off a trunk road, past a couple of construction sites and eco-retreats, a clearing where you pay the landlord a fee to park your car. Then, a short hike through the jungle and a climb down a slope with thick tree roots for rungs, to get to a ice-cold pool fed by a small but lusty waterfall. It looks placid, this not-untouched wilderness, but on googling pre-trip I read that people have died here: from unexpectedly strong undercurrents, fallen trees.

You can see from these idyllic photos, our time passed without incident. We swam, sunbathed, lunched, took too many pictures (I haven’t used a camera that isn’t my phone in a while). We had the whole place to ourselves until a couple arrived, any planned romantic plans they had scuttled for we were much greater in number. Our gentle canine companion added a touch of comedy: she stopped mere steps from where they were reclining together, relieved herself.

New letter:
Surprising transmissions

It’s about the unexpected ways in which pathogens have spread, directly or indirectly, to humans: for example, some transmission pathways were unlocked by timely social and political factors you may not have thought would play a role.

I had been meaning to write a letter riffing off this story I wrote for South China Morning Post’s print magazine last year—about the increased risk of emerging zoonoses, through a historical lens: the deadly Nipah virus that broke out in a pig-farming village in Malaysia in the 1990s, owing to our intensification of animal agriculture. I found out so many things I didn’t know in the writing of the story, which has helped me better appreciate how human, animal, and planetary health are intimately intertwined—and the multitude of connections I keep discovering has recalibrated the lens through which I see a lot of things.

With new developments on the H5N1 virus (it has spread for the first time from mammals—dairy cows—to humans), I finally got down to finishing this letter, which has been languishing half-done in drafts for a long time. Apparently, timeliness does give me the push I need 😅

Read the rest here.

From the archive:
Peering around riverbends

Last year, I wrote an essay for The Mekong Review about rivers, connecting the dots between the bodies of water I’ve come to throughout my life.

An excerpt:

When I was a child, the river was a place of mystery and wonder—I saw my first fireflies there—and sometimes, of adventure laced with danger. I spent much of my childhood in Kota Tinggi, a town in the southern Malaysian state of Johor, where my maternal grandparents lived. A river traverses through it, and floods are not an uncommon occurrence despite its name, which literally translates to ‘high town’. One year, amid a deluge, my grandmother was marooned on the third floor of the building where she lived and had to wait for the fire department to rescue her. I know this from the newspaper cutting she kept, which featured a photograph of her perched on the shoulders of her bandana-wearing saviour.

More recently, when it flooded again, the state’s wildlife department warned residents to be on guard for crocodiles. They might have strayed out of the rivers—perhaps to seek out the carcasses of drowned animals—and into monsoon drains, which, even in the absence of floods, could turn into little rivers of their own in stormy weather. I remember once, when I was a child—still small enough to clamber down into these drains to catch tadpoles with my bare hands—and it was pouring, my mother asked me to wait by a corner shop while she went to get the car. When she came back, she couldn’t find me and panicked, imagining that I had fallen into the drain and been carried away by the gushing water. Later, she found me at the other end of the shoplot, clasping the hand of an elderly uncle who had taken it upon himself to watch over me until she returned.

Read the rest here.

Readings, etc.

1./ I am trying to make rituals of things, such as reading outside in the shade somewhere, sipping coffee—or chilled coconut water as the days grew warmer in March/April!—while spending time with the dogs. Here’s “Ducky”, waiting for ruffles and pats as I finish Rachel Heng’s second novel, The Great Reclamation, which I went through very quickly. I had read her debut novel, Suicide Club, but this one resonated much more with me. It’s a really well-crafted portrait of a fishing village changed forever by the determined march of development—land reclamation and the construction of HDB flats—in a newly independent nation just coming into its own, with a lot to prove. (It’s an ongoing struggle in these parts: fishermen in Penang, Malaysia, are still protesting the building of new artificial islands, for one.) The novel is charted along a historical timeline I’m familiar with, having researched the history of Malaya for a series of TV documentaries years ago, and I think Heng has put in just enough here as scaffolding, without overwhelming. She skillfully weaves in the history of Lee Kuan Yew’s bid for power and for Singapore’s self-determination from the British, which, in a post-WWII world dogged by international pressure to decolonise as well as Cold War tensions, led him, critics say, to crack down ruthlessly on his political rivals—painted as “communists”—to clear the way for his ascent. The book comprehensively presents multiple perspectives in granular detail about Singapore’s trajectory towards modernisation and westernisation through its characters, though it felt at times like their motivations perhaps tracked too neatly. Actually, the book feels like a grand fable to me: the somewhat ominous opening sets up how it’ll end so there is a sense of the inevitable (though not predictable) in its narrative arc.

2./ I’ve been interested in how the ideas behind veganism and animal farming are engaged with in literary works—in the sense that they are distinct from nonfiction primarily intended to impart information or persuade—and recently picked up J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello. The first book takes its title from two lectures in fictional form Coetzee (most celebrated for his writing on the sins of apartheid South Africa) gave at Princeton in 1997, delivered by a character he made up, Elizabeth Costello—also, like Coetzee, an esteemed writer. The lectures are published in full and form the crux of this book, followed by reflections from four scholars of various disciplines, including the animal rights activist Peter Singer. The second book, Elizabeth Costello, is a portrait of the character’s life, told in a series of lectures about storytelling and human-animal relationships, which includes the two lectures Coetzee gave at Princeton. Coetzee is vegetarian and Elizabeth Costello has been said to be his fictional stand-in, but it’s not that simple. Some might say it’s an evasive way of expounding one’s ideas without taking responsibility for it; I think it could be a vehicle to explore one’s ideas more deeply from different points of view. When Coetzee has written about our exploitation of animals in his fiction or literary essays, he often comes across as more ambivalent. Apparently, when he took questions from the audience at Princeton, he answered by prefacing, “I think what Elizabeth Costello would say is that…” When writing this op-ed, he was more straightforward.

3./ I’ve finished How to Hunger, a short story collection by Singaporean writer Grace Chia. It explores themes of longing and belonging through the many permutations that cross-cultural friendships, relationships, dalliances emotional/sexual, and rivalries—in one story: cousins, one who stayed and one who left, competing to prove who is more Singaporean 😅—can take, in cosmopolitan Singapore and abroad. I like that it refutes our often too facile ideas of what belonging to a place means, as if it were just about what you eat or how impervious your stomach is. It reminds us that there are multiple variations of belonging, depending on one’s class, race, religion, etc. I found her through Junot Diaz’s newsletter, and, without being presumptuous, I think I can see why he likes the book? There’s a similar energy to her writing, a similar spiky vulnerability to her characters. They feel alive, shot through with vigour, though perhaps some of them edge a little toward caricature—or is it that some of them have too-similar sounding voices on the page? I’m not sure. But I like how they never see themselves as without agency, including the women with men too myopic to appreciate them, and how their feelings and actions, like our own, don’t always cohere.

4./ Feeling listless one day, I started watching the TV adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and I’ve now flitted through all three seasons of it. I think, in trying to get into a more “fiction” mode of mind for a short story I’m working on, I was looking for inspiration in more obviously imagined stories. I haven’t read the source material, so I don’t know if the shortcomings I felt of the adaptation (the motivations of the characters and the conflicts between them didn’t always feel convincingly built) are its own, but still, I liked the atmosphere of the worlds it created—the dark academia of Oxford, the mythical Arctic—and wanted to immerse myself in it beyond the end of the series. I found it particularly compelling that, despite the story being written for children, good and evil are not binary forces but co-exist in the same person: specifically, both of Lyra’s parents, and their expedient-over-good treatment of her and other children. I was also drawn to the idea of a person’s soul being manifest as a separate being, an animal, so that if you’ve learnt that you need to suppress your heart to live in the world, it shows in the animal, in how you treat it. I didn’t go on to read the trilogy of books the series is based on, the TV series still too fresh in my mind. But I did pick up the second book in the follow-up Dust trilogy, The Secret Commonwealth, which begins roughly ten years after the conclusion of the original trilogy. I put on the audiobook (read by Michael Sheen) nights before bed and was transported.

5./ When I saw the trailer for One Day, the recent Netflix TV series, I wondered what the point of it was: a remake so soon (well, thirteen years after), replacing the white protagonist with a brown protagonist? Why not just make more new films by brown people telling their own brown people stories, or original stories by whomever already featuring diverse characters? But a friend said she liked it, so I gave it a shot. And actually, I think I prefer Em and Dex in this adaptation over the Anne Hathaway one (though I found Edinburgh’s wet moody ambience on the night they met in the film adaptation more memorable). I don’t remember now if Emma Morley in David Nicholls’ novel is as prickly, defensive, and sardonic as Ambika Mod plays her on TV, but I definitely found Mod’s Emma to be more convincing as a British uni student and wannabe writer still tripping over her growing pains, hiding her vulnerability under a veneer of superiority. I don’t have any solid empirical comparisons for this, only that I attended university in England at a time before social media’s chokehold on our daily lives and Mod’s Emma just feels right to me. Also: Snakebite, anyone? 😆

Joy is not a crumb

Goodnight hugs with Little Miss Marple. I love it when she stays still long enough to let me hug her 🩵

From KL,
E.

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This essay was first published in The Mekong Review’s August 2023 issue.

I had meant to sign up for five days, tops. Then I saw the map of the river. It covered the entire wall of the tour agency’s office in Lagunas, a village gateway for river journeys into the Peruvian Amazon. I had arrived during the rainy season in 2015 and the jungle was flooded. Five days paddling downstream in a dugout canoe would take me barely halfway up the wall.

My mind began to race ahead. I stared intently at the bright blue rivulet, followed its curves upwards to where it pooled into a lake, then dropped sharply off the edge of the wall. “What’s there?” I asked.

“Lago Pastococha,” the agent said, with a whispery reverence that made an impression on me. “It’s pure wilderness there.”

From what little he told me, I imagined big black caimans turning circles lazily around a lake, reoccupying an abandoned oil storage apparatus I later found blurry pictures of online—the way, in a climate-changed world, giant lizards started reoccupying corporate boardrooms in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. Perhaps that should have put me off, but instead, I found myself drawn even more to the part of the map I couldn’t see.

I’ve often come to forks like this while travelling. Do I stop where I had planned to arrive, or do I keep going? I’ve gone to places where I encountered few other tourists, which lacked conventional attractions, simply because I wanted to see for myself what was there. In a world where Google Maps is our main source of wayfinding, the seemingly unmapped places—I couldn’t find Pastococha on it, just the green expanse of the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve it lies within—intrigue me, especially if I draw in closer, delineate tighter boundaries for myself. The smaller the area I hone in on, the more I want to know every part of it, the more it feels possible to know every part of it. Maybe if I just go on a little bit further—around the next boulder on a jungle trail, or around the next bend of a river—I might find something I have never quite seen, in quite the same way, before.

I’ve found that rivers, particularly narrow tributaries, best encapsulate this sentiment. Sculling your way along a river’s curves, your vision is necessarily obscured, blinkered by its inherent topography. Then, at some point, you emerge into an expanse, of water or of land, and regain some clarity about your surroundings. Sometimes, you come into a stillness where you can feel the slightest movement of air around you, or you stumble upon a community in places that may initially seem inhospitable for human life. I have always loved this feeling, this surfacing as if on to a different plane.

Last October, I went on another extended river journey, this time along the Kinabatangan in Sabah—starting with a reporting trip in the wetlands around the river’s lower reaches. When night fell during my days out there, I would lie awake in the dark, in one of its eight villages, shrouded beneath a mosquito net after the solar power had reached the end of its ration, and run through what I had seen and heard along my journey.

While ambient sounds provided a soundtrack for my thoughts—in one village, it was the muezzin; in another, a neighbour partaking in a passionate karaoke session that seemed to swell the air above the open water—what kept coming back to me was the memory of entering the village of Pitas Laut, narrowing into a winding tributary under the hooded shelter of mangrove trees.

We could do so only because the water was “turned on”, as the villagers describe it in Malay, and even then we had to swap our boat for a slimmer one before we weaved between flanks of bakau kurap, an especially ubiquitous species of mangrove found here. In the rustle of the breeze, they seemed almost human to me—their roots like a dancer’s arched feet, their slim, spear-like seeds hanging from their branches like a woman’s earrings, waiting to fall off and grow new roots in the soil. From their tangled shadows we bumped up gently against a bank alongside a smattering of other moored boats, where marshy ground quickly gave way to a grassy plateau squeezed between river and sea, where this fishing community had built their wooden stilt homes.

One of my favourite stories about rivers is the story of Juliane Diller, who was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian Amazon in 1971—reportedly the deadliest lightning-strike disaster in aviation history—when she was seventeen. I first heard of her before I made my own Amazon journey, sitting around a table in Lima with a few women I had recently met, one of them a conservationist. Diller was the only child of two German zoologists working in the Peruvian Amazon, both of whom died in the crash. Miraculously, her fall had been cushioned by the Amazon’s foliage, and she sustained just minor injuries. “She had been taught by her parents to always follow the river, if she ever got lost, until she found a human settlement,” I remember the conservationist said. “That’s how she survived.” I listened to that story and was transfixed.

When I was a child, the river was a place of mystery and wonder—I saw my first fireflies there—and sometimes, of adventure laced with danger. I spent much of my childhood in Kota Tinggi, a town in the southern Malaysian state of Johor, where my maternal grandparents lived. A river traverses through it, and floods are not an uncommon occurrence despite its name, which literally translates to ‘high town’. One year, amid a deluge, my grandmother was marooned on the third floor of the building where she lived and had to wait for the fire department to rescue her. I know this from the newspaper cutting she kept, which featured a photograph of her perched on the shoulders of her bandana-wearing saviour.

More recently, when it flooded again, the state’s wildlife department warned residents to be on guard for crocodiles. They might have strayed out of the rivers—perhaps to seek out the carcasses of drowned animals—and into monsoon drains, which, even in the absence of floods, could turn into little rivers of their own in stormy weather. I remember once, when I was a child—still small enough to clamber down into these drains to catch tadpoles with my bare hands—and it was pouring, my mother asked me to wait by a corner shop while she went to get the car. When she came back, she couldn’t find me and panicked, imagining that I had fallen into the drain and been carried away by the gushing water. Later, she found me at the other end of the shoplot, clasping the hand of an elderly uncle who had taken it upon himself to watch over me until she returned.

In Kuala Lumpur, where we currently live, I don’t live near a river—at least not one that I can see. Perhaps I just haven’t always thought of them as rivers. In fact, two major rivers—Klang and Gombak—flow through the city and flush into each other at the foot of Masjid Jamek in the city’s core. But over the decades, the rivers have been engineered—straightened, deepened and widened—in what some say has been a misguided attempt to mitigate floods. The rivers, they say, now resemble big drains, concrete having replaced the mud and vegetation that could have better absorbed excess rainwater. And that’s how people have come to treat them, too: erecting buildings with their backs facing the rivers, illicitly dumping their garbage into them.

It wasn’t until I took up a project to walk the two rivers, to better understand their physical and social histories, that I began to see them differently. I walked inside the hulking hollows of their concrete canals just to find out how it felt to be inside them. When it rained and the tide rose, I watched, helpless, as the homeless abandoned their makeshift shelters in the shadows of the flyovers along the river. I followed the rivers to the outer reaches of the city, where they took on their natural features again around clusters of kampungs—and delighted, once, in bumping into a man in traditional dress walking his free-roaming geese. I will never forget that view of the city from the vicinity of Kampung Puah, off the trunk road of Jalan Gombak: the river flanked by grassy green banks so dense they call to mind that Triassic jungle of Ballardian fantasy, tapering finally into a point on the horizon capped by the Petronas Twin Towers.

After my reporting trip around the lower reaches of the Kinabatangan River last year, I headed upstream to stay the night at the Danau Girang Field Centre. I was curious about what life was like on a scientific research station in the wild and what kind of work was being done there. I arrived sometime after lunch and was ushered to the main building, where I found foreign student conservationists on break—some watching Harry Potter on a projector in the canteen, while others planned the details for their next field trip.

Later, I followed Amanda Wilson, a local Kadazan biologist who was just beginning her PhD on the little-known but endangered flat-headed cat, as she went about her work. The small feline is believed to populate riverine forests in search of aquatic prey, and we criss-crossed the river by boat and hiked in nearby jungles in the rain to check on camera traps that had been planted sometime ago. At night, we searched a riverside palm oil plantation with our torches, looking for signs of the elusive creature.

According to Amanda, the cameras had not picked up any footage of the cat in the past decade, which made me curious about what had made her decide to commit to studying it for five whole years. There was a self-possession to her, a surefooted way of speaking and moving that belied that uncertainty.

“Well, as a researcher, you always want to test things out,” Amanda said. “So you just have to start somewhere.” She had already wanted to pursue the research for her master’s, but her supervisors had cautioned her that a master’s wouldn’t afford her enough time. A creature like the flat-headed cat would need more time to reveal itself; it would require someone patient enough to see it.

This resonated with me. I told her it sounds a lot like writing sometimes, trying to figure out what a story is. You start with a question and a hunch that you’ll find answers for that question. But sometimes you don’t find what you’re looking for, and turn up different questions instead. And isn’t that the whole reason for exploring?

In the end, in the Amazon jungles of Peru, I never did arrive at Lago Pastococha. The river can’t take you where it doesn’t flow. On my fifth day out on the Marañon River with my guide, before we would have to start making our round trip back to Lagunas, we came up against large swathes of river carpeted with bright green water lettuce and giant water lilies: an astonishingly surreal sight.

At first, Santiago hacked at them with his machete, but their roots were too strong, too entangled, and though we managed to cut through one section and bypassed another by wending off along a side stream to get back to the river, we couldn’t keep doing the same for the other floating meadows that lay ahead. It seemed destructive of the nature we had come so far to experience.

The sky had also begun to darken ominously. As tough as Santiago was, I detected a furrow of worry between his brows. He warned that the river currents could get quite turbulent in these parts, and since the jungle was flooded this time of year we wouldn’t too easily come by solid ground for refuge. The existence of black caimans in these parts also began to cast shadows on our minds.

Eventually, Santiago put down his paddle and turned back to look at me, apologetic. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to continue,” he said. “What do you say? Should we turn back?”

This essay was first published in The Mekong Review’s August 2023 issue. Do make a subscription to support literary writing in Southeast Asia.

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As the world continues to boil, I’ve been trying to find personal ways to understand the climate crisis—to better appreciate that it’s not something that is just happening to the world at large, but happening all around us, to us, and how every aspect of our human lives contributes to it. This has meant, for me, finding out more about how our natural and built environments work and how we interact with them; and what I’ve found particularly interesting is how pathogens (and zoonotic pathogens in particular) spread. I plug my newsletter as one that seeks out stories to make sense of our place in the world. For me, too, this includes making sense of, and reimagining, our place in nature.

I’ve been meaning to write a letter riffing off this story I wrote for South China Morning Post’s print magazine last year—about the increased risk of emerging zoonoses, through the historical lens of the deadly Nipah virus that broke out in a pig-farming village in Malaysia in the 1990s, owing to our intensification of animal agriculture. I found out so many things I didn’t know in the writing of the story, which has helped me better appreciate how human, animal, and planetary health are intimately intertwined; and the multitude of connections I keep discovering has recalibrated the lens through which I see a lot of things.

Now, with new developments on the H5N1 virus (it has spread for the first time from mammals—dairy cows—to humans), I finally got down to finishing this letter, which has been languishing half-done in drafts for a long time. Apparently, timeliness does give me the push I need 😅

H5N1 infection fuels renewed anxieties

A dairy farm worker in Texas recently contracted H5N1, a highly infectious strain of the zoonotic bird flu virus. Humans have been infected by this subtype of Influenza A before, in the U.S. and globally, via exposure to infected birds or contaminated environments. However, this is the first known case of the virus jumping from mammal to human: in this case, farmed cows, via close contact.

Cows were not previously thought to be vulnerable to H5N1. The virus was first detected in chickens in Scotland in 1959 but it took a more virulent turn around 2021. It has since spread globally and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of wild birds and more than half a billion farmed birds (chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese), which died from infection or were culled by farmers to stop the spread of disease. It has also infected other mammals, possibly via the ingestion of infected birds or other contaminated food sources and water; but the recent infection of farmed cows—and also goats—is particularly concerning to humans, given our more regular proximity to them.

In the U.S., some 33 herds in eight states have so far reported cattle infections. Virus levels appear to be the highest in the cows’ milk itself; and the virus seems to be spreading between cows too (not just from birds to cows)—though it’s not clear yet precisely how—by air transmission, by exposure to contaminated surfaces such as milking machines that are not disinfected between cows, or via the excreta of farmed birds used in cattle feed. Moreover, factory farms, with genetically similar animals all living together in crowded conditions, are especially conducive to the rapid spread of viruses; and new batches of animals being bred continuously ensure that any pathogens managing to sneak their way in won’t fizzle out as easily as they would on a small farm.

Beyond the devastation to bird biodiversity, the cruelty of mass culling, and the risks to food security, why is all this troubling? Because cows are mammals, we’re mammals; the virus has also spread to wild skunks, bears, foxes, seals, even polar bears in Antarctica—in total, more than forty-eight species of mammals spanning 26 countries. At present, the virus doesn’t appear yet to pose a threat to public health, but as it better adapts to mammalian species, it can gain new mutations that enable it to spread more effectively to humans and between humans, arming it with “pandemic potential”. Experts are particularly worried about it spreading to farmed pigs, which, as in the case of Nipah, have been shown to be effective living vessels in which avian and human viruses can mix and become better at transmitting to people. This was what happened with swine flu, caused by the H1N1 virus (also a subtype of Influenza A). It emerged in 2009 in Mexico and the U.S. and has since killed at least 150,000 people globally.

Update, May 30, 2024:
There have since been two further cases of humans infected with H5N1 via dairy cows.

Surprising transmissions

I won’t go over the same ground in this letter that my published story covered. Instead, I would like to share some of the unexpected ways in which pathogens—of zoonotic origin or not—have spread, directly or indirectly, to humans: for example, some transmission pathways were unlocked by timely social and political factors you may not have thought would play a role. In putting this letter together, I’ve borrowed heavily from Sonia Shah, whose book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, really should be required reading for everyone in the wake of Covid-19 (though it was published before the pandemic). Even if you have no existing interest in the subject, you’ll find the book relates to so many aspects of how we live. I highly recommend it!

Let’s start with:

Chewy the bubble dog

Wisconsin, 2003. A pet prairie dog called Chewy was brought to a vet for sneezing and coughing. From a microbiologist, Shah gleaned his story:

The veterinarian decided to nebulize Chewy with oxygen, encasing him in a hamster ball, a hollow sphere made of plastic, while forcing a jet of oxygen into the ball through a vent.

Later, when Chewy was freed from the ball, people who came into the vet’s room also fell ill—it turned out, with monkeypox. Chewy was part of a species native to North America, but he had been held in a distribution centre along with other animals from Ghana, such as giant pouched rats, dormice, and rope squirrels, that had arrived in the U.S. as part of the global pet trade—and had contracted monkeypox from one or some of them.

So, as Chewy sneezed and coughed into his bubble, he filled it up with aerosolized monkeypox virus. When the ball was removed, the virus broke out and infected ten people who entered the room where Chewy was held. The vet had inadvertently created what the microbiologist Shah spoke to called a “poxvirus bomb”. Ultimately, Chewy and other prairie dogs held in the same distribution centre spread monkeypox to more than 70 people across six U.S. states.

Travelling surgical patients

We know tourists carry germs from one end of the globe to another—but also medical tourists in particular, due to the increasing number of people who travel where the same treatments are available for cheaper. Shah in her book:

A less noted but equally potent way air travel broadcasts pathogens is by extending the mobility of infected carriers who would have been far too fragile to travel via other means. Surgical patients, for example, played little role in the global spread of infectious pathogens in the past. People who’s recently undergone surgery were relatively immobile. Not so today. Surgical patients travel the world, carrying pathogens from operating rooms on one side of the globe to the other.

These surgical patients are particularly vulnerable to infectious pathogens:

Surgeons’ knives breach the protective layer of skin that separates the interior of the body from the exterior environment, allowing the army of microbes that live on the surface of the skin, in the air above the bed, and on the surgical instruments and other objects that pass over the open wound to slip in. Even the most elaborate sterilization practices often fail to stop them.

India is a popular destination for medical tourists, receiving hundreds of thousands who undergo surgical procedures there every year. Many of India’s bacterial pathogens are also resistant to antibiotics. In 2008, a bacteria containing an enzyme called NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1) was carried by medical tourists who had visited India back to their countries, spreading it around the world.

What’s worrisome: NDM-1 endows bacteria with the ability to resist fourteen classes of antibiotics, at the same time that human resistance to antimicrobials, including antibiotics, is becoming a serious impediment to global health—due in part to our overconsumption of them.

Foreclosed homes, stagnant pools

The 2008 housing crisis in South Florida, U.S., led to the foreclosure of 380,000 homes, many of them abandoned. This being Florida, many of the properties had pools. Shah in this NYT story:

Then the rains came. The pools filled with standing water. With nobody home to notice or to let inspectors in, those derelict swimming pools became giant mosquito hatcheries.

This led to an outbreak of dengue in Florida in 2009, infecting five per cent of the population of Key West.

(The same story, linked above, talks about “the unintended consequences of human activity that would seem to have little to do with the biology of microbes, from economics and housing policy to architecture”. Besides being attracted to these empty pools, mosquitoes have also been ferried across the world in the trade of used tyres—similar enough to “dark, wet tree holes” apparently—and “lucky bamboo” plants for home decor.)

Ship ballasts

In her book, Shah shows how cholera spread to the “New World” from India via new shipping routes established between American and European ports in the late nineteenth century. Some of these ships carried cholera via human or animal cargo on board, but some also transported them via the barnacles, molluscs, and other marine creatures that attached themselves to the ships’ wooden hulls.

The ships’ ballast, too, could carry cholera. Ballasts are materials such as sand, soil, and stone, that are used to fill a ship’s holds to keep it stable in the water, and they often contain thousands of species, such as crab, shrimp, jellyfish, sea anemones, sea grasses, etc. Shah in her book:

They would shovel it onboard and when they left shore and dump it miles later upon reaching their destinations, creating massive deposits full of alien invaders. Water ballast, used on iron ships, carried cholera even more efficiently.

Fast forward to the present: As the climate crisis worsens and more sea ice melts, new shipping routes are being opened in the Arctic and more ships (not just ice-breakers) will be able to cross previously inaccessible parts of the ocean—which could lead to higher numbers of microbes being transported around the world.

Discriminatory colonial policies

In 1845, a fungal pathogen called Phytophthora, Greek for “plant destroyer” and originating in Mexico, arrived in Ireland in a batch of potatoes.

Before the advent of steam travel, any potatoes infected would have gone bad during the long voyage, before they ever reached Ireland—and they would have been discarded. With the advent of steam travel, though, the infested potatoes could arrive intact; and once they were planted, the pathogens they carried could spread to surrounding plants and lead to mass crop failure.

That’s what happened this time. The Great Hunger set in between 1847 and 1851, leading to the deaths of one and a half million Irish. This, in turn, led to the great migration: between 1845 and 1855, nearly two million people emigrated from Ireland to America and Australia, and another 750,000 to Britain.

What made this famine possible? According to Shah, it was discriminatory British policies that forced Irish tenant farmers to grow crops for export and restricted the area of land they could work to feed their families. As a consequence:

The potato was the only crop they could afford, but their overreliance on it made them vulnerable to any pathogens that might prey on it.

Well-meaning United Nations peacekeepers

January, 2010. In the aftermath of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that killed over 200,000 people and displaced over one million people in Haiti, a contingent of UN peacekeepers arrived from Kathmandu, Nepal—at the time struggling with a cholera epidemic.

They were stationed at a camp built by Nepalese soldiers in the mountains north of Port-au-Prince. Since there was no waste disposal system, they had to build their own—but, it turned out, one that did not take into account proper sanitary measures, sending raw sewage from the camp streaming into the Arbonite River.

Until then, Haiti had been cholera-free. But with the camp’s establishment, cholera began to infect the waters, which washed into the river delta where thousands of Haitian farmers grew rice. Unknowingly, they continued to use the water to irrigate their fields and to bathe, cook, and drink. By 2011, there were more cholera victims in Haiti than anywhere else in the world, clocking over 820,000 cases and nearly 10,000 deaths. By 2019, it seemed like the problem had gone away. But cholera made a comeback in 2022.

The UN was taken to court for this. Did it take responsibility? Yes and no.

Back to zoonoses: the big picture

Some facts of note, extracted from different sections of my SCMP story:

1. Of the millions of microbes that exist, roughly 1,400—which include viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites—are pathogens that have the potential to harm humans, according to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report published in 2020. Of the 1,400 pathogen species, about 800 are zoonotic.

2. The Neolithic Revolution, at the end of the Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, marked a significant new chapter in the history of zoonoses. Humans, who had until then lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer communities, began to form settled agricultural communities to cultivate crops and domesticate wildlife, creating new spaces where humans and animals lived in close proximity, allowing pathogens to move from animals to humans more often. The larger human congregations also allowed diseases to spread more widely.

3. The bubonic plague, influenza, smallpox, measles, cholera: these are some of the oldest zoonoses the world has known. And measles, thought to have spilled over into humans from cattle in the 10th century, casts a long shadow. When Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 16th century, they brought measles and other infectious diseases with them, which are believed to have wiped out 95 per cent of the indigenous population, leading to the destruction of their ancient civilisations. Measles still causes epidemics globally, infecting about 30 million people and killing more than 2 million each year, according to the World Health Organisation.

4. It had taken hundreds of thousands of years for humanity to grow to 1 billion people, in 1800. Now, there are nearly 8 billion. This population explosion, followed by rapid urbanisation and growth of industry, has wrought drastic changes on our landscapes—particularly the deforestation that has encroached on and destroyed wildlife habitat. The UNEP report points to the increasing demand for meat, agricultural intensification, and the consumption and exploitation of wildlife as the most important human behaviours driving the emergence of zoonoses globally.

5. “The number-one driver of epidemics of zoonotic disease outbreaks is us—the things we are doing that influence the way we come into contact with wildlife and the way that our livestock comes into contact with wildlife,” says Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian and disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance, a global non-profit organisation that works to safeguard animal and human health.

6. Earlier epidemics or pandemics happened two or three times per century, but we have had several major outbreaks in the past two decades, and 75 per cent of all emerging infectious diseases since 1970 have been zoonotic. The Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us of bird flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika: all infectious diseases originating from wildlife—spread directly to humans or indirectly through intermediate hosts such as farmed animals, vectors like mosquitoes or the consumption of contaminated meat.

7. It’s predicted that future pandemics are likely to be zoonotic in origin and caused by viruses. At present, nearly 1.67 million undiscovered viruses may exist in wildlife, of which some 631,000 to 827,000 have the potential to spill over into humans. According to the scientists, virus spillover will most likely emerge in forested tropical regions with dense populations and high wildlife biodiversity, and where there is a high rate of land-use change, such as in Asia and Africa.

8. Climate change, too, could drive more than 15,000 new cases of mammals transmitting viruses to other mammals over the next 50 years, as species move to cooler places and meet for the first time, opening up new pathways for new viruses to spread to humans. Warming temperatures could also amplify mosquito-borne diseases and spread them to new regions.

Read the rest of my piece here.

It starts with a tale of a bat that met the wrong pig, as the film Contagion put it…

Additional reading

How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases by Ferris Jabr

Animals That Infect Humans Are Scary. It’s Worse When We Infect Them Back. by Sonia Shah

Mass Consumption Is What Ails Us by Sonia Shah

Think Exotic Animals Are to Blame for the Coronavirus? Think Again. by Sonia Shah

Our Cruel Treatment of Animals Led to the Coronavirus by David Benatar

Why Killer Viruses Are On The Rise by Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh

Research with exotic viruses risks a deadly outbreak, scientists warn by David Willman and Joby Warrick

With this letter, I wanted simply to draw attention to the interconnectedness of all earthly things. I was in awe as I absorbed all these stories, from the sense that there are any number of things happening all at once around the world while we’re not looking, where we’re not even thinking of looking, and that calamity can strike when the right conditions finally coalesce over time, and it can strike anywhere, at anyone, without discrimination. As for zoonoses: spillovers from animals to humans probably happen more than we know, but we only find out about them when an outbreak is reported.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that only if a pathogen attains the capability for human-to-human transmission could it have “pandemic potential”, helped along by our ever more globalised ways of living. And I think it’s important to say that the takeaway from zoonotic spillovers shouldn’t be to see animals as dangers or pests. We’ve destroyed their natural habitats, we have to coexist with them. What we need to do is change our behaviour and our relationship with animals. Because there’s the rub, isn’t it? We’ve created these risks for ourselves through our own rapaciousness. As Tan Chong Tin, a Malaysian neurologist I spoke to for my published story, said, “Zoonotic diseases have always been with us. There’s nothing unusual about zoonosis. It’s human lifestyles that have changed.”

From KL,
E.

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Driving in KL one late afternoon, weaving around doubled-parked streets flanked by malls and restaurants and bars, I took a wrong turn and surfaced onto this hushed road crowded in by trees and bushes made iridescent by the sun. It felt like I had suddenly been transported to the country. We slowed right down, pausing to ooh and ahh and try to capture the same light in different pictures, before finding our way back onto the grid...

New letter on Abang Adik:
Living in a world not of our own making

But this is a movie, and we get to see this side of Adik. It reminded me again of the gap fiction can fill in telling the stories of those marginalized by state and society: it lets us imagine another person’s emotional reality. We’ve been reading the news, we’re all aware of the ever-deepening inequality that is a feature, not just a byproduct, of our times; there is nothing about the material realities in Abang Adik we don't already know. But a movie, with characters of complexity, can make you feel. It jolted me into pausing, once again, to pay attention to the injustice people like Abang and Adik struggle against. As with so many of the world’s problems, I think it’s not so much new facts or new developments that we need, as the news cycle often demands, but reminders of what we already know, so our hearts don’t stay complacent for too long, so that we are galvanized again to speak or act in support of those who need it, in whatever humble way we can, when the next occasion calls for it.

Read the letter here.

From the archive:
An old city by the sea #2

“Please,” he said, pressing his palms together when he got to us. “Please. When you want to go, please come to me.”

He was soft-spoken and hustled without the air of a hustler. I hated to see someone being forced to do this. We told him yes, we would come and find him when we eventually make a decision. But the price for renting a private boat is steep. And since then, fearing we would have to pass on his offer again, my heart has felt a little heavier every time we meandered too close to his booth. Every time, I hoped we wouldn’t see him or his boat. If we didn’t, maybe it would mean he had managed to find some customers that day.

Then, one night two weeks ago, as we sat in the back terrace of the same cafe we’re at now, looking over the old port: I saw his slim white vessel, looking like a silverfish in the flickering glow of the streetlamp besieged by frenzied moths. On another evening, enjoying the breeze by himself, he had waved to us with a silent smile. But tonight, he wasn’t alone. He was having a tête-à-tête with a long-haired blonde in the open rear of his floating home.

At some point, he stretched out to lay his head in her lap, and I felt a rush of joy for him. I hoped that whatever his current difficulties in this pandemic, this seaman was enjoying a moment of peace. (Or perhaps a quickening heartbeat 🩵)

Read the rest here.

Readings, etc.

1./ In January, I joined a coffee tasting and brewing workshop by Jeffrey Lim, who documents old trades in Malaysia that have been overlooked, in part because they have been so much a part of our everyday. He is interested in the heritage of our local kopi across peninsular Malaysia—how we make it, how we drink it, with what tools. He gets right down to the most granular details, but it’s the little insights into the history, such as that of the traditional ceramic cups kopi is still being served in across the country’s kopitiams, that feel most resonant. Follow @kopilau for a project still in progress.

2./ The Russian dissident Alexey Navalny died in prison recently—widely believed, by Putin’s hand. I don’t doubt that Putin is capable of murder, but because of what’s happening in Palestine, I cannot help but see Joe Biden’s publicized sitdown with Navalny’s wife and daughter as a PR move that fits into the United States’ seemingly binary view of the world, of good guys vs. bad guys. As we have seen in recent months, there are no good guys and bad guys, just good and bad deeds any government, any people, are capable of. Still, I found Navalny’s story quite inspiring—that he still returned to Russia after being poisoned by Novichok, when he must have known he would be jailed or that another attempt would be made on his life. It’s not a choice most of us would ever make if we had a family, but to “figure” in this world I think you do have to be at least a little bit self-aggrandizing, and the man certainly had charisma and had already amassed a following with his YouTube channel exposing corruption in Russia. My partner W.C. is always slightly suspicious of leaders who are popular because they are “cool”; what matters is what they actually do. But it does feel, especially these days, like it’s star power that most effectively boosts popular attention to the nitty gritty of political issues. And Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny, which couldn’t have been produced without Navalny’s own sleuthing, does lionize him some. It sometimes feels like Navalny, a kind of journalist himself (albeit one transparently motivated by political self-interest: to unseat Putin), is steering the camera’s gaze when he’s ostensibly the subject. The documentary is worth a watch to appreciate that tension as well as the gleeful chutzpah with which he succeeded in pranking one of his poisoners into a confession.

3./ Honestly, I have a harder time listening to texts; I read them much better. Sometimes when I don’t have subtitles on a film I have to rewind parts to better absorb what was said. I can’t get the most out of a podcast or audiobook unless I’m intentionally training my focus on it—or driving on long trips. But I’m trying to listen better. These days I try to get through a chapter before bed, though I’m usually out before my sleep timer is up 😅 Still, I love listening to a story, especially a story that has an aura of mystery (though a voice narrator that doesn’t jive at all with the voice I imagine can be jarring, or if an unsympathetic character sounds as grating as they come across on the page), so dystopian, fantasy, or detective stories work really well for me. Currently, I’m alternating between John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (there’s also a dramatized version but I think I prefer non-dramatized ones) and Agatha Christie’s Passenger to Frankfurt.

4./ Went to cheer on a lawyer-turned-author friend, Kimberly Lee, as she celebrated the publication of her first book of fiction for kids—illustrated by Charlene Chua—with an engaging reading+singing session. Boys Don’t Fry challenges gender norms and celebrates her family’s Peranakan culture 🩵

5./ Harper’s is a magazine I subscribe to in print. I usually find it thought-provoking and love being able to read it from cover to cover—a more coherent act than jumping from tab to tab. I particularly like the regular Easy Chair column—by Lionel Shriver for a time (“Semantic Drifts” was one of my favorites), then more recently Rachel Kushner (“The Palm at the End of the Mind”). There’s also a fascinating essay on the climate case against children by Elizabeth Barber, of which, in the end, she is skeptical: “people would rather be enthusiastic collaborators in a global project than be skeptics of its fundamental integrity.”

Note: I’m trying to reorient my reading around deeper troves of things, to wrest back control over my attention. I don’t generally curate shorter standalone pieces here anymore (as in Landmarkings), and now share them instead on Instagram Stories @emilydingwrites - shares on Israel and Palestine go there too.

Joy is not a crumb

Went lindy hop-ping again recently! I love dancing and I love to watch people dance! I used to go for lessons and socials when I was still in London, but I haven’t done that for years, and this was my first time back at it in a long time. Here’s one of my favorite songs to dance to. It’s cheeky and funny, listen:

And I leave you with

That’s how the big one siestas 😆 It’s disarming, how trusting she looks in her sleep, and I can’t help thinking: That’s something strays can’t afford to be…

Until the next,
E.

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I should say: if you haven’t watched the film and you're planning to, maybe don’t read this yet. I’m not trying to spoil it, but I’m also not trying not to spoil it 😆

I didn’t know much about Abang Adik before watching it but for the enthusiastic reviews from fellow Malaysians. (Turns out it’s done pretty well on the global festival circuit too.) But I did get a prior sense about the kind of movie it is when I asked a friend to come with and she said she would wait because she didn’t feel like crying that day. She was right. Reader, when I finally watched it, I cried. Many others were clearing their noses in the dark of the cinema too.

Without going into too much detail, the film directed by Jin Ong is about two men who call themselves brothers—abang means older brother; adik, younger brother. Abang (played by Taiwanese actor Wu Kang-Ren) was born in Malaysia but is stateless, because he doesn’t have a birth certificate, apparently lost in a fire, to prove his provenance.1 Adik (Jack Tan) has a birth certificate, but for whatever reason hasn’t been issued with a national identity card, which makes it difficult for him to access basic necessities: he can’t open a bank account or get a motorcycle license or secure formal employment. Their lives are marked by constant evasion from law enforcement and capricious exploitation by others.

Abang Adik brings together some of the same issues I’ve covered in my journalism: the people caught between borders, the possible errors in the application of the death penalty, the search for redemption. I was very moved by it—though I did find a couple of its major plot points a little forced, as if contrived to bring about a desired ending—and received it as something of an onslaught: it brought to mind again all the people still stuck in the Kafkaesque loop of trying to prove they exist in a system that is willfully blind to them. The film is about Malaysians who are stateless, but it also nods to those who live by the same cruel logic imposed by the nation-state: the “illegal immigrants” and the refugees, who are also treated as “illegal immigrants because Malaysia doesn’t recognize refugees—though at the same time, as I wrote before, it also takes a “turn a blind eye” approach to their existence here).

Abang falls in love with Su, a Chin refugee from Myanmar. But when she receives news that she will be resettled to another country, he sends her off with her family without confessing his love, knowing she will have no future with him in Malaysia. Adik, exploited by others, also exploits those who are more vulnerable than him: he smuggles migrants into the country, telling himself he is doing them a favor, even when they don’t end up with the jobs they are promised and are sold out by another trafficker up the chain, who tips off the police so he can pocket money from both ends.

The film seems to be asking a question I’ve also found myself thinking about as a writer: How do we live in a world not of our own making? In this case, what does someone born into invisibility and poverty, who had no choice in the circumstances of his birth, owes himself and others?

The two brothers have very different worldviews. Abang, who is mute, is always trying to be good, is always trying to will Adik to be good. Adik, on the other hand, has grown deeply cynical and refuses to play by the prevailing rules of our world, even as he succumbs to the logic of its shadow world. Seen in a different way, it’s Abang who comes across as the rebellious one, in his steadfast holding on to hope, to possibility. He is the kind of person we all want to help. He, who does not throw your help back in your face, who shows himself to be grateful. He gives us the license to say: Look, this person deserves your help. Please listen to his story, please donate, please change the law for people like him. We ask victims to remain honest and honorable and steadfast, despite all the injustice in the world that must break their souls.

Adik, on the other hand, tests our patience. We wonder about his unproductive behavior. We wonder why he won’t help himself when we’re trying our best to help him: Just do what you need to, and this will happen for you. And yet, in doing this we would be failing to acknowledge his life’s context and strip him of his agency, since we, too, don’t always do what’s objectively ideal for us, for emotional reasons specific to us. I’m reminded of why the homeless sometimes don’t buy into social programs designed to assist them, because they would then be obliged to live a certain way, when they may have different ideas for their own lives, even if their options are more narrow than that open to you and me.

In the film, a young NGO worker, Jia En, is shown going out of her way to help the two brothers—Adik especially, because he has the better legal case, with an estranged father still alive who can attest to his Malaysian birthright, if only Adik would deign to meet him again. But in one scene, visiting her brother (I think it’s her brother, I haven’t yet been able to rewatch the film), a doctor at a hospital, he tells her to quit doing the work she does, because being among such unsavory people could pose a danger to her. Her brother is meant to stand in for many people who hold such views—which overwhelmingly, in real life, don’t hold much water. Too tragically in this film though, he is proved right.

But whatever Adik’s faults, in the film we get to see another side of him. By showing the intimacy of the relationship between him and Abang (even more affecting when we find out they are not blood brothers), we see a gentler side of him—drawn out by Abang, who loves him, as well as Kak Money, a trans woman who had taken the boys under her wing when they were young and alone in the world. There are many scenes in the film between the two men designed to make you cry, but the one that got me was when they were at Kak Money’s farewell party, before she readies to leave Kuala Lumpur to return to her hometown. In the red cast of the DIY-disco lights of her apartment, Adik, looking to patch up an earlier disagreement with Abang, and seeing in his luminous eyes how bereft he is left by the recent departure of Su, a romance which never had a chance to begin, embraced him on the small living room floor in a slow, shuffling dance.

In real life, most of us would never come to know someone like Adik well enough to see this side of him—even a journalist who “hangs out” with “their "subjects” in hopes of being afforded a glimpse of their inner world, unless, exceptionally, they do it over a sustained period, like Katherine Boo did with Behind the Beautiful Forevers: something none but the most dedicated journalist, with a rock-solid stamina and a willingness to suspend their own lives for a time, would and could afford to do. Because you cannot truly tell their story from their point of view unless they let you witness a part of them they usually keep for their nearest and dearest. And because of such limitations, editors sometimes tire of what can seem like the same story of suffering without a vivid enough “character” to bring it to life. That is the real tragedy: that the same misery attends so many people and we grow desensitized to it, no matter how empathetic we think we are.

But this is a movie, and we get to see this side of Adik. It reminded me again of the gap fiction can fill in telling the stories of those marginalized by state and society: it lets us imagine another person’s emotional reality. We’ve been reading the news, we’re all aware of the ever-deepening inequality that is a feature, not just a byproduct, of our times; there is nothing about the material realities in Abang Adik we don’t already know. But a movie, with the characters’ complexity, can make you feel. It jolted me into pausing, once again, to pay attention to the injustice people like Abang and Adik struggle against daily. As with so many of the world’s problems, I think it’s not so much new facts or new developments that we need, as the news cycle often demands, but reminders of what we already know, so our hearts don’t stay complacent for too long, so that we are galvanized again to speak or act in support of those who need it, in whatever humble way we can, when the next occasion calls for it. By this, I don’t mean that stories of real refugees are no longer needed—only that their individual stories, even without any ‘novel’ news developments as is often asked for by editors, is also worth telling, if a journalist can be patient enough, gets close enough.

For most of the film, Abang is a pillar of silent resilience. So when he is finally wrought enough to speak, railing at his own impotence, it comes as a violent confrontation. As he languishes on death row—or the last room, bilik akhir, as we call it in Malaysia—after a freak accident that seemingly forced his hand, a well-meaning Buddhist monk comes to him, urging him not to forgo his meals, telling him he owes it to himself to live well as long as he still lives.2 Abang, who keeps so much of what he feels to himself as the only act of self-possession available to him when so much in the world is denied him, is finally moved to protest his plight. It comes as a thunderous, voiceless indictment of the indifference of the world, watery moans straining out of him as he signs to the monk: He has never chosen anything in this life. “I want to die, I want to die, I want to die,” he says—and then abruptly stops, as if suddenly realizing that even that isn’t up to him to choose. He didn’t choose how he came into this world and he wouldn’t choose how he will leave it.

And it’s with a stark, simple finality that Abang tells the monk, “I want to change my life, but it’s impossible.” This sounds like a clichéd turn of phrase we might sometimes overuse ourselves in more banal circumstances, but in Abang’s case, it’s loaded with actual meaning. And I wonder, how would we ourselves deal with this utter lack of power to decide our own lives? The judges have pronounced him guilty of one thing, and it feels like the world thinks him, and people like him, guilty of other things too.

One day, when Abang is sitting in his cell waiting for the day of his hanging to arrive, a boy, a vision of his younger self, comes to visit. Mutely, the boy picks up a small flat comb and strokes it through Abang’s hair, the way we saw Abang do it himself earlier in a mirror before getting his headshots taken at a photo shop for his citizenship application—a painfully hopeful scene. Here is a man who, in the face of forces that sought to negate his very being, still took care to put himself in order so he could better face the world. There is something about the gesture itself that feels so vulnerable to me.3 And when the boy combs his hair, it feels like he is comforting his adult self, absolving him of his sins, real and assumed, returning him to his innocence once more.

Reality check:
Notes on the perpetuation of statelessness in Malaysia

1./ Abang Adik resonates a lot here at present. Many children born to Malaysian mothers have been unable to obtain citizenship, whereas those born to Malaysian fathers face no such hurdles. Some of these children have been able to inherit their foreign father’s nationality, but some others, due to special circumstances (say, if the father is undocumented himself), have not, rendering them stateless. Read more on this in a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy during the pandemic.

2./ Last year, the Malaysian government finally announced that it would remove a sexist clause in the constitution to allow any Malaysian “parent”, not just “father”, to pass on their citizenship to their children. However, as part of the same package of reforms, it also introduced other changes regulating access to citizenship, which would be detrimental to other categories of children, such as the stateless. Iqbal Fatkhi has a great video explainer at Cilisos.

3./ Chen Yih Wen, a journo friend, wrote a piece for New Naratif sometime ago about Wong Kueng Hui, a stateless man born in Sabah, and his long legal pursuit —since he was twelve years old; he’s now approaching thirty—for citizenship in Malaysia. It’s paywalled, but you can listen to the accompanying podcast to learn more. Luckily, his story had a happy ending last year.

From KL,
E.

Footnotes

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I was in Singapore for a few days over the Lunar New Year. Besides attending family reunions, I tried to see a bit more of the city, crisscrossing different neighborhoods. Most of all, I enjoyed being able to get around almost anywhere by public transport and on foot. It’s as hot there as it is in KL, but Singapore feels like a more walkable city, thanks to its abundant tree cover—the city has been doing a lot of planting over the decades (“It’s now a city in a garden, not a garden city!” my Singaporean uncle once relayed)—and sheltered walkways (also made fun of on this Facebook page; Malaysia not spared either 😆) that help you get around even if it’s too hot or raining, and I guess the ubiquitous air-conditioning wafting out of shopping centers, though that isn’t doing the environment any favors. A friend recently said that it all feels too manicured, too curated, for her liking, and I can sort of see what she means: there is a designed wildness about it all… but, I like it? Especially the dense green creeping up the hulking elongated-H concrete trestles of road bridges? Certainly, it appeals to something Ballardian in my imagination. In KL’s urban areas, you often find beautiful craggy trees lopped off, sometimes for suspicious reasons and sometimes apparently so they won’t block the facade of a building—what? But it’s the stumps that mar the view, cast a building more flatly against the sky, its facade undappled by plays of shadow and light usually filtered through dancing foliage. When I was growing up I disliked Singapore, because all I knew of it came from following my parents or relatives around, waiting for them to finish their social rounds or their errands. (That time with family feels formative and precious now, but back then I dreaded the routine and the repetition 😅) It wasn’t until about a decade ago when I started to experience Singapore more independently that I grew to appreciate it as a place, for what makes it different from KL—just as I appreciate KL for what makes it different from Singapore, though it would surely be more livable with more integrated public transport and more trees!

New letter:
Turning the page again

On a shift I’ve been feeling in my writing, with some thoughts on journalism. I’m hoping this will set the tone for my 2024:

A year ago, speaking to a friend, I told her how hungry I felt just to find things out, in the sense that I had begun to ask all these questions about our climate crisis, and I was searching for answers to them, and I had to read a lot since I don’t have a science background. I went down a rabbit hole and now have stacks of academic papers sitting along my window bench. Off the back of a story about the link between zoonotic disease and intensive animal agriculture, I started reading about global food systems, wondering: How can we nourish ourselves, all of us, without turning the world into a giant factory farm? And I told my friend that it felt like this insatiable thirst for information was overshadowing my hunger for story a bit, which surprised me. I had always thought that the creative aspect of writing, i.e. the “narrative” in narrative nonfiction, was what called out more to me, that it was my edge among faster, more investigative, and more specialist reporters, and suddenly I felt a kind of identity crisis! But I needn’t have worried. It was a phase, and it will come again; a writer always needs specific material facts to make a story, even in fiction. But right now, my hunger for narrative has reasserted itself again...

Read the rest here.

From the archive:
A woman out in the world

Despite the hand-wringing over all the what-ifs that can accompany the planning of more difficult journeys in more remote places, it’s hard to express adequately how much being able to navigate the world independently means to me. It feels like the very essence of freedom: just knowing that you have the capacity to land on your own two feet in a strange land. It feels especially true for me, as someone who has always had a terrible sense of direction and who can’t get around without a map. I blame it on my constant reading in the car when I was a child, disinterested in the world passing by outside. It was really only in my late teens or early twenties that I grew to want to see the world for itself, to level it with its depictions in the books I read.

I remember that as a young girl, I was described more as “book-smart” by my mother in contrast to my “street-smart” best friend, and it had felt like something of a vindication when I returned home safely from my first solo trip. I had shown myself that I could go somewhere completely unfamiliar, without a single contact in the country, and be resourceful enough to find my own way—not without some stumbling blocks and false starts, but find my way regardless. For that reason, traveling on my own remains my greatest source of security and confidence...

Read the rest here.

Readings, etc.

1./ Worried that by the time I got back to KL, Abang Adik, a Malaysian film by Jin Ong, would no longer be screening, I went to watch it at The Projector, an indie cinema in Singapore housed in an old cinema inside the Golden Mile Tower, with all the delightful kitsch that vintage entails. They have an eclectic mix of east and west in their programming, and they re-run old classics! And yes, Abang Adik is as good as everybody says. I have mild reservations about what I felt was some contrivance in the plot, but still I think it’s one of the best Malaysian movies ever made. Go watch and support!

2./ I also hurried to catch Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, the only Ghibli film I’ve seen on the big screen. I felt deeply immersed in it, right up till the end, but I can’t say that I knew immediately what to make of it. I still don’t, and I’ve avoided reading reviews or criticism so I can take time to figure it out for myself. I do love, though, how his creatures manage to be cute or whimsical yet diabolical at the same time: like that heron, and the nasally little duck man it seems to swallow and lets surface from time to time? They linger with me. (Also, if you haven’t already, watch this documentary detailing Miyazaki’s creative process.)

3./ A book I’m still reading that has rewired my brain in a small but perceptible way is Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. I was similarly feeling like I was in a writing rut, had started taking comfort in the minutiae and little animals, and didn’t know if what I wanted to say was necessary compared to what is happening in the world. It’s not like I haven’t read books like this before: novels that don’t read like novels, that read like memoir, or a journal. But it’s this one that has unlocked something cerebrally and emotionally for me at this moment in my life, in a way I don’t think it could have at a different time.

Joy is not a crumb

Sometimes, I’m partial to a cafe simply because of the arrangement of a particular perch—such as this inside-outside nook for two 💛

And I leave you with

… if not the dogs, then other animals we share our world with. Even if some are common sights, I want to learn to name them, to better name my surroundings.

At a coffee stop one afternoon, a Javan Mynah—a juvenile, I think; it looked to have a youthful, lurching amble—came really close to us, looking for crumbs. An omnivore that is highly adaptable to different environments, it was completely unafraid of people! Brought to Singapore in the 1920s via the pet trade, it is now the most common bird in the city, having led to the decline of other species such as its close cousin the Common Mynah, which is differentiated by the yellow patch of skin around its eyes. Its Malay name—Gembala-Kerbau Sawah Jawa—hints at where else it would have been found, in the paddy fields of Java as a “buffalo herder”. Are they the ones perched on top of buffaloes, pecking the insects off their backs?

Another morning, we watched a flock of Javan Mynahs battling a flock of larger crows for more human leftovers. One of the crows, though, had a marked penchant for the sugar cubes you might drop into your coffee. They were encased in transparent plastic, but that presented no obstacle. I watched as the crow held the tiny packet against the back of a chair with both feet, pecked it right open.

From back in KL,
E.

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It’s a strange contradiction: the last months of 2023 have felt so full, and yet, idle at the same time? Full with reunions back on W.C.’s side of the world and the traveling required to get to friends and family, recovering from flu-like symptoms twice (the second bout Covid), and using all the time in between not dedicated to the everyday architecture of life to read, dream, plan, agonize, write. I felt like I never had enough time but also like I had days ahead of me. It had a lot to do with all the activity going on in my head: a constant churn—because of what’s still happening in Gaza; because I feel like I’m at another crossroads, feeling a desire to shift into a different gear, trying to determine exactly what and how.

Meanwhile, I’m back in KL. But aside from frequenting a cafe for lunch, I’ve been keeping my solitude eating, sleeping, reading, and writing. I’ve just emerged from the after-effects of Covid (they lingered this time) and jetlag, each seemingly made worse by the other. But the cloud has lifted, and I’m looking forward to getting back into the balmy rhythm of life here again: taking my dogs to the park, catching up with friends and family, revisiting old haunts and exploring new parts of the city and the rest of the country, learning again—always, over and over again—how to belong back to it.

So, this letter feels less like a start to 2024, more like a cap on 2023. There’s some rethinking I need to do so I can move along, but I’ll see you here again soon.

New letter:
Watching Gaza from Berlin

It’s crazy to me how this letter, written in November, remains relevant:

Yes, a lot about what’s happening right now remains uncertain. So much is contested, so much “we said–they said” is being lobbed around. But what at least seems clear is the mass scale of destruction, killings, and displacement that is being wrought in Gaza, even if one were to quibble about exact numbers. And in any case, for those who feel they can’t commit to believing in any one reality because the situation is so divisive and the facts on the ground so unclear, isn’t that more reason to support calls for a ceasefire? So that various parties like international humanitarian organizations and journalists can be allowed to enter Gaza and begin to ascertain what’s really going on, which can’t happen when it is being carpet bombed and isolated from the rest of the world? At the moment, it feels like we are wasting previous time arguing over justifications that we are not even sure are true...

Read the rest of the letter.

Something I wrote before

Simply: good food was a joy, a gift, from the people who made it, and I felt no need to demystify it. When I was a child, my father would grin and point out the uncle perspiring through his thin shirt at our favorite nga choy gai stall in Ipoh—serving poached chicken and blanched beansprouts, with kway teow soup—and say, See, how he puts his sweat into it? That’s the secret sauce that can’t be replicated. Every time, I knew that was a lie but I would nod and laugh. I was happy just to marvel, and dig in.

These days, that has changed for me, as I sense it has for others too. First, a percolating awareness that how we eat directly impacts our warming planet as the climate crisis began to lead the news agenda, then bulldozed into one’s daily consciousness when the pandemic hit and restaurants and supply chains faltered, thrusting concerns about our food security and long-held assumptions about how we eat into the spotlight.

Read the rest here.

Something I loved

I was just combing through my bookshelves again—fair to say I do that every time I come home—and found this True Story piece, published in print by the same people at Creative Nonfiction magazine (not sure what’s going on there these days) a while back, which I loved. As the name says, each issue features just one true story: Where am I? by Heather Sellers.

This piece is about how she struggles, really struggles, to find her way due to an inability to read her physical and spatial surroundings—linked perhaps to her face blindness? but maybe also the way she grew up?—and her attempts to cope with it. She also writes movingly about how she learns to grant herself the same compassion she so generously bestows on others with similar difficulties.

I don’t struggle to the same extent but I am sympathetic to her troubles because I can find it difficult to find my way around without a map. I don’t do as well with verbal directions; I insist on an address so I can map out my route—even in the days before GPS; even when, for a long time, people like my parents were more inclined to use landmarks for directions and didn’t necessarily even know street names. If I’m not visiting a place regularly, I’ll soon forget how to get there, even if I once spent every day frequenting it for a year. If someone diverts me onto an alternative route to someplace I’ve been, I’ll likely get disoriented and lose my bearings. By contrast, a cousin of mine could direct our grandparents to his kindergarten when he was just five years old. So, maybe it’s really not about one’s awareness per se, but that our brains are wired differently, mysteriously? Or okay, maybe I just spent too many of my formative years sticking my nose into books in moving vehicles…😁 Anyway—

Way-finding requires ongoing effort, practice, review. Some humans are excellent navigators because they automatically perceive and process visual clues provided by objects and landscapes. Others don’t rely as much on space and geometry; they create a holistic landscape out of stories, feelings, and memories in order to understand, access, and execute a route. Some people “just know” how to get across campus and back to their car. I have very limited abilities in any of these realms, but I have developed another set of skills.

I know how to remain calm. I know how to ask questions. I have my paperwork in order.

Joy is not a crumb

Affinities, etc.

Currently reading: Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by . I’ve been to South Korea only once on a family trip, years back. That, aside from having an appetite for Korean food and watching Autumn in My Heart—it seemed like the entry-level K-drama when I was a teenager?—and more recently watching Bong Joon-ho’s movies, I’m not too familiar with Korean culture; much of what I know of it are stereotypes, especially as it pertains to plastic surgery and the imperative pursuit of beauty. Picked this book up because it felt like it would be illuminating as to whether those generalizations are true…

Currently listening to: The Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, read by Vanessa Kirby, which I put on every night before bed, setting the timer to 30 minutes—usually falling asleep before that 😅. I love audiobooks! Especially when read by performers with a certain timbre of voice that evokes a mist of mystery (Kirby’s really matches this material), but they help put me to sleep. Because see, without someone else’s voice in my head, mine keeps running, which keeps me awake. Also: I find Wyndham’s stories particularly conducive as audiobooks. I had read him before, but the first time I listened to him (well, Stephen Fry) was The Midwich Cuckoos, during my first round of Covid two years ago. Recuperating from Covid really is most conducive to listening to audiobooks.

The short-fiction pile-up: As I’m trying to complete a short story I started a couple of years ago, in the name of experimenting, I’m trying to read more of them. I tend to be bad at finishing short story collections, picking and choosing from them piecemeal, hopping between them. For now, I’m shuffling between The Barnum Museum by Steven Millhauser, The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin), Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, and Malaysian writer Shih-Li Kow’s new collection, Bone Weight and Other Stories. I’m trying to read them more intentionally, a project greatly helped by reading ’ newsletter too.

Added to the queue:

Friends & Familiar Strangers

In previous newsletters, I’ve occasionally posted a shout-out to friends or people who have contributed in some way to Movable Worlds. Most recently, , a Chinese-American writer and editor—I spoke with him a couple of years back about his life and work and English translation of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara for Movable Worlds—just got himself a book deal for his debut novel, Masquerade, to be published by Tin House Books in 2024 🥳. Congrats Mike!

And I leave you with

So happy to be reunited with our dogs! Here’s the more manageable of the two (only because she’s smaller), which means she gets more photos 💛

Until the next,
E.

p.s. My 2023 in books: I finished off the year with a couple of titles on Israel and Palestine: Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I and Language of War, Language of Peace (highly recommend), Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Last year also marked my completion of all Emily St. John Mandel’s novels, with Sea of Tranquility (it’s surprising how she builds tension despite her books not being very plot-y), as well as Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogy (I love the way she dissects life). Memoirs: How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, a debut collection of essays by Malaysian writer Florentyna Leow (on coming to find, in solitude, her own way through a city haunted by the ghost of a suddenly lost friendship), What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo (I don’t think I would have picked this up on my own but it came highly recommended by three people I know, and it made me cry), Stay True by Hua Tsu (as good as everyone says it is, and I don’t think there are too many coming-of-age memoirs by “Asian” male writers?), and I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee (I couldn’t quite latch onto the voice, but found bits in it I related to). Historical fiction: Lily by Rose Tremain, Matrix by Lauren Groff, and The Women of Troy by Pat Barker (the second in the Regeneration trilogy reimagining the Trojan War through the eyes of the women)—all of which were not as plot-driven as you’d expect, but still a pleasure to read. Other novels: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (sharper on plot than subtext; turned page after page and read it in one sitting), Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (elegantly written with an interesting premise, but I had a little trouble feeling propelled through it). Narrative journalism: Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah, which really ought to be recommended reading for everyone. Literature review: Essayism by Brian Dillon and A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland. Photobook with an accompanying essay on still life: Teju Cole’s gorgeously contemplative Golden Apple of the Sun.

My 2023 in TV & movies: Settled back and binged a bit when I caught Covid over Christmas, and on the long-haul plane back to KL—really enjoyed Arcane (though I felt Powder’s turn could have taken a little more time?) and Past Lives (found it thought-provoking, but I couldn’t decide if the dialogue was sometimes stilted/contrived/too knowing, or if that’s just partly the protagonists’s character). It was hard to watch Killers of the Flower Moon without thinking of how it so perfectly encapsulates the nonsensical injustice of this world; and though the movie’s long, it didn’t feel like it at all. In the “eat-the-rich” genre, I watched The White Lotus (kind of wickedly fun), The Menu (skewering, delights in shocking), Triangle of Sadness (bleak and punishing), Saltburn (even bleaker and more punishing). Films set in a more closeted time with gothic undertones that I found quite compelling: The Wonder, Women Talking, Power of the Dog. I watched Unorthodox (Deborah Feldman, the Berlin-based Jewish author of the memoir the mini-series is based on, has been outspoken against Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which is how I found out about her) and All The Light We Cannot See because I was interested in the books but hadn’t read them, and then came away feeling that I would probably have preferred reading them. Tár, Don’t Worry Darling, and Babylon are a decent watch, mainly for the performances. But I would recommend: The Banshees of Inisherin (the kind of black comedy I like, with still-endearing characters; from the director of In Bruges), Belfast (for a film that plays out amid the Troubles conflict in Northern Ireland, it’s so life-affirming), Loving Vincent (a classmate suggested we do a co-presentation about it in my German language class, and it’s just gorgeously drawn), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel. As for the dystopian: could not get enough of The Last of Us and Silo (based on a pageturner, Wool, by Hugh Howey I read years ago). Fantasy: House of the Dragon (uhhh so wrong but so good) and the latest season of The Wheel of Time (the world-building elements don’t always feel persuasive visually, but the stakes feel higher this season and it got real dark with the appearance of the enslaved damane; also, Natasha O’Keefe, who plays the evil Lanfear, is chilling.)

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I’ve been wanting to write about Berlin. Not so much on the level of journalistic curiosity yet (though there’s plenty keeping me curious), but more a kind of personal accounting, how I came to it and how I’ve started to find my way around it. Often, though, when you know a place will play a larger role in your life in times to come, is beginning to, when every return builds on the last one, it can be a more complicated task to put into actual words how you feel about it. I’ll come around to it soon enough, perhaps in the order of fragments, as that has been my experience of the city, but for now, here’s a belated photodrop to round up the end of 2023. It’s mostly vibes I want to remember, now that I’m back in KL, where the texture of life again feels very different…

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Soon after I wrote this letter, it was reported that the Israeli government and Hamas had reached a “temporary ceasefire” agreement on November 24, 2023 for the release of some hostages on both sides. The pause in fighting was shortlived and ended on December 1.

I took these photos in Berlin on the night Gaza first went dark, unable to communicate with the outside world. The wet leaves on the streets made me think of blood stains. We were suspended in a kind of strange limbo, enjoying dinner outside surrounded by glass clinking and loquacious cheer while our thoughts remained with something happening far away that had nothing and everything to do with us, while we wondered what news the next day would bring.

I was working on some other writing, but that had to take a backseat as, like much of the world, I’ve been caught up for the past month in what’s happening in Gaza.

I have no pre-existing emotional connection to either Israel or Palestine: I don’t have close friends from either place nor have I ever visited the region, in part because the Malaysian government doesn’t recognise Israel as a country and so prevents us citizens from visiting Israel (though one can apply for exemption to go on pilgrimage, as Christian groups have done; I’m not religious). I am a third party watching all this human violence and carnage playing out onscreen, and I have found myself unable to look away.

I’ve always been interested in how the long shadows of history play on our present—a theme I’ve also written about other conflicts, such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland—but I think, like so many others, I have not been able to help but care about Palestine for the flagrant hypocrisy the West, including its mainstream media, has shown in its oft-vaunted commitment to universal human rights (always a little suspect, but still better than most of the world, we thought), and for the fact that I’m currently in Germany, where this crisis has greater resonance because of its central role in the Holocaust. But I’ve also felt so invested in what’s happening in Gaza because of what it shows about our further deterioration of language and how we communicate with one another—through mainstream and social media, and from person to person.

I’ve been trying to write this letter for a while. The attempt has felt like a thorn in my side for the past weeks—I felt, simultaneously, like it was pointless and crucial to write about what is happening, and every time I started to document my thoughts I would soon abandon the effort, ending up scrolling and reading and listening and watching more instead, trying to make sense of the questions that continue to pile up one over another in my head, making the whole undertaking feel even more impossible. I’ve posted here and there, privately and publicly, on social media, but I’ve needed some time to clarify my thoughts further and to put some of them down more coherently here (and I’m already keeping this letter purposefully narrowed in scope).

All this is, above all, for my own record. It feels important, first on a private, personal level, to remember how I’ve reacted and to find out what I think.

I’m currently reading Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh’s Language of War, Language of Peace (2015), in which he describes the violence done to language in order to make what’s happening to Palestinians a more palatable reality. In his introductory chapter, he writes:

The future of this small area between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan is the concern of not only Israelis and Palestinians. It is a land with particular significance to many people around the world. It has been known for a long time that the key to a safer, more peaceful Middle East lies in resolving the conflict here. While it will ultimately fall upon those of us who live in this tiny contested plot to make peace possible, at the moment we cannot achieve this without the assistance of the rest of the world.

In truth, the first week after Hamas’ atrocious attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, I wasn’t paying too much attention to the news; I had just flown back to Berlin and was traveling around Germany a bit to visit my partner’s family. And at the time, when I saw people on social media—people like me just coming to the Palestinian struggle, with a superficial understanding of the history—sharing their thoughts, much of it often felt either too reductive or too all-encompassing, paying lip service in a way that did hardly anything to advance the conversation, that could, perhaps, even be detrimental to the cause of peace. Much better to just amplify informed voices that actually help make sense of what’s happening, I thought—which was what I did, and still do, on Instagram Stories. Sometimes I would add a caption, but usually, I’ve amplified without comment, preferring to let the facts speak for themselves.

By the second week, however, as the body count of civilians continued to climb in Gaza under the Israeli government’s bombardment, with no end in sight, and it was clear that no one with the diplomatic muscle to stop the Netanyahu government was going to do so, I started to think differently. I started to feel like only popular international opinion supporting calls for a ceasefire could apply the necessary pressure to stem the hemorrhage of lives that are inexplicably still being lost. More importantly, voicing one’s opposition to Israel’s ongoing disproportionate attacks on civilians in Gaza, which many experts have said make up a good case for genocide (especially as several Israeli officials have unabashedly articulated their intentions), could embolden others to do the same, to push back against the suppression of free speech going on right now and the risk of being baldly, and wrongly, labeled “terrorist sympathizer” or “antisemitic”, which has affected even Jews criticizing the Israeli government—especially in Germany, where I’m writing from. The powers that be may be able to cancel a few voices, but they can’t cancel a crowd. And that crowd is growing.

Where the world couldn’t do anything about Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians because they took the world by surprise, it can, right now, do something about Israel’s bombardment of Gazan civilians. Because we are all watching in real-time as it happens, and it is clear that Israel has not been able to target Hamas militants without killing a disproportionate number of civilians, human shields or not. (I mean, if someone uses you, a civilian, as a human shield without your explicit consent, would it be fair to kill you to get to them? And if Israeli officials are making the case that they are voluntary human shields, they need to provide the evidence for it, right?) Surely, if it’s not possible to root out Hamas without killing thousands of children, then any decent, or even pragmatic, person must conclude that it can’t be done—not today? How can retribution, no matter how justified, trump the loss of such a disproportionate number of lives? Yet, it’s been more than forty days since Israel began pulverizing Gaza, and despite hundreds of thousands around the world protesting and more politicians speaking out against their governments for abstaining or voting against a “humanitarian pause” at the U.N. general assembly on October 27, the violence has only escalated and the rhetoric from Israeli officials has only become more brazen in the face of the inaction—no, the explicit backing—of Western powers.

To be persuaded by them is to believe, illogically, that there can be “no innocent civilians in Gaza”—not even children and babies apparently, because they will surely grow up to become Israeli-hating adults. Doesn’t this seem like an argument for prosecuting “thought crimes”, which can reasonably have no legitimacy and will take us down a dubious slippery slope? The same goes when they justify this line of thinking by arguing that Gazans had elected Hamas in 2006—though there are, as John Oliver points out, some qualifications to the durable truth of this statement—so they are fair game. Just turn these arguments on yourself. If you had voted for a “bad” government, for whatever reason, should you also then be punished for their crimes? Nicholas Kristof in his column, at a time when the suggestion he names was still “implicit” (it’s not anymore), wrote:

I particularly want to challenge the suggestion, more implicit than explicit, that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. People do not lose their right to life because they have odious views, and in any case, almost half of Gazans are children. Those kids in Gaza, infants included, are among the more than two million people enduring a siege and collective punishment.

As such, statements by the U.S. government to the effect that they will not put any restrictions on Netanyahu, and will instead send billions more to fund what is beginning to look more and more like Netanyahu’s personal crusade, beg disbelief. The fact that U.S. and Israeli officials continue to say that they are trying their best to prevent civilian casualties while at the same time doing the very opposite, insults our intelligence. The world sees how the Israeli officials are acting, hears what they are saying. Okay, every state—not just Israel, not just Palestine—has a right to defend itself, but can the indiscriminate killing of civilians, many of them children and babies, in good faith be described as “self-defense” or a “lawful” use of force? Hamas’ attacks on civilians, in their homes and at a music concert, cannot be justified in self-defense; neither can the Netanyahu government’s attacks on civilians who are just trying to live their lives as best as they can under siege. No cause, no matter how good, can justify targeting civilians—because, as we have seen, they are not usually the ones the aggrieved have direct quarrel with. Shouldn’t this principle apply to both sides, even as one acknowledges the asymmetries of power and suffering between them? The fact that we have seen indiscriminate force being used for supposed greater ends in history does not mean it’s okay if the same happens today.

Yes, a lot about what’s happening right now remains uncertain. So much is contested, so much “we said–they said” is being lobbed around. But what at least seems clear is the mass scale of destruction, killings, and displacement that is being wrought in Gaza, even if one were to quibble about exact numbers. And in any case, for those who feel they can’t commit to believing in any one reality because the situation is so divisive and the facts on the ground so unclear, isn’t that more reason to support calls for a ceasefire? So that various parties like international humanitarian organizations, diplomats, and journalists can be allowed to enter Gaza and begin to ascertain what’s really going on, which can’t happen when it is being carpet bombed and isolated from the rest of the world?

At the moment, we are wasting time arguing over justifications that we are not even sure are true; and in any case I would say that nothing can justify attacks on civilians—much less scorched-earth assaults as this. There are no neat answers as to what should or can come after a ceasefire, but doesn’t it seem like a reasonable first step, so further lives can be saved and so cooler heads can prevail on what should follow? The current violence only fuels the flames further and makes the world a more dangerous place—not just for Israelis and Jews and Palestinians and Muslims, but for the rest of the world.

I think some people remain hesitant to join in calls for a ceasefire because they fear they don’t know enough. But while I agree that knowledge of the historical context is necessary in terms of explaining—not justifying—both side’s positions and the crimes they’ve committed to pave the road forward with better understanding, I don’t think anyone needs to be an expert on this conflict to support a ceasefire as a bare minimum. There is no time to lose. The killing needs to stop already; it should have stopped before.

I’m persuaded that all that is required of anyone to support calls for a stop to the fighting is for them to center humanity: even if one were to just consider the latest round of hostilities without the weight of all the history—imagine if instead of Israel, we had Greenland?—surely one should, if one prioritizes human rights, come to the same conclusion? I don’t think one needs to have made up their mind about whether one group is truly “terrorist” to condemn the crimes committed by both sides or to mourn their victims. Frankly, I don’t know enough about Hamas—there is apparently a good book by Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained—but if one were to designate it as a terrorist group, shouldn’t we say the same of Netanyahu’s government by its actions? Isn’t it enough for us to know that both sides, whatever their political designations, have committed acts of terrorism? Let’s look at what their actions really say about them, not simply at whether they’re a “good” guy or “bad” guy as designated by those in power.

We must all emphatically reject the suggestion that supporting a ceasefire means in any way supporting Hamas or terrorism—a real stretch of an idea that opportunistic politicians and extremists have so dangerously encouraged. I think one could hold more sympathies with Israel than Palestine and still echo calls for a ceasefire, simply to stop the bloodshed of innocents. The Malaysian and Singaporean governments (not that I’m holding them up as particular bastions of anything), for instance, have united in their call for a ceasefire though they differ in their foreign policy with respect to both states. It’s the bare minimum.

In thinking through all this, I’ve found this Judith Butler essay, published fairly early on amid the conflict, instructive. In it, she grapples with this question:

I ask myself whether we can mourn, without qualification, for the lives lost in Israel as well as those lost in Gaza without getting bogged down in debates about relativism and equivalence.

In short, she says: condemning the attacks on civilians, committed by both sides, is not complicated. It doesn’t require you to know what has happened in the past few decades.

But ideally, she adds: one shouldn’t stop there. The complicated part should come next—or rather, the messy part; as in a sense, it’s also not so “complicated” as they tell you. Having taken that initial moral stance, she says, one could then go on to learn about the long history of circumstances that have brought all this bloodshed about, which might then push one to take on additional stances—such as being anti-apartheid, anti-ethnic cleansing, or anti-occupation—without feeling like that would threaten the position one has already taken.

As Butler writes:

I oppose the violence that Hamas has inflicted and have no alibi to offer. When I say that, I am making clear a moral and political position. I do not equivocate when I reflect on what that condemnation presupposes and implies. Anyone who joins me in this condemnation might want to ask whether moral condemnation should be based on some understanding of what is being opposed. One might say, no, I don’t need to know anything about Palestine or Hamas to know that what they have done is wrong, and to condemn it. And if one stops there, relying on contemporary media representations, without ever asking whether they are actually right and useful, whether they let the histories be told, then one accepts a certain ignorance and trusts in the framework presented. After all, we are all busy, and we cannot all be historians or sociologists. That is a possible way to think and live, and well-intentioned people do live that way. But at what cost?

Instead, she proposes:

What if our morality and our politics did not end with the act of condemnation?

And later goes on to say:

It need not threaten our moral positions to take some time to learn about the history of colonial violence and to examine the language, narratives and frameworks now operating to report and explain—and interpret in advance—what is happening in this region. That kind of knowledge is critical, but not for the purposes of rationalising existing violence or authorising further violence. Its aim is to furnish a truer understanding of the situation than an uncontested framing of the present alone can provide. Indeed, there may be further positions of moral opposition to add to the ones we have already accepted, including an opposition to military and police violence saturating Palestinian lives in the region, taking away their rights to mourn, to know and express their outrage and solidarity, and to find their own way towards a future of freedom.

As Israel continues to bombard Gaza, I’ve been watching media interviews on the situation with some frustration. It would seem that for many people, mourning the lives lost on both sides or condemning the attacks on civilians committed by both sides is tantamount to “bothsiding”, or being “neutral”. The Israeli writer Edgar Keret told the New York Times:

But I think that the most attacked posts on the internet are those of people saying, “Oh, my god, I see people dying in Israel and I see people dying in Palestine, and it breaks my heart.” If you put up a post like that, they will rip you to pieces from both sides. And I’m saying that, in this sense, I do feel some kind of deterioration, a human deterioration.

It’s been startling to see how some supportive of Israel can decry Hamas for killing civilians on October 7, but fail to similarly decry the Netanyahu government for its equally indiscriminate killings of civilians, and in far greater numbers. As for those whose sympathies lie more with Palestine, I think many do hold that moral consistency; but pushed by many a pugnacious American news anchor to first condemn Hamas before they are allowed to even speak their minds—“to audition for empathy and compassion”, as Palestinian-American writer, Hala Alyan put it—one can understand how they might be put on the defensive and feel reluctant to play into the media’s hands, to give an inch at all to Israeli grievances when they have the world’s war machines behind them, when Palestinian grievances and suffering need more airtime as a counterweight.

Or perhaps the problem is in the imprecision of what they are being asked to condemn: is it Hamas as a whole, or is it the attacks it made on civilians on October 7? One might ask: Is there a difference? For Jeremy Corbyn, there seems to be: he condemned Hamas’ attacks but refrained from condemning Hamas itself. I puzzled over this at first, but then thought: perhaps he’s thinking that Hamas may still need to be negotiated with, so nothing can be gained from condemning them wholly as a “terrorist” group? I’m speculating, trying to make sense of what people say and don’t say, at a time when words no longer just mean what they mean. But his refusal reminded me of how former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy made a comparison between Hamas and the Irish Republican Army—pointing out that the latter, despite their use of violent tactics, had eventually to be negotiated with (no matter how unsavory the thought), so that a peace deal could be reached in Northern Ireland.

Also, I don’t think that it is productive for the media to goad Palestinians themselves who have lost tens of family members in Israel’s airstrikes to first condemn Hamas before they are allowed to describe their suffering, which they must feel falls on deaf ears. I think it would be understandable if they’re not feeling too generous under the circumstances. Also, might it not endanger Palestinians for journalists to ask them to publicly condemn Hamas—if Hamas is, indeed as the West says, a murderous outfit that could come for them and their families? Such condemnations are better asked of politicians, historians, activists, or third parties like you and me, with no actual skin in what’s happening. I think Zack Beauchamp makes a persuasive point that the better role for outsiders is to help foster the belief in the possibility of the co-existence of both sides on the same land, whatever form that may take.

In the same vein, Edgar Keret, in the aforementioned interview, also spoke against the tendency to divide popular support into two camps, as if this were a team sport:

I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times a long time ago about how I don’t like the terms “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestinian.” Because when you speak to somebody and he says that he’s pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, then it doesn’t matter what argument you’re going to give, he’s going to stay in the same opinion.

It’s like, being “pro-Israeli,” are you pro-children dying in Gaza from bombing? The idea is that reality is complex, and, for me, the primal responsibility is a human one.

And when I see people watching the horrible tragedy that is happening here as if it were a Super Bowl of victimhood, in which you support one team and really don’t care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see other pain.

Similarly, I’ve found it unhelpful when the authorities characterize a protest in advance as “pro-Palestine” or “pro-Israel”—especially here in Germany where they are more likely to prohibit the former and when it is often equated to sympathising with Hamas or supporting terrorism—because that could scare away people who simply support a ceasefire. Even if one rightly comes to the conclusion that Israel has been the greater offender in all this and Palestinians the greater victims, and supports an end to the Israeli government’s occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, I think professing to simply be “pro-” one side or the other is too simplistic, because there are likely aspects of both sides one can agree or disagree with. Israel and its allies committed the “original sin” in 1948 when it forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to establish Israel as a state, but in the intervening years, perhaps both sides—and their successive, different governments—bear some, even if unequal, responsibility for scuttling attempts at peace or for exacerbating the violence? As a non-expert in this (I’m still reading and learning), I’m keeping the question open in my mind. As with so many things gone wrong in our world, one can’t always turn back the clock to its root cause (some would also disagree on what the root cause is) to return everything to what it was—because it’s true that may create new injustices, or exchange one victim for another. At the same time, at least some turning back of the clock seems necessary in this case? Some reparations will need to be made, some justice will need to be done, which may require compromise from both sides?

This can be a hard pill to swallow, considering that one side seems, on the face of it, very much more the perpetrator—supported by the mightiest countries of the world—than the other. Yet, given everything that has already happened over the decades, Raja Shehadeh, in the same book I quoted from earlier, wrote that at the same time that Israelis must accept co-existence with Palestinians, Palestinians too must do the same:

What we should seek is not the destruction of Israeli society, but ways to forge a new relationship that would make it possible for both of us to have a full life based on justice and equality in this beautiful but tortured land which we share, for both of us—Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews—live here.

On such a highly divisive and emotional matter, it feels important to be consistent in how we respond to violations of human rights, whoever commits them or suffers from them. I understand that there is a reluctance among some to amplify any suffering of Israelis, because they have the world’s big powers behind them—support David, not Goliath, as a friend put it. And I do get that: it’s legitimate that we highlight what we feel is not highlighted. But I think we should still be ready to condemn both sides and sympathize with both sides when the facts as they are revealed call for it—if only to make the point that one need not obscure the other’s humanity to magnify one’s own. It seems self-evident, yet frequently forgotten amid the present divisiveness, to say that a group’s government doesn’t represent the entirety of its people, to say that we should be trying to see the humanity in both sides to salvage any bit of common ground. Instead of being “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine”, what about being pro-human rights instead? The people who really suffer in all this are civilians, on both sides.

And yet, and yet—having said all that, what exactly is the point of all these condemnations? What do they actually achieve? Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former Finance Minister, thinks “condemning” only makes things worse:

Why did I not take the easier route of, on the one hand, condemning Hamas and, on the other, championing the rights of Palestinians? Because I wanted to make the point that it is we, Europeans and Americans, who must be condemned. Because it is we, Europeans and Americans, who, with our patronisingly ritual moralistic condemnations (whether one-sided or equidistant), have been making Peace impossible in Israel-Palestine.

As someone who uses words to make sense of the world and to express myself, I’ve been so disheartened to watch how the “discourse” has unfolded in response to the current events. Language has become a minefield, and no matter how rational and empathetic you think you’re being, carefully laying out your arguments for the position you’re taking, someone can still completely disregard your intentions and wilfully misunderstand you. It feels like we can no longer communicate reasonably and expect to be reasonably understood. What then, is the point of words?

There seems to be a tendency to find fault with any statement—even one that, as a whole, say, supports a ceasefire, followed by an end to the violation of Palestinian human rights. Maybe the statement starts by condemning Hamas’ October 7 attacks, therefore insufficiently recognizing the context in which they took place; maybe it doesn’t start out condemning Hamas’ October 7 attacks, therefore insufficiently recognizing their savagery. It feels like this makes allyship tricky when what’s needed right now is for us to emphasize our common ground so we can change the terrible status quo. “Pro-Palestine” protesters are by no means monoliths, but broadly, they support a ceasefire to save lives. And what we need immediately is to save lives, over winning any argument.

I’ve also been trying to resist the feeling that I shouldn’t share a particular post on social media unless I can stand behind all of it, because I think you can take something important from one perspective and not agree with another part of it, and that doesn’t invalidate the whole perspective. Simply, I share things that help me, in whatever little way, make sense of what’s happening. I often post things because I find something in it that makes me wonder, Oh, what else is there to this detail?—that maybe there is something else, or another way of seeing, I haven’t considered. And I feel if we are doing it right, each new thing you read opens up another question, another connection, that adds to the bigger puzzle you’re piecing together. But when you look at social media, it can feel like everybody just wants to “teach” somebody something, everybody just wants to be told, unequivocally, how to think about a situation—and, if possible, all in one text. What happened to fact-gathering and coming to our own views of the world?

In such a climate, it’s easy to be afraid to express yourself, to err on the side of remaining silent, where you can’t be attacked. Because of this, I want to close this letter with some words from Gabor Maté, a Holocaust survivor who recently said in an interview with his daughter something that I think is worth repeating—so that we are not scared away from trying to figure out for ourselves what’s true and reasonably speaking our minds, so that we resist the urge to put words into each others’ mouths simply to score a point:

I’m responsible for what I say, I’m responsible for how I say it. I’m not responsible for how people hear it and I’m not responsible for how people interpret it—that’s on each and every one of us.

So let’s all speak with as much information as we can reasonably gather, let’s all speak with as much compassion for everybody as we can possibly muster… But let’s be responsible for not just how we speak, but also how we listen.

I’ve realized that increasingly, in the past few years, I’ve found myself qualifying, and qualifying again, things I say, to make sure they can’t be interpreted in a way I don’t intend. That’s just part of what it means to be a good communicator in our present media environment of frequent context collapse, I thought, and if someone misunderstands me, then it’s partly my fault. But that’s an impossible standard to hold oneself to, considering the very different minds one’s words travel through. So I’ve found a lot of comfort in this passage, in a way that goes beyond this current crisis. I hope it bolsters you too.

I leave you with:

In solidarity,
E.