Turning another page — etc.
The digest: including postcards from Singapore + an old letter about travelling alone as a woman + readings + joy, wherever it is found.
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
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...
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...
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.
extremely thorough!