Hi dear readers, long time no see! Realize I've broken my blogging streak for the first time in years — June whizzed past so fast I barely had time to reflect amid the journalism grind. But now that we're past midpoint of my internship, it's a good time to pop on here for some long-overdue … Continue reading Interning at Bloomberg News Pt. 1
Category: Writing
Hong Kong International Literary Festival: Asian debut voices, Jhumpa Lahiri on linguistic exile, the politics of memory
Spent a couple of days listening to writers and journalists speak virtually on topics ranging from billenials (billionaire millennials) to translating oneself to China's navigation of collective historical traumas. I've jotted down some notes. ⬇️ First off, THANK YOU to the folks at Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF) for gifting me with a media … Continue reading Hong Kong International Literary Festival: Asian debut voices, Jhumpa Lahiri on linguistic exile, the politics of memory
SWF 2020: 刘慈欣谈科学与幻想的无限可能
Back in my sophomore year, for a class on global fictions, I read Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem and even ended up writing a paper on it: Reimagining Communities: Hospitality in The Reluctant Fundamentalist vs. The Three-Body Problem. That was my first foray into hard sci-fi. Quite stunning. Yesterday, at noon, I watched him speak at the … Continue reading SWF 2020: 刘慈欣谈科学与幻想的无限可能
SWF 2020: Zadie Smith’s Intimations
Singapore Writers Festival 2020 is happening from now till 8 Nov. 🎉Read my overview of the festival here. This is my first time hearing Zadie Smith's voice and she is just as sharp as she is on the page. Parts of what she says resonate so much it feels like she is stapling words into … Continue reading SWF 2020: Zadie Smith’s Intimations
[Writing] Snippets from old drafts
中秋快乐～ Happy Mid-Autumn, my loves! 🌕🥮🎑 *** Ok, now some writing ramblings: My current novel draft is titled V6. The word count clocks in at slightly over 52,000. Today, I went back to read V2 and V3—it kind of shocked me how they present a drastically different novel altogether from my current draft (where are … Continue reading [Writing] Snippets from old drafts
July things
July is... staying indoors all month (except for the momentous excursion outdoors to the polling station on July 10). My hermit life continues with my mom — neither of us have taken a step out of the house for months. Life meanders: the whole morning wrapped in blankets, my mom's home-cooked lunch right after light … Continue reading July things
[Writing Updates] June 六月
整个六月都在室内度过，三点一线的生活：床，餐桌，还有皮沙发。我倚着餐桌打瞌睡，在床上看小说，在皮沙发上码字和偷吃零食。窗外有烈阳，有蓬勃生长的仙人掌，依山（很矮的武吉知马山）傍水（游泳池嘻嘻）。 这个月至少读了十本小说。我流着汗，也流着眼泪，滴答在屏幕上，流成故事。 📚 The whole of June happens at home, facing rolling green hills. A defence camp hidden somewhere inside. Every day, I write (though you can easily spot some bad days 😓). In June, I've written a total of 20,498 words. I conceived the idea for IDOL last summer in New York and started … Continue reading [Writing Updates] June 六月
[Story] Third Space
Author's Note: 4 photos, 4 vignettes! I've typed the scenes out just the way they entered my head when these images first came alive, each with their own stories. The title draws inspiration from Prof Homi K. Bhabha's concept of the third space — disjunctive, hybrid, in-between spaces beyond borders that make ambivalent structures we … Continue reading [Story] Third Space
[Story] Remembering Jamal Khashoggi
Author's Note: Wrote this story in March. Today marks one year since the gruesome murder (and dismemberment) of Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. One morning before class, on a misty pink spring morning, I went on Twitter for the first time in forever. Behold then: a trailer for CNN's "Saudi Arabia: Kingdom of Secrets." The video automatically … Continue reading [Story] Remembering Jamal Khashoggi
Confession: “I Was Born A Writer”
I’m not sure that Morocco or France are my countries... No, my country is language. My country is a library. Have you ever felt utterly exhilarated just listening to someone talk? I was in a conference room somewhere in the basement of the Center for European Studies. Leila Slimani was in conversation with my Advanced Fiction … Continue reading Confession: “I Was Born A Writer”
[Story] Dog Days Are Over
Author's Note: Found this buried in my drafts from 2018. Just a random little story on the impressionistic, surreal flicker of a college encounter between a girl and a boy (and dogs). She met him in the dorm room with a slanted ceiling. It was a mixer of about fifty people, with a makeshift bar … Continue reading [Story] Dog Days Are Over
April is tough. And brilliant. ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ
Easter Egg: Screenplay at the end of the post. 🥚✨ ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪ 🌏 Harvard China Forum 💡 April 12th to 14th, Harvard College China Forum happened. Remember last year when I was the Programming Associate in charge of the Culture Panel (ft. Fang Wenshan 💕)? As the Programming Chair this year, I oversaw how my amazing team … Continue reading April is tough. And brilliant. ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ
[Valentine’s Day Short Story] April, I Arrive on The Shores of Your Love
Author's Note: Here's the first short story I wrote in college. It's from 2017. I workshopped it in the first creative writing workshop I took at Harvard — thank you to Claire Messud and everyone else who gave me their precious feedback. The writing might be kitschy at parts and the style is also rather … Continue reading [Valentine’s Day Short Story] April, I Arrive on The Shores of Your Love
[Story] The Plato Act
Author's Note: Hello loves, I'm currently in the midst of my final papers (two down, one more to go!) — here's the creative, futuristic piece that I submitted as my final paper yesterday for my History & Literature seminar on Speculative Fictions. The central conceit might seem speculative to some of you, might be eerily familiar to others. … Continue reading [Story] The Plato Act
I declared my concentration!
BLACK SCREEN. FADE IN. INT. DORM ROOM - NIGHT Selina (20, Singaporean-Chinese) has both hands on the Mac keyboard. She is leaning forward expectantly before a desk piled high with dog-eared books, loose sheets of paper and thin notebooks with mythical, cartoonish covers. Cue music: something whimsical like Hisaishi's Nausicaä Requiem! something dramatically perching on … Continue reading I declared my concentration!
[Story] The Writer
Author's Note: This short story was submitted as the final paper for a class last semester. The protagonist of this story is the act of writing itself. I am fascinated by the idea of the separation of the writer and the person into two selves, of the tension existing within the diasporic writer. Set in … Continue reading [Story] The Writer
[Story] Hills
She isn't sure what it is, the colors—Supreme red, the blocky black letters of Balenciaga, the wild marbled swirls of Dries Van Noten—sharpening like psychedelic blotches, the strap on her shoulder suddenly prickly and leaden, an indignant discomfiture that rises like a gorge in her throat until she furrows her brows and realizes with a … Continue reading [Story] Hills
[Story] 7-Eleven: A Summertime Romance?
When she trudges home that night, it’s forty minutes later, after two transits and twelve stations. She is about to turn left, head down the bridge, cross the crossing under a flickering street lamp and follow that path she has walked for twenty-one days when she notices the 7-Eleven store. Undimmed, the fluorescent white from … Continue reading [Story] 7-Eleven: A Summertime Romance?
Quirky Snippets of An Untold April
I guess there's an untold side to every story. He handed me a Whole Foods bag. I took a peek and saw a glass bottle of red wine vinaigrette resting against some other random-shaped items. "There're some salt, olive oil, and chili," he said, "and chocolates." "Okay, I don't cook, but thank you, Prof." I was … Continue reading Quirky Snippets of An Untold April
[Story] Why Believe in Fortune Cookies
She works in a dingy pseudo-Chinese restaurant that dons several hats: a bar, a lounge, and a dance hall harkening back to the eighties. The interior is soaked in shades of reddish-brown timber. An earthy scent weighs on the entire ambiance—the glimmer from the gilded Buddhas and the gaudy frescoes gives it the air of a … Continue reading [Story] Why Believe in Fortune Cookies
[Story] On Black Friday Morning, in a Sun-lit Café
BLACK FRIDAY — 10:40AM, Friday She sits there, her heart a solid thudding of the metronome, an old man's pace. The café is a startling white, clean like a repurposed showroom. The rows of baked goods behind the open-air counter are a dash of brown-gold, like yolk nestled in egg-white. Patterns crawl across its interior; … Continue reading [Story] On Black Friday Morning, in a Sun-lit Café
My Vipassana Meditation Retreat: 10 days of absolute silence, veggies & no technology
The word Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self-purification by self-observation. One begins by observing the natural breath to concentrate the mind. With a sharpened awareness one proceeds to observe the changing nature of body and mind and experiences the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness. The Code … Continue reading My Vipassana Meditation Retreat: 10 days of absolute silence, veggies & no technology
The Modern Child
Disclaimer: this is a piece of satire (not autobiographical!), but then again definitely all art imitates life. The structure is a parody of Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, which depicts a very different world of expectations -- simmering beneath the mother's long string of admonishments and words of advice to a daughter are the layered themes of … Continue reading The Modern Child
Bali: opening to you, the heart of life
This...unsettles you, from your ordinary, rooted world. I was in the land of photogenic temples -- places of worship perching atop seaside cliffs, nestled in misty mountains, carved within caves, and residing around every bend in rural villages. There was more to Bali than temples, of course -- soaked green carpets of rice terraces, beer-bottle thronging beaches, and museums … Continue reading Bali: opening to you, the heart of life
[Story] Macau: Casino Lights Dancing
It felt like the universe had conspired in magnanimity to lay out before me all the stars it had in its pouch. There's a boy seated next to me at the roulette. It's a round-table congregation of tense, weeping or energetic men (some slightly crazy-eyed); this boy who seems unperturbed by it all; and then there's me, … Continue reading [Story] Macau: Casino Lights Dancing
Selina Xu 