For my ex (an unforgiving poem)

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Vacuum

e-bookIn 2013, there were 319,325 migrant workers in Hong Kong. About half were Indonesian and nearly all were women. Recruitment and placement agencies, in...

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FictionIt was a loud dinner. Everything was loud. The murmuring soundtrack of free jazz seemed to emphasise laughs and guffaws. He grew drunker and drunker and toyed with his food, which no one even noticed. Normally, he would wolf down everything they cooked, but he twisted his fork in the spaghetti and just kept twisting. As he was on serving duty, he cleared it up without anyone even registering he’d barely taken a bite.

The octopus within

Non-fictionI’ve now watched quite a few doctors sketch my thyroid on office pads, something they all seem to love to do, relishing that butterfly shape, the two spreading wings. They do shade-hatching on the left or right lobe, colour in a dark circle to represent the tumour and draw four little dots for the parathyroid glands. I have started to look forward to this moment when a medical specialist transforms suddenly into an artist, taking pride in their drawing, picking up a special pen with a thin black nib, concentrating on making this invisible organ real to me. They are maybe unaware that through their own idiosyncratic drawing styles, they become instantly more interesting as people. They hand over the piece of paper and explain the next steps, and I take their drawings home, magnet them to the fridge beside the more exuberant pictures done by my kids, start making the necessary calls, and turn up on time to the next appointment, curious as a child in kindergarten. Which is how I first learnt that there is an octopus within.

Getting attached

IntroductionMore than fifty years after Larkin lamented the emotional inadequacy of generations past, we’ve equipped ourselves with an extensive vocabulary with which to characterise, analyse and diagnose our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the places, objects and ideas that shape our sense of who we are and who we wish to become. Yet still we face the same old set of conundrums: from parasocial connections and fractious family politics to the solace we seek in non-human entities, our myriad attachments continue to offer us comfort and complication in equal measure.