My grandmother had a lifelong association with water. She was also twice a refugee, or what would now be called an illegal immigrant. My...

Chanukah in the Maghain Aboth, Singapore I just spent Shabbat Chanukah – the Saturday over the Jewish Festival of Lights – in the...

Can we eat our way back to our childhoods? There’s a reason why Marcel Proust’s seven-volume memoir-novel kicks off its epic journey down...

Honorable Mention for the 2021 Curt Johnson Prose Award (Nonfiction). Excerpt. Please visit december for full essay. All rights reserved...

The camphorwood chest is indubitably my mother’s archive. It is dominated by her objects, as our growing-up was overwhelmed by her family...

Last night’s episode of The Singapore Grip showed the luckier protagonists boarding the Felix Roussel, Bombay-bound, in a bid to escape...

Only when I opened the camphorwood chest and really started to delve into my mother's past did I discover that she had been a model in...

Why did last night’s episode of The Singapore Grip (Christopher Hampton, ITV) spend so long – as does the eponymous novel by JG Farrell...

Whenever the chest is opened, the scent of camphor pulls me into another world. This is the past of my grandfather: a spice-trading...

For as long as I can remember, the camphorwood chest has been the family archive. Its contents are scattered across individuals, history,...

(A recipe-poem. I really did make this.) Gather windfall fruit from unloved park Detach red chillies from absent girlfriend’s plant...