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Music plays such a significant role in my mother's family that I even considered incorporating a musical element into the title. Our family includes a few renowned singers, such as Haron Elias from the 1920s-30s and Shirley Nair from the 1950s. For them, music was a means to preserve cultural identity while also engaging with diverse audiences, primarily in Singapore, bridging cultural differences. When the first edition of my book was released in 2024, there were several la

My grandmother had a lifelong association with water. She was also twice a refugee, or what would now be called an illegal immigrant. My grandmother Sim Koh-wei was just days old when she was laid in a basket by the side of the Han Jiang, close to where this river meets the South China Sea. A fisherman-farmer found her. It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, I know, but this most watery, fennish part of China straddles worlds. Life is amphibious here. Lotus roots and l

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 memory lane with the narrator eating a madeleine, a French cake, dipped in lime-infused tea. For many of us, food is our most sensuous route to recover lost time. The taste of a beloved childhood dish can open the floodgates of memory, as it does for Proust. Proust calls this trigger ‘mémoire involontaire.’ It’s a phrase that implies not ju

Chanukah in the Maghain Aboth, Singapore I just spent Shabbat Chanukah – the Saturday over the Jewish Festival of Lights – in the synagogue of my ancestors, in Singapore. I’d come as a child when I visited Singapore with my mother, but I’d not done this for decades. After many years in ‘shuls’ in Britain – even those with a largely Sephardi congregation – being part of a service here was an auditory immersion in the music of my ancestors’ Middle Eastern past. And I realise ho

Honorable Mention for the 2021 Curt Johnson  Prose Award (Nonfiction). Excerpt.   Please visit december  for full essay. All rights reserved © december   magazine. Shema: hear. Listen to the tape I write about below here . I clunk a tape that’s half a century old into my throwback audiocassette player. Suddenly, the sounds of my mother’s family past are all around me. I’m back in the flat on Short Street in Singapore. Heat radiates through the recording. And I feel connected.

The camphorwood chest is indubitably my mother’s archive. It is dominated by her objects, as our growing-up was overwhelmed by her family stories. My father didn’t get an ear-in, so to speak. His silence around his past wasn’t helped by the fact that he was away so much, with his career service in the British Army. So I was completely surprised to discover in the chest an item that is exclusively his, one that fills in a missing part of his life before he met my mother. The d

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 Singapore. It was something she had kept very quiet over the years. And yet the 'New Look' ultra-romantic fashions of the '50s that she modelled, which promised to transport women from their daily humdrum into a magical world, were a launching pad for my mother's journey. In her letters to my father my mother mentions that she was taking

Last night’s episode of The Singapore Grip  showed the luckier protagonists boarding the Felix Roussel, Bombay-bound, in a bid to escape the Japanese bombardment and imminent invasion of Singapore. The Felix Roussel is the very ship my mother took, three years old, with her family, on their way to a refugee camp in Bombay. The Felix Roussel was the very last ship to make it out of Singapore, and it only just did so. The story is remarkable not only for how the Felix Roussel

For as long as I can remember, the camphorwood chest has been the family archive. Its contents are scattered across individuals, history, and geography. Unpacking the chest allows me to reanimate the lives of these loving strangers.   My parents’ letters, from their whirlwind courtship in Singapore -- cross-cultural lovers, at the tail end of the British Empire in the Far East. My father’s rain-stained diary, from the Malayan Emergency: one of the last of the Asian colonial