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 launch events. For...

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 lotus flowers,...

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 just unwilled...