A short photo walk exploring the flora & fauna of Lorong Halus — Do you ever just look at leaves and go ‘huehue’? There are all kinds of leaves…

A very brief overview of how different disciplines explain the formation of identity — Who defines who we are? Are we a constructed amalgamation of outside influences, or do we have the autonomy to define ourselves? Is there even a dichotomy to be made here? Could we not be both? In this piece, I explore, just very very briefly, how discourses in disciplines have…

Why communities need to build and contest their own narratives — According to Hong and Huang (2008), history is not dead. It is constructed and reconstructed, about the past but for the present. By presenting a single narrative, we risk forgetting others and being blinded to the hegemonic power that governments and its institutions hold. …

Are the bissu really the bastions many claim them to be? — With a wave of legislation legalizing same-sex marriages, both in the West and in Asia [1][2][3][4], many queer Southeast Asians have been responding by resurfacing pre-colonial practices to emphasize their sexual diversity too [5][6]. One of the groups which have been frequently raised as bastions of sexual diversity is the…

“就不能写中文名字啊?” (You cannot write your name in Mandarin?) “忘了嘛.” (I have forgotten.) — Upon entering the cinema to catch Anthony Chen’s “Wet Season” last Monday, one fact immediately hit me: the cinema was filled with old people. I kind of understood why. Who, after all, wanted to watch a Singaporean film on a sleepy weekday afternoon? Especially when there were so many other…

“Power from unearned can look like strength when it is, in fact, permission to escape or to dominate.” — Peggy Mcintosh — In the past week, I have had the privilege of attending a talk organized by the Asia Research Institute, of which quite a large proportion of the talk had been dedicated to the discussion of racial privilege. There was a great moment of irony when the moderator of that session…

The longlasting impact of ‘Jaws’ and what mental health advocacy can glean from it — More than 40 years after the release of this Steven Spielberg classic, 51% of Americans are still terrified of sharks. This is despite attempts to quell the fear of sharks time and time and time again. In that same time, both sport and commercial fishing of sharks spiked. …

The romantic allure of the exotic ‘other’ — In class this week, we talked about tourism and its many impacts. One of the most interesting groups we read about were the Akha people. They are one of the most heavily promoted ethnic communities in the eyes of tourism media. A quick Google search will lead you to a…

Hope is a powerful thing, but even greater than that is denial — The first time I did a double take was when the events of the Charlottesville shooting had just unfolded. There I was writing an essay when a classmate of mine who’d been scrolling through Twitter suddenly raised, “Oh my god, did you hear about the shooting?” “Yeah, I saw it…