When Dawan was born, Great Aunt Kung looked at her and said, ‘She is my successor. She has the gift.’ In her mother’s Cambodian culture, there must always be a ghost-keeper in the family. Blessed or cursed with second sight, the ghost keeper’s role was to perform rituals and exorcisms, appease spirits and tell fortunes […]
Sometime during the Eocene Era, India collided into Asia, hurling the Himalayas high into the sky, lifting up the Tibetan plateau, and giving birth to an unruly spirit called monsoon. Fifty million years later, I arrived exhausted in Bangkok, the City of Angels. I was met at the airport by a muscular white man […]
Apsara was returning from the market, walking to the end of the street where the motorcycle taxis wait, when she heard crying. Deep, heart-broken sobbing, coming from somewhere nearby. Curious, she turned into a side street. She was going in the right direction, though now, strangely, the crying sounded further away. The street had a […]
HANGING WITH THE HANGETSU Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929 “Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it […]