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 […]
Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929 ∆ A simulacrum is a likeness, image or effigy; bearing a superficial similarity to its original, it is a placeholder or sign for the real thing, a representation rather than a replication. The instrumental suffix -crum signifies something which might be used in a simulation, […]