Category: Looking Back
Looking Back: On Returning Home
May you laugh, may you laugh, like hail falling on a tin roof, may you laugh.
Looking Back: Korean Homesick Blues
Where’s my passport? I need it to reclaim my fingerprints that they’ve sequestered at the immigration office so I wouldn’t smudge the windows that they’ve polished to keep me out.
Looking Back: The Deepest Need For Maps
Without a tether, without an anchor to your bed back home. You move. You have no need for memories. You have the deepest need for maps.
Looking Back: Tokyo, Japan
In Tokyo’s veiny dusk vapor trails become rope in the fingers of my mind, criss-cross the darkening sky; a cat’s cradle of water droplets connects continents thousands of miles distant…
Looking Back: Elizabeth J Cottages, Bonavista
The cottage, shot through with sun, beckons us awake. Where there was one are now two icebergs—the night having grown a twin, imperceptibly spinning in the light gravity of morning.
Looking Back: Tiananmen Square
As I sit in Tian’anmen Square eating a Big Mac and drinking a Coke over the nucleus of a country’s rupture, I enter the world as a tourist…
Looking Back: Lumpinee Boxing Stadium
There is no spectacle in Bangkok like the boxers—their slick bodies like blown glass fresh from an oven.
Looking Back: Paharganj Street
Her eyes, like collapsed suns, lulled me into their orbit, and I imagined some beauty in the event…
Looking Back: Beras Terbakar
During the Siamese invasion of Langkawi in 1821 the Chieftain of Langkawi ordered the granary to be burnt in order to starve the enemy.
Looking Back: Langkawi
Where the manicured fingers of the beach fan out across the asphalt, we tourists sing our cicada songs—seventeen years in the dark earth of our jobs.
Looking Back: Notre Dame, Saigon
On the steps of Notre Dame Cathedral, where Saigon’s ceaseless traffic flows, preternaturally—a murder of a million crows—I withdraw into the shadow of a high-rise.
Looking Back: Bonavista Iceberg
The remnants of icebergs punctuate the horizon. Lit from below by the morning sun, black-winged gulls wheel in the morning.
Looking Back: Night Train To Varanasi
On the platform lanterns gather back the night with thin fingers of light and young girls pass with slow step among the benches selling cigarettes and old coins.
Looking Back: Route 13, Northern Laos
Only the thin grey scar of Route 13 breaks the rolling landscape of jungle and sky. The scene was humbling, immeasurably majestic…
Looking Back: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
In an old high school in the middle of Phnom Penh stand the remains of S-21, coloured delicately in moss and mildew.
Looking Back: Cambodia
Phnom Penh is spill of whitewashed buildings heaped together on the shore of the Mekong like bones bleaching in the sun…
Looking Back: Saigon
Delightful and disconcerting, Saigon is Vietnam on amphetamine. The ante’s always up in this city: where Hanoi slows down and shutters its windows, Saigon is just getting warmed up.
Looking Back: Luang Prabang
At dusk, motorbikes buzz lazily through dirt avenues, lit from above by fluorescent bulbs that flicker onto the street through insistent moths
Looking Back: Hanoi
Sitting at the vortex of this carousel, I weave butterfly nets of words with which I chase down the barefoot beauty of the women curling through traffic.
Looking Back: Royal Lao Classical Dancers
Beautiful and remote, the Lao Royal Dancers moved sedately across the floor of the Royal Palace Hall.
