---

ALK: The funny thing is that it hardly felt like a voice much older than myself. When writing, I often feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience in which I’m as ageless, sexless, classless, raceless as I can ever humanly get. I don’t mean this in an esoteric or flippant sense. I mean that I have to forget myself so I can be fully committed to understanding my character’s motivations in a way that isn’t facile or boxed in. 
​
What one often finds, in real life as well as fictive life, is that what motivates you or another person or a story character is something that isn’t as circumscribed by external identity markers as one might have originally presumed. Yes, these are crucial for a writer to study, but only as parameters to imagine or perform within. They also have to be tossed out, so that we can find the invisible particularities that are secret and internal.
​
Read "A Secret Cut in History", ALK as interviewed by BOMB Magazine.

---

ALK: I think the question about obligations and origins is one that needs to be reconsidered in our globalized, wired age: What are origins, in the first place? So often this gets conflated as place of birth, or color of skin, but what does that really mean today? For example, I might be racially read as Chinese, but what does that even mean in my middle-class, Anglophone context, where my first language is English, and I grew up reading Virginia Woolf? The assumptions that we might make are natural, but they’re also limited by a failure of imagination. 

​Read "Imagining the Secret Lives of Old Movie Stars", ALK as interviewed by Electric Literature.

---

On the last day of 2002, we went to Mad Monks, a lesbian club flanking the Singapore River. It doesn’t exist anymore. The bouncer was a butch in her thirties. I was stunned: There are old lesbians in Singapore? Patently underaged, we were told to run out the back in the event of a police raid. Inside, there were adult butches in binders dirty dancing with adult ah lians in halter tops. Online anglophone definitions of this Hokkien slang word suggest a “skimpily dressed girl gangster with tattoos,” an “unsophisticated hillbilly seen in unsavory places,” a “distasteful (Singaporean Chinese) female who speaks bad English, is lowly educated, crude, loud, foulmouthed,” but this does nothing to capture the demotic reverence encoded in the term, which is not half as pejorative as it sounds: the ah lian is always hot, sassy, and ready to hold her own in a fight. Wow, I smirked to myself, watching them dance. It was so not a phase. At midnight, I wanted to call Maidina, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to. Her curfew was nine o’clock. Happy New Year to me. My love had no future, nor any end in sight. My friends were having a ball on the dance floor. Standing in line for the bathroom, I started to cry. A tall girl in a long-sleeved shirt approached me. She asked for my number.
​
“Hi,” I said. “I’m crying.”

​​Read "Not Gonna Get Us", a personal essay on t.A.t.U, sports, ah lians, broken promises, growing up queer in Singapore and falling in love with a Uighur female soccer player in Shanghai on The Paris Review Daily.

---

Now standing in line at Ladurée, sunlight streaming through tall windows under the champagne glow of crystal chandeliers, pointing out rose, lychee, and pistachio bonbons to fill a celadon-green gift box finished with a powder-pink ribbon, nodding while saying to the shopgirl, Une boîte de douze: it all made her feel so – fine. You could let yourself go in an ugly little town. A beautiful place made silent demands on your person in no uncertain terms, even as it gave nothing of itself back to you. What Bébé was enthralled by wasn’t Paris. It was only the person she liked to think she could have been here.
​
Read "The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing Circa 1989" an excerpt from Delayed Rays of A Star on Granta.