NEW
Not Gonna Get Us | The Paris Review Daily
The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing Circa 1989 | Granta (excerpt from Delayed Rays of A Star)

Short Fiction
The Sexual Potential of the Gallery | e-flux: art-agenda
2.55 - CHANEL Short Stories | Harper's Bazaar
Last Night I Dreamt That Harry Was In Love With Me | Berfrois 
Why Do Chinese People Have Slanted Eyes? | Asymptote 
The Ballad of Arlene & Nelly | Asia Literary Review 

Translation
The Last Ten Entries of Ren Hang's Depression Diary | Guernica
Ren Hang's Depression Diary in "Ai Wei Wei Reflects on the
​Sadness of Ren Hang's Photographs" | TIME Magazine
​Chapter 2 of Su Qing's "Ten Years of Marriage" | Asymptote 
Chapter 1 of Su Qing's "Ten Years of Marriage" | PEN America Translation Series

Listen to Amanda read the original text of "Ten Years of Marriage" Chapter 2
in uncharacteristically demure Mandarin:

​Non-fiction
If This Is Home, Truly, It Should Look Like Home | Sunday Times
Stayin' Alive (in the face of hostile architecture) | The Straits Times
On the 50th Anniversary of Singapore’s Independence | Guernica
To Singapore, With Love: 'If you care too much about Singapore
​first it breaks your spirit, then it breaks your heart' | Manifesta #18

Interviews
A Secret Cut in History | BOMB Magazine
​Imagining the Secret Lives of Old Movie Stars | Electric Literature

​Events
Transition & Change: conversation with Min Jin Lee, Nuril Basri, Claudia Kaiser, Frankfurt Book Fair, Oct 2018
"Dreaming of deterritorialization whilst shopping at Urban Outfitters", Asian American Cultural Center, Yale, Apr 2018
PEN America World Voices Festival, Apr 2018
Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, Sept 2017
"Resisting speechlessness - on feminism and sexuality in times of shrinking spaces", Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin, Sept 2017
"Revolt, she said", Internationaler Literaturpreis, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Jul 2017
Fondation Jan Michalski, Geneva, Jun 2017
Georgetown Literary Festival, Penang, Nov 2016
Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, Bali, Oct 2016
"Five Absolutely Ravishing Women of Assorted Extraction Lost in the Shifting Sands of the Global South", World Literature Symposium, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Jan 2016

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​AV

No One Wants To Dance 

was produced by Amanda Lee Koe for the Asian Film Archive's State of Motion: Through Stranger Eyes exhibition tour as a lo-fi / guerrilla / anachronistic / site-specific response to Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack (1979; banned in Singapore for more than twenty years), and the forcible ban of transwomen from Bugis Street in 1980s Singapore, with police slogans such as "Tourism does not depend on transvestites".

​All that is left of Bugis Street now exists in Peter Bogdanovich's movie. But what does it mean for a Singaporean girl to hanker after a vision in some white man's New Wave Hollywood movie, in a production bankrolled by Playboy? Did the non-professional Singapore cast have agency in their roles, was there room beyond stereotypes? What does it mean to act and to voice and to show and to tell?

No One Wants To Dance replicates and implicates the white man's moviecam gaze by way of pseudo-authentic representation and "local color" even whilst it documents a voice from the underrepresented Singaporean trans community and the irrevocable loss of Bugis Street (and the continuous OCD tendency to clean-up still extant in Singapore). Anita is a 60-year-old transwoman who was a Bugis Street old-timer in its heyday, and through long conversations with her before the making of the video, we're given to know that "Bugis Street was the most beautiful place in the world. It was the only place I felt at home. There will never, never, never be another Bugis Street."

This karaoke video was shot on an iPhone without permits and played for a month in a swanky VIP lounge opposite the site of the old Bugis Street - stomping ground of transwomen in '60s and '70s Singapore, where boisterous sailors, convivial conversation, hard drugs, chilli crab and bartered sex could all be found in one place. Once referred to as the Montmartre of Asia, Bugis Street is now a by-the-numbers pedestrian mall peddling Hello Kitty keychains / fast fashion / McDonalds. ​


performed by ALK feat. Anita
composed & arranged by Kiat & Cherry
archival images courtesy of Anita
lyrics by ALK

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I Am Ardently In Love With The Girl

[i made a song about two lovers making a pact under a pink frangipani tree for an audio-installation component of National Gallery Singapore's Light to Night Festival, in response to the histories of Esplanade Park. 

in my research i came upon a 5 june 1952 The Straits Times article, about a pair of lovers, a 21-year-old indian electrician (Maniam) and a 23-year-old chinese girl (Ah Eng), who were tried in court after they tried to commit suicide by jumping into the sea from esplanade park (they were rescued from the sea by a malay seaman). when asked by the magistrate why they did so, Maniam said: "I am ardently in love with the girl, but I know it is a hopeless affair."

💔 💔 💔 

fiction fails when history was so cruel. these two lovers did no wrong, and i didn't want to write a story or a dialogue, so i wrote lyrics incorporating statements from the court hearing. sixty years on, one hopes things have gotten better for any sort of relationship that falls out of the bounds of societal norms (be it race / class / religion / age / gender), but the going is always gonna be tougher than it should have to be. if you're in a relationship with someone your parents / peers / workplace / strangers don't accept / acknowledge / approve of, this one's for you <3 <3 <3]


performed by Shak feat. ALK
composed by Victor Low
arranged by Evan Tan
lyrics by ALK

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