For my ex (an unforgiving poem)

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Vacuum

e-bookIn 2013, there were 319,325 migrant workers in Hong Kong. About half were Indonesian and nearly all were women. Recruitment and placement agencies, in...

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IntroductionMore than fifty years after Larkin lamented the emotional inadequacy of generations past, we’ve equipped ourselves with an extensive vocabulary with which to characterise, analyse and diagnose our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the places, objects and ideas that shape our sense of who we are and who we wish to become. Yet still we face the same old set of conundrums: from parasocial connections and fractious family politics to the solace we seek in non-human entities, our myriad attachments continue to offer us comfort and complication in equal measure.

Reluctant farewell to a trusted companion

Non-fiction‘We have the same stroller,’ a woman in the line said to me. I turned and there she was, my first friend. A New York mother of two with her stroller. The same stroller! In black.

It’s only natural

Non-fictionI often feel that we have landed in the worst of all possible worlds for women when it comes to breastfeeding. We are subject to an ideology that argues for its singular efficacy in generating infant attachment to the mother, making an inviolable and exclusive bond. We are also expected to breastfeed to repudiate the maternal industrial complex that fills our supermarkets with formula in shiny tins.