Rants and Rambles

  Vancouver in September looks like something straight out of a Ghostly Kisses' album cover, doesn't it? It's the end of September already?  With all the shenanigans from the beginning of this chaotic year, I could hardly believe September is coming to an end. It was like yesterday that I was still lolling on the armchair with Sapiens on one hand and a bag of chips on the other -  and here am I, with the new school year getting on my nerves at 10pm. Honestly, the last few weeks of summer flashed by, carrying many goals that I had not ready fulfilled: places to be visited, boba meetings to be taken place, and people to say goodbye to. Apart from spending the last bits of summer sweating from the heatwave  and getting jabbed (at last!), I could just return to my all-time habit of downloading e-books and fumbling with the annotation tool. Then all of a sudden, an email popped in my inbox with the name of a vaguely familiar place listed as the sender. As unnerving as it ...

Originally published in The Peahce Project. my mother has a rice bowl  passed down from her grandparents. not the typical delicate porcelain bowl,  hand painted with dainty dragons and flamboyant fairies  that should only be displayed in a glass case.  the bowl is just a simple wooden bowl, with cracks at the bottom where the 9 and 6 in the year 1960 has faded away  from the sun and rain and hurricanes  of history.  the bowl was with my grandfather when he returned from the North back to his hometown 200 miles away. the wood was still fresh, with the musky scent of the ebony glimmering in the Central sun and grain patterns curving like waves of the river across which my grandfather tried to swim twice  on his way fleeing from the war. the inside was filled with mushy cassava along with some adlay grains of days of stumbling in the jungles but also with blood and tears of happiness  from seeing his family again. the bowl was with my mother whe...