Word: poon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...been there to see her and talk to her before she became unconscious. Perhaps us children being there with her before she died gave us some peace. But I and my sisters and brothers still miss our Mum, and my eldest sister is 72 years old! Patrick Kwai-sum Poon, BURTON-ON-TRENT, ENGLAND...
...been there to see her and talk to her before she became unconscious. Perhaps us children being there with her before she died gave us some peace. But I and my sisters and brothers still miss our Mum, and my eldest sister is 72 years old! Patrick Kwai-sum Poon, BURTON-ON-TRENT, ENGLAND...
...Consider the story "Addiction," about a gay Singaporean student in London named Alistair. Parts of it are smartly observed, but structurally Poon draws too crude a contrast between London and Singapore to power her plot of a young man's journey of self-discovery. Alistair's parents are caricatured embodiments of lowbrow, materialist Asia. Because she uses the abbreviation k to denote a thousand, we are asked to believe that Alistair's mother has "a barbaric attitude towards money - reducing something vast to a small, inconsequential syllable." His father makes bawdy comments about the breasts of "these Western women" while...
...Instead, Poon's stories succeed when she examines Singapore on its own terms. Take the love with which she describes a Singaporean-Chinese cook in Queens: "In Singapore, there were men like him who sat around hawker centers at night over a Guinness Stout and a cigarette - men who wore open-necked shirts and small gold chains around their neck. They would sit for hours at a time, then grunt an observation, tap the cigarette on the ashtray and then shake their heads." Images like this make the reader want to read Poon on Singapore, not London, Toronto...
...means of escape and instead relied on a powerfully Singaporean stoicism to get them through military duty, embodying qualities Joanne's family too blithely left behind. "She looked at the thousands of HDB [Housing & Development Board] homes that fanned out from either side of Sam's tiny flat," Poon writes. "She suddenly felt her heart open. These were the people who will protect the country, she thought ... Against such a solid breakwater the waves of cynicism would crash, but would fail." Here the exile returns to illuminate an intimate part of Singapore, and does so quite beautifully. One only hopes...