Have you ever seen someone (typically a guy from a developed country) travelling to India seeking a spiritual awakening? You can sneer at their tangled hair and the way they say “Namaste” with an accent. But in fact, I was also one of those people who went to India seeking spiritual inspiration - or at …
There are said to be 4.7 billion people in Asia today. I understand that I am just one of them, but I have never felt so insignificant until I landed in Beijing in 2011. So many people. Everywhere I went, there were people. Not one or two, a group of people were in sight all …
I want to write about the person I met in Singapore, but I hardly remember him — Because it was 21 years ago and I was 21 years old. I was at a transit counter of Singapore Airlines in Changi Airport. My flight schedule allowed me to join a free sightseeing tour in the city, …
Can a cool kid and an uncool kid be friends? I met Laurie on my way to Thailand. We were sitting next to each other on the bus from Siem Reap to Bangkok. She was 25 years old from Australia. She had a nose piercing and lots of beaded and braided bracelets. I had a …
“Hey, that’s Angkor Wat”. My bike-taxi driver pointed out a dark grey chunk of rocks standing among the tree. Having spent several days earlier in Southeast Asia, I got used to riding a motorcycle. However, keeping my body in a right position on a rear seat of an old scooter in the darkness before dawn …
On a late-summer day in 2003, I was humming on a boat. There were several routes to Siem Reap from Phnom Penn, and I took a speed ferry across the lake Tonlé Sap. There were many shacks on the water. I remembered the encyclopedia I had seen in a library in my elementary school; the …
“I wanna go somewhere.“ It was the summer of 2003. I was in my junior year at university. I have never travelled overseas alone, and I thought it was the time to go. That urge was strong. It felt as if I were a plant that needed to be repotted. If it is kept in …
No, it’s not “PayPal” - It’s “pen pal”. It is probably the word becoming so obsolete nowadays that my MacBook thought it needed to be autocorrected as I started to write this story. However, the word “pen pal” has been more common than PayPal back in 1998. In July 1998, I set off to Malaysia …
A Thousand Years 