“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 …
"How old are you?", the waiter asked. I was at a hotel restaurant in Oahu with my parents. I knew how to count the number from one to ten in English, but I had to count up from number one to get to my age -- a long journey to number nine. Feeling fretted, I …
A Thousand Years 